Russia Hungry for World Records

Morale is up at the Tsaritsino City Meat Processing Plant. Costs are rising, times are hard, but what the heck -- the factory just made it into the Guinness Book of World Records with the biggest pelmen in history. All 179 kilograms of the traditional Russian meat-filled dumpling were officially weighed in, verified, registered and wolfed down by a crowd of 30,000 last Saturday afternoon at Luzhniki Stadium, Guinness officials said. The pelmen measured 0.95 by 0.75 meters, stood 0.35 meters high and required 134 kilograms of ground beef. It was a brief but glorious moment for the employees of the plant. "We are an unusually fine factory," beamed Larisa Burova, the plant's director. "All our employees really love their work," she added. "It was a very interesting project."Chalk one up for emerging democracy. All over the former Soviet Union, people are doing nude winter calisthenics, unicycle marathons and endless string quartet performances in an effort to qualify for the Guinness Book. In the three years since they set up shop in Moscow, Guinness' Russian representatives have managed to add 400 new records to the venerable catalogue of superlatives.Russians are enthusiastic about the book because it was banned for so long, said Igor Zaitsev, the Russian edition's editor. Until 1989, the only copies were locked up at the Lenin Library, accessible only by arrangement with the KGB. The state propaganda committee explained only that the book was a "collection of human idiocy." The real reason, Zaitsev said, was a run of statistics that were common knowledge in the rest of the world but state secrets in the U.S.S.R.: the size of the Soviet Army, the number of casualties in Stalin's purges, the number of prisons. Mikhail Gorbachev lifted the ban in 1989, and Zaitsev came out with the first edition the same year. Since then, letters have been flowing in steadily from self-proclaimed phenomena all over the country. "Many of them are silly," said Zaitsev. One man wrote in to announce that his hair had grown over his ears. Another claimed to have the world's biggest collection of model flying saucers. "There is no such thing as a flying saucer," Zaitsev pointed out. "How could this man have models?"Then there are the anticlimaxes. The Beer Lovers' Party made a bid to break the record for beer consumption recently, but could not break the standing world record, said Viktor Firsov, general director of the Jupiter joint stock company, which issued this edition. "You go with the feeling that the record should be broken. If it's not, it can be very frustrating," he said. But the organizers try not to let the failures demoralize them. "It all depends what area you choose for the record," he added. "If we organized a competition for vodka consumption..."In any case, the Russians are setting records at a brisk rate. Last week, a circus performer from Almaty set the world best for unicycle racing one breathless afternoon at Dinamo Stadium. And this week's monster pelmen will not be the last record broken by the Russians, who have a talent for adjusting to extraordinary circumstances, Firsov predicted. "There are things that any human being can become accustomed to, but perhaps Russians are more..." Firsov hesitated, looking for the right word. "The conditions in which they live might help them."