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Show mi SM l7 4 it 1 J n I il L jr INSTALLMENT FIVE This morning," says Kirilov, as we climb into the waiting Zees, "we visit fur factory." In his bright lexicon, a factory is any place where something is produced. This one turns out to be a collective mink farm. It was once a village. The houses still stand along the mud street. The biggest, which probably belonged to a thrifty kulak who was liquidated in the thirties, is now the administration building. The communal com-munal kitchen and dining room Is in the second biggest house. A nursery nurs-ery school is in a third. In the director's room is the usual picture of Stalin, the usual carved furniture. The director is a lean, gentle farmer. His face and neck are weather-beaten. So are his hands. So are the faces and hands of his assistants. These are rugged, intelligent farmers such as you might find in the Farm Bureau Office Of-fice of Lyon County, Kansas. This director gives us some statistics. statis-tics. His collective has 1,200 hectares hec-tares (hectare-2 acres), of which animal cages occupy about forty. It raises minks, silver foxes, sables and martins. Mink pelts bring almost al-most $12 each, and at a wholesale price of about $800, you can buy the seventy necessary for a coat, which Will retail at ahnut t9. WCl Tt tnkpc I though Soviet doctors have less training than American doctors, their people probably get better medical care than do many Americans Ameri-cans in the lower income groups, who cannot afford good doctors and yet are too proud to go to charity clinics. And Soviet medical training train-ing has made great strides in recent years. Today I visit Eric and Joyce at the embassy and am invited to lunch. Never have simple, vitamin-stuffed vitamin-stuffed dishes like canned pineapple and tomato soup made with condensed con-densed milk tasted so good. Afterwards Joyce and I follow Eric up to his room. He brings out a list. "This is the itinerary they've worked out for the Urals trip. It's too long. Lots of places I'd like to see, but my chamber cham-ber meeting starts the twelfth and I absolutely must be back for that." Just before Johnston left America, Amer-ica, the Soviet Ambassador promised prom-ised his Russian trip would include both an interview with Stalin and a trip to the front. The latter is now going to be delivered, only we are to visit not the German front but the Finnish. It is necessary first to go to Leningrad. Len-ingrad. The reporters are excited because Eric has agreed to take half a dozen of them along. So far none of them have been able to get near rusting ruins of wrecked tanks. "Now somebody." said Eric, "ought to do a magazine piece about these Russian women. Look at them out there back working alreadyclearing al-readyclearing things up. The women of Russia! Probably the engineer en-gineer and fireman on this train are women. Look at all the women we've seen in the factories. Those Woman out there don't shrink from hard work! They're practically keeping Russia going! The magnificent mag-nificent women of Russia! We glide through a wood as ! heavily blasted by artillery fire as those in the Somme in 1916. Only I a few shattered, branchless trunks I protrude above the shell holes. Here i the Red Army's excellent artillery had to blast the Germans out of every ev-ery inch of ground. The colonel tells us that these German fortifications were built when they cut the railway line, completing the encirclement of Len- ingrad in late 1941 and early 1942. This encirclement was only broken by the Russians late in 1943. We now pass a railway siding where the heavy machinery of a ; factory stands loaded on flat cars. It I is a former Leningrad plant, return- I ing from its wartime exile in the Urals. As we drive from the Leningrad station to our hotel, we get a good j about sixty-five sable skins to make a coat, and these pelts are sold at prices ranging from $50 to $000 each. Only one or two sables are born in a litter and it sometimes takes a hunter two weeks to find and kill a single animal. Wild sable pelts sometimes bring $500 each. The darkest and silkiest made up Into a coat bring as high as $45,000. Practically all of them are sold In . New York. In normal times, also London and Paris. Very few in the Soviet Union. I get a brief attack of social conscience. con-science. Here this half-starved na-i na-i tion is forced to put skilled farmers farm-ers to raising useless animals for the cream of the foreign luxury mar-ket mar-ket so that Russia may buy useful machines. The mink farm Is orderly and ; clean, and the sturdy farmers seem to know their business thoroughly. The supervisors, both men and women, are "agronomes." They have degrees from agricultural schools in veterinary science. A visit to what Kirilov calls a look at the city. It is a beautiful, Pci0UJ, well-planned town, built over two hundred years ago on the ; shores of the Baltic. As part of a drive toward Westernization West-ernization and modernization Peter the Great built his new capital on j the shores of the Baltic, giving Rus- j sia a window on the civilized outside 1 world. There is in its beautiful. clean architecture little suggestion j of Russia. The architects were all French or Italian. The city might be part of Paris except for its churches and except that its public building! and palaces are painted lemon yellow, the color of the czars. It is, of course, now run-down and dilapidated. Yet, somehow, we all felt we were back in Europe, in a gently cultured, comfortable world. Russians, proud of Leningrad's I war-suffering, are always annoyed If you mention the fact that the town is less damaged than London. Actually Actu-ally the beautiful old central part is j almost intact, except for broken win-1 dow glass and nicked cornices. Shell j or bomb craters are rare. I meat factory, which is, however, not ! a stock farm but a packing house. Since it Is food, we are again garbed in rumpled, slightly soiled white. It differs little from an American packing house, but they show us something they say is a Soviet invention. in-vention. The cow, instead of being slugged with a hammer, is struck just at the base of the skull with a javelin, tipped by an electrically j charged needle. This stuns but does not kill. Her heart continues to i pump out blood after her throat is I cut and while, suspended by the horns, she moves down the disassembly dis-assembly line to be skinned. I say "she" advisedly for Soviet : beef consists almost entirely of worn-out old milk cows, calves, or an occasional bull whose romantic I fires have burned to embers. Almost Al-most no cattle are raised to maturity matu-rity purely as beef. Here it is the end product of the dairy business, as it is over most of Europe. Mink industry was found to have become big going business. enough to the battle lines to hear a gun. A Soviet "front trip" usually consists of a trip in a de luxe Pullman Pull-man in the general direction of the lines, a perfunctory interview with the sector's commanding general, inspection of some abandoned German Ger-man trenches, and at the end, champagne cham-pagne and vodka at the officer's mess. This time they hope it will be different. Eric, Joyce and I traveled In what, when we left Moscow, was a private car at the end of the train. It was clean and comfortable. Its rear contained a long table and there, of course, was the Intourist steward, laying out the sliced sturgeon, stur-geon, uncorking the champagne, and opening the cans of caviar. But just before dusk, the train was halted at a junction and a ram- shnplrlp hnvrnr was hnnkprl nn hp. In Leningrad we are put up at the Hotel Astoria, one of the relics of czarist grandeur. Eric has what could be no less than the former Romanov bridal suite and we inspect in-spect this with awe. There is a large dining room, a spacious sitting room and a thundering big bedroom with matching double beds covered in silk brocade. The rooms are done in the lavish style of czarist days, and there are several pieces of porcelain bric-a-brac, thick with china cupids tickling each other or else pinching the gilded bottoms of angels. Opposite our hotel is St. Isaac's Cathedral, but there is no hint of Europe in its architecture. It j squirms with Byzantine ornament over which float onion-shaped spires, j It is Russia, and back of Russia, j the Eastern Empire of Constantino-pie, Constantino-pie, and back of that Bagdad and the temples of Asia. Before the war most of Russia's In the Soviet Union tenderness makes little difference since, due to the lack of refrigeration, almost all red meat is prepared as smoked sausage. During our entire stay in the country, only twice were we offered of-fered steak. We were surprised at this plant to , find that the basic wage was only 500 roubles a month Instead of the customary 750. However, the fact presently comes out that workers who overfulfill their norms (almost all of them do) get an extra dividend, divi-dend, not in money but in meat, which is infinitely more important. Joyce and Eric return wide-eyed from today's trip. They visited a large Russian military hospital, a section of which Is devoted to the repair of genital wounds. They have here developed a surgical technique to treat men who have had their vitals blown away in battle. Although visiting Soviet doctors have free access to Allied hospitals on the Western fronts, it is most difficult for Allied medical observers observ-ers to visit Soviet field hospitals. This is not entirely because of the traditional Russian suspicion of foreigners. for-eigners. They are a proud people, and conceal their weaknesses. Their general standard of medical care cannot compare with that of the Western countries. They spend freely on the more spectacular branches of medical research, re-search, but under this top crust, the average Russian doctor has less training than a good American nurse. So when permission to visit a Russian hospital is refused by the Soviet method of delay and postponement, post-ponement, the real reason often is that the Russians know the foreigner foreign-er would learn nothing new except the meagemess of their equipment. For the general poverty of the country coun-try extends to medicine. Yet even hind. Two anti-aircraft machine guns were bolted on its roof. Some straw was also piled there and on this sprawled the gun's crew half a dozen Red Army boys. The Soviet Union was taking no chances with the safety of the titular leader of American business. Thirty or 40 miles farther on we are halted again at a siding to let a troop train pass us on its way to the Finnish front. By Western standards, they look shabby. They have been haphazardly haphaz-ardly piled aboard this rickety train. Everything seems improvised. The equipment is battered, a little rusty and considerably lighter in construction con-struction than ours. In many ways Russia is like Mexico. Mex-ico. Both peoples have been basically basic-ally agricultural, with no great aptitude apti-tude for industry and still less experience. ex-perience. The general poverty of Russia is no less than that of Mexico Mex-ico except that it is a cleaner poverty. pov-erty. Also the standard of health is better in Russia and this has cut the Infant mortality rate. Russian doctors do not have the problem of persuading the peasants to accept what medical care they are equipped to give. In Russian villages vil-lages the people aren't asked; they are told. The compartment I share with Joyce is a little larger than an American Pullman compartment but lacks all the ingenious contraptions contrap-tions with which Western nations make limited space useful. There is no washbasin. Nor toilet. The only mechanical device is the bolt on the door. The train comes out onto level ground and we see ragged women, who plow barefoot through this mud, have planted little potato patches in clearings of the debris of concrete pillboxes, barbed wire, and the highly skilled precision workers lived here and it was the center of Russia's precision industries, which, however, were only about 10 per cent of the whole. Leningrad also made tractors and comparable machines. ma-chines. Most of this factory equipment equip-ment and the people who worked at it were loaded into freight cars and hauled halfway across Russia to the Urals, Siberia, or the Chinese border, bor-der, where they are now operating. We are taken to Leningrad's city hall and there meet the official architect of the city Alexai Bar-anov. Bar-anov. On the wall is a huge map of future Leningrad. Some of this grandiose plan had been built be- j fore the war; most of it is still only on paper. Leningrad's intellectuals continued contin-ued with this planning during the blockade, as both architects and people were sure their town would never fall. Like everything in Russia, Rus-sia, it is very impressive in its blueprint blue-print stage. , On to the new Palace of the Soviets, So-viets, the hub of the future city. We drive down a wide street be tween rows of six-story concrete barracks - like workers' apartments. Suddenly the city stops. Beyond the last apartment are the open fields of a collective farm, whose buildings build-ings we can see in the distance. But near us is not a shack, a shed, a bungalow, or an old fence. We have emerged into open fields of grain and potatoes. Here a city follows, not the contours con-tours of the land nor the desires of the people, but a blueprint on a drawing board. Suppose those people peo-ple in that six-story concrete workers' work-ers' barracks had been able to choose, would not some of them have preferred modest bungalows here in the outskirts? (TO BE CONTINUED) |