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Show fm&sl Hit 1 1 lib WW i I f i 11 PJ m INSTALLMENT SIXTEEN The Uzbeks, racially, are a mixture. mix-ture. They resemble the near-by Afghans, and others might have Persian or Arab blood. Occasionally Occasion-ally we see a Mongolian face which has strayed down from Kazakstan. Tashkent Is an enormous sprawling sprawl-ing city of cracked and peeling stucco stuc-co with wide, hot, dusty streets. We arrive in the clean, comfortable office of-fice of the director of the Stalin Textile Tex-tile Trust and what with the heat are frantically thirsty. They start to open champagne but we plead for water. So they bring out bottles of that warmish pink soda pop. Mercifully, Mer-cifully, there are on the table half a dozen fresh peaches. In half a minute the plate is empty and in another half minute It contains six peach stones. Nothing ever tasted so delicious and we realize how starved we have been for fresh fruits and vegetables. Since we crossed the Ural mountains moun-tains we have seen little American machinery indeed, few foreign machines ma-chines of any kind. There are 14,000 workers in this textile plant and 80 per cent are women. The raw material is cot- A typical Russian school building in its republics. ton, grown under irrigation in this valley. They also weave silk, which they import. The workers' hours run from eight to ten daily according to their age, and they average more than 1,000 roubles per month, although some crack ones make as iiigh as 4,500. In addition each worker averages between five and six meters of cloth per month as a premium. The mayor of Tashkent is a dark little Uzbek, a friendly but rather timid Oriental. His name is Sadik Khusaynov. Before the war, he tells us, Tashkent had 700,000 people and more than 50 pei cent were Uzbeks. At the peak of the evacuations, there were 900,000 but now it is back down to about 850,000. Many machine-building industries were evacuated here with their workers mostly the light and medium me-dium but a few heavy machine industries in-dustries as welL They also make aircraft here. A big, handsome, full-faced Russian Rus-sian with very blue eyes sits down by the mayor. He tells us they have here a plant making Douglas planes. Also a light machine tool plant converted con-verted to turn out arms and ammunition ammu-nition for the Red Army; shoe factories, fac-tories, garment industries, plus a plant for making emery stones needed by heavy industries. Ihe handsome young Russian is Rodion Glukhov, vice-premier of the Uzbekistan Republic. Now and then he interrupts always picking up for the mayor if he falters. Evacuees came with their plants, and will stay permanently. The plants came from Moscow, the Ukraine and the North Caucasus. And from Leningrad they have many skilled workers and engineers. He tells us Leningrad is anxious to have these engineers back, but Uzbekistan Uz-bekistan is anxious to keep such valuable men. It will be for Moscow Mos-cow to decide. He tells us that Uzbekistan before the war had 6,200,000 people, so the addition of 2,000,000 refugees was a big task. But when we ask him how he managed it, he politely refers re-fers us to the mayor. A huge munitions plant evacuated from Rostov-on-Don had left its foundry behind, which had taken two years to build. Here in Tashkent Tash-kent they finished one In twenty-eight twenty-eight days. A great aviation plant was moved from Moscow; within a month it was up to 80 per cent of its former production. The dacha where we stay is comfortable com-fortable and spacious. This rural mansion ii rest home and summer sum-mer vacation place for members of the Uzbekistan cabinet. ' Now another character enters the scene a plump, middle-aged woman wom-an called Nona. She has large, warm blue eyes. She is the hostess and the kind of big, friendly. Jolly girl who makes herself useful on picnics. Nona spoke excellent English, which she had learned in a most curioui way. She had been "the mother" to a number of interned American pilots who had been forced down on Russian soil after Aleutian bombing raids. They had been housed under guard in a dacha similar to this and Nona was in charge. She was fond of them all, and they had brought their troubles to her. What her job Is we never learned. She is by Soviet standards remarkably well turned out, with plenty of afternoon and evening gowns. That evening Nona goes into town with us to the local opera house (new, and well-done with Oriental decorations copied from ancient Uzbek Uz-bek designs) for a concert. They give, especially for us, one act of an opera based on an incident in Uzbek history. This is followed by a couple cou-ple of vocal numbers and then by a "jazz band" which is on tour from Georgia (U.S.S.R., not U.S.A.). About half the crowd in this theater thea-ter is Russian and half Uzbek. Watching the Uzbek opera I realize that the most admirable thing about the whole Soviet Union is its colonial policy its relationships with the smaller and sometimes backward races. This is partly accounted for by the fact that Russians historically historical-ly have few race prejudices. Instead of Jim Crowing the weaker weak-er peoples, the Russians lean over backward to give them titles and offices of-fices which are rather beyond their capacities. At first, I jumped to the conclusion that the native officeholders office-holders were stooges, dressed up and provided with fancy offices but with little real power. But we learn that the premier of this republic is an Uzbek and a smart one an old-time old-time Bolshevik with a steel-trap mind, highly respected in the party councils. We are assured he is no stooge. He is apparently as powerful power-ful here in his own right as was Manuel Quezon in the Philippines. Since I am so keen on ancient cities they offer a brief tour in the Oriental quarter of Tashkent. The old city is a labyrinth of winding alleys like those in the Arab Me-dinas Me-dinas in North Africa, the old quar ter of Jerusalem, the Cairo Dazaar, or the cities of Afghanistan across the border. But just outside this old city are two beautiful new white buildings, both ornamented with Uzbek Uz-bek designs the post office and a huge cinema. At first there seems nothing to see in the ancient city but adobe walls enclosing cobblestone streets with here and there a carved doorway. There are no windows in the walls. A shabby old man offers to show us his house. With an ancient, six-inch six-inch iron key he unlocks a door under un-der a pointed wooden arch, and we step out of the drab alley into a gem of a garden with a fountain in the center. At one end of this patio ii his home two clean, whitewashed rooms, some low furniture. On the floor is a mellow Oriental rug which he says was his grandfather's, and a polished brass samovar. The old man tells me, as Nona Interprets, In-terprets, that in writing any of this in America, I should understand that he is an old man, who well remembers the days when the emirg ruled this land. And that in those days he was not a man. But now he feels like a man, and is treated like a man, and for this he has to thank the Revolution and Comrade Stalin. All Soviet streets are clean even the crooked alleys of this Oriental town which elsewhere in the east would reek of garbage. But I must for the record tell Hal Denny's story of the eager professor. Hal was New York Times correspondent corre-spondent in Moscow. One of bis afflictions had been the numbers of eager tourists who came every summer sum-mer to study the marvels of the Soviet So-viet system and become authorities on this Land of the Future. A professor of municipal government govern-ment in a mid-western college arrived ar-rived to spend a month studying his specialty. After two weeks in the library h"? showed up at Hal's room, breaking in on a party of homesick correspondents, and began to talk about the marvels of the Soviet town-planning system. All, all was marvelous, the eager professor insisted; their methods of police protection, taxation, utilities, elections, and administration! Yet on the rather unimportant topic of sewage disposal there seemed to be no literature. Could HlI tell him what they did with their garbage? The answer, instantly given by a roomful of correspondents, rose in spontaneous chorus: "They eat It!" In this hungry land there are no dogs, cats or cockroaches. Tin cans and carefully straightened nails are sold In the market place. In passing pass-ing let it also be on record that we saw no beggars. Forty-year-old director, Afanasy Yarunin tells us this Tashkent plant builds Douglas airplanes. It arrived here from Moscow in November of 1941 with 7,000 workers, and thirty-five thirty-five days later was in production. Now they have 14,000 workers building build-ing a Russian modification of the DC-3 and turn out six planes daily. The Red Army has modified the Douglas so that it can be used as a combination transport, paratroop ship, hospital plane and night bomber. bomb-er. Because it sometimes goes into battle, a huge transparent gun blister blis-ter bulges from the top of its fuselage, fuse-lage, creating a wind-drag cutting off at least 50 miles per hour. They use wood in the floor-braces, partitions parti-tions and doors. The director insists it is as good or better than aluminum alumi-num and easier to work. Perhaps in Russia, where both aluminum and tools to work it are scarce. But aluminum is stronger and wood, under machine-gun -fire, dissolves to flaming slivers. ! Russia pays no royalties to Douglas, Doug-las, having paid a flat sum in 1939 which the director believes was $2,500,000. Before that, his chief engineer, en-gineer, Boris Lisunov, worked in the Douglas Long Beach plant for two years, so they needed no American help when they set up production in Moscow. Only about 5 per cent of the machinery is American; the rest was made in the Soviet Union. We are taken out into the desert to visit the Stalin-Chirchik Electro-Chemical Electro-Chemical Trust, which, when unscrambled, un-scrambled, turns out to be a Soviet Muscle Shoals. Thev have dammed the Chirchik river, providing the 100,-000 100,-000 kilowatts of electric power necessary neces-sary to run a huge nitrogen-fixation plant, which makes 80 tons of ammonia am-monia every twenty-four hours. Before Be-fore the war it turned out 600,000 tons of fertilizer per year. Without a minute's rest (because eating is the most gruelling part of our work) we are packed into cars and after a half hour's drive unload at a "fruit factory," an irrigated irri-gated valley. They walk us down an incredibly long arbor where grapes hang so low they knock our hats off. At its end we arrive at a pavilion where (Oh, Heaven! Be merciful before these well-meaning people kill us!) a long table Is set for another banquet. ban-quet. They tell us they are experimenting experiment-ing with cotton. This sovhoz (state farm) raises seed for all the kolhoz (collective farms) in the region. This experimental station was started by an ancient Oriental with the jaw-breaking name of Rlzamat Musamukhamedov. He is sixty-three sixty-three and started working in the vineyards as a boy of thirteen. He is an Uzbek of a peasant family, a thin, dreamy man with an Uzbek skullcap (or tubeteyka) and a scrag-gly scrag-gly beard out of Arabian Nights. Ha has on his coat the ribbons of many state decorations. The Russian director, Abram Mal-tezeb. Mal-tezeb. The big struggle since the war, he tells us, has been for sugar. Four refineries were evacuated from Ukraine to Uzbekistan, still others to Kazakstan. Since the Germans seized the sugar sug-ar beet fields of the Ukraine, Uzbekistan Uz-bekistan has planted 35,000 hectares in beets for sugar, with this year another 15,000 hectares for seed for the liberated Ukraine. Irrigation is responsible for the heavy yield of the seventy-five kinds of grapes grown here. The average yield is 22 tons per hectare, with water supplied three to five times a season so the yield is steady. Samarkand is an even richer grape country. And, as here, the little hand-work done is on the grape collectives most of it being done by tractor. What we have seen of Soviet agriculture agri-culture has been uniformly good. Since I come from a farming state ' -tJ The Republic of Uzbekistan furnished fur-nished some of Russia's best fighters. fight-ers. I could not be badly fooled. True, they have shown us their best. But it is at least as good as our best. We return to the dacha in time to change our shirts for the local opera. We see something called "Ulug-Beg," which was one of the titles of Tamerlane, and its story is of his times. Between acts we are taken into the banquet room (Yes, God help us, the usual table laid) to meet the composer, a slender slen-der young Russian intellectual. His wife, a handsome but worn-looking girl, who has written the words not in Russian, mind you, but in Uzbek Uz-bek is here to explain the plot (TO BE CONTINUED). |