Foreign News: On Street Cars

The right to board a Moscow street car by the uncrowded front platform instead of by the normally jammed rear entrance is a privilege heretofore granted by Soviet law only to “citizens carrying bundles of the order of trunks; cripples, and women with infants less than 42 inches tall.” Humanitarians have called this an admirable law, an instance of the instinctive chivalry of the proletariat. Despatches told last week, however, that the front door privilege has recently been extended to all People’s Commissars (Cabinet Ministers) and their staffs, as well as to members of the Congress of Soviets and the Union Central Executive Committee (Parliament).

These gentry may now enter by the front door and lawfully demand that the other streetcar riders pass their money from hand to hand to the conductor on the rear platform and then pass back from hand to hand the change, if any.