City's Shops Will Be Pretty, or Else

By day, sparkling chandeliers, glimmering china and gilt lettering lure passersby to the windows of Bakalowitz. By night, the store blazes like a lighthouse among the storefronts on Ulitsa Tverskaya.


With this captivating look, the Austrian lighting and crystal store's directors won the Moscow government's first annual prize for best window and interior design. The award was given by the city's Consumer Market Department in hopes of encouraging shopkeepers to compete for customers by making their stores more beautiful.


To drive the point home, the city has decreed that stores on the low end of the beauty scale could find themselves not only not getting a prize, but having to pay an ugliness fine to boot. Moscow mandates now provide for the right to charge fines to store directors who fail to keep their shop windows attractive, clean and well-lit night and day.


This carrot-and-stick approach is typical of Mayor Yury Luzhkov's government, which hails the birth of a market economy but can't seem to resist using the old levers of central planning and control to hurry it along.


"Of course, we would like not to have to do this," said Leonid Belov, head of the city advertising department. "But in the area of trade, we have to use this old system of 'strong recommendation.'"


"There must be lighting, there must be signs so you can understand what kind of store this is, the goods you sell must be in the window, like anywhere else in the world. We're not asking for anything extra," said Yefim Rybalov, deputy head of the Consumer Market Department, which dreamed up the prize as an update of Soviet awards.


Belov has even more ambitious plans, which include securing discounted electric bills for window lighting and even moving out residents of first-floor apartments to make room for brightly-lit stores.


"We want the city to shine," said Belov, who seems to yearn for some magical dust to sprinkle over Tverskaya like those cans of seeds that are supposed to transform a scraggly yard into a meadow of wildflowers -- Fifth Avenue in a Can.


About 20 city decrees from the past two years regulate window displays, according to Viktor Shumailov, an official at the city inspection department.


About 6 percent of stores inspected in February -- 45 in central Moscow -- were fined 140,000 rubles ($84) apiece for breaking a rule requiring window lighting from dusk to 2 A.M., said Irina Krymskaya, the department's press spokeswoman.


Fines are taken from the offending firms' bank accounts without warning and go to the city budget for "city management," Krymskaya said.


Also fined are stores displaying advertisements for other firms without city permission, whether posting a Volvo ad in a supermarket window or "sticking up any old signs -- I don't know, they probably do it out of a lack of culture -- usually from foreign firms," she said, referring to the modish collages of Snickers labels in Moscow shops.


A fine for hanging signs in foreign languages without a Cyrillic translation has reduced violations from 592 in February 1993 to 16 last month, said Krymskaya, who calls the rules "perfectly normal."


'"Otherwise, I think, it would just be anarchy," she said.


Mayoral spokesman Andrei Varchenya had a straightforward explanation for anyone wondering how the mayor could legally tell privatized stores what to put in their windows. "It's very simple," he said. "They're located on the territory of Moscow." As for Bakalovitz, employees say the renovation was a business decision taken without knowledge of the contest or the fines.