Russia: Tosca & a Cold Climate

Out of the Soviet boondocks comes a rising tide of complaints about the kind of people the Moscow authorities send out to the hinterland. Too often, they are troublemakers who are supposed to be reformed through hard work. Instead, they just make more trouble. In Vladivostok exiled young toughs formed a bandit gang that terrorized the city and knifed to death a young Communist leader;deportees to a Ukrainian collective farm last year drank so much booze that they were barred from the liquor stores, turned in desperation to eau de cologne.

Last week came an angry gripe in Literaturnaya Gazeta from a Siberian housewife who demanded that Leningrad stop sending its prostitutes 2,735 miles to Irkutsk and surrounding villages. The housewife was especially upset about a young lady named Tosca, whose fame was so great that it preceded her arrival in Siberia. “Won’t this piece of goods find admirers even in a new place?” asked the matron. “She probably will. I know that the wives of a few Bodaibo miners, for example, asked the ‘authorities to stop sending the likes of Tosca to Bodaibo. This desire to push their unfinished goods onto others is wrong.”