The food stores in Moscow are very large, and, as with the restaurants, there are two kinds: the ration stores, where food is very cheap if one has the ration tickets to get it; and the free stores, also operated by the government, where one can buy nearly anything in the way of food at very high prices. The canned goods are piled in mountains, the champagne and wine from Georgia are pyramided. We saw here some products which might have come from United States’ stocks. There were cans of crab with Japanese marks still on them. There were German goods. And there were the luxury products of the Soviet Union itself—large cans of caviar, piles of sausages from the Ukraine, cheeses, salt fish, and even game, wild duck and woodcock, bustard and rabbits and hares, small birds and a white bird that looks like a ptarmigan. There were smoked meats of all kind.

But this food is all luxury food. To the average Russian the important thing is the price of bread and its quantity, and the price of cabbage and potatoes. In a good year, such as this one, the prices of bread, cabbage, and potatoes come down, and this is the index of the success or failure of the crops.

The windows of the food stores, both ration and commercial, are filled with wax figures of the food sold inside. There are wax hams and bacons and sausages, wax quarters of beef, even wax cans of caviar.

We went next to the department stores, where clothing, shoes and stockings, suits and dresses, are sold. The quality was not very good, and the tailoring was not very good either. It is the principle of the Soviet Union to make utility goods as long as they are necessary, and to make no luxuries until utility goods have taken up the slack of need. There were print dresses, some woolen suits, and the prices seemed very high to us. But here we come to the danger of making general statements, for even during the short time we were in the Soviet Union prices came down and quality seemed to be improving. It seems to us that a thing which is true one day is untrue the next.

We went on to the commercial shops where secondhand goods are sold. These are specialty shops. One handles china and lamps, another deals in jewelry—antique jewelry since there is very little modern jewelry made—garnets and emeralds, earrings, rings, and bracelets. A third sells photographic supplies and cameras, mostly German cameras that have come back from the war. A fourth carries secondhand clothes and shoes. There are shops where the semi-precious stones from the Ural mountains are sold, the beryls, topazes, aquamarines.

Outside of these shops there is another kind of trading. If you come out of a camera shop, two or three rather furtive men will approach you, and each one carries a package, and in the package is a camera, a Contax, or Leica, or Rolleiflex. These men will give you a glimpse of the camera and tell you the price. The same thing happens outside jewelry shops. There is a man with a squib of newspaper. He opens it quickly, shows you a diamond ring, and mentions a price. What he is doing is probably illegal. The prices asked by these outside salesmen are, if anything, a little higher than the prices in the commercial shops.