A Pair of Pants

A year ago, when Stalin purged Economics Planner Nikolai Voznesensky from the Politburo, a top U.S. diplomat in Moscow said: "Voznesensky made one big mistake. He tried too hard to please Stalin by turning out capital goods [to rebuild Russia] instead of consumer goods. He thought the Russian people could wait a little longer while he made a good showing. What the average Russian wanted was a pair of pants.

The diplomat had stated a truth about Russia which many Western observers have failed to grasp: the Kremlin cares deeply about the morale of the Russian people. Thanks to censorship and secret police, Stalin does not have to worry about "public opinion" in the Western political sense. But morale matters, because it has an effect on how hard the people work, how ready they are to fight, how willingly they submit to the rule of Russia's dictatorship.

This was the point that Voznesensky missed. In the year since he was kicked out, the Kremlin has tried to divert its economic effort a little from steel smelters to pants. Consumer prices have been cut sharply, indicating that more goods were at hand (TIME, March 13). Last week came further news of increased consumer production in Russia.

Radio Moscow, reporting on the first month of the new prices, told of upsurges in retail trade. No doubt the radio reports stretched the truth here & there, but their general picture of the situation was probably true. Sample reports:

P: In Stalino, an industrial city in the Ukraine, the main department store sold four times as many shoes, watches and jewelry in March as in February. Also: "Workers purchased 200 cars for their private use." (More probably, Stalino got its first big batch of postwar cars, and the 200 leading party functionaries duly latched onto them.)

P: In Estonia, woolen and cotton sales rose 100%, trade in general 150%.

P: In Moscow, where women jammed the always-busy department stores, general trade was up only 15%, but sales of food items cherished by upper-caste Muscovites--meat, poultry, sausages, white bread--were up 150%; and shoes and woolens 200%.

P: In Tashkent, near Afghanistan in West Asia, collective farmers bought 7,000 sewing machines.

P: In the villages of Dnepropetrovsk province, bicycle and motorbike sales rose to the point where every single family had one or the other.

Radio Moscow also announced that this summer 30,000 mobile units--gasoline and horse-drawn--would take portable displays of goods to collective farms.

The new flow of consumer goods was a start, at least, toward what the Bolshevik leaders of the Russian Revolution had been promising for 32 years. Soon everybody in the workers' paradise might have a pair of pants.

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