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No Browsing. If the peasants' pristine ways have changed little since the Revolution, Russia's cities have been largely created by Communism. With industrialization, the urban population, now 116 million strong, has quadrupled in 30 years. But even second-generation city dwellers seem restless, disconnected from their environment and one another. Amid jostling, unsmiling crowds on the streets, in bookstores where the buyer cannot browse, in restaurants where the customer is as insignificant as a hat rack, life in the capital has a disordered, rough-edged, strangely impersonal quality.
The command economy of Communism has no ears or eyes. The individual can plead, complain, threaten or walk out. But no one really cares.
Russia seems wholly oblivious to esthetics. There is hardly an object in Russia, from the worn, chipped steps of Moscow's newest department store to the tasseled Victorian lampshades in an Aeroflot jet, that looks as if it had never really been new. Walls and floors often bulge as if there were gophers in the woodwork; many new buildings are girdled with safety nets to protect passers-by from cascading bricks and plaster. From its pockmarked paneling, cracking plaster and flaking paint, Moscow's eight-year-old Ukraine Hotel looks almost as if it had been built for Mosfilm's movie of War and Peace. While party officials sing the praises of Orgalit, a kind of Red Masonite widely used for doors, Muscovites snicker: "Builders stick to it—but door handles won't."
"What Underwear!" Communists even show a certain pride in genteel Chekhovian shabbiness. Restaurant tablecloths are almost always slightly soiled, but clean oilcloth is distinctly nekulturny. Hotel maids may forget to remove dead cockroaches, but they never fail to dust the chandelier and the grand piano. Only at the ballet does the Russian's old love of flashing hues and sumptuous textures seem to come into its own. Even women's underwear at lingerie counters is coarse and drab, prompting a visiting French Communist's classic comment: "What under wear! Yet what a birth rate!"*
Because manufacturers and retailers do not have to compete for the consumer's ruble, there is little incentive to produce attractive, well-made goods or to improve design. If a factory retools for a new product, the lost production time may well cost its manager his bonus for overfulfilling the sacrosanct quota. As it is, at the end of every month he is limp from shturmovshchina, the frenetic, last-minute battle to beat the quota.
The non-enterprise system has bred an underground elite: the hard-to-find specialists who can make brand-new shoes wearable, alter off-the-peg suits and dresses so that they have a semblance of style, or give a broken appliance the "provisional" treatment, as the Russians call their intuitive knack for makeshift repairs.
Room at the Top. Soviet life is further complicated by inexplicable shortages of simple commodities, from razor blades to pencils and light bulbs; and each shortage seems to create yet another vacuum. Though