MOSCOW — In the fluorescent-lighted dens of despair called pawnshops, bad luck is a commodity as casual as an aging cellphone or a grandmother's ring, held up for inspection, the sellers holding their breath to see what it's all worth.
You won't find Russia's petro-rich here, but you will find plenty of people who wouldn't have been caught peddling heirlooms to a pawnshop a year ago -- people too prideful to say they've been ejected, at least temporarily, from the middle class. They creep in off the rusting snow banks and from calcified cars, turning gold and silver in their pockets, looking for cash.
On the walls of this Moscow pawnshop are pictures of dreams: a black-and-white shot of Paris, still-life portraits of gold bars and a chest of gold coins. "Attention," announces a sign. "Drunk clients will not be served."
Hounded by landlords, determined to bring the same sweets and vodkas to winter parties, turned away by banks, Russians are being driven to the pawnbrokers and their quick-money-for-collateral at unprecedented rates.
With the rest of the country hemorrhaging cash on falling oil prices and tumbling currency, the pawn business is booming -- up 20% nationwide since the onset of the global financial crisis, said Oleg Osipov, chairman of Russia's association of pawnshops.
"We started to get a totally new category of customer: people who got bank loans for various big projects and now don't have money to make their monthly payments," he said. "So as not to spoil their credit ratings, they come to us for short-term loans.
"They got wealthy enough to enjoy precious things, and now they are bringing them to us," he said.
Anton Chernov is a tall man in a tracksuit, last night's liquor -- or is it this morning's? -- still lingering on his breath. An out-of-work jewelry maker, he's been driven into this pawnshop after losing a string of jobs as the financial crisis chewed its way through Russia.
First, this fall, the workshop where he'd labored for five years abruptly laid him off. He found a slot at a jewelry factory, but only on a freelance basis. They paid him, he snorts, at "rates set by Lenin." Still, it got him by until the factory too began to feel the pinch of dropping sales.
"At first they started firing people for little things, mistakes, for missing work," Chernov says. "They did this on purpose, to avoid having to pay two months' compensation for firing people without reason. I missed one day for a very, very good reason, but they laid me off."
