I Dreamed I Was a Marxist In My Maidenform Bra

Once upon a Stalinist time, Masha the Machinist was supposed to get maximum uplift just by doing her bit for the Five-Year Plan. Her unharnessed figure, unrouged cheeks and unwaved hair were the model for Soviet womanhood. Feminine adornments were considered decadent. But under Nikita Khrushchev's rule, glamour has become one of the Marxist virtues; the party line has caught up with the hemline. At a Moscow fashion show this summer, 9,000 people a day enviously ogled the sleek styles that so far only the mannequins were wearing. The counters of GUM, Moscow's government department store, blossomed with gaudily colored brassieres. Costume jewelry and other Western fripperies adorned new shops along Gorky Street.

Last week a new voice of authority proclaimed the revived right of women to be proletarian and pretty. The Sunday supplement of Izvestia argued: "You can't deny a woman's striving to be attractive. What woman's heart does not miss a beat at the words: 'Now that dress suits you' or 'What a splendid hairdo.' This is not just a caprice, but a demand of the times and a reflection of the increased cultural level. We must not consider these 'petty matters' unworthy of attention." Trouble was, added Izvestia pleadingly, that economic planners who are responsible for supplying the "pretty clothes, nice makeup and jewelry that every woman craves" are maddeningly inefficient.

To document its story of ladies in distress, the magazine assigned a team of eight women reporters to a kind of undercover investigation. According to their findings, black lingerie is so scarce that salespeople are tired of saying "no" to repeated demands. Supposedly black slips and panties delivered to GUM are only dirty brown. Why are lace trimmings so shoddy? Not enough lace or lacemaking machines. Only four factories in the country produce nonrun nylons, and the 83 stocking-repair shops in Moscow are so far behind that it may take a month to fix a pair of hose. Square-fingered Soviet gloves, complained Izvestia, "make even the most graceful hand look like a paw." Hair rinses, shampoos and large curlers are hard to find; one reporter in Moscow waited more than four hours for a hair dresser, still was twelfth in line when the shop was ready to close. Concluded Izvestia: "If you want to look beautiful, you must suffer."

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