Caterpillars, Sirens, Valuta
RUSSIA
Caterpillars, Sirens, Valuta
Among cities Vladivostok is "The Last Place On Earth." Recently to this extreme terminus of Russian railways, to this jumping off place for Kamchatka (if one must jump off--see p. 32) came breezy Henry Wales, of the Chicago Tribune. He reported:
"Vladivostok is much like San Francisco, physically, built on and around a dozen steep hills, but there are only two lines of street cars and no taxis in town. Most of the lugging is done with Chinese carriers, who have a sort of chair arrangement they pack on their back, and I'll bet they could carry pianos and billiard tables if they had any here.
"If some one dies, you call in a Chinaman, put the deceased in a box, or sack if you haven't a box, and the Chinaman packs the remains neatly on the chair and trots off to the cemetery. I saw several funerals like that.
"The only Americans in Vladivostok are the experts maintained by the Caterpillar Tractor company of Peoria. . . .
Valuta. "Vladivostok has a population of close to 200,000 half of whom are Chinese, and the city presents a dreadful spectacle with its swarms of ragged, famishing men--Mongols and Slavs both.
"In the free port in the harbor, conveyor belts are sending thousands of sacks of wheat, grain from last year's bumper harvest, into the holds of British, Japanese, French, and Italian ships, from the huge elevators of the Soviet grain trust. Half a mile away men are falling unconscious on the streets from lack of nourishment.
"The best restaurant in Vladivostok, operated by Japanese for the Government, is on a valuta* basis. Rubles are not accepted in payment, only dollars, yen, sterling and marks.
Dizzy Sirens. "Sailors don't have much fun in this port, because there are no dance halls and no saloons or any places of amusement, and they can't take girls into the seaman's home.
"The girls wait down by the free port for the sailors to go uptown for shore leave, and they beg cigarets, sugar, meat, bread, shoes, anything except money, from the lads they snare. They don't want rubles. They are no good to them since they can't buy anything with them, and they don't dare fool around with valuta, as the G. P. U. is very suspicious over any Russian possessing foreign money.
"These girls are certainly the dizziest looking sirens one could imagine. In rags and tatters, holes in their coarse cotton stockings, torn, heeless shoes, their dresses ripped and burst, dirty--they can't get soap to wash their faces and hands--and no cosmetics to make up. About as much sex appeal as a busted down tractor, but somehow they grab off the sailor lads.
Efficient G. P. U. ''Every morning there is a bazaar down by the bay, with hundreds of Chinese selling a few radishes or a handful of onions or macaroni or rice, and peasant women with geese or chickens, butter, eggs, milk. The whole town jams into the square for the bazaar, and pickpockets do a rushing business. I saw the G. P. U. arrest 15 pickpockets in less than an hour.
"Nine dollars a woman asked for a little pullet weighing about two pounds. Milk was $1 a litre, eggs were $4.50 for ten eggs, butter was $8 a pound. Six-Month Tractors. "Complaints are beginning to come in from every hand that the poor quality of gasoline, benzine, and kerosene, shipped here by the Naphtha trust from Baku and Grozny is ruining all the motors, besides wasting untold working hours in the long period it takes to start the engines every morning. It begets terrible waste, too, as tractor drivers never shut off the motor, remembering the backache of starting it again, and leave it turning over for hours while they are busy doing something else.
"Bad fuel, coupled with careless handling, is cutting down the average life of a tractor from eight to ten years, which they enjoy in America, to about six months here, I was told."
*Soviet term for non-Soviet money.
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