FOREIGN TRADE: Red Sales

To impress the U.S. with Soviet “science, technology and culture.” the Russians opened a trade fair in Manhattan’s Coliseum this week—the first big exhibit of Soviet wares in the U.S. since the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The Soviet Union spent more than $10 million on the New York show, which touches on nearly every aspect of Russian life from art and ballet to city planning, and sent their First Deputy Premier Frol Koslov (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) to preside at the opening. The 10,000 exhibits are good, bad and indifferent by U.S. standards; the overall result is a significant study of Russia’s position in the world.

Architect-Designer K. I. Rozdestvensky, who designed the Russian pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair and the Russian exhibit in Brussels last summer, has set the tone of the show with a giant, 54-ft. curving aluminum fin: a slice of the universe, crisscrossed with red and yellow traceries of satellites, surrounded by full-scale models of the buglike Sputnik I and the heavy cone that carried the dog Laika into orbit. In the background rise four 48-ft. triangular columns, showing heroic Russians more than twice life-size over legends such as: THERE IS NO ILLITERACY IN THE SOVIET UNION.

The Emphasis. Most of the propaganda is not so obvious; the Russians are content to let their products make their case. There are elaborate table models of heavy Russian industrial units: an integrated steel plant sprawls over a 450-sq.-ft. area: there are models of a plastics and synthetic-rubber complex and an offshore drilling platform that stands on hundreds of stilts in the Caspian Sea. In an area called “Atoms for Peace,” the Russians show a 15-ft. model of the icebreaker Lenin.

To demonstrate their progress in the machine tools behind the machines, the Russians showed off seven industrial tools, including some that do their cutting by “sparking” discharges and ultrasonics. In the electrical discharge field (TIME, Nov. 10), U.S. experts guessed that the Russians are ahead of the U.S. In the more conventional machines and in the automatic ones operated by magnetic tapes (including a machine that cuts the word peace in a metal slab), the guess was that the U.S. is ahead.

No Envy. When it comes to consumer goods, there is no doubt that the Russians are far behind. The textiles—mostly thick, heavy-textured woolen suits—a”e more impressive for their usefulness against the Russian winter than for their styles, which are clumsy attempts to copy Western designs. The Russian TV sets might have come out of U.S. living rooms (one bore the Russian brand name Admiral). The Russian cars looked like copies of small West European autos.

In a two-bedroom apartment, the paint easily rubs off the prefabricated walls. The furniture is frail and imitative. The kitchen contains a small, 1,300-ruble ($130) refrigerator that stands 3 ft. 9 in. high, is more like a 1939 than a 1959 U.S. model: the stove ($60) is so small that the oven would cramp a large chicken.

While the Russians have stewed about the $13,000 American home to be shown at the U.S. exhibition that is to be opened by Vice President Nixon in Moscow July 25, no one can expect U.S. consumers to envy the Russian products on display in Manhattan.