Ukraine sees echoes of the 1990s as financial crisis bites

Kiev

A CRIPPLING financial crisis in Ukraine is turning the clock back to the 1990s, when people kept dollars in their socks rather than at banks and smuggled cars to sell them on the black market and avoid the tax man.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the command economy in tatters, many in the newly independent republics such as Ukraine were left to fend for themselves, using guile to seek out goods and services and navigate the new capitalist reality.