“It’s not hard to understand why people in Ukraine sell their hair a hundred times more often than people in Sweden,” David Elman, a co-owner of Raw Virgin Hair Company, an importer based in Kiev, Ukraine, said in a telephone interview. “They are not doing it for fun. Usually, only people who have temporary financial difficulties in depressed regions sell their hair.”

Here in Mosalsk, a 16-inch braid, the shortest length a buyer will consider, fetches about $50.

Natalya N. Vinokurova, 26, grew up nearby in Yukhnov, a town where half the homes lack indoor plumbing and the average monthly wage is about $300. What little cash-crop agriculture there once was collapsed with the Soviet Union.

But Ms. Vinokurova cultivated something with market value: strawberry blond hair that hung to her waist before she sold it.

“I wore it in a braid, a ponytail, different ways,” she said. “But I got sick of it, and all the other girls have short hair, so I cut it,” and then sold it, she said with a shrug. She now wears a bob and has no immediate plans to grow it to a marketable length, which she said would take years.

Mr. Kuznetsov’s company here, Belli Capelli, which processes human hair into extension kits, is the largest business of its type in Russia, with annual revenue of about $16 million.

Kicking mud from his boots, he clambered into a Land Rover to tour the buildings here and in a neighboring town where a few dozen employees wash, dye and comb hair, then sort it by hue and length. At one sorting table, where about 500 braids were laid out, he stopped to extol the quality of his product. The best hair, he said, is honey-hued, changes color in the light and is soft to the touch.

“This is capitalism,” he said. “The people with money want to distinguish themselves from the people with no money. Why does one woman sell her hair to another? The person with money wants to look better than the person without money.”