Vegetable Scandal

Moscow is hungry for fresh vegetables, could do with more fresh meat. The bread shortage of last year no longer exists, but this evidence of better times was all but ignored last week as a great squawk began about the Vegetable Scandal. Squawked the Workers' Gazette:

"We demand intervention by the State

Prosecutor! There is disgraceful, scandalous, even criminal mismanagement in the Moscow-Central Co-operative Bureau of Food Distribution. A huge proportion of the perishable food brought into Moscow, particularly vegetables, spoils before it reaches the consumer."

Year ago Moscow's Central Market, corresponding to Les Holies in Paris, was abolished and distribution of perishables entrusted to the Cooperative.

Theory: The despised "private trader" who bought cheap at the market and sold dear to his proletarian customers would be squeezed out of this detestable "unproductive" occupation, forced to do honest "work" or starve.

Result: Private traders still seem to be able to get fresh vegetables and meats somehow, and breakdown of the Co-operative food distribution system has forced more and more proletarians to "buy private." Naturally the private traders have raised their prices, "thieves and robbers that they are," as any proletarian will tell you.

Buying from the Co-operative means that the housewife or a servant must stand in line for hours every day, and when she gets to the Co-operative window she must take whatever the overworked comrade clerk has left, and sometimes he or she has nothing left, slams the grocery window. Not only in Moscow but throughout the Soviet Union such standing in line is a common sight in every city. In remote Alma Ata, in romantic Samarkand, patient women, whether they can read or write or not, guard jealously their "food books," in which the Co-operative clerks enter every purchase to prevent "food repeaters."

In Moscow today the current series of "food books" allows a housewife to purchase for each and every member of her family at the Co-operative 25 Ib. of potatoes per month, plus 15 Ib. of "other vegetables."

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