Many of them also have contracts with Western investors requiring them to convert rubles into dollars at agreed-on exchange rates.

Most anyone who plays the black market has also found ways to convert rubles into dollars, stereos and jeans.

That happens as Russians sell merchandise in Ukraine for rubles and bring the cash home rather than converting rubles into coupons.

This meant that Russian citizens and foreigners would be able to convert rubles to other currencies for trade transactions.

The omnipresent sense of shortage is mostly the result of pent-up purchasing power, as everyone from pensioners to enterprise managers scrambles to convert rubles of uncertain value into goods.

Just last Wednesday, it eased restrictions on businesses seeking to convert rubles to foreign currency.

Yet accelerated mass privatization and an effort to encourage investment by taming inflation and making it easy to convert rubles to other currencies did not bring about significant industrial restructuring.

And most individual Russians will be able to convert rubles into foreign currency only on the black market.

In 2011 this led to currency crisis when government became unable to honor its promise to convert Belarussian rubles to foreign currencies at fixed exchange rate.

The other clause specifies a reliable system for converting rubles into dollars and other hard currencies in an unrestricted or nearly unrestricted foreign exchange market.