Everything comes to Russia late.

• Author: Richmond, Yale

Title: Everything Comes to Russia Late

Author: Yale Richmond

Text:

Everything comes to Russia late. With its self-imposed isolation, and its command economy and over-centralization, the Soviet Union was often decades behind developments in other countries. Ideas from the capitalist West were often regarded as dangerous, and although Russia has produced many great scientists and scholars, the tried and traditional was often preferred over the new and innovative. Moreover, suspicion of the West can be seen as a continuation of the anti-modernism tradition in Russian history. That seemed to be how the Soviet leadership, many of whom were of peasant origin, wanted it.

When Western steel mills were producing modern and lighter steel alloys, the Soviet Union's Lenin Steel Works at Magnitogorsk-seven miles long, and the largest steel plant in the world-was still producing sixteen million tons of steel every year, using the old open-hearth method, and subjecting all inhabitants of the town to its noxious gases and particulates.

On a much smaller subject, the ancient abacus was still being used in stores to add up purchases when I arrived in Moscow in 1967. Two years later, electronic calculators began to appear in stores but cautious cashiers, suspicious of innovation, were checking them with an abacus. Twenty-two years later, at a meeting of the Congress of People's Deputies, the Soviet parliament, in May 1989, complaints were made about the shortage of computers, and some Soviet scientists were still using the abacus.

When making purchases in stores, Russians had to stand in line three times. One was to tell a clerk what you wanted and receive a chit with the purchase written on it. The second line was to present the chit to a cashier and make payment. The third line was to present your receipt of payment and pick up your purchase. What Russian, I often wondered, had thought up such a time-consuming and labor-intensive system? It did help to maintain full employment, but I later observed the same system being used in a Paris department store, and learned that it had been brought to tsarist Russia from France.

In a country that claimed to have given full equality to women, and had enshrined that equality in its constitution, traditional attitudes toward women continued. One day my wife, who was driving our Plymouth station wagon, was stopped by a Moscow traffic cop who asked to see her papers. She produced her Soviet driver's license and vehicle...