Remember The Good Old Lines?

By Yuri Zarakhovich/In Line in Moscow

"Oh, the romantic lines of my youth," sighs a middle-aged Moscow housewife. "We would line up at Sokolniki Park to see the first American exhibition, where Khrushchev debated Nixon. Or at the Pushkin Museum to see paintings by Fernand Leger. What wonderful times we had! Not like in these horrible lines today."

It would seem a bizarre monologue almost anywhere else, but not in the Soviet Union. Though comrades have stood in line ever since strains of the Internationale first wafted over Red Square, the queues are longer and crankier these days, thanks to chronic shortages. Biding one's time to buy soap or bread has become the form of public life most readily available to the masses. Soviets spend so much time waiting that the lines have generated a culture all their own: part rumor mill, information exchange, social club and town meeting.

Political debates begin there. Outside one of only three automobile dealerships in all of Moscow, a tall uniformed general fumes. "I have to line up six times at this same window to have my car registered," says he. "Lenin said, 'Socialism is inventory,' but surely not this kind of inventory."

"Inventory is socialism," retorts an unshaven man ahead. "Hence all this crap."

"But this is perestroika now," objects a young man. "Things must change, mustn't they?"

"Must they indeed!" snorts the unkempt philosopher. "Perestroika is an everlasting process."

The general replies with a muttered obscenity.

Lasting enmities have been born in queues, as have fast friendships. Nikolai and Lena met as students while waiting for a table in a popular cafe. They never got inside, but 20 years of wedded bliss and two children prove that some marriages are made not in heaven but in line.

The trendiest queue these days is the one outside McDonald's in Pushkin Square. The three-hour wait for a glimpse of life abroad -- which is more precious than the Big Macs themselves -- has supplanted such cultural diversions as visiting the Bolshoi, which is usually either closed or touring abroad anyway. On a recent Sunday, a troupe of young actors staged a skit for waiting patrons in the McDonald's line. Thus the performers were fulfilling the oft-stated but little-realized communist goal of bringing culture to the masses by going to where the masses can always be found.