Russia: Service, Please

A Soviet housewife in Kiev, blessed with a private bathroom, discovered one morning that the toilet was clogged. She immediately informed the janitor, who told her that it was necessary to apply to the apartmenthouse “block committee.” A member of the committee instructed her to fill out a form and take it to the area repair center for her district. etting this far consumed most of one day. Early the next day, the housewife appeared at the repair center. There she had to wait in line for two hours before she reached the comrade who allocated plumbers for her district. He studied his calendar, looked up and said: “We can have a plumber at your appartment within a month.”

This tale of delay is not uncommon in the Soviet Union, which long regarded service jobs as demeaning and accorded them low status and pay. In a classless society, a plumber, a waiter or a barber was thought to lack self-respect because he had to cater to others. The result, not surprisingly, has been a severe shortage of trained people in the whole range of service occupations.

Now the government has moved to remedy the situation. It has just set up a three-year crash program to train more people for service jobs, promised them more pay and a set of new titles of the kind previously reserved for tractor drivers and steel workers. Examples of some of them: “Master First Class” in plumbing or “Master Higher Class” in hotel management.

Queues at Dawn. Even so, it will take quite a while to bring relief to the long-neglected Russian consumer. Women who seek the services of the top hairdressing shops in Moscow must queue up at dawn if they expect to get in. Moscow’s new glass-steel “skyscrapers” (of modest height) became functionless in last summer’s heat as broken air conditioners remained unfixed.

“They stand idle,” says Soviet Humorist Boris Egorov without much humor, “because no one understands how they were built or how to operate them. There are no repairmen or instruction books.” As for the Russian lucky enough to own a car, he can forget about mechanics if it breaks down; there are so few of them that the state requires anyone wanting a driver’s license to be able to take apart the engine and make basic repairs himself.

These are minor woes compared with the ones that the government will face when the new Tolyati Fiat plant in the Middle Volga region is completed in 1969. Right now there are only about 1,000,000 cars in Russia, and only 75,000 in Moscow, a city of 6,500,000 people. Moscow has only eight filling stations and Leningrad just three. Yet the Fiat plant, for which the Italians are providing equipment and technical advice, will produce some 600,000 cars a year by the early 1970s—more than triple the present Soviet output. Mechanics of the Soviet Union, multiply!