MOSCOW -- For as long as Vladimir Arkhipov could remember, he lived surrounded by his father's homemade contraptions: blinking Christmas tree lights, when there weren't any to be bought back in the 1960s, and a jury-rigged radio receiver, so the family could huddle in the kitchen and listen to the forbidden Voice of America. There was even a television antenna made out of unwanted forks that were purchased only because his grandmother was at the store, the Soviet Union was collapsing and there was nothing else for sale. But it took Arkhipov decades to realize that his father's ingenious solutions were in fact invaluable artifacts of Soviet culture, the private side of life in a country where consumer shortage was an everyday state of affairs. His revelation came a decade ago, when he went to a friend's dacha and found himself hanging his coat on a hook carefully fashioned from an old, bristleless toothbrush. He saw the strange, humble object -- and recognized a genre. Today, he is Russia's leading -- and, as far he knows, only -- collector of these unique inventions, with more than 1,000, ranging from a homemade tractor to a tiny bathtub plug made from a boot heel. Each one is a small essay in adaptation. As Russia tentatively enters the world of global consumerism, Arkhipov's thingamajigs tell the story of its Soviet past -- and also of the wrenching dozen years since the Soviet collapse, when the items of capitalist commerce started to become available in Russia but were still largely unobtainable by the country's impoverished millions. Yekaterina Dyogot, an art critic, calls them "fragments of the sunken, non-market civilization of Soviet socialism." They are also just plain clever, in the quirky personalized way of inventions meant to serve their maker and not a marketing department. How else but to admire a back massager made from one of the old wooden abacuses that are still used to tally purchases in remote reaches of Russia, or the toy castle made out of the candy boxes in which sugar-based payments were made to a surgeon in the cash-poor 1990s? "This is a unique class in the world -- things that were never meant to be goods for sale. People made them for themselves," said Arkhipov as he rummaged around his dank basement studio one evening late last month. "In the 21st century, it seems somehow unreal." Out of his backpack came that day's find -- a cleverly adapted metal teapot with a carved wooden spout and an electric coil that has brewed countless cups in the office of a friend over the past two decades. Arkhipov is delighted with it. At 42, the engineer-turned-artist works full time on his unusual form of social anthropology, collecting not only the objects themselves but also interviews with their creators. His book, "Born Out of Necessity," has just been published with a grant from the Ford Foundation; he exhibits his finds in Russia and wherever he is invited in Western Europe but has not found a single museum in Russia willing to help gather what he calls "living history." It is not just individual quirks but political realities that his objects document, Arkhipov said. He connects his collection directly to the individual Russian experience in an oppressive state. In such a place, he argues, "each person who can make something with his hands prefers to make something small and concrete rather than uniting with others to change their lives. Everyone still struggles with their own problems alone." In Soviet times, the centrally planned economy begat chronic shortages and perpetual consumer angst -- a situation where a missing spare part could become a crisis for a factory and individual needs never registered in the deep recesses of the bureaucracy. With no obvious way to change the system, individual Soviets did what they could to live within it, and at-home inventors created a thousand items missing from the stores. Take the tiny device known as a "conman" that Arkhipov pulled from one of the dusty bins in his studio. It is, in effect, a homemade plug, meant to convert a light-bulb socket into an electrical outlet. "Everything," Arkhipov said, "is related to the history of the country." After the destruction of World War II, there were chronic power shortages. In villages, electrical outlets were forbidden and people were allowed just one light bulb per house, to be turned on a few hours a day. Dictator Joseph Stalin even decreed jail terms for installing banned outlets, Arkhipov said, "but still people needed electrical sockets." Since inspiration struck in the form of the toothbrush-cum-clothes hook, Arkhipov's collection has grown to include toys, tools, mechanical and electronic devices, and improvised forms of transportation. A few items defy classification, "because there is nothing else like them in existence," Arkhipov said. Some are whimsical, like the briefcase-shaped gasoline can made by a driver after years of ferrying bosses and their attache cases to work. "I think he didn't even know himself why it turned out this way," Arkhipov mused. "He must have dreamed of becoming a boss himself." Arkhipov said he often knows at a glance whether objects were made before or after the Soviet fall. "This could not appear now," he said as he cradled a toy Kalashnikov assault rifle wrapped in scrap metal. In Soviet times, such metal was a staple of homemade inventions; today it is a commodity, bought and sold for precious rubles by poor people who would no longer think of wasting it on a child's toy. A brightly colored carrying basket, in contrast, is a product of more recent times. It is woven, Arkhipov said, from the color-coded bands used by European banks to separate denominations of cash. The basket weaver worked in a Moscow bank. "He just collected them from the garbage bins," Arkhipov said. Many of Arkhipov's objects fall into the category of professions or hobbies that simply couldn't be pursued without personal ingenuity. Soviet stores didn't provide amateur filmmakers with captioning devices or weekend ice fishermen with reels, baskets and rods. In the crisis years of the early 1990s, even firefighters found themselves making their own axes. Arkhipov has also turned up quirky domestic niceties that few Western consumers would think possible to make by hand -- a flowerpot holder made of an old vinyl record, a hair curler-turned-paint roller, a food tin recycled as a calculator holder. And then there are some things in his collection that speak mostly to the impoverishment of the place -- like the hat that Arkhipov's mother fashioned from one of her old skirts and lined with one of her old shirts to keep her grandson warm. "Poverty and misery are a very powerful stimulus for creating such things," he said. Arkhipov said he is sure that sooner or later Russia will stop producing objects that reflect its communist past. Maybe then, Arkhipov said with a laugh, he will go ahead and create his own handmade "utopia" -- living entirely with the creations he has collected. After all, he said: "I already have a handmade refrigerator, a washing machine, a telephone, different kinds of furniture. A handmade paraglider, a boat, a car, a tractor. . . . Toys you can play with, instruments, tools, a hammer, a drill, a screwdriver. Everything one needs to live with."