@Remus2
it experienced roughly 10000% inflation in that short time
That would be a story in and of itself. I don't think anyone in the west understands what that is like.
The weird thing is, it's not the end-of-the-world as such is sometimes portrayed. Greater magnitudes and longer times in that regime can be, and obviously are much worse, we got it easy.
Well, personally I was still in high school, so somewhat shielded from the very brunt of it too, probably. My weekly pocket money allowance from my dad went from 5 rubles in September to 500 the following May, without actual increase in purchase value (my dad's an accountant, so I could trust that as fact). Nevertheless, the life went on surprisingly normally overall.
Yes, you don't save and try to exchange local currency you receive to something else as soon as you possibly can.
Booze becomes an actual currency. A 1/2 liter bottle of vodka would get you up to half day work from a neighbor on the countryside. Any goods that can be easily stockpiled. 25kg bags of sugar, if you can get your hands on. We had a garden shed full of brand new furniture we didn't really need (although much of it was labeled as possible use if some future plans come to, everyone realized it was an excuse). A couple extra TV sets too.
There's actually still a 200L barrel of A76 gasoline, possibly stolen from a construction site before sold out of hand. (I don't know is it actually usable still, but it's a sealed barrel without any air in it, and don't annoy anyone, so it's still there.) And yes, it was bought while you would routinely plan for two hours of a queue at a gas pump, limited to 20L per customer, and no guarantee they won't run out. Larger purchases, if you have a seller accepting -rubbish- rubles and the money at hand, you pay the asking price; availability is the limiting factor more often than not.
Sure, "hard" foriegn currency is part of the best solution, regardless of legality of circulation of such. Then, nobody worries much about legality of anything if police can't react to calls because their vehicles are out of gas and their wages withhold for three months and more -- with mean they are actually unpaid (and, no much surprise, there even was rumors of rapes by people in police uniform).
US dollars was the favorite of course, German marks were in circulation too, to somewhat lesser extent. You pretty soon have default function in your mind converting prices and currencies as you go, and current exchange rates are default news right there with weather forecast and is boldly displayed at every exchange kiosk and in bank windows, and yes, nobody wonder if afternoon values differ from the morning (the change isn't always the same direction either, while the trend is clear, day-to-day values may still fluctuate quite a much sometimes).
Electronics stores had their prices in dollars more or less openly. They couldn't display such at shelf, so those changed daily, but at the counter there was a print-out brochure with the actual prices in dollars, with wasn't immutable either (contrary to holdout pockets of Soviet economy that used to have mandated prices etched in plastic extrusion molds and similar -- with criminal charges of "speculation" if you asked more).
On the business side, if you could delay a payment, even a few days, you could probably profit on it. So, what you get in wages was sometimes piped through a random function with your boss goodwill in the parameters. Private sector pretty soon switched to real wages indexed against "hard" currency, if not even given in such, as cash, with no taxes paid on that part, naturally. Naturally, such was only be possible if there was revenue stream in alternative currency, but our economy as small as it is, the "if you don't export you don't exist" mantra is true still. Government work went more or less unpaid, did mostly either by fanatics on a self given mission or otherwise interested persons.
Then, we're here a hardened bunch as it was, with millennia old tradition of self reliance,
and when it comes to the last century... My grandfather was born in 1913, a youngest of five brothers orphaned during WW1. Around 1920 there was around 20 alternative currencies in circulation simultaneously in the post war chaos the country was born out of, in armed independence fights (and yes, we often call that process "fights" and not a "war" for a reason; you will get lost quickly trying to follow who was with whom when and why British fleet was firing at West Russian Volunteer Army formally formed to fight communism but attacking Riga for some garbled reasons instead).
Then, after the thirties with were time of unquestionable prosperity even despite the background of global depression there was Soviet occupation of 1939 with, among other atrocities, equaled Soviet ruble to Latvian lats overnight (fair exchange rates I'm not going to look for now, but believed to be somewhere on the magnitude of 100Ru:1Ls) and overall did such a poor job Germans were welcomed as liberators. The war ended under Soviet occupation again, and then there was the forced collectivization with robbed peasants again, and I'm not actually knowledgeable, but there's apparently was another, even if relatively milder, round of money devaluation and government robbery of savings sometime in the seventies. So by the nineties much of it wasn't anything unheard or unseen by most, rather just how things happen to be time and again. Money as such is pretty worthless, it's just a plain truth that shouldn't be forgotten.
Maybe thanks to that the crime scene here didn't go completely out of control. Russian side of the border was rumored to go near full wild west, with battling bands of highway robbers. Goods convoys to/from Moscow used to, according to some rumors, employ armed guards sitting behind the first row of boxes in the back of the lorry, instructed to open fire without warning if someone started to unload those boxes when not supposed to.
Meanwhile, our school children -- from the first graders including -- were and still are expected to navigate public transportation to/from school independently. We can do that, in some recent survey we were touted as one of the safest countries in the world... with may as well be true on the ground. So, my experience may not be universal.
