Foreign News: Water Grinders

When it comes to criticizing Soviet bureaucracy, no Westerner can be so merciless as the Communists themselves. Last week Pravda took after O.K.B., the government's Experimental Design Bureau, which supplies industrial know-how not otherwise borrowed from the West. Samples:

Eggs: "How to boil an egg—that is one of the life-shaking problems which designers, draftsmen and consultants of the O.K.B. are engaged ... After years of cogitation there appears ... an egg boiler for eight eggs . . . marked approved, but not acceptable for use." Cost of developing the eight-egg boiler: 35,000 rubles.

Fruit juice: "The designers and constructors squeezed out of the O.K.B. budget ... all the juice they needed, but the institutions that needed fruit juice dispensers have been unable to squeeze out of the O.K.B. one single dispenser." Cost of the fruit-juice project: 250,000 rubles.

Pravda also peeked into the O.K.B. trade machinery division where "56 persons occupy themselves with pouring from one empty barrel into an empty pail and back again." This inspired Pravda to a new term for bureaucratic goldbricking: "Grinding water in a mortar."