[lr1970]

> I always tell people of how my mother was smuggling Soviet rubles stitched into her coat when she flew to NYC to immigrate to America...

Typically people were smuggling foreign currency (US dollars) out of the Soviet Union rather than rubles. Rubles were of little use in America. But smuggling dollars was in violation of two soviet laws at one -- any operation with foreign currency was illegal (up to death penalty for currency "speculation" at scale); and transporting undeclared valuables across the border was illegal too. People in 1978 were literally risking ending up in a Siberian labor camp while trying to board an Aeroflot plane to Vienna (transit hub for immigration from the soviet union during iron curtain).