World Notes Soviet Union

In a country the size of the Soviet Union (more than two times larger than the U.S.), letters frequently get lost in the mail. Sometimes even important documents disappear into the maw of a vast bureaucracy. But a whole train? Just so. In June 1983, according to an article last week in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, a 28-car freight train loaded with crushed rock rolled out of the Tomashgorodsky Metal Factory in the Ukraine, bound for a construction site 350 miles away in the Russian republic. The train left, Pravda reported, "but it did not arrive."

Puzzled, F. Polyak, the factory director, contacted the Moscow railway department, through whose territory the missing freight should have passed. No luck. Next, Polyak asked the South Western railway directorate, only to be told to get in touch with its Belorussian equivalent. The reply there: check with Moscow. Finally, Polyak queried the central search section of the Rail Ministry itself. He was informed that "it was not possible to do anything" because the shipment documents had routinely been destroyed after a year. No matter that the train had left less than a year before. Said Pravda: "Even Sherlock Holmes from Baker Street in London could have lost his way in the paper labyrinth."