Death for Hot Sweaters

Against a half-century of socialist dialectics, the profit motive still survives in Russia, in both honest and dishonest forms. Hardly a week goes by without another case of graft or "left-handed production" -- the Russian nickname for clandestine manufacturing. Judging by three new scandals last week, the problem is getting worse.

> In the Ukraine, the woman book keeper of a collective farm, Yulya Kutasevich, stood accused of embezzling $55,000 in collusion with the farm chair man and half a dozen other local officials. So well protected was the operation that even as Yulya went about her double-entry bookkeeping, she was singled out by regional commissars as the best collective-farm accountant in her district, sent on an expense-paid trip to Moscow. The swindle was discovered only after agents of the Department for the Struggle Against Embezzlement of Social Property dropped in for a routine inspection. Last week Yulya was sentenced to be shot, her male accomplices to long prison terms.

> In Moscow, 25 plant executives of the five-factory Leather Combine were awaiting trial, charged with diverting tons of their inventories. Most sensational was the confession of N. Medintziv, supervisor of Sporting Equipment Factory No. 2, that he had turned his back, for thousands of rubles a month in payoffs, while the chief of his cutting-floor section routed consignments of leather to distant Georgia (via the state railway). There it was secretly fashioned into fancy high-heeled shoes, which were smuggled back to Moscow --and snapped up by the Soviet capital's increasingly style-conscious women.

> In Odessa, the biggest of the trials involved one Comrade Kunyansky, chief engineer of the Defender of the Motherland knitted-goods factory. With two main accomplices, Kunyansky set up an undercover textile mill which, using government yarn, spun out 6,250 high-quality, snug-fitting women's sweaters that sold for 30 to 40 rubles each to budding Ukrainian sweater girls. The operation netted $169,400, was not discovered for seven months. Last week the three ringleaders were ordered to face a firing squad, and 23 of their employees were sent to prison. Almost as impressive as their caper were the generous measurements of their product: an average size of 40 to 44.

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