(FORTUNE Magazine) – A factory worker's search for a lost lottery ticket has led to the discovery of one more bizarre form of free enterprise in the Soviet Union. Sorry, make that the Commonwealth of Independent States. According to Trud, a newspaper published by the Council of Trade Unions, textile worker Alexandra Sergeyevna and a group of colleagues paid 50 rubles for 100 tickets in a lottery that offered a 70,000-ruble Volga car among the prizes. If they won, they agreed to cash in their prize and split the proceeds. Sergeyevna got three tickets, one of which she gave to her husband, Ivan, for safekeeping. Ivan died of a heart attack soon thereafter and was buried in his best suit. You guessed it, the winning ticket was in one of the pockets. And that's just what the widow remembered some months later when the lottery was drawn. Ifher co-workers had let her alone, Sergeyevna might have got along without the prize money. But they didn't, thanks largely toa crumbling economy that makes peopledesperate, and Sergeyevna resolved to do the unthinkable. Recalls she: ''I decided to dig up the grave and get the ticket.'' Authorities in the unnamed city gave her the necessary papers, but the grave was empty: no body -- and no casket. The police put out an all-points bulletin for whoever claimed the car. The man who did said that he had found the ticket in a suit he'd bought at a second-hand clothing store. The police visited the place and found a thriving cooperative that was digging up newly buried coffins and stripping them clean. The perpetrators were selling the caskets to funeral parlors, the clothing to stores -- and the bodies to makers of animal feed. Ugh. There is something of a happy ending. When Alexandra's co-workers heard what happened, they agreed to let her keep the car. She sold it and, so the newspaper account says, gave the money to a fund for victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.