Listen to Anatole telling this story (original audio)
My dad once came up with what he thought was an efficient Soviet innovation.
There was a famous theater in Leningrad that was always sold out. The normal way to get in was to show up early and ask random people whether they had an extra ticket to sell. This was perfectly ordinary. If someone couldn't make the show, they'd often sell their ticket at face value to whoever was standing around outside.
My dad decided this was inefficient. Instead of approaching people one by one, why not let them come to him?
So he made a large sign that said he was looking for an extra ticket and stood in front of the theater holding it.
His friend Sasha had planned to do the same thing, but backed out after his father, a Soviet colonel, told him absolutely not to. My dad, whose father was not a colonel and who had asked nobody for permission, went ahead with it.
At first, people just laughed. They smiled, waved, and told him they had no extra ticket. Then, about ten minutes later, a police van came flying into the square, screeched to a stop, and unloaded what felt like half the Soviet state.
The policemen grabbed my dad, twisted his hands behind his back, threw him into the van, and tore the sign into pieces. Then the officer in charge asked him what the sign had said.
My dad told him it would have made more sense to read it before tearing it up.
The officer demanded his papers. By luck, my dad had with him an identification card showing that he held a fairly senior post in the university Komsomol organization. This did not mean he had real power, or even much real work to do, but it gave him the right kind of official-looking status. The officer saw it and immediately changed tone.
Then came the real explanation. The officer told him that a foreigner might see him standing there with a sign.
That was the whole problem.
Not drunkenness. Not theft. Not violence. Not black-market profiteering. Just the sight of a man peacefully holding a sign in public and asking for a theater ticket.
That was the Soviet Union: a system so paranoid, brittle, and absurd that even a handwritten sign outside a theater could trigger a paramilitary response.
The story gets even better. After they let him go, my dad walked over to the local police station to file a complaint, arguing that the police had interfered with his effort to buy a ticket.
The desk officers looked at him as if he were insane.
"Did they beat you?" they asked.
When he said no, they advised him to go home before he gave them a reason to create a real complaint.
So he did.
He did not get into the theater. But he did get a perfect lesson in how communist systems work: they are not merely cruel, but ridiculous; not merely oppressive, but humiliatingly petty. Even when nothing is forbidden exactly, everyone is expected to sense the invisible line and never cross it.
My dad's crime was trying to save time. In the Soviet Union, efficiency itself could look suspicious if it wasn't state-approved.