Russians Mending Manners

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31321, 17 March 1967, Page 2

Russians Mending Manners

(N.Z.P.A.-Keuter) MOSCOW. Russians are being told by their newspapers that the time has come to mend their manners. The general attitude to such matters was summed up by one writer in the statem e n t: “Ordinary courtesy is sometimes looked on as a funny throw-up from the old world.”

This is just what the startled foreigner in Moscow sometimes thinks when he politely steps aside to let a woman pass and an army of jostling Muscovites surges past as if he were no more than a doorstep. Articles urging the need for teaching manners in school appear frequently in newspapers. The writers emphasise that it is not enough for a good Communist just to have studied his books well. “Nowadays. I think, everyone agrees that man’s moral

and cultural upbringing is one of the most important and urgent tasks in the construction of communism,” said one writer in “Izvestia,” the Government newspaper.

He supported his arguments by pointing out that Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet State, hated every form of bad manners and did not hestitate to correct his revolutionary colleagues if they were rude or abrupt.

The trade union newspaper, “Trud,” has started a regular feature entitled: “What does it mean to be cultured?" It invited its readers to contribute their views. STRANGE TWIST To many Russians, “being cultured” means simply to have good manners. But this can sometimes take on a strange twist A Western reporter once saw a woman taxi-driver put an abrupt end to an argument with a prospective passenger by spitting at him. “What did you do that for?" the reporter asked. “Oh, he was being uncultured," she replied with apparent unconcern.

Some Russians believe that good manners belong to the pre-Revolutjonary past

A self-styled “modern young man” wrote to the “Literary Gazette” defending his right to play his transistor radio wherever he liked, or jostle people tn the street. it was, hh said, all part of the rhythm of modern life. He was sorry for people who complained of the noise from his transistor radio.

“These old-fashioned people are vainly trying to turn back the eJock in their desire for peaee and quiet In plfices where it is not only impossible but, to tell the truth, also unnecessary,’’ Explaining that it published the letter as part of a general discussion, the newspaper commented: “It will obviously bring objections from other readers."

M. Karpovich, who writes in “Izvestia," declared that the idea that manners were unnecessary arose from “naive nihilism” in the early years of post-Revolutionary fervour, when everything linked with the old aristocracy was rejected out of hand. “HUMILIATING”

In the 19205, he said, a young girl would be very offended if her escort offered to help her on with her eoat. She did not need, she would have said, the “humiliating help of a man." But this attitude “opened the way for plain rudeness, primitiveness in human attitudes, and sometimes simply led to obscenity and pettybourgeois licentiousness.” People sometimes protest, Karpovieh says that “we are not against what is useful and understandable, but against the nonsense which is thought up. Take table manners. . . . Is it not all the same how you use a knife? “No, it is not all the same.

“Many customs which seem at first glance to be thought up,’ are really quite sensible. One should not eat with the knife instead of the fork, say, if only because one might unintentionally cut one’s lip.”