Laugh! Wear Neckties!

Meek Soviet citizens who dress, work, laugh and even love very much as their State directs, looked back last week on a momentous 90 days, a summer during which Russia's leaders historically changed their cultural directives* to provide more fun for All the Russias.

Almost the only pure fun or vanity sanctioned last spring by Bolshevik Spar tans was the buying and using of lipsticks & rouges sold by petite, blonde Paulina Semionova Molotova, wife of Soviet Premier Molotov and Manager of "Tezhe," the Soviet powder, perfume, rouge & lipstick trust (TIME. June 13). Considered daring in the spring, Paulina Molotova was comparatively a back number when July rolled around, bringing its Annual Congress of Young Communists representing 5,500,000 Red maidens & swains.

Boldly handsome, smouldering-eyed Alexander Kosariov, "The Stalin of the Young Communists." mounted the Congress platform in a bourgeois business suit, clean collar and loud tie. Banging for order, he shouted:

"Vulgarizers of Socialism think that we, being collectivists, are against personal wellbeing. They think we oppose flowers, music, cleanliness, a stylish suit! They imagine Socialism as a grey barracks in which everything is done according to instructions alike for everybody! They think we oppose three or four rooms comfortably furnished, for every family. What a foul and stinking lie!"

Actually the state of affairs ridiculed by Comrade Kosariov was and is to a great extent the standard of life throughout Russia which is facing her worst food shortage since the Famine Year 1921. Scarcely any of the young Communists who heard him possess or will possess a necktie for years to come, let alone a business suit. For that reason they cheered wildly his new directive to the Communist Youth movement: "We are not against love! We are not against flowers! We are not ascetics and we do not preach asceticism. We are for a full and many-sided life--a life rich in experiences!"

Marking out more fully the scope of the new directive, Comrade Kosariov continued. "We have virtually no comedies in our theatres. Genuine love scenes must be introduced! We have no plays or films which really tell about ordinary everyday life. They must be produced! Joyful, hearty laughter must sound in play and film--laughter which defeats the enemies of Communism and helps us to build Socialism!"

Such championship of mere pleasure for its own sake would have cost any Communist his treasured Party membership last spring. But Josef Stalin, shrewdest of shrewd Dictators, has sensed that millions of Russians are sick of his laborious Five-Year-Plan, deaf to exhortations and are increasingly hungry. Let them laugh then and be cheered up!

Matter of fact the Soviet State, as usual, anticipated the public announcements of its leaders. Change after drastic change was quietly made last summer on the Cultural Front:

Cinema. Pensive Anatoly Lunacharsky, onetime Commissar of Education, wrote and his once beauteous wife acted in a thoroughly sentimental, Mid-Victorian confection now delighting All the Russias.

The film begins with a hunting party at the castle of the Duke, includes a 100% bourgeois ghost and ends when the Duke in a proper passion vents his jealous rage upon the naughty Duchess--there being no Red moral. A few years ago Mme Lunacharsky played the role of prostitute-heroine in a film preaching solemnly against the green-eyed vice. When her man kicked her out of their house and sat down sullenly, the moral was croakingly pointed in these words: "There is no time for exhibitions of so bourgeois a passion as jealousy in our Socialist society! This man should not have interrupted his work."

Sergei Michailovitch Eisenstein, greatest of Soviet cinema directors, returned from two years in Hollywood and Mexico last spring, found to his consternation that he could no longer make serious films such as The Armoured Cruiser, Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World. Instead, last week Comrade Eisenstein was filming belly laughs.

Music. Comrades with gramophones (and how prized is the oldest gramophone in Russia!) are now playing them openly at last, inviting their friends to dance and casting off frankly the Bolshevik-Puritan mask.

Schools. One formerly privileged Russian class has suddenly been put to hard labor: schoolchildren. Up to now Bolshevik schooling has favored the modernistic "Dalton System," each child being assigned a "problem" and "encouraged" to solve it. In practice many a Russian schoolchild has loafed under the Dalton System, was growing up illiterate. But last week they loafed no longer.

With the opening of Russian schools for the autumn term, Soviet pupils face frequent quizzes, periodic examinations and they must obey their teachers. Until now teachers in the Soviet Union have been at the mercy of the "school soviet" (i. e. their pupils).

The Press. Still deadly serious, full of dull statistics and clarion shouts for the Five-Year Plan are Russian newspapers. But not long ago a leading Soviet editor rebelled, told the Kremlin privately but passionately that there must be more human interest, fewer statistics and less propaganda in his newspaper. Instanter the editor got the sack, was expelled from the Party. But his advice is being deeply pondered. Already a change looms, and some human interest has crept into Mos cow's Evening News, which even good Party members are reading more avidly than the dry-as-dust Pravda or Izvestia.

*Instead of "taking orders" Russians "receive directives'' which are supposed to be more com-radely.

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