The Soviet Garage Sale

by Clarence Brown

It was, for one thing, a sort of trip back into the past. It brought back my grandmother's house, with its old Victrola, its railroad spike of a needle in the tone arm, and 78 rpm records of Beale Street jazz. Food was cooked on a monstrous wood stove. The radio, almost as big as the stove, was an Atwater Kent with dials that looked as if they operated Hoover Dam.

The atmosphere that I am trying to describe was what I found in Moscow in the 1950s and '60s. Everything was twice as big and solid as it needed to be.

There was an express train called the Krasnaya Strela (Red Arrow) that ran between Moscow and Leningrad. I have seldom known such luxury. The cabin walls were a deep brown wood, and all the fittings, even those in the shower, were in sturdy brass. There was a table by the window on which a blacksmith could have shod horses. Red plush everywhere.

Exactly this style of luxury was also to be found on the airliners of Aeroflot. The level of psychological comfort, to be sure, was not so great. It was nervous-making, this aeroplane with plush carpets, mahogany paneling, and heavy brass reading lamps with parchment lampshades. An Aeroflot plane from that era without a soul on board, with nothing but its ponderous decor, would probably outweigh a fully loaded DC-10 today.

A trip to the USSR was a trip not only back in time but also into a world where nothing bad ever happened. Bad things happened in the west. Workers were enslaved by voracious capitalists and black men were hanging from lampposts throughout the US. Pan Am planes crashed, killing all on board, and Pennsylavnia RR trains flipped off the rails into mountain gorges as a matter of course.

But in the Soviet Union nothing bad ever happened, unless... Unless there was a foreign national on board, and then there would be a two-inch story in the bottom inside corner of page three of Izvestia. Foreigners were bad news. No Aeroflot plane with an all-Soviet passenger list ever had the least mishap.

These reminiscences of the USSR have been inspired by, of all things, a mail-order catalog that came through the slot the other day. It is called the Sovietski Collection: Treasures from a Bygone Era. I turned the pages with growing astonishment. It is as if a Superpower had been sent to a taxidermist, stuffed, and then put up for auction.

Never did I imagine that anything could make me feel sorry for the Soviet army and navy, to say nothing of the KGB, but this has finally done it. You can buy a Soviet admiral's complete uniform for $995. The uniforms of smaller fry are being knocked down for a song.

The catalogue is littered with glossy pictures of stuff that you would at one time have been shot for even asking to photograph. You can buy the Soviet knock-off of the German Leica camera for $300, and the accompanying copy says that the plans were "spirited out of Berlin by secret agents." For such an affront to the Motherland not only you but your whole family and anyone with whom you ever had lunch could have been shot in the head in the basement of the Lyubyanka.

There is even a wind-up Victrola. It costs $245, and with it you get three 78 albums. No, honestly.