RUSSIA: Button Culture

Newest Soviet word to be endowed with pointed meaning is “culture.” To attain such “culture,” Russian comrades are now strongly urged by their Dictator to become neater in dress, mind and habits. Last week a prominent Soviet journalist who had just been received in the Kremlin told one of the few off-the-record stories about Stalin to get by the censor.

The Dictator, noting a button off his Bolshevik caller’s shirt, pointed out the deficiency with bantering reproof: “So, Comrade, you call yourself a cultured man!” Cracked back the Soviet journalist, according to his story: “It is easier to buy a tractor in Russia than to buy a button!”

This being profoundly true, Dictator Stalin has dedicated Russia’s present Second Five Year Plan to ending the shortage of consumer goods like buttons.

Last week Plan statisticians announced that Russian production of such goods for the first six months’ of 1936 was 28% above last year but still much below what would be needed to make every Russian “cultured” in the sense that he would have a full set of buttons.

Just now buttons, shoes, dress goods, fountain pens and other articles of culture on which Russians have had to skimp for 20 years, are momentarily abundant in Moscow, having just arrived from Japan in barter-payment for Russia’s share of the Chinese Eastern Railway (TIME, March 25, 1935). Long queues of buyers at once formed but Soviet police, as usual, shortened them by the old device of arresting as “speculators” persons who bought more than one or two articles. Sentenced to five years in jail was a Moscow housewife who had bought only one pair of shoes for 80 rubles ($16) but was caught red-handed selling them for 100 rubles to a friend who had not cared to stand in line all night.

Still evident, too, is poor distribution of seasonal goods. While Moscow sweltered through a heat wave, buyers combed stores in vain for electric fans, found only electric heaters.