MOSCOW - Haunted by pirates and bootleggers, stacked with tempting contraband, the Gorbushka Market in western Moscow is an Aladdin's cave for movie and music fans. For copyright lawyers, it is a chamber of horrors.
It almost doesn't matter what you're searching for - a CD by Snoop Dogg, an LP by Dave Brubeck, Tarzan and the Leopard Woman dubbed into Russian or a videocassette of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Or the latest PlayStation game.
If it has been recorded anywhere on almost anything, there is a good chance it can be found among the 1,800 kiosks jammed in the sprawling market, housed in cavernous buildings of the former Gorbunov aviation factory. There's an even better chance that whatever you find is what Russians call piratsvo, a copy mass-produced by some shady outfit and sold without the original creators sharing a kopek in royalties.
Gorbushka (meaning "bread crust") may be the largest market for pirated music and films in Eastern Europe. Every day, 30,000 people hunt along its narrow aisles. Merchants now are gearing up for the approaching New Year's holiday, when Russians traditionally exchange gifts.
Gorbushka is a monument to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Russian people and is also a good example of Russia's stubborn resistance to playing the capitalist game by the West's sometimes-annoying rules.
According to the Business Software Alliance, a trade group based in the United States, about 90 percent of the commercial computer programs used in Russia are bootlegged. That means Russia is second only to China in the use of stolen business programs.
The group estimates that sales at Gorbushka and other pirate outlets cost the software giant Microsoft more than $900 million a year.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry likewise says that two out of three CDs in Russia are counterfeit. And outlaw copies outsell legal ones by a ratio of 4-to-1.
At Gorbushka, one trader said, illegal DVDs outsell legal ones 100-to-one, and the reasons are simple to find. In the West, legal DVDs can cost $15 to $20. At Gorbushka, DVDs of recent films sell for $8. A legal edition of the Microsoft Windows operating system may cost $90. Here, it's $2. CDs of everything from the boy band 'N Sync to Prokofiev cost only $2.50 to $3. That's perhaps one-eighth of what they would cost in the West.
Despite pressure from the West for authorities to crack down on the piracy, there is little evidence of reform. In August, U.S. Ambassador Alexander R. Vershbow sent a letter to the Russian government alleging that some military factories were churning out pirated CDs and videos.
Merchants at Gorbushka cheerfully estimate that 75 percent to 90 percent of what is sold in the market is pirated.
"And that percentage is increasing," said Vyacheslav Treibutsky, a 20-something entrepreneur, "because a lot of people can't afford to pay that much for the licensed products."
Treibutsky, who has a stall in the market, didn't want to identify the source of his merchandise. But nearby kiosks sell knockoffs of everything from a Harry Potter computer game to pornographic films that play on computers. All are dirt cheap.
"In the center of the city, on any street corner of the city, this stuff can be bought even cheaper," said Alexander Kuvshinov, another kiosk trader. The quiet, 42-year-old physician decided a couple of years ago that he could make more money selling music and films.
Outside Moscow and a few other urban centers, Kuvshinov said, it is probably impossible to find any recorded material that hasn't been bootlegged.
Several times a week, stall owners say, copyright enforcement agents of the Ministry of the Interior stop by and check merchandise. Sometimes the agents confiscate suspected pirated material for "testing." But traders say the inspections are an annoyance more than anything else.
Such items always find their way back to the market, one merchant said. Often, all it takes to retrieve seized contraband is a small payment to the right official.
It is not exactly a secret that much of what is sold here is pirated. One trader explained to a customer that his copies of the latest Harry Potter film were, of course, illicitly videotaped in a theater somewhere. Some scenes are probably interrupted, he warned, by the silhouettes of patrons getting up to go to the snack bar. (Many vendors will even exchange shoddy goods.)
Gorbushka has been a popular market since the 1990s, when merchants set up their kiosks in a park near the factory's Palace of Culture - a Communist-era community center.
The trader Treibutsky remembers shoppers descending on the park like locusts, scooping up practically everything on sale.
"All of Moscow came to Gorbushka twice a week and bought up all the stuff," he recalled nostalgically. "Then the traders would go and buy more to sell."
Gorbushka now faces increasing competition from other markets in the Moscow region selling music, software and movies. And the number of sidewalk tables is growing.
At the same time, there is pressure on Gorbushka's merchants to raise prices. In 2001, Moscow's city government forced the merchants out of the park and into two vacant city-controlled factory buildings.
It was part of a city program, begun in 1998, to close outdoor markets. Ostensibly, officials wanted to crack down on tax evasion, parking problems and control by criminal gangs. But the city seemed less interested in cracking down on piracy and more interested in collecting skyrocketing rents, merchants say. Kuvshinov says rent for his space has increased by a factor of 10 in the past year. He now pays $400 a month, which is sometimes more than his net profit.
But he says that even if he is forced to charge more for his merchandise, he still expects people to come. Recordings not reproduced legitimately for decades are on sale here. So are hard-to-find cassettes of television classics, live musical performances and old films.
When the outdoor market closed in December 2000, and before the kiosks reopened indoors, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Palace of Culture to mourn.
Organizers drafted a resolution calling the place "an original pilgrimage destination, a mecca of cultured and thoughtful people, 'free artists,' admirers of music and other arts, progressive and independent youth."
Russian music fans, it seems, regard Gorbushka as a national treasure rather than a national scandal. And it may be both.