RUSSIA: Ivan in Creditland

For years, Soviet economists have inveighed against installment buying as simply another hobnail in the capitalist heel grinding the faces of the poor. When a Western worker lost his job, they declared, he lost his car, his furniture, even the home on which he could no longer keep up payments. Last week, in an unabashed about-face, workers all over Russia were invited to sign up for the installment plan as a wide range of Soviet consumer goods were made available on credit.

In Moscow’s mammoth GUM department store a plump, blonde secretary mooned over a Tula portable sewing machine priced at 1,200 rubles,* finally planked down 300 rubles, signed some papers and took it with her. In an Izmailovo radio store a middle-aged man watched the clerk packing an expensive Luxe radio-phonograph and said: “I only had to pay 440 rubles, and we’ll have music in our home this very night.” Whether cameras, clocks, accordions, motor scooters, outboard motors or silver fox furs, the terms were everywhere the same: 20%-25% down, a service charge of up to 2%, and the rest deducted in six to twelve installments from the worker’s monthly paycheck.

For all its novelty, consumer credit caused no traffic jam in the stores. Reason: the hard-to-get goods in greatest demand, such as automobiles, refrigerators and TV sets, were conspicuously missing from the credit list. And lest the Russian shopper think that the consumer millennium is just around the corner, Premier Khrushchev, on his way back to Moscow from Peking, told a Vladivostok audience that the U.S.S.R. has no intention of trying to equal U.S. automobile output. “We will use automobiles more rationally than the Americans do,” he said. “We are going to establish taxi pools, where people can use cars when they need them. Why should a man worry about parking space?”

As even he must have anticipated, Nikita’s taxi-pool plan evoked no display of overwhelming enthusiasm from his subjects. And for all his usual adroitness, Khrushchev dropped a real clanger when he sniffed that, in the capitalist U.S., “People say: ‘This is a lousy car, but at least it is my own.’ ” Parking problem or no parking problem, this is a statement that most Russians would clearly like to be able to make.

* The ruble’s official exchange rate is four to the dollar, the tourist rate ten to the dollar, and on Russia’s active black market in currency the rate sometimes leaps as high as 100 to 1.