We Left the USSR With $75 Each. For Five Months I Traded at Italian Markets

In August 1989 my family left Minsk as refugees, and the Soviet Union took away our citizenship. Each person was allowed two bags and $75. Instead of a visa you got an exit paper with your photo on it, saying you had the right to leave. That was the Iron Curtain, and getting out of the country was very hard.

People who went through emigration in those years know all of this, and I think they will enjoy remembering it. For everyone else, this is the story of the six months we spent between the USSR and America.

What we packed, and how two weeks in Vienna became a month

We had no money, so we packed what we were told would sell in Austria and Italy: Komandirskie watches, canned crab, caviar and camera equipment, plus canned food for ourselves. We left on August 28 or 29 on a bus that went from Minsk through Poland to Vienna. We were supposed to stay two weeks. Something went wrong with the paperwork, we were put back in line, and we stayed a month.

Then we flew to Italy, and a bus took us to Santa Marinella, near Rome, to a very cheap hotel. Within a week we found an apartment in Ladispoli. Most refugees from the Soviet Union lived either there or in Ostia. We left Ladispoli on February 23, 1990, so we spent five months there waiting for permission to enter America. I had no relatives in the United States, and we had to wait until someone agreed to sponsor my family.

How I sold everything and then bought it back

On our first day in Santa Marinella a man named Borya, who had made a business of it, asked what I had to sell. I sold him caviar and 20 cans of Chatka crab at $4 a can. I love that crab myself. In Austria I sold very little, because you couldn’t trade there the way you could in Italy, where everyone trades. In Ladispoli I sold at the market. In Rome I sold my wife’s two diamond rings, one for $3,000 and the other for $2,500. I also sold a large Venetian glass punch bowl with twelve glasses and a ladle to a shop for about $1,000. I’m sure the shop got a lot more for it.

When everything was gone, I had money and still no permission to leave. So I decided to buy the same things I had been selling and sell them again. I bought at the market in Ladispoli and at a market in Rome, where other emigrants sold their watches, cameras and lenses. A guy from Moscow sold me a little moped for $25. It was tall, but its wheels were about 30 centimeters across, and I rode it everywhere, even from Ladispoli to Rome.

Other emigrants ran bus trips to Rimini and San Marino. Three or four buses left on Friday and came back on Sunday. We stood near the hotel holding our goods in our hands, and a lot of Italians came to look. In Rome I stood in a row with African vendors who sold statuettes, and I sold my things the same way. I had a family to support. You had to be careful, too, because several gangs of our own emigrants robbed other emigrants.

Why I took two bags of cameras to Udine

One day my wife and I ran into Yasha, an acquaintance from Minsk, on a bus in Rome. He had just received his permission and was flying out in a couple of days. He was sorry about one thing. He had planned a trip to Udine, where the owner of a tobacco shop wanted to buy Soviet cameras and lenses. That equipment, made in Kyiv and Leningrad, was very expensive in Italian stores. Yasha had never been to Udine, but he passed on the directions he had been given: come out of the station, walk that way, turn left, then right. I memorized them and said I would go in his place.

I bought up cameras, lenses and watches in Ladispoli and Rome, and one evening I got on a train with two bags that weighed 15 or 20 kilograms each. The ride took all night. I reached Udine around noon, followed Yasha’s directions and found the shop. It was closed for the siesta. It was winter and really cold, and I waited with a bag on each shoulder until about 4:30.

When the shop opened, I walked in and said the Italian word for watches to the man who looked like the owner. He repeated it. I said the word for cameras. He repeated that too, and then he shouted for the police. His wife, who had been standing near the entrance, ran out into the street shouting the same thing. The police had already picked me up once at a market, and although they let me go and took nothing, I didn’t want to go through that again. I threw the bags on my shoulders and ran.

How a stranger in an Audi bought everything

After a couple of blocks I was out of breath and slowed to a walk on a path about 15 meters from the road. A car stopped beside me, a new Audi 80, and the window went down. The driver called out to ask whether I was Russian and whether I had cameras. I said yes to both. He told me to get in, opened the trunk for my bags and said he knew someone who wanted to buy.

I should explain who was running down that street. I was 31, and back in Minsk I had been a wealthy and respected man. Now I was being chased around an Italian town with two bags on my back.

It was about 5:30 in the evening. I expected a ride of five or ten minutes. We drove for about an hour, and it got dark. I had at least $15,000 worth of goods in the trunk, and I decided this was where they would kill me. Finally we pulled up to a single house in complete darkness, with a light in the window. He took one bag, I took the other, and we went in. About eight men were sitting inside. I was really frightened.

I thought: that’s it, I’m finished.

They told me to show what I had. I already knew from Rimini how Italians buy. You ask $20, he says 15, you say 19, he says 18, because he has to bargain. Then he pays you the 20 you asked for, or even 25, because he understands that you are poor and need something to live on. These men asked the price of each item, and when I said $100, they paid $130. I sold everything, left them the bags too, and came away with 20% or 30% more than I had hoped for. Then the same man drove me back to the station in Udine, and I went home to Ladispoli happy.

What those five months gave me

There was risk in everything I did then, but the money I made in Italy helped us get through the beginning in America. We landed in Des Moines, Iowa, and two months later moved to a suburb of Chicago. I could have tried to become an engineer or a programmer. I went to work as a loader instead, because I dreamed of being a businessman.

I remember Udine better than my other Italian stories because I was sure it was the end for me, and it ended well. The people in that house turned out to be decent. In five months in Italy I saw nothing but good from Italians. They knew we had left the USSR with nothing to live on, and they sympathized and helped us a great deal. Keep fighting the way I did, and don’t give up.

Originally published as a video on my YouTube channel on 23 May 2025. Watch on YouTube