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Show RFPAPT AM'Tlir ' iffc.1 Ufi p li fy a INSTALLMENT ELEVEN In the Soviet Union about 180,-000,000 180,-000,000 people have been on an even i lower living standard for twenty-five j years, and only a few privileged mil lions know anything better. During ; this quarter-century the Soviets j have controlled one-seventh of the world's land surface, rich in natural I resources. They explain this low living standard stand-ard by pointing out that the Russian ; people lack technical experience and that Russia's resources are largely undeveloped. But to correct these things they had almost a quar-' quar-' ter of a century of peace which is a long time. Temporarily, money has little value. val-ue. Everyone has far more than , he needs to buy his ration limit. The unofficial currency in Russia is vodka. The average citizen may buy a pint a month for about $5, but if he does not care to drink, it has a very high trading value. There are several categories of rationing corresponding to different strata of the Soviet caste system. The Red Army is extremely well he knows, and is at rase in the French language. His political line in relation to the Germans is indistinguishable from that of the late Georges Clemen-Ceau. Clemen-Ceau. This has not always been the line of his government. Until the Telieran conference, where it became clear that the Anglo-American powers would raise no serious obstacle to their annexation of the Baltic States, the Soviets maintained, main-tained, in Moscow, a Free German Committee of captured generals. Stalin had emphatically said that the war was not against the German people but only against Hitler's clique. A separate Soviet peace, signed with any German faction other oth-er than Hitler's, keeping intact the German army, was possible. Since Teheran, however, when Stalin, in exchange for various assurances, as-surances, accepted the Anglo-American "unconditional surrender" formula, for-mula, the Free German Committee has been soft pedaled, and Ehren-burg Ehren-burg has had a free rein. His articles arti-cles calling for vengeance on all Germans are prominent. His passionate admiration for France contributes to the poor view he takes of Anglo-Saxons, and in particular of the Anglo-American war efTort of which, like most Rus-j Rus-j sians, he has seen nothing. His ar- tides led the Soviet journalistic 1 clamor for a premature second front. When the Anglo-Americans finally opened their Normandy offensive, of-fensive, he explained the rapidity j of their advance from the Normandy I beachhead as being largely due to j the effectiveness of the French ! Maquis. with their possession of Slavic blood, they take the further logical step of concluding that something is wrong with anyone not similarly blessed This popularization of the old medieval me-dieval Slavic skull-busters resulted naturally in a rising contempt for Jews. The anti-Semitism did not directly embarrass the Kremlin for, since tiie purges of 1937, very few Jews remained in high government positions. posi-tions. They have recently taken steps to cprrect the trend by soft-pedaling soft-pedaling publicity about the Slavic skull-busters of antiquity. The czars often encouraged anti-Semitism, and one of the admirable things about the Soviet regime is its uncompromising uncompro-mising attitude toward any form of race prejudice which it holds down with a firm hand; no small task in dealing with the Russian people, in whom anti-Semitism has been a tradition tra-dition for centuries. But the government has done a good job in keeping it down with the result that anti-Semitism is no stronger than it is in America. The people during the Moscow panic were also sore at the army. For twenty-five years they had sacrificed sac-rificed to maintain the biggest one in Europe, and had been told it was the best equipped. But since June it had been kicked out of one defense line after another, and now beaten back to the outskirts of the capital. The whole thing seemed hopeless to many, and since they were also frightened by the continual bombing, bomb-ing, they felt the sooner it was over the better. My informant-friend with one blue eye and one brown, had the habit of wearing in his button-hole mJLA .,.', a small replica of the well-known flag of his country in red, white and blue enamel. It also happened his country was then being highly praised in the Moscow press for the aid it promised to Russia, and the people were being assured that much more would soon arrive. But my friend had to take off his little enamel flag because it got him into too many arguments. Strangers would come up to him on the street or on the subway and say, "Why are you silly people sending help to the regime? Don't you know you're only prolonging the war? If you'd mind your own business, busi-ness, it would be over sooner." And if anyone started making a patriotic speech, someone might remark re-mark sourly, "What's the matter with you, anyway? Are you a Jew?" In general, the evacuees were not popular. Rumors circulated as to enormous prices they were paying for automobiles to make their getaway, get-away, and other rumors to the effect ef-fect that peasants were stopping them on the highways to relieve them of hoarded valuables. The situation got worse. The militiamen mili-tiamen on the corner had disappeared. disap-peared. Also those guarding vacant embassies against looting. Levies of green troops hastily raised to defend the capital, had broken at Mojhaisk and run away. There were near-riots at food stores. Russians are not by nature an orderly people and as soon as they discovered the militia was gone, the slow-moving food queues became pushing crowds. There were rumors that Jews were being beaten in the subways. Three things stopped the Moscow panic. First, the government on October Oc-tober 17, ordered all stored food dumped on the market, allowing What might be called the American Amer-ican fifth column has never bothered to go underground, even during the I war. Large sections of our people openly favored the axis before it began, and since we got in, powerful power-ful newspapers have continued caustic caus-tic criticism of our British and Russian Rus-sian allies. By contrast with this, Russia seems a miracle of national unity, with not a dissenting voice. But if Russians are contemptuous contemptu-ous of us because all of our newspapers news-papers do not support Roosevelt with that degree of doglike devotion devo-tion with which Russian newspapers support Stalin, we can retort that, so far, none of our generals has deserted de-serted to join either the Germans or the Japanese. Moscow has not widely publicized that General Vlassov, charged in the early days of the war with the defense of the Staraya Russa sector, went over to the enemy with his entire en-tire army corps, mostly Ukrainians. The Germans soon discovered it was not safe to arm these men for combat com-bat on the Eastern front for many of them would desert again to join the partisans. We generously praise the high morale of the Red Army and sometimes some-times complain that our boys do not seem to know what they are fighting for. But, for the record, we should remember that out of the many Anglo-American prisoners the Germans hold, they have failed to organize a single battalion willing to fight in Nazi uniform. We have read many stories of the heroism of Moscow when the enemy was at its gates. Thousands of women wom-en left their homes to dig fortifications fortifica-tions in the suburbs, saving the city to the embarrassment of our American Amer-ican experts who had predicted that it would fall. Such stories are true, and are typical of the great majority. major-ity. But I should like to give a few other stories which, although typical only of a minority, are equally well authenticated. The Moscow panic described for me began October, 1941, as the Germans Ger-mans approached the town. The foreigners and the government had gone. As the fighting got closer rumors ru-mors arose. People began destroying all evidence evi-dence which would prove they were ever sympathetic with the Party. They burned up those pictures of Stalin, Lenin and Molotov which are in many Russian homes, and burned their Communist books doing such a thorough job that it is still difficult to buy this type of literature because be-cause of the paper shortage the government gov-ernment has not got around to replacing re-placing it. The Germans were dropping not only reprints of Winston Churchill's early speeches attacking the Bolsheviksbut Bolshe-viksbut also attacks on Jews. But German propaganda was not solely responsible for the rising anti-Semitism anti-Semitism in Moscow; Russian propaganda prop-aganda also contributed. In an effort to arouse patriotism in the Russian people, the Bolsheviks Bolshe-viks had turned to history, repopu-larizing repopu-larizing the discarded heroes of czarist times, generals and czars who in the past had heaved out in-vaders in-vaders in the name of Holy Mother Russia. "We know," reasoned a prominent Bolshevik, "that the people are not fishting for Communism; they are fightmg for Russia." It was true, and the Bolsheviks capitalized on it. But pride of race cuts both ways: if you convince a people that an unusual un-usual amount of heroism goes along View of Moscow, shown before hammered by Germans. j fed. And Soviet offlceri enjoy a 50 per cent discount at the commercial stores. The Kremlin is luxuriously fed through its own commissary. To foreign embassies the Kremlin obligingly provides delicacies otherwise other-wise unobtainable in the Soviet Union at any price. Foreigners are about as well fed as the top Bolsheviks (except, of course, for the very top, in the Kremlin). For ordinary Soviet civilians, there is a sliding scale, which may be pretty well judged by the bread ration. A first-class warworker gets 600 grams a day more than a I pound. A second-class worker gets 500, an office employee (not an executive) ex-ecutive) gets 400 and a dependent (old people, children, cripples) gets 300 grams. Writers, actors, singers, musicians, musi-cians, and other artists are in a special luxury category, for food, clothing and living quarters. The estate of a czarist nobleman Is now a museum. When Peter the Great was forcing Russia to turn toward Europe, this nobleman sent several hundred of his young serfs to Italy to learn the arts. They returned re-turned as architects, portrait and landscape painters, sculptors, opera singers, and actors. They renovated renovat-ed his palace in the Italian style. It became a forest of slave-produced statuary and paintings and included a theater for the ballet. The slaves had learned a smooth technique and certainly no one could criticize their volume. We pass down lanes, of Venuses. Neptunes and swans tampering with the honor of Ledas. But as art it is as dead as the autocracy which inspired it. The old, courtly caretaker and his wife bow us out after we have signed the guest book. Jennie whispers, whis-pers, "They are of the old regime, those two." "You have seen them before. "Never. But I know by the way they speak Russian, and their manners man-ners One can always tell the former for-mer people. They are of the old times." .. Probably an old lawyer, or an old teacher and his wife, who found for themselves this little haven against the social storm which destroyed their class. To find such a haven was not easy, for an estimated 20 000 000 people died during the civil wars-most often from starvation starva-tion And of these, few were rich aristocrats, for before the first world war only 30,000 people had taxable incomes of more than $5,000. A society called Voks. organized bv the government to maintain cultural cul-tural relations with the outside world today honors Eric, accompanied accom-panied by Joyce and me. with a T ".ore than twenty-five Cans are there but the 1 includes in-cludes every well-known Russian in the arts. There is, of coTr e L composer Shostakovich Z sculptress who did the gigantic PS tlr ter Uya Ehrenburg. of Xm avralheard much from LC0;errvePdnadrTass correspondent to Pan. the only Western country Sevastopol, typical of ruined Russian Rus-sian cities. people to buy in unlimited quantities. quanti-ties. If the Germans were to take Moscow, it was better to have it in the cupboards of the people than in warehouses for the Germans. The people were so busy scrambling for . this food that they had no time for j rumors. (TO BE CONTINUED) |