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Show ''f""f' Wm!' Wf Wt wfa $fwf PJP V"W i 'i 'f"' I someone who normally lives in the city. It gleams new and white against the great trees which surround sur-round it and overlooks the Ob. The house would be indistinguishable from the great estates of the wealthy New York families along the Hudson. Hud-son. It has an equally large staff of servants. The rooms are as large, as clean and as luxurious. Whenever the convenience of a high Communist is involved, these people can be as clean and tidy as the Dutch or the Swedes. So it is in this dacha. Below the dacha a private bathing pier extends out into the Ob. Down the hill we see a well-kept tennis court, with flood lights for night games. To the right is a volley-ball court. We have a volley-ball game Russians versus Americans. There is considerable shouting. On the Russian side only one man does any shouting; the others play in grim Slavic silence. He is an undersized un-dersized man in his forties, with wide cheekbones and a shock of curly hair quick as a fox terrier INSTALLMENT THIRTEEN I told him what I was doing here i and that this was Omsk. They told me they'd been assigned I as technical advisers on a big war construction project. "A mine up north," said Tex. "And now we're going out." Ed said, "At this little burg, they set up a whole Intourist Hotel to take care of us. Brought in wine, cheese, cigarettes, candy, noodles, and dried eggs. For the rest, we were supposed to scavenge off the country. They sent in a cook and an assistant cook, a bookkeeper in all about ten people taking care of us. "We really didn't get to know : many Russians," said Ed. "Except it was different with the girls. They have some fine girls and nobody seems to mind if you take them out. They might have been assigned to us. Or anyway had to tell the NKVD whatever we said." "We know they gave the hotel employees em-ployees a lecture," said Tex. "Said live out your sentence," said Tex, they turn you loose, but your passport pass-port has a red line through it. That means you can never get a house or a good job you've got to keep moving." "Or you may not get sentenced," said Kd, "just arrested and investigated. investi-gated. If things don't look quite right, then you get a passport with letters in front of the numbers. This means that you are under some suspicion, sus-picion, and you can never hold a key job." "You see a mining engineer gets about 1,800 roubles a month," said Ed. "They get one room for which they pay about 30 roubles. All they can buy on their ration cards amounts to 400 or 500 roubles a month. Then they must go to the free market for enough butter, eggs, meat, or fish." Now for a note on Russian suspicion sus-picion of foreigners. Russia does not yet trust the outside world. Diplomats Diplo-mats are just as closely imprisoned in Moscow as are correspondents. At the time of our visit, the current I. . who keeps up a running fire of com- i mand and encouragement to the i Russian team. He is strikingly un-Russian. Some j odd combination of chromosomes has produced out here on the steppes I a quick-minded, tough little Irishman Irish-man complete with wiry hair and j jutting jaw. He even talks out of I the corner of his mouth. His name was Michael Kalugin. and although he turned out to hold no local office, it was easy to see J how he had acquired the habit of command. He was Secretary of the Communist Party for Siberia. Novosibirsk has a shopping district dis-trict about the size of Wichita's. There is a beautiful new theater, for the ballet, but Moscow artists also occasionally perform there. Near by, a smaller theater Is devoted de-voted to operettas, and plays are given at a third. The post office is the usual Soviet shabbiness. The building is pretentious preten-tious but the linoleum is worn ' through. In the halls, tiles are chipped and missing. The railway station is from the outside an impressive, modern building. The architecture is dramatichigh dra-matichigh ceilings with sweeping vistas, but the materials are second-rate. It is shopworn already, but the effect is beautiful. The crowd is fascinating. One great hall is roped off for women British ambassador had been unable to secure permission to travel outside out-side the capital. One of the Allied countries which has In power a left-wing left-wing government adorned its diplomatic diplo-matic staff in Moscow with a special spe-cial labor attache, and appointed to this post an Important union official. He came to extend the hand of fellowship fel-lowship from the toilers of the West to their fellow workers in Russia. The Soviets gave him countless banquets ban-quets but let him see nothing. This lack of freedom has so warped his viewpoint that he now Insists that the Soviet system of unions is only a scheme to get the last ounce of work out of labor. After the Revolution, Lenin invited invit-ed foreign concessionaires to help get Russian industry back on its feet. Later they were thrown out. Stalin invited foreign engineers to build the great factories and dam rivers, but later put some on trial for espionage. Of course, Bolshevik hostility aroused bitter counter-hostility. A cordon sanitaire was built around Russia. France supported Poland in a war against the Bolsheviks in 1921, and Russia was for over a decade excluded from the League and denied de-nied diplomatic recognition. So their suspicion of foreigners came to have some basis in fact. This warped view of the world held by the Kremlin is slowly yield- Lack of highways and motor transportation prove handicap to Russian development, we were foreigners, and anything we did they must report. Very suspicious. sus-picious. "At their mines they sure do things different from what we do. Instead In-stead of having big construction firms, they call them trusts and most of them are branches of one big central trust." "Any ten-year-old American child with a Meccano set," said Ed, "will start at the bottom and build up. But these Russians always start at the top, build the roof first and then raise it." "And work like hell, so they can throw up some kind of framework that they can hang a red flag on the tip of and make speeches," said Tex. "They've got no respect for materials. ma-terials. They have no conception of how much work has gone into making mak-ing them. They unload valuable pipe from a flat car by just rolling it down an embankment smashing hell out of it. And fire brick for smelters the same way. The way they'd heave it off, about 25 per cent would be damaged." with babies and small children. There are no seats. Their mothers sit on the clean-swept terrazza floor. There are polished wood benches in the spacious main waiting room-only room-only this is reserved for wounded soldiers who sprawl on every inch of the space, their crutches leaning on the benches beside them or lying on the floor. There must be between 500 and 1,000 of these weary men, most of them with an arm or leg missing. This is a normal hour of a normal day in Novosibirsk station. In the main hall they even have Indians copper-yellow faces with high cheekbones and straight, black Mongolian hair. These, of course, are from Kazakstan down on the Chinese border. But I see no racial difference between Uzbeks or Ka-zaks Ka-zaks and our Osages or Navajos, except that these Soviet Indians are not so well-dressed as ours. Like ours, they were fighting nomad Mongolian Mon-golian tribes until the Russians j tamed them. At the dacha a Red Army band is tuning its instruments down bv i "When we'd try to stop it," said Ed, "they explained they had a law in Russia because of the freight-car shortage, that they had to be un-I un-I loaded within two hours after ar- rival. No one seemed to see it . would take more cars to bring more material." "We were only consultants," said Tex, "and if they got tired of us hollering, they'd get around it by not supplying us transportation out to the job. They'd say our chauffeur couldn't be found. Which was non-i non-i sense, because he was picked by the NKVD, and if he took a five-day vacation, he'd be shot." 'They don't understand mechanical mechan-ical stuff. They put things up out of plumb and then blame this trouble I on poor American design. So they take it down and start all over. Once j we saw them assembling a compli-1 compli-1 cated steel frame out in a field, instead in-stead of on its foundation. They said they wanted to be sure it would fit ing to reality. After Lenin's death, Stalin won power and supported the thesis gingerly at first that socialism in one country was possible pos-sible and Russia could dare to devote de-vote her energies to building up her own economic structure. World revolution rev-olution he explained, was desirable, and he pledged himself to bend all efforts to bring it about. But for the immediate future, it was not indispensable in-dispensable to the Russian Bolsheviks. Bolshe-viks. In recent years there has been a further change. For publication the Kremlin has announced that world revolution is neither necessary nor desirable from the standpoint of the Soviet Union. And the ablest foreign observers in Moscow agree that these protestations are sincere. They point out that Russia has been terribly ter-ribly weakened by war and needs desperately a few decades of peace. They say she now realizes that Europe Eu-rope does not want to be "liberated" from capitalist democracy, and that this could be accomplished only by a further bloody struggle involving sacrifices which the Russians are both unwilling and unable to make. Russia wants, they insist, only a stable and friendly Europe. Novosibirsk, Siberia's capital, lies in the center of this chill roof of the world, about midway between Berlin Ber-lin and Tokyo. The feeling of this big, sprawling boom-town was like that of the West where the robust town-builders are proud of their city. West of the Urals, Bolshevik civilization has taken tak-en over the ancient towns and palaces pal-aces and their new structures rise on the ruins of things they destroyed. de-stroyed. Here in Siberia, they have chopped and blasted and dug their cities out of a virgin continent. And they have something to be proud of. Novosibirsk has almost a million people. We are whisked across the town to our quarters. Tiny potato patches are along the highway shoulders and back in forest clearings. Big handsome hand-some girls, often barefoot, walk erect down the road with scarves around their hair and farm tools over their shoulders. The patches have been assigned to workers in the city. Some factories maintain busses to take the workers out on week-ends to hoe the patches. But most trudge out from town, as we see them doing now. Presently we ride along the banks of a river as wide as the Ohio at its mouth, but as yellow as the Missouri. Mis-souri. We are told that it is the Ob, of which none of us has ever heard, and that it is the fourth longest long-est river in the world. We come to the dacha a Russian word meaning country residence for 'V'l'W"' . -. .X::. ..-. .w.... .'5 "I think their system," said Ed, "doesn't give them the personal ambition, am-bition, the incentive that ours does. And it's so complex they have to talk to so many people before anything any-thing gets done. They could never be a competitive threat to America. Amer-ica. We can always build in a year and a half anything It takes them ten to do. "You see," said Tex, "in Russia they don't have our penitentiary system. sys-tem. They herd prisoners into labor la-bor gangs, and the NKVD, which has charge of them, has developed a fine engineering staff. They bid on construction jobs, supplying both the engineers and prison labor. Often the engineers are also prisoners." "Politicals get the roughest deal," said Ed. "They have NKVD spies in the markets and hanging around the store counters, waiting for someone some-one to pop off. They usually get ten years chopping wood with no correspondence, cor-respondence, and 500 grams of bread a day. If you are husky and can work hard, they'll give you more." "U you miss getting typhus and Omsk, one of the industrial centers cen-ters visited by Johnston and White. the water front. As it strikes up a military march a second band appears, ap-pears, in even smarter uniforms, and begins tuning up. As we go in to dinner, a gleaming white river steamer ties up at the wharf. We are told that after dinner din-ner we will go for a ride on the Ob. Mike Kalugin ushered us down thj river bank and aboard the steamer Mike waved us expansively to a row of deck chairs just forward of the bridge. The better of the two bands, lined up on the bow facing us, struck up as the boat moved out into the current. The band was magnificent. It was the official band of the Red Army. (TO BE CONTINUED) |