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Show f fm P P i 1 1 Wm W fb J fcf I 1 f J I fci ,. X 1. in I It i II I lllfl . INSTALLMENT THREE But now for the Stormovik fac- tory itself. It is, first of all, poorly lit and unbelievably dirty. It has no production line in the American ense but rather a series of connected con-nected piles between bottlenecks, with women waiting idle at their machines for the line to start moving mov-ing again. It is jammed full of the best American machine tools, but seems to lack proper organization. At one point, the assembly belt Is a makeshift make-shift canvas affair. The floors throughout are uneven with holes in the concrete. Piles of metal shavings shav-ings are everywhere. No one bothers both-ers to clean up. Many of the girls wear gunny sacks tied around their feet. Others have crude wooden sandals with a nail sticking up went into production in only three weeks. The Zees plant now has four daughter plants turning out army trucks and munitions in the Urals. Their directors were formerly shop chiefs in this plant. Automobile production started here in 1924, the car being designed around a Soviet adaptation of the famous American Hercules Engine made in Canton, Ohio. The director tells us with quiet pride that he has visited American factories at Detroit, Flint, Buffalo, Saginaw, Pittsburgh and Chicago, that he is a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers. A worker who is ill, he tells us, goes to the plant doctor to get a leave of absence. If the case is serious, in this plant his social insurance in-surance would pay 90 per cent of are about 1,500 workers. In answer to our questions he explains that he gets the basic monthly salary of 3,000 roubles ($240 without the usual production pro-duction bonuses because the plant isn't yet operating). They started building it only in December and began be-gan setting the machinery only six weeks ago. Back in the director's office, Eric j wants to know what percentage of their wages Soviet workers give to the war. Chesnikov tells us proudly proud-ly that Soviet Union workers sometimes some-times give as much as two or three months' salary. We attended a performance of Tschaikovsky's "Nut Cracker Ballet" Bal-let" at the Bolshoi Theater, the Grand Opera house of Moscow. It is a magnificent old czarist building decorated with a restrained lavish-ness lavish-ness rare in Russia under any re- between the great and second toes In these, they scramble around in I the dim light. Here they are mov- lng (by wheel-barrow) a load of un-j un-j finished parts which spill at a bump on the floor. The girls must stop to pick them up, There Is an elaborate banquet in the director's dining room at the end of the inspection. There again I are the red wine, white wine, champagne, cham-pagne, and vodka glasses, the tremendous tre-mendous array of cold hors d' oeuvres, starting with caviar and I pastry. Standing behind the table, I see a familiar face. It Is the smiling smil-ing steward who presided over the banquet nt the Tschaikovsky Theater. Thea-ter. He was, It developed, the chief caterer for Intourlst, and everywhere every-where we were entertained we were to find his beaming smile whether the scene was a factory, a railway diner, or a picnic near abandoned German trenches on the Karelian Isthmus. Between toasts Johnston whispers to me: "That director's a good man. He could hold an Important job In the States Mavho nnt rniila Iho ins wages ior inree monins. ii ua is still not recovered, he gets either a temporary invalid's status or maybe lighter work. A pregnant woman gets several weeks' leave of absence before her baby, and after it. The average family, he tells us, is five children for the city worker and about eight for farmers. But Eric wants to know about the problem of absenteeism. The director di-rector seems amazed that such a question should even be asked, because be-cause he says, of course, they have no such cases here. Lazy or tardy workers are rebuked by the wall newspaper or denounced over the shop public address system. If it happens two or three times the matter mat-ter is taken up with him by the union. We gather it is a grim proceeding. pro-ceeding. It is hard for our capitalist minds to grasp the idea that under socialism, social-ism, possibly the factory belongs to the workers but certainly the worker work-er belongs to his factory; without it he has nothing to eat and no place to sleep. Now we tour the plant. Again it seems to have no smooth-running nccnmhli, line K,,t n a-inc .,f gune. ttnu uie pet luniiuiice is j beautiful beyond anything I have i seen on any stage in any country ' dancing, costumes, acting and scenery are done with sweeping imagination. These people have a genius for the theater. The theater is the only thing in the Soviet Union which can boast of an uninterrupted growth and tradition. The Bolsheviks were proud of the ballet and in both Moscow Mos-cow and Leningrad they kept going continuously all during the revolution. revolu-tion. The Bolsheviks did not liquidate liqui-date their actors, stage designers, directors, and artists as they did most of the upper classes in 1917 and in the ensuing Civil War. Today, a visit to a motor factory which used to make tractor engines. Both factory and product have been redesigned and the plant now turns out dive bomber motors largely for the Stormovik a 1700-horsepower job. Its director is only thirty-four years old and seated next to him at the table is a dark-haired woman of forty who is assistant director, and who has charge of wages, working Job he has here, not president of the company, "And you'll notice that on all such policy questions, this guy didn't know. Obviously, the Kremlin decides. de-cides. Like any plant manager he does the best he can with what they give him. "We're talking to production men. The planning brains of this thing are In the Kremlin, not in the factories." fac-tories." The Russians around the table are familiar serious, orthodox, industrious indus-trious young men anxious to get on in the world the same type you might find at a Junior executives' lunch in an American factory. There they would be registered Republicans Republi-cans without having given it too much thought, but because the boss was a Republican and because it was the party of respectability and Its hallmark would be helpful to a young man anxious to get on in the world. Here their prototypes are Com- He tells us he has 15,000 workers and most of them eat their meals in one building. The food is cheap and good because the factory owns and operates two farms. There are permanent operating staffs on each, but the factory workers rotate to furnish most of the labor. We glance into a workers' lunch room. The meal consists of a porridge por-ridge with kasha (buckwheat), black bread and borsch a rich meat and beet soup. It looks and smells good. Beyond is the foremen's dining room. They get the same dishes plus black pressed caviar. Farther on is the engineers' dining room. They eat like the foremen except they may have white bread as well as black, butter, and their cavi- I ar is the more expensive, loose, un-salted un-salted kind. Now we proceed to the director's dining room, where I jot down the menu's main items: vodka, red j wine, white wine, champagne, cavi- munisis for tne same reason. These i men would average thirty-two years j old. In 1917, when Communism was a revolutionary party In Russia (sometimes It still is abroad, but only when it is helpful to Russian foreign policy), these men were boys of five. When Lenin died they j were twelve years old. j The Revolution was over and those young men most likely to succeed suc-ceed followed the Communist Party ; because it represented authority, j power, and wealth, as has the Re- i publican party to a lesser extent in I America. ar, ui er, smoKed sturgeon, salted cucu s (which are delicious). Coleslaw, cold veal, salami, smoked beef tongue and for dessert, pastry and fine-textured chocolate layer cake. We learn (not from our Russian hosts) the caste system we have seen in the dining rooms goes all through their factories. They have developed devel-oped enormous white-collar clerical and engineering staffs. Once a man becomes an engineer, he loses face and prestige should he slip into a suit of cover-alls, as American engineers en-gineers do, and go down to a fac- Reviews Red Army bottlenecks and connected piles. The workers look Up, but they seem to have no fear of the bosses. They look him straight in the eye as an American worker would. The Zees trucks and half-tracks look sturdy by American peacetime standards, but they can't compare with the rugged giants which Detroit De-troit pours out for our armies and those of our allies. The workers are about half women, and the rest very old men or boys in their middle teens. The next morning Kirilov arrives to take ui to another factory, one of the most important In Russia. For here they make the Soviet Union's automobiles. In America a dozen major companies turn out a hundred models. In this classless society one company makes one model, and its entire output goes to Its single privileged cbss the top communists, factory directors, and government officials. It looks rather like a 1935 model tedan of American manufacture with the difference that it is a sloppy engineering job. Its name, pronounced pro-nounced "Zees" in English, comes from three Russian words meaning "Factory in the name of Stalin." The director of the Zees plant, Ivan Likhatchov, is a stumpy, serious seri-ous little man of forty-eight who carefully cultivates a slight resem-hlane resem-hlane tn Stnlln Ua wry Dencn to show workers how it should be done. Until the 1917 Revolution, Russia for a thousand years was a caste ridden feudal state. Twenty-five years can no more wipe this out than it can abolish Russian food habits hab-its or Russian verbs. So this new socialist bureaucracy, raised up out of the proletariat, instinctively stratifies itself into castes. Slowly I am beginning to understand under-stand this place and its people. Suppose Sup-pose you had been born and spent ail your life in a moderately well run penitentiary, which kept you working hard and provided a bunk to sleep in, three daily meals and enough clothes to keep you warm. Suppose it was explained that the warden and the guards were there largely to protect you from the malevolent outside world. Needless tn saw if unvnn. lril Wages here, including the director's direc-tor's salary, are exactly what they were at the other plant and at most of the others we are to visit. We go in to the usual banquet at about four in the afternoon. The next day we are herded into our Zees and tear across town to another dingy square, flanked by barracks - like concrete workers' apartment houses, where flapping Red banners and huge portraits of Marx, Lenin, Engels and Stalin announce an-nounce the entrance to the ballbearing ball-bearing works. It is crammed full of the newest and best American machinery but its floors again are cluttered and the lighting bad. However, the product seems to be a good, precision-made job, although we guess that by American standards, production per worker must be low. At the regular afternoon banquet there are many toasts to Soviet-American Soviet-American friendship and the second front. Then Eric tries to find out something about business competition competi-tion in the Soviet Union. The director direc-tor of the factory Insists that there is great competition particularly to get raw materials. But who gets the most? The plant with the highest high-est production record. We pile back into our cars to be taken to what Kirilov describes as a rubber factory; actually it produces pro-duces not rubber but tires, from rubber made (usually from alcoholj in the Soviet Union, whose scientists pioneered in this important field. Us director, introduced as Vladimir Vladi-mir Chesnikov, is a pleasant young man of thirty-three and under him to release you or menaced you with a parole, you would fight like a tiger. ! There Is, however, one marked difference between inmates of the Soviet Union and of the Kansas State penitentiary at Lansing, where I have often visited an old friend. Food and clothing in both places are about the same, maybe a little bet-ter bet-ter In Lansing. But should my Kan-lai Kan-lai friend decide his penitentiary was not well run, and express the hope that there might be a change of wardens, he would run no danger of being shot were he overheard by a stool pigeon. I concede, howev-er, howev-er, that in Russia a talented inmate can work himself up to be warden, which would be impossible in Lan- I sing. (TO BE CONTINUED) J .,, -. - ntaia a cap, grows a soup-strainer mustache. : and receives us in riding trousers and high black Russian boots. First, he gives us an over-all picture pic-ture of the plant. It employs 40,000 workers, and has 12,000 more young-I young-I sters in its factory school. Formerly, Former-ly, it made trucks (the Soviet Union, with over 209.000.000 people, made 300,000 motor vehicles per year at the peak compared with America's 1941 production of 4,800.000 for its 130,000,000 people). Now it produces pro-duces trucks, half-tracks and munitions muni-tions for the Red Army. The Komosols (young communists) commu-nists) in the factory school started making tommy guns for the Red Army when the Germans were only B6 kilometers from Moscow, and |