The Russian communists long ago decreed the people had a right to cheap chicken. The price of chicken was duly set at the government mandated rate. Of course, Maltsev (a former economic adviser to Leonid Brezhnev) tells me in person that it was impossible to deliver chickens to the stores at the price mandated, so when you went into a communist food distribution depot there was hardly ever any actual chicken. And so the Russian people made do on whatever ration of rice and suet the stores were handing out to the people waiting in the interminable lines in the dark and the snow that week; they went to sleep hungry and malnourished but much cheered by the certainty that no greedy capitalists were making obscene profits by actually delivering them any chicken.