Off-white collar workers

Press, 27 April 1989, Page 14

Off-white collar workers

TREVOR FISHLOCK reports from Moscow for the “Daily Telegraph”

LIKE any man, President Gorbachev knows the matutinal pleasure of a fresh shirt. You might say that as an aspect of being clean and decent, a shirt is a significant indicator of a reasonable standard of living. The Soviet leader is always smartly turned out and neatly shirted. But for many of his fellow citizens the clean collar is not so easily achieved. This prosaic fact is one symptom of formidable problems to which Mr Gorbachev returns after the excitements of foreign travel. If he calls for the list of goods in short supply, the things doggedly queued for by longsuffering women, he will note that one of them is washing powder. People do not need telling about the need for reform — 70 years on and it is still a struggle to put meat on the table and find the wherewithal to wash the old man’s shirt. The chronically inefficient economy and the scarcity of basic household goods and food make Russians sceptical about reform, a scepticism that Mr Gorbachev needs to conquer. It is not only a matter of washing clothes. There is also the question of getting clothing in the first place. Russians like good clothes and, if they can, spend a lot of their money on them. But good-quality materials, style and choice are all in short supply. Soviet clothing factories

work to the orders of central planners, not to the demands of consumers. For all that, many Russian women and men are smartly dressed. They have to work hard at it and pay high prices. Many women seek out goodquality foreign fabrics and make their own clothes, working from patterns and examples in Western fashion magazines, which change hands at SNZISO to SNZ3OO a copy. Mr Gorbachev perhaps at the prompting of his well-dressed wife, has told the fashion industry to sharpen up and has encouraged small fashion houses. Otherwise there is always the black market — the Soviet economy that works. The Soviet appetite for foreign clothing is as famous as it is enormous, and no amount of official disapproval has dampened the enthusiasm for dzhinsy (jeans), the wearing of which is not only fashionable but a way of thumbing the nose at deadening conformity. A lot of theft is connected with Western clothing, either direct stealing of jeans and jackets, or of money to finance their purchase on the black market. The selling of jeans for large sums is a standard traveller’s tale. There is a new twist to this. In order to turn a corner of the black market white, one of Moscow’s large stores, Vesna, was given permission a few weeks

ago to open up a section to buy clothes from foreigners for resale to Muscovites. • When I went there, people were packed three-deep around a small counter, looking at second-hand sweaters, anoraks, shirts, shoes, tracksuits and a couple of pairs of jeans. Some of the clothing looked decidedly worn and was, I thought, expensive: SNZISO for a pair of trousers, SNZ22S for a jacket.

A woman shopper said: “The idea is good, but the choice is too small.” Most of the sellers are visitors from East European countries. What the store badly wants is sellers from the West — and coveted Western clothing.' It is asking Intourist, the Soviet tourist agency, to let visitors know that it is open for business. It will give 100 roubles (SNZ3OO at the official exchange rate) for fashionable jeans in good condition and sell them at 115 roubles. A foreigner can get more on the black market, but has to accept its risks and difficulties.

Vesna’s operation is a legal and convenient way of profitably shedding clothing. But it seems such a tiny commercial step, and the spectacle of a large crowd of shoppers flocking around the small counter, as if at a jumble sale, tells its own story. The store would like to be able to deal in audio and video equipment, but the authorities will not have it.