Sewing Machines & Spontaneity

Fresh evidence mounts weekly that Russia's new team of bosses wants to shuck the rigid trappings of centralized planning in favor of a more flexible, consumer-oriented supply-and-demand system. Scarcely a day goes by without one or another of Russia's government-controlled newspapers beating the drum for less centralized economic control.

Examples:

> Pravda cocked an eyebrow recently at the Great Sewing Machine Scandal. A decade ago, the Soviet Union was short on sewing machines, so Marxism's planners pressed the "on" button. Immediately factories began competing to see who could turn out more sewing machines faster. Result: Russian seamstresses are awash in a sea of treadles and bobbins. "We have more than 150,000 machines accumulated here," complained a worker at the Podolsk Sewing Machine Factory, "and still we are making thousands of them every day."

> Lenin's Banner, official organ of the Moscow District party, bared the Great Nipple Shortage. Last week, after tracing the problem from drugstore to Kremlin level, a pair of reporters revealed that there is not a single soska (rubber baby-bottle nipple) to be had in all the Moscow oblast. Although last year's central economic plan called for the production of 30 million nipples, only 12 million were actually manufactured.* The crusading reporters declared that the only plant making surgical rubber was denied authorization to increase production by the planners.

> Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, a government and party blat in Soviet Central Asia, vented its spleen on factories that produced fur hats too inferior to capture customers. One plant was fined $12,000 when it was discovered that only half its output of fur hats and other clothing had been inspected, and of that percentage fully one in five garments proved defective.

> Two papers waxed indignant over the state of the Soviet toy industry. "Toys are serious business," bellowed Komsomolskaya Pravda. "Tanks, armored cars, planes and armored trains, rifles and Tommy guns have almost disappeared," the paper said. The blame for this lamentable situation was laid to Nikita Khrushchev, who allegedly did not want to encourage warlike feelings among children. Pravda, on the other hand, called attention to unsold stocks of toys ($180 million worth in 1963), blamed central planners for misconstruing the public taste. "These monsters of plush, papier-mache, wood and stainless steel are costing the state a pretty kopeck," the paper warned.

Whether the newspaper outcries will be followed up by bolder moves toward decentralized planning remains to be seen. Less easily remedied, though, would be another complaint aired in Komsomolskaya Pravda. Writing from Leningrad, an engineer identified as L. Svetlanov heretically demanded the utmost in decentralization: individual freedom and "live spontaneity" in daily life. Deploring the "rehearsed informality" of Soviet society, Svetlanov described a typical "poetry night" in a Moscow cafe. "After the poets are through reciting," he wrote, "they sit at a separate table and talk animatedly among themselves. A couple of autograph hunters approach timidly. The jazz band plays a few dances. It is all so boring, terribly boring. Why?"

* The nipple shortage was reported in TIME'S Brezhnev cover story (Feb. 24), arousing great ire in the Kremlin. A second reference to this kind of "slanderous information" was made when the Kremlin closed TIME'S Moscow bureau in May.

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