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Show W?PO$T ON TtJP iW&hmMb ''',.. : f wbite INSTALLMENT THIRTEEN jld him what I was doing here hat this was Omsk. -i.y told me they'd been assigned ?'chnical advisers on a big war ''ruction project. "A mine up " said Tex. "And now we're -J ou'- M, said, "At this little burg, they "-ip a whole Intourist Hotel to 5's' care of us. Brought in wine, 0"rie cigarettes, candy, noodles, dried eggs. For the rest, we Vint; supposed to scavenge off the . They sent in a cook and Assistant cook, a bookkeeper in bout ten people taking care of M je really didn't get to know Russians," said Ed. "Except H, .is different with the girls. They ' some fine girls and nobody is to mind if you take them out. rr might have been assigned to )r anyway had to tell the NKVD iever we said." Ve know they gave the hotel em-Ves em-Ves a lecture," said Tex. "Said m 'J $ 4 'lM ili ifh ck of highways and motor iportalion prove bandicap to lian development. Vert foreigners, and anything I lid they must report. Very sus- ft their mines they sure do is different from what we do. In- ipof having big construction sV !, they call them trusts and - 1 of them are branches of one llfentral trust." " Jiy ten-year-old American child ",.' Meccano set," said Ed, "will ?),': at the bottom and build up. these Russians always start at ,top, build the roof first and then )W work like hell, so they can J up some kind of framework they can hang a red flag on the Jg)f and make speeches," said jMOlT'hey've got no respect for ma- iMRls' They have n0 concePtion of much work has gone into mak--them. They unload valuable from a flat car by just rolling jrjwn an embankment smashing out of It. And fire brick for (,ilers the same way. The way U d heave it off, about 25 per cent 1P be damaged." MOn we'd try to stop it," said (jtf'they explained they had a law Jissia because of the freight-car u,age, that they had to be un-Uft;d un-Uft;d within two hours after ar-n,t,t ar-n,t,t No one seemed to see It t jo-jsi take more cars to bring more sms'rial." tie 1st e were only consultants," said 2?' ."and 11 got tired of us B jfjng, they'd get around it by not rt6 frying us transportation out to They'd say our chauffeur t be found. Which was non-because non-because he was picked by the P. and if he took a five-day f "on, he'd be shot." JPL?d0n't unde"tand mechan-ltsluff. mechan-ltsluff. They put things up out JfT"1 Md blame this trouble Wr American design. So they lTni StartaU over- 0n" fl,.,. them assembling a compll- 4R";iteeIframe out In a field, in- ?.,01 n its foundation. They ry wantd to be sure it would rtfSftjtteir aystem," said Ed, iP" t g,ye them the personal am- the Incentive that ours does. "J so complex-they have to so many peopie before any-m any-m SJZ dne- They could never ifiw ;mpetlUve threat to Amer-'J(fiian Amer-'J(fiian aIways buiId ln a year anything it takes ttem I,5J; ionthave our penitentiary sys-PriSners sys-PriSners 1- 1; . enE n!f?,em' has veloped "nita , ering stafl- They bid b". -Zl Md prison Iab-. Often wSiEj ..Jet roughest deal," 5'marker NKVD ""orecnnM d hanSinS around f :;'popTehWaiUngforsome- chonni; h6y UsuaUy ten :ence aLWd With n ' V , e' and 500 grams of bread fhard ZvT hUSky and can raUou glve you rnore." Mi 8etUng typhu' and 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 Ed, "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 British ambassador had been unable to secure permission to travel outside out-side the capital. One of the Allied countries which has ln 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 yielding yield-ing to reality. After Lenin's death, Stalin won power and supported the thesis gingerly at first that socialism ln 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 ln 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 ln 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 thebank 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 long-est long-est river in the world. We come to the dacha-a Russian word meaning country residence for fomeone who normally lives in the c'ty. It gleams new and white against the great trees which sur round it and overlooks the Ob. Th house would be indistinguishable from the great estates of the wealthy New York families along the Hud son. It has an equally large staf of servants. The rooms are a; large, as clean and as luxurious. Whenever the convenience of : high Communist is involved, thes' people can be as clean and tidy a the Dutch or the Swedes. So it i in this dacha. Below the dacha a private bathin pier extends out into the Ob. Dowi the hill we see a well-kept tenni court, with flood lights for nigh games. To the right is a volley-ba1 court. We have a volley-ball gam Russians versus Americans. There is considerable shouting. Oi the Russian side only one man doe any shouting; the others play ii grim Slavic silence. He is an un dersized man in his forties, witl wide cheekbones and a shock o curly hair quick as a fox terrier-who terrier-who keeps up a running fire of com mand and encouragement to th Russian team. He is strikingly un-Russian. Somi odd combination of chromosome: has produced out here on the steppe: a quick-minded, tough little Irish man complete with wiry hair anc jutting jaw. He even talks out o: the corner of his mouth. His name was Michael Kalugin and although he turned out to hole no local office, it was easy to se how he had acquired the habit o command. He was Secretary of thi Communist Party for Siberia. Novosibirsk has a shopping dis trict about the size of Wichita's There is a beautiful new theater for the ballet, but Moscow artistf also occasionally perform there Near by, a smaller theater Is 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, moderr. building. The architecture Is dra matic high 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 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 tamed them. At the dacha a Red Army band Is tuning its instruments down by llliSlllS3MilllSl ft 1 1 1 ' ' ' ' ix 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, ln 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 the 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) |