That wasn't a Soviet joke because a dollar in, say, Brezhnev times, cost 0.64-0.66 Rouble and even with dollars you couldn't buy anything in the USSR but go to prison instead (messing with foreign currencies was a serious crime).
Now if you referred to Yeltsin times, that would be true, what was it, 6000 Roubles per one dollar? The blessed Yeltsin times when democracy flourished over here and you ,Jerry, were studying (and practicing in Russia) how to empty our pockets in a more civilised and ecological way
Well, I knew that joke... which was of course aimed just at the unrealistic official exchange rate.
I also remember that ban or not ban, people hid Western forex, keeping it as a security just like jewels or gold. They also practised cross-border barter trade and smuggling like a folk sport -- say, if a university class from Prague or a workers' brigade from Budapest went on a tour to Moscow, they'd load various stuff available at home or smuggled from the West (from kitchen utensils through forex to sex magazines), and sell or exchange in the Soviet Union. One colleague told that on one such tour in the seventies, they had a great time because their KGB minder was busy in the trade himself. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
