"When Russia's financial markets buckled in August 1998, and the ruble collapsed, Mr. Nikiforov [of the Ulyanovsk Roofing Material Factory] had a brainchild. Already wrestling with severe shortages of old cloth and wastepaper, his basic raw materials, he proposed an unorthodox way to mop up Russia's excess money supply.

We'd already tried wood chips and even straw, but to no avail, " say Mr. Nikiforov. "We found that bank notes worked much better." A ton of rubles costs less than $15, not even a third as much as scrap paper.

Not only do rubles help plug leaky roofs, he says they also eventually could revolutionize personal hygiene. He shows off certificates from the health ministry and epidemiological control department certifying that bank notes pose no health hazard as toilet paper.

Toilet tissue made of rubles - known in the trade as MBS, a Russian acronym for "Special Waste Paper" - would be "a bit rough" and not particularly absorbent, he says, but it would be cheap.

"Marx and Lenin predicted we wouldn't need gold and would one day make toilets out of it," says Valery Perfilov, director of a dusty complex of museums in the center of town dedicated to Lenin. "We don't have golden toilets yet, but we have roofs covered with money. Who knows what might happen next?""