Världskrigspersonligheter fortfarande i livet

(Los Angeles Times News Service, MOSCOW)
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"Measures taken by society against drinkers are very strict and effective," Yuri Tkachevsky, a legal authority, wrote earlier this year in Pravda, the Communist party daily, "but there are still numerous facts telling of a weak struggle against drinking."

Despite severe forms of punishment, tighter rules on selling vodka, the prime source of drunkenness, and continuing publicity campaigns, overdrinking is still a deeply imbedded, extremely costly social phenomenon. Alcohol is blamed for about 90 per cent of all murders, rapes and thefts and more than half of the "violations of labor discipline" such as absenteeism.

With the country trying desperately to increase economic efficiency, moderate drinking has been found to reduce output by 5 to 30 per cent on the "morning after." On the days after payday, production drops 25 to 30 per cent. The press is filled with tragic stories about the effects of drinking and the penalties for overindulgence, but there are few published analyses for the causes of the evil. The old Marxist argument that alcoholism was rooted in bourgeois society is as out of date as are the charges that the Orthodox church stimulated drinking. Picked up on the street, a drunk can be sent to a sobering-up station where he will be charged 15 rubles for the service and perhaps another 20 for the offense. In addition, his head may be shaved if he has been a regular customer.

MOSCOW (UPI) — Sex problems in the Soviet Union still are veiled in hypocrisy and secrecy and should be brought into the open for Russian youth, a professor wrote in a newspaper for Moscow teenagers.

"Vitally important problems of sex ire still covered today by the veil of pedagogical hypocrisy and secrecy," Prof. Yuri Tkachevsky said in the Moskovsky Komsomolets. "To ignore ihe specific task of sexual education is to cause damage not only to individuals put to society, too."

Tkachevsky welcomed the translation into Russian of a foreign book, "Youth and Love," said, "It is high time similar books appeared by Soviet authors." At present, only work in the field of sexual education was carried out by such lofty institutions as the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR, he said.

He said, "It is necessary constantly to fight the prejudices of the old morality, opposing it with the new social morality based on equality of rights and respect in sex relations, responsibility and love."

There are no sex education courses in Soviet schools.