Moscow Stories: Russia is being flooded with pirated goods

Gorbushka market is a sprawling indoor bazaar where Russia's post-Communist compromise with capitalism is fully on display.

The magic of the marketplace yields amazing bargains – if you don't mind dealing with pirates. A fully registerable copy of Microsoft's Windows XP software sells for about the price of a newspaper. An MP3 disk with everything the Beatles ever recorded is just £2. A crisp video knock-off of the new Lord of the Rings movie goes for £3. The collected works of Monty Python on DVD? £10.

This is no back alley operation. Gorbushka, built into a former aircraft factory in southern Moscow, has hundreds of well-lit, modern shops, and attracts tens of thousands of customers weekly. Vendors say they pay their rent and their taxes and guarantee every product they sell. When the issue of piracy arises, they are defiant.

"This is the only way Russians can get this stuff," says Oleg, a software salesman. "What Russian can afford to pay $200 for a copy of Windows? And why should they? If the Americans stop us copying these things, we'll go back to Communism."

The way Oleg sees it, the big Western companies are to blame for not competing. "They are monopolists who want to control the market for super-profits. We're fighting for freedom here."

Other Moscow markets offer everything from counterfeit clothing or toys, to furniture, pharmaceuticals and motor oil. It is estimated that at least 50 per cent of all products sold in Russia are either counterfeit or contraband. Sometimes illicit goods are bad quality, or even dangerous. About 40,000 Russians die each year from alcohol poisoning, often after imbibing fake vodka. But most counterfeits enhance our quality of life no end. Some argue that pirating goods has saved the economy by providing jobs to thousands of underemployed engineers and giving new life to bankrupt military factories.

Even some state institutions have got into the act. Last November, in one of their rare successful anti-piracy raids, police stormed a huge underground plant that had been churning out DVDs of Hollywood movies. A few eyebrows were raised at the address: it was the Moscow Institute of Precision Instruments, owned by the Russian Space Agency.

Under Western pressure, the Kremlin says it will fight piracy and enforce respect for intellectual property. But, says Oleg: "They've cracked down on us every year and our sales just keep growing."

* * *

This has been the coldest winter in Moscow in 25 years, with temperatures dipping below –30C. The saddest result is the frozen corpses gathered from the streets each morning. So far this winter some 300 people have been killed by cold, many of them drunks who lost their way or made the mistake of dozing off while staggering home. But increasingly the victims come from Moscow's estimated homeless population of 100,000 – including thousands of children. Emergency workers have a poignant name for the tiny, board-stiff corpses gathered up each day; they call them "snowdrops".