The market for musical products in the Soviet Union was 100 percent dominated by the state-run company Melodia, which sold vinyl disks produced by the Aprelevka factory, cassettes for tape recorders produced in Tbilisi and, on rare occasions, some imported material, mostly from the Bulgarian recording company Balcanton.

The latter were mostly pop-music collections by Bulgarian, Polish and Czech singers. The quality of these disks and cassettes in terms of sound/noise ratio was noticeably inferior to their Western counterparts, and the variety was rather poor, although, to tell the truth, classical music was adequately represented and included both Russian and foreign composers.

For example, it was no problem to buy a disk of Grieg, Saint Saens, Mozart or even Gustav Mahler, my favorite composer. Prices were affordable at three rubles (2 percent of the average wage) a disk, but records by Alla Pugacheva, Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava, though enormously popular, were produced in relatively small quantities. Therefore, they were difficult to buy and sold for 10 rubles on the black market.

Everyone who had a turntable at home knew were the black market was located, when it was open, how it operated and what the prices were. The police turned a blind eye to the crowd that amassed almost every day in the backyard of the Melodia store, where records by the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Abba, etc., were bought and sold for 60-100 rubles, which totaled 50-75 percent of the average monthly wage. Obviously, the business was lucrative.

Home video was limited to 8 mm films viewed with a film projector (with no sound effects, of course, except for the projector’s crackle). These were mostly animated cartoons, as well as shorts and documentaries, and they cost around seven to 10 rubles for a 15 minute film (some 5 percent of the average monthly wage).

I don’t know when such things as VCRs and CD-players appeared in the West, but I saw them for the first time in the late 1980s.

With Perestroika and the subsequent economic reforms, high-tech products made their way to Russia. The words "DVD," "Joystick" and "Playstation" have entered the Russian language. These days, the market is swarming with all kinds of modern video and audio products. Vinyl disks and reel-to-reel tapes have been pushed to the sidelines and replaced with cassettes, videotapes, CDs, CD-ROMs and DVDs.

Russia still belongs to the Top 10 "leading" countries in terms of pirated software turnover, and 80-90 percent (according to different estimates) of all software used in the country is pirated. The situation is slightly better in the case of video and audio recordings, in which pirated products amount to approximately 65 percent, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.