We should keep in mind that Russia is a country that has spent 70 years in an inhuman experiment aimed at arranging all sides of socioeconomic life within a giant centrally planned system. Even if this time is over, many features of today's life go on reminding us of this heavy and in many ways onerous heritage.
Under the so-called Socialism, each family lived on its own, striving to survive at any price. It was especially hard in the God-forsaken countryside and in small towns around the widely spread great country. Almost everything was forbidden. People sat in jail for a handful of grain collected at the borders of a collective field. Taxes for keeping cattle, pigs and even chicken sometimes made keeping them practically impossible. People paid for every apple tree or currant bush in their garden (or preferred not to have them at all).
In this tragicomic situation it was only natural for families to try and invent occupations that, remaining hidden, could add at least something to their incomes — in order to survive (in the crudest and direct sense of this word). In the cities, clandestine "capitalists" emerged and started manufacturing consumer goods (garments, cutlery, cosmetics and the like) and rendering services essential to normal urban life but absent in legal supply (from taxi to tape-recording modern Western music). Thus the "shadow economy" and "black market" (or vice versa — exact terms are not so important) appeared and blossomed — in the depths and on the outskirts of the officially existing and loudly praised "Socialist economy."