Four Essays on Russia Today Main Street USSR
ADAMS, ARTHUR E.
FOUR ESSAYS ON RUSSIA TODAY The four articles which follow do not attempt to explore every aspect of life in Malenkov's Russia. On the contrary, each deals with a limited area of that complex and...
...Forty rubles comes to $10...
...says Pravda, "the craftsmen offer their services—they will obtain everything for repairs for a "nominal fee.' But many people cannot afford such services at 40 rubles a sole...
...The Russians live in incredibly crowded quarters, and the press, ignoring obvious historical reasons for the housing shortage, bears down hard on Soviet construction men...
...Sometimes these "traders" are thieves with friends at a factory or warehouse...
...When Dmitri and Sophie try to furnish their one- or two-room apartment, they run into new troubles...
...An apartment on the second floor drew special attention...
...With the woman out of the way, the judge moved in and then illegally expanded into still another room, creating a three-room apartment...
...they were told by Pravda, as they have been told for several decades, that the future depends upon their own superhuman efforts...
...There are no adequate food assortments...
...Or at least it did until lzvestia stepped in...
...Like American men, Soviet reporters register amazement over what women wear on their heads when the babushka is tossed aside...
...They buy what they want at impossible prices, or they go without...
...One man cleared the orders...
...Businessmen and industrialists divert money from state funds to increase the family's comfort...
...and whoever has responsibility for the food stores at Simferopol should have his head examined, because this Black Sea city is reportedly without a fish store...
...Glushchenko admitted that "only three or four" buildings were completed, although he claimed that eight others were "under construction...
...She wants the new hat with pretty flowers on it, and, after all, she isn't going to live forever...
...Bureaucrats, factory managers, Communist functionaries —all throw their rank around if it's a question of an apartment with one more room...
...So everyone must work harder and harder...
...They lounge about in the stores, brassy and well dressed, sizing up the prospective customer, plucking at his sleeve when he can't find what he wants...
...It may be that Big Brother is bored with babushkas and boots, or it may be that the women have expressed such vociferous dissatisfaction with their unattractive clothing that the rulers consider this a major domestic problem...
...Colors are dull and monotonous...
...Attractive furniture is rare and expensive...
...By next year, in comparison with 1950, butter must increase 176 per cent, milk 240 per cent, cheese 280 per cent, chocolate candy 380 per cent, loaf bread from high-grade flour 290 per cent, macaroni 230 per cent...
...He exhausted the builders by running up and down half-finished stairways, inspecting all 36 apartments and diligently ferreting out shoddy work...
...For months, the tenants of the decrepit building begged for repairs, and they were overjoyed when trucks finally arrived with materials and men...
...A public bathhouse provides a room where people may do their ironing, but there are no irons...
...One cleaning co-op is said to send clothing back after adding stains, and this co-op frankly admits it doesn't know how to remove chemical spots...
...And they do make money...
...It's possible to live without a bath...
...After Stalin's death last year, Malenkov doubled and tripled food-quota figures on the pages of the current Five-Year Plan...
...There is a nationwide struggle for better quarters...
...Services and repairs are a problem too...
...But the sturdy building was completely renovated...
...And Dmitri feels the same way, even about the hat...
...No, indeed...
...But these are conditional...
...In the northern Caucasus region last year, the Krasnodar Oil Combine misspent 2,000,000 rubles—approximately $500,000 —building summer cottages at a local resort for officials from the Ministry of the Oil Industry and for the managers of the combine...
...Yet they recognize woman's right to wear what she pleases...
...Of late, in the Western press, unkind remarks have been made about Sophie's figure...
...he checked the view from the windows...
...According to Pravda, the street itself is muddy and dreary...
...A gas plant is under construction, too, but Pravda, commenting on this, drily notes that the still-unfinished plant "was begun at Sverdlovsk over twenty years ago...
...These paper increases were published as the first steps in a well-advertised effort to prove to the people that Big Brother spares no pains to create an adequate food supply...
...The Evening Moscow recently bemoaned the awful fate of the woman who is forced by unimaginative hatters to wear a hat "incomprehensibly shaped and adorned with faded flowers and greenery which even a discriminating goat would spurn with contumely...
...they become landlords and sublet their rooms...
...Also—and this is Pravda's satire, not mine—he could expedite the matter by bringing in lining, buttons and his own tailor...
...drainpipes reach from the ground to ah interesting point several feet from the roof gutters...
...Back in Sverdlovsk—and we're picking on Sverdlovsk for the moment only because it closely reflects the national picture—one borough in the heart of the city is to receive 40 new apartment buildings during the Fifth Five-Year Plan...
...1 shall take it for myself...
...And "how long must the customer buy chairs with light arms, dark backs and even darker legs...
...Late last year, two Pravda reporters at Kiev went from store to store seeking attractive furniture...
...Sometimes they are employes from the factories, selling plunder...
...Pushing it on March 6, he said: "The more grain there is, the more agricultural products the country will receive?bread, meat, fats, milk and butter...
...But last October—late in what is officially the third year of the Plan—the chairman of the borough government, Comrade Glushchenko, showed up gloomy and discouraged for an interview with a special correspondent from Izvestia...
...Black market operators at Vilna can provide the customer with practically any article of wearing apparel, in all sizes and colors...
...There are no laundries...
...It has been said that she carries a little too much weight and inclines to dumpiness, although certainly she looks healthy...
...In all Moscow, a city of five million, there is only one refrigerator repair shop...
...But all this new land cannot be plowed and planted overnight...
...While construction officials trembled, the inspector quizzed them on room measurements and details of construction...
...The director of the local construction trust and the director of the local housing administration lived in the two favored apartments...
...These days, Big Brother appears to be deeply concerned with the way Dmitri and Sophie dress—Sophie particularly...
...lzvestia's writer laments, squatters of every sort rushed in, justifxing their action by the \ ice-chairman's example...
...Rank conquers all...
...She wants the hat?and all the other things for herself and her family?now...
...To correct this situation and protect future and legitimate tenants, the vice-chairman of the provincial government made an inspection...
...The papers bluntly charge that Soviet builders are impossibly slow, inefficient and careless...
...Imaginations are ordered to attack the "accessory front" because belte, trims, buttons and ribbons are awkward and ugly...
...A recognition of this complexity is the first step toward an intelligent policy...
...Only the bathtubs are lacking in our buildings," he said...
...That is why we consider the increase of grain production a most important and fundamental problem...
...Was the dreary building repaired...
...Statues already ring the promenade, but Big Brother is thundering about this...
...Thereafter...
...With the furniture problem still unsolved, Dmitri and Sophie look for food...
...His business: speculation in scarce knitted goods...
...True...
...When Dmitri turns away from the counter, disappointed and angry, with money in his pocket, he is ripe for negotiations with black marketeers...
...Cobblers at Tashkent make half-soles with the casings of worn-out automobile tires...
...For seven years, the victim has been trying to get her apartment back, but other judges have refused to bring Kachanovetsky to court...
...electric razors, radio and television sets are sold without replacement parts, and people who look ahead and have money buy several vacuum cleaners in order to keep one running...
...Through Izvestia, he pointed out recently that the statues are peeling, an arm is broken from one, and another has vanished from its pedestal...
...who, seven years ago, managed to get a woman evicted from a two-room apartment he coveted...
...Some specialize in particular lines—women's hosiery, silks or woolen goods...
...Big Brother's newspapers are trying hard to persuade Sverdlovsk's—and the nation's—builders to color their stucco and plaster with any pigment but gray...
...In one store, an "absurd dirty bed" with rusty springs disgusted them, and they fled to the next place to stare at a "muddy-green couch...
...The absence of repair shops and spare parts for household appliances creates a new series of problems...
...In the quarters used by the construction firm for its offices, he shouted, "These crooks must be evicted...
...In another instance, Pravda lavished space on a description of two apartment houses, standing side by side, one "melancholy, with a gaping roof and cracking stucco, the other sturdy, cheerful...
...woodwork is cut from green lumber, or it rots and is not replaced...
...He owned a television set, a Pobeda automobile and a motorcycle, and he employed a maid...
...At Tashkent, there is no place to have clothes pressed...
...They visited high officials of the furniture industries and asked them how long they were going to continue to put out chairs "upholstered with black mourning-cloth...
...The complaint on this "front" arises from what Soviet manufacturers provide for milady's head...
...And a "Make Our City Beautiful" campaign is in progress...
...The Tiflis newspaper...
...they knock down walls and partitions to expand their quarters...
...Frequent shortages occur in staples—bread, meat products, salt and sugar...
...The preparation and sale of packaged goods is deemed "completely unsatisfactory," but Anastas Mikoyan, Minister of Internal Trade, promises Sophie packaged hamburger patties, sorted and cleaned potatoes in mesh sacks, and pickled cabbage in glass jars...
...Current issues of Pravda and Izvestia continue to hammer at lagging labor-productivity...
...Many of these urban "nomads" move several times a year...
...Poor workmanship and materials shortages complicate slow construction...
...Retail stores and coops in cities and towns across the country are under the spotlight, criticized for everything from bad manners to empty shelves...
...After considering the matter at length, he brazenh announeed: "This apartment I like...
...MAIN STREET USSR By Arthur E. Adams Russian History Department, Michigan State College With rare exceptions, the West never sees Russia beyond her capital cities and conducted tours...
...At Sverdlovsk, a giant industrial city of the Urals comparable to Pittsburgh, city officials have been catching the devil for several months...
...Meanwhile, victory gardens are encouraged in the big cities, and complaints are regularly printed that arrangements for getting the farmer's produce into the cities and distributing it are awkward and inefficient...
...Surrounded by huge refineries and foundries, Sverdlovsk is plagued by smog, but a plan is afoot to develop centralized heating and rid the city of the hundreds of coal-fires that keep boilers going today...
...Nikita Khrushchev, the beefy and vigorous First Secretary of the Communist party, has staked his reputation—possibly his life—on this new plan...
...The manufacturers "listened and shrugged their shoulders...
...Dyes run or fade...
...In April...
...Arrogant officials push and jostle each time a better apartment house is opened...
...Otherwise the wait will be endless...
...Great days may be coming at the market, but for the moment, despite lowered prices, Sophie cannot buy enough of the sort of food she wants...
...It wasn't touched...
...Investigators uncovered at the villa "240 men's knitted shirts, more than a thousand yards of knitted cloth, over 1300 pounds of raw textiles, and many other manufactured goods, as well as large sums of money...
...Faults in construction are reported from cities and towns all over the Soviet Union...
...At Ulyanovsk on the middle Volga, new roofs sag, foundations begin to shift even before houses are occupied, and walls collapse...
...Only 5.6 million acres will be cultivated this year, and their productivity depends on the completion of irrigation systems still under construction...
...City Park Lake, polluted by industrial wastes from the factories, is to be cleaned up...
...Izvestia quoted one agent who strenuously argued that the deficiencies in his buildings weren't important...
...in particular, two apartments were expensively redecorated, complete with costly double-paneled doors and shutters for the windows...
...Another important development, announced this March, is the plan to open up some 32 million acres of virgin and fallow lands for grain cultivation...
...In November, V. P. Zotov, Minister of the Food Products Industries, issued new quotas to his subordinates...
...Bread is not baked properly...
...In the Ukraine, where public laundries do exist, fine materials —silk shirts and curtains—are refused because the laundries know their own weaknesses...
...Furniture makers, with a ruble-quota of production and sales to fulfil, produce luxury items for the wealthy and thus fill their quotas by assembling only a few units...
...Dmitri and Sophie take what is left after the official helps himself, gets one for a friend, and makes certain that his newly-married daughter is provided for...
...lzvestia reports the case of Judge Kachanovetsky...
...He was so well off—this burned the Pravda reporter most of all—that no one else in the family had to work...
...At Tiflis...
...They are commanded: "Devise new, brighter dyes...
...In January, Pravda discussed the clothing situation at Tashkent...
...And at Kiev, too, shoe repairs are difficult...
...Here, except for the streets in the center of town, mud is everywhere, and out in the new housing areas conditions are so bad that it's almost impossible to tell where the streets are...
...On the contrary, each deals with a limited area of that complex and ever-changing society...
...Some work an exclusive clientele, calling at the customer's home in pre-repeal American bootlegger fashion...
...the other supervised the work—all at state expense...
...In August 1953, of twelve housing units made available for occupancy at Sverdlovsk, ten were rejected because of "serious deficiencies...
...Produce fast colors...
...Textile industries are told to create new textures and patterns...
...Tashkent has a few cleaning establishments, but the big central dry-cleaning plant begun four years ago never got off the ground...
...Miss Shushana Gurashvili "carried her wares women's knitwear—on her person and led customers into a lavatory where she would strip off various items of her attire...
...Despite current campaigns to increase and improve consumer goods, many manufacturers have not altered production schedules...
...Nevertheless, we believe these four essays, taken as a whole, should suggest how variegated and complicated a modern totalitarian state is at all its levels...
...Public buildings and housing units are condemned for their gloomy, flat-box modernity...
...At Tambov, an industrial city some 250 miles southeast of Moscow, the builders of an unfinished housing unit began moving—illegally—into some of the apartments as they were completed...
...Rooms were transformed into "offices" while the builders "liquidated shortcomings...
...Floor waxers...
...Dawn of the East, reports still another sales method...
...Here's how one man solved for himself the problems that beset Dmitri and Sophie...
...Such is life today on Main Street USSR...
...Maiofis—a man of no known occupation when arrested?lived with his family in a roomy and lavishly furnished villa...
...Average Russian—may have considered renting one of these units, pressured by the agent's promise to supply a bathtub as soon as possible...
...where Stalin once studied theology, swarms of "traders" work openly in the stores and on the streets, under the eyes of officials and police...
...This report is an effort to set down in English the picture of life on Main Street USSR that is presented by the Soviet press...
...But lzvestia torpedoed the deal by pointing out that 800 non-existent bathtubs had already been promised to people who had moved in earlier in the year...
...In an all-out effort to carry the food fort by assault, the Party has commanded 100,000 members of the Communist youth organization, the Komsomol, to "volunteer" their services on the new farms...
...Elsewhere, floors crack, steam heat doesn't heat, doors have no knobs, bathtubs are rusty, stoves won't work and their doors fall off, wiring is faulty, and wall-paint peels and cracks...
...The equipment for it is rusting in the open...
...Dmitri and Sophie?Mr...
...Styles and stylists are being raked over the hottest coals, and the official press sometimes reads like an ultra-militant Vogue...
...One engineer's $25,000 home was completed by the combine from funds entered on the books as "planned capital investments...
...But the rewards are worth the risk, and competition is rugged...
...A broad stairway will descend to the lakeshore so that young lovers and tired workers may promenade there...
...But what about Dimitri and Sophie...
...With a population well over 600,000, Tashkent is the greatest metropolis in Soviet Central Asia and one of the major cities of the Soviet Union...
...The meat-products industry was commanded to raise its production for 1955 to a volume 100 per cent above that of 1950...
...Said Pravda: "We well know that the chief deciding condition in the further development of the economy and the growth of the welfare of the Soviet people is the universal improvement of productive labor in all branches of industry, transport, construction and agriculture...
...To augment food production, budgets of the food ministries were greatly increased...
...Well, but Sophie has worked hard all of her life...
...And he did...
...and Mrs...
...But they would gladly arrange to have such a suit made?provided he can furnish the suiting material...
...They refuse to turn out the mass-produced, cheap but attractive chairs, tables and beds that Dmitri and Sophie could afford...
...Also, she dresses in unattractive babushkas, wears shapeless, dull-colored uniform-suits and bulky shoes...
...Here, if Dmitri should enter the store and say that he wants to buy a suit like the one in the window, the clerks would laugh at him...
...The explanation...
...The head of the provincial justice department is a personal friend: Kachanovetsky has the local government in his pocket...
...That these private salesmen exist in droves is freely admitted by the press...
...In the Urals, the citizen who wants his shoes repaired is advised to "Buy new ones...
...That the men in the Kremlin are moved by gallantry seems improbable, but there is no doubt whatever that they are seriously worried about Sophie's appearance...
...Often they are speculators who corner the market by buying up scarce goods from the official stores and sell at fabulous prices...
...Big Brother, the incorruptible, the only referee in this fight, lands hard on his officials—when he catches them...
...Dmitri and Sophie can have everything some day if they work like dogs today...
...At Simferopol in the Crimea, plastered walls are spotted with dampness that never dries out...
...Well, then, the chemical industries must begin to fight...
...Meanwhile, there are the promises—as ever: prosperity and luxury tomorrow...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 32
