Foreign News: Those Moscow Mules

With the coming of spring, an alarming case of human nature was busting out all over the Soviet paradise.

Through the milling crowds in front of Moscow's department stores, furtive figures accosted shoppers to hawk wares hidden in briefcases, paper bags and coat pockets. After striking a bargain, the hawkers disappeared into the throng before agents from the "Department for Struggle Against Swindle and Speculation" could lay on the heavy hand of the law. The trade, according to Krokodil, Russia's official humor magazine, which sees nothing funny in the situation: a brisk black market in privately and illegally made woolen jerseys, caps, scarves, mittens and T shirts.

Back to the Knitting. Soviet mills have boosted production, but both the quantity and quality leave much to be desired. This is what gives capitalist knitters their chance. In Moscow, admitted Krokodil, scores of underground knitting plants operate under the noses of the cops.

Sleuths of the Department for Struggle, etc. raided a shop operated by one Anna Lazaryeva, discovered $9,250 worth of yarn, 150 sweaters and $7,500 in cash; a few doors away a second shop was discovered producing 100 blouses a day. The operators, said Krokodil, suffer from no shortage: state textile-industry employees swipe huge amounts of wool from government plants, resell it at a tidy profit to black-marketeers.

Off with Their Wheels. Even Soviet bureaucrats were acting like capitalist bureaucrats. Several months ago the government ordered all officials and executives to turn in their state-owned vehicles to a common motor pool. The decree has been more honored in the breach than in the observance. One brewery director refused to surrender his Moskvich sedan, pleading that it was needed to deliver beer. Moscow police stopped a small delivery truck bearing the sign, "Home Delivery of Buns and Crullers," discovered that it was delivering the bakery manager to the railroad station to meet incoming relatives. A roving reporter from Komsomolskaya Pravda found that in Alma Alta the director of a state livestock farm had placed a large roll of absorbent cotton on the back seat of his car, and declared that it was a Mobile Veterinary Laboratory. The Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences had not yet handed over a single one of the dozens of cars it was using. When the reporter demanded why the state prosecutor's office had not taken action, he was informed: "The state prosecutor himself refuses to turn his cars into the common pool."