RUSSIA: Premier Goes Shopping

A man in workman’s clothes looking a bit like Charles Augustus Lindbergh without a shave walked out of Moscow’s Kremlin one day last month, across vasty Red Square and stopped at a line of common folk waiting outside a State store. He asked the man at the end of the line, “What are you waiting to buy, Comrade?”

“Soap,” said the Comrade.

The stranger joined the line. After an hour’s shuffling forward, he was given a sticky handful of some noisome stuff. He asked the surly clerk for change, was told there was no change in the store. He patiently asked for wrapping paper. The clerk jeered, “Afraid you’ll get your hands soiled?” The stranger asked, “Where is the manager?” The clerk handed him a piece of newspaper to wrap his handful, told him the manager was “upstairs somewhere.” Upstairs he went, gingerly hold-ing his handful. Clerks sent him from department to department for more than an hour, finally told him the manager was out. The patient man suddenly looked angry, his cold eyes turned colder. Dropping his humility, he barked, “I want the manager of Store 134 and I want him quickly. I am Sulimov.”

The manager’s secretary blenched. The shopper was indeed Daniel G. Sulimov, since 1930 Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, comprising nine-tenths of the Soviet Union. Before becoming the equivalent of Pre-mier of an area two and one-half times as big as the U. S., he had headed the Soviet commission inspecting U. S. railways, had been Vice Commissar of Transportation. When the manager of Store 134 came cringing into view, Premier Sulimov roared, “Do you call this soap?” and hurled the handful on the floor. His preliminary investigation showed that the stuff had been made from garbage, that several manufacturing and distributing officials had diverted the fats assigned for Soviet soap, sold them for their own profit.

In most modern states a small case of simple graft would not be news. But as Premier Sulimov maintained last week his public rage, his investigation of the garbage soap, a tremor ran through Soviet officialdom. In Soviet Russia simple graft is punishable by death.