RUSSIA: Lenin's Landlords

Since in Russia it has always been more important to know the exceptions than to know the rules, citizens of Moscow accepted with stoicism last week the revelation that in their Soviet midst a total of 1,667 Capitalist landlords have survived to harass the proletariat with extortionate rents. According to the Government Press, which professed itself scandalized, one Moscow landlady is now suing before a Red court to compel a proletarian family to pay her a bonus of 5,000 rubles for the privilege of not being evicted. When the suit appeared to be dragging on. Moscow's meanest landlady got herself a cartwhip, cracked it ominously in the presence of her lodgers and screamed: "Comrade, unless you pay me the bonus I demand, I'll horsewhip your children, I'll horsewhip your wife, and I'll throw you out with the slops!" In the capital of a Communist State such Capitalist carryings on are "intolerable," as the Government Press remarked last week. Unfortunately they were made possible by the late, great Lenin and for a Bolshevik to criticize his acts or decisions is well-nigh treason. During the lean years after the Revolution it was decreed under the NEP policy of Dictator Lenin that houses in Moscow which had fallen into disrepair might be granted as "private possessions" to any Russians willing to put them in good repair at their own expense. In theory such houses are not "private property"—i.e., the landlord cannot sell out—but as "private possessions" they constitute the most valuable thing a Russian can get his hands on in fantastically overcrowded Moscow. Still disinclined to crack down on "Lenin's landlords." the State merely warned them of its displeasure through the Press last week, counts on finally liquidating the landlords as a class when structures of all sorts are torn down to rebuild Moscow according to the new civic Ten-Year Plan (TIME, July 22).