RUSSIA: Commissaresses

If proof were still lacking that the bloody Soviet purge of the past year was a brutally direct, Oriental method of ridding the modern Stalinist Russia of the oldtime, inefficient professional revolutionists who brought it into being, such proof seemed to become apparent last week in the shuffled appointments of three Soviet career women. Removed without warning from the post of Commissar for Finance was Varvara Nikolaevna Yakovleva, to be succeeded by a little-known man, Nikolai Sokolov.*

Mme Commissar Yakovleva, 52, is an Old Bolshevik, a veteran of the bloody fruitless days of 1905, who was exiled to Siberia under the Tsar. After the 1917 revolution she did valiant service in the ruthless Cheka, the pre-Ogpu secret police, gradually rose to be Vice Commissar for Education and finally Russia’s first and only female Finance Commissar.

While she was being quietly ousted last week, two younger, more tractable career women received rich promotions. The wife of Soviet Premier Vyacheslav Molotov, who bears a strange Semitic resemblance to the Duchess of Windsor, has for five years managed the Soviet cosmetic trust so efficiently that, aside from ball bearings, lipsticks are almost the only article manufactured in the U. S. S. R. comparable in quality to those of capitalist industry. So she was advanced to the post of Vice Commissar for the Food Industry. Appointed to take her place was a plump, personable ex-scrubwoman, Mme Tatiana Morozova, until last week director of the New Dawn perfume & face powder factory.

*Not to be confused with Federal Music Project Director Nicolai Sokoloff.