Not Like Texas

Young Galina Stepanchenko lives in the Donbas coal-mining town of Makeevka, works hard and wants to get married. When she wrote to three young men of her acquaintance one day, she had no idea the letters were going to turn up in black type in Komsomolskaya Pravda, but they did. Miss Stepanchenko had made the deplorable mistake of getting all three letters into the wrong envelopes. The recipients thought three was a crowd and exposed the flirtatious Galina. Moscow Correspondent Joseph Newman sent Komsomolskaya Pravda's story along to the New York Herald Tribune, which pubished it this week.

The Dream of the Comb. To Nikolai Fedorovich, Galina had written: "I feel just as melancholy as you . . . There are always dreams passing through my mind. When I awake in the morning I look at your picture. I look at it 30 times a day. Without it my heart aches, and there is no rest for my soul."

To "Bright Sunshine": "I am terribly worried and concerned about you. In my dream last night I saw a fine lady's comb with three teeth missing in the middle. I awoke with a single thought in my mind--what has happened to you?"

To "Vanya": "What has happened? Why did you not answer my last two letters? Perhaps you are tired of our friendship . . . Oh, Vanechka! Apparently you have fallen in love with someone else, and she prohibits your continuation of our comradely correspondence. In that case, I can tell you only one thing--real comrades shouldn't act that way. If there is any trace of the old feeling . . . then write . . ."

The editors of Komsomolskaya Pravda were not amused. An investigation had been made of Miss Stepanchenko. Without doubt, she had been cultivating multiple boy friends in order to make a shrewd, calculated choice of a husband, just like any common bourgeoise.

The Siren of Slutsk. It reminded the editors of another, similar case: that of Galina Dubrovina, of the town of Slutsk in western Belorussia. Miss Dubrovina had actually kept a notebook with a special page entitled "My Fiances." There she had scored nine young fellows under four headings: "Job--Salary--Year of Birth--Home Address."

This sort of thing would not be surprising in the U.S., the editors thought. In fact, they said, according to a survey taken in Texas, most American girls were chiefly concerned with the "pecuniary aspects of their future marriages." But Komsomolskaya Pravda, which exists to point morals for young Communists and Russian youth in general, said that such things could not be tolerated in the Soviet Union:

"Slutsk is not Texas."

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