GUM for Consumers

Moving men and huge vans converged on Moscow's Red Square last week to take away load after load of government files from the massive block of buildings which front on Lenin's tomb. Behind the movers came the carpenters, with blueprints to make over Upper Row, on the Red Square's east side. Three weeks had passed since Premier Georgy Malenkov (sounding more like the editor of Vogue than boss of all the Russians) announced that "we must develop attractive textiles, smart clothing, elegant footwear."

By next Nov. 7, the revolution's 36th anniversary, Upper Row will be back to its historic use as one of Moscow's biggest shopping centers. In its Czarist heyday half a century ago, the Upper Row--one of three huge sandstone arcades, three stories high and glass-roofed, newly built at a cost of $3,000,000--boasted 1,000 shops. Came the revolution, the end of private industry and the proliferation of bureaucracy: the shops eventually became offices.

Reborn Upper Row will house stores dealing in men's and women's tailoring, radios and bicycles, jewelry, children's wear, readymade clothes, furs and linens, and, presumably, elegant footwear. The Soviet consumer, promised great things--clothes that fit, machines that work--if only he will pitch in for "two or three years," will also find lunchrooms, restaurants, buffets, post offices, savings-bank branches, theater-ticket offices, and rest rooms for mothers and children in Upper Row. It sounded very much like capitalistic Macy's in New York, except that it will all be state run, of course, by a giant outfit called GUM (Government Universal Stores).

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