COMMUNISM ACTUALLY LED TO GREAT INVENTION, especially on the part of ordinary people trying to make the system work for them.

MOSCOW -- For as long as Vladimir Arkhipov could remember, he lived surrounded by his father's homemade contraptions: blinking Christmas tree lights, when there weren't any to be bought back in the 1960s, and a jury-rigged radio receiver, so the family could huddle in the kitchen and listen to the forbidden Voice of America.

There was even a television antenna made out of unwanted forks that were purchased only because his grandmother was at the store, the Soviet Union was collapsing and there was nothing else for sale.

But it took Arkhipov decades to realize that his father's ingenious solutions were in fact invaluable artifacts of Soviet culture, the private side of life in a country where consumer shortage was an everyday state of affairs. His revelation came a decade ago, when he went to a friend's dacha and found himself hanging his coat on a hook carefully fashioned from an old, bristleless toothbrush.

He saw the strange, humble object -- and recognized a genre.

Today, he is Russia's leading -- and, as far he knows, only -- collector of these unique inventions, with more than 1,000, ranging from a homemade tractor to a tiny bathtub plug made from a boot heel. Each one is a small essay in adaptation.

As Russia tentatively enters the world of global consumerism, Arkhipov's thingamajigs tell the story of its Soviet past -- and also of the wrenching dozen years since the Soviet collapse, when the items of capitalist commerce started to become available in Russia but were still largely unobtainable by the country's impoverished millions. Yekaterina Dyogot, an art critic, calls them "fragments of the sunken, non-market civilization of Soviet socialism."

Read The Rest Scale: 3.75 out of 5 for nifty details on numerous ever-clever little inventions.