But Nobody Outsells G.U.M.

Inside the huge store, the crowd was so thick that the militia stood by to keep order. Peasants in tanned-sheepskin coats and felt boots, city matrons in mouton-collared coats stared in awe at yard upon gleaming yard of silks and satins produced by Soviet textile plants. In the 36 years of Communist rule, they had never seen anything like it.

The big textile sale at G.U.M., Moscow's massive principal department store, was the flashiest display yet in the new Soviet campaign to bolster morale at home with consumer goods long denied by the bleak succession of five-year plans. G.U.M. has been thronged by 125,000 to 200,000 lookers and shoppers a day since it opened three months ago in a Red Square building that looks more like the Louvre than a department store.

Hit of the display, reported New York Timesman Harrison E. Salisbury, was an evening gown with a white satin bodice and floor-sweeping skirt of rainbow-hued pleats, which "brought a hush of silence over the shoppers." The hush was under standable, since the white satin of the bodice was priced at the equivalent of $34 a yard, the crepe de Chine pastels of the skirt at $27.50 (wage of average Russian: $175 a month). At an opulent lilac negligee lined with white silk and with a white ruffed collar, said Salisbury, "an old peasant in a sheepskin cap and coat ... stared as though his eyes would pop." There were heavy velvets at $52.50 a yard, silk in flower patterns ("more heavily figured than would suit Western buyers") at about $32, corduroys in solid colors and stripes at $35. The quality, Salisbury added, seemed good.

The drive was not confined to G.U.M. Another big department store attracted thousands of women with a big poster displaying a pretty girl with deeply penciled eyebrows and rouged cheeks advertising:

SPECIAL EXHIBITION AND SALE OF PERFUME

AND COSMETICS. Inside, among glittering spangled signs and recessed exhibition niches, small jars of "orange cream for nourishing the skin" sold fast at 50-c- ; so did "Cream Metamorphic" for improving the complexion. There was "White Nights Face Cream" for 80-c-, "Festival Face Powder" for $1.95, perfumes called "Spirit of Red Moscow," "Fisherman's Fairy Tale" and "Fly Away." (One old favorite notably missing: "Svetlana's Breath," named in honor of Stalin's only daughter.) Some, like "Jubilee of the Red Army" ($12), came in delicate glass flacons. A children's set containing tooth paste and powder, soap and toothbrush cost $2.70 and sold well. Most expensive gift package: a "Golden Star" assortment of cosmetics, packed in a golden box with a red velvet lining. Price: $42.25.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.