Quantities of Quilts

OGPU Agents began last week a grand roundup and jailing of Moscow housewives who since the beginning of the buying boom have made a business of stocking up on every sort of household stuff. With screaming headlines in Moscow papers branding such housewives as "Speculators," the OGPU made its most spectacular raid of the week on an eight-family house in Bakunin Street, swept all housewives therein off to jail, left astonished husbands and children to return to find no dinner. With an air of uncovering the deepest-dyed skullduggery, the OGPU revealed that the eight women had possessed among them 50 woolen shawls, 1,800 yards of cloth and "quantities" of quilts, tablecloths, boots, shoes and rubbers which they planned to resell at a profit.

Even louder was the fanfare when the Soviet Government, announcing that it had "decisively overcome" Russia's shortage of consumer goods, abolished restriction cards (TIME, Oct. 7), threw open Moscow stores said to be bulging with more than the public could buy and dispatched throughout the world Soviet newsreels of beaming buyers rushing in to obtain meat, butter, caviar, cloth, quilts, rubbers, etc. One scoundrelly speculator was caught last week selling for 40 rubles a pair of gloves she had stood in line to buy from the State for 15 rubles, the purchaser preferring not to spend the day in a queue.

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