CARDS IN RUSSIA

Taranaki Daily News, 3 April 1934, Page 6

CARDS IN RUSSIA

GAMES MORE GENERAL. KINGS AND QUEENS RETURN. London, March 21. Kipgs and queens are returning to Russian playing-cards, says a Moscow message in the Manchester Guardian, thus ending efforts firstly to abolish cards because they emphasised inequalities, arid secondly to replace the picture cards with anti-religious and other devices. >

The world-famed bridge authority, Mr. Ely Culbertson, who was bom in Russia, yisited Moscow at the end of 1931, and unsuccessfully attempted to induce the Soviet to introduce contract bridge as part of the' five-year plan. The chief of the Card Department explained that his job was to eliminate playing. He had reduced the sales to 1,500,000 packs annually, but since then, cards and wine and spirit drinking had steadily increased. Now Moscow’s most intelligent officials generally play bridge, so the Government, faced with the dilemma of allowing workmen and peasants to continue to use even dirtier, disease-harbouring cards, decided, in the interests of health, to provide new packs.