SOVIET UNION: Happier New Year

As the big New Year holiday approached in the Soviet Union last week, Russian shoppers crowded stores from Tallinn to Tashkent in search of food, liquor, gifts and winter clothing. What they found was generally more abundant, of better quality—and costlier —than in the past. Stores on Moscow's busy Kalinin Prospekt shopping street carried the first-ever Soviet-made jeans at authentic Western prices: $10 to $20 a pair. In Leningrad, women were snapping up pantyhose imported from East Germany at $10 a pair. Other briskly selling items: Hungarian electric shavers at $35 each and a new line of Soviet-made all-wool overcoats...

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