| Show fr 0 R hica U 1 V 1 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 a I 1 44 we lo 10 white k installment ELEVEN in the soviet union about people have been on an even lower living standard tor for twenty five years and only a few privileged millions know anything better during this quarter century the soviets have c controlled 0 nt rolled one seventh of the worlds world a land surface rich in natural resources they explain this low living standard by pointing out that the russian people lack technical experience and that dussias Rus sias resources reso resources urcel are largely undeveloped but to correct these things they had almost a quarter of a century of peace which Is a long time temporarily money has little value everyone has far more than ahafi he be needs to buy his bis ration limit the unofficial currency in russia is vodka the average citizen may buy adint a pint a month for about 5 but it if he does not bareto care to drink athas it has a very high trading value there are several categories of r rationing a tic ning corresponding to different strata of the soviet caste system the red army Is extremely well 1 1 po V q 1 I A lob view of blosco wi shown before arn by germans fed and soviet officers enjoy a 60 per c ent cent discount at the commercial stores the kremlin is 13 luxuriously fed ed through its own commissary to foreign embassies the kremlin obligingly provides delicacies otherwise alse unobtainable in the soviet union at any price foreigners eigners 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 judg judged edby by the bread ration A first class war worker gets grams a day inore more than a pound A second class worker ge gets ts an office employee not an executive gets and a dependent old people children cripples gets grams writers actors singers musicians and other artists are in a special luxury category for food cloth clothing lug and living quarters the estate of a czarist nobleman Is now a mu museum eum when peter the gr great eat was forcing russia to turn to toward ward europe this nobleman sent several hundred of his young serfs to italy to learn the arts they returned as architects portrait and landscape painters sculptors opera singers and actors they renovated his palace in the italian style it became a forest of slave pro produced deuced statuary and paintings gsand and included a theater tor for the ballet the slaves had learned a smooth technique and certainly no one could criticize their volume we pass down lanes of benuses Ve neptunus Nep tunes and swans tam tampering with the honor of lidas ledas but abart atar tit it is as dead as the autocracy which inspired it fc the old courtly caretaker and his ID invite eife bow ui us out after we have signed the guest book jennie whispers they are of the old regime those two you have seen them before never but I 1 know by the way they speak russian and their manners one can always tell the former people they are of the old times it probably an old lawyer or an old teacher and his wife who found tor for themselves Ws this little haven against the social storm which destroyed their class to find such a haven was not easy tor for an estimated people died during the civil wars most often from starvation and of these few were rich aristocrats for before the first world war only people had ble incomes of more than IWA reable A society called boks organized by the government to maintain cultural relations with the outside world today honors eric accompanied by joyce and me with a party not more than twenty five russians are there but the if list t includes s every well known russian name in the arts there is of course the composer kovitch the sculptress who did the gigantic statuary group for the paris pans exposition of 1937 and the immensely popular writer ilya ehrenburg of whom I 1 have also heard much from the 1 he correspondents hi he served as toss tass correspondent in parla the only western country he knows find and Is at ease easa in the french language his political line in relation to the germans Is indistinguishable from that ahat ot of the late georges clemenceau this has not always been the line of his government until the teleran teheran conference where it became clear that the anglo amer loan ican powers would raise no serious obstacle to their annex annexation atlon of the baltic states the soviets maintained in Im i moscow a free german committee of captured generals stalin had emphatically said that i the ahe war was not against the german people but only against hillers Hit lers clique A separate soviet peace signed with any german faction oth eathan hillers Hit lers keeping intact the german army was possible since teheran however when stalin in exchange for various assurances su accepted the anglo amer lean ican unconditional sui surrender render for mulat mu lathe be free german committee has been soft pedaled and ehrenburg has had a tree free rein his articles calling for vengeance on all germans are ills his passionate admiration for or france contributes to the poor view he takes of anglo saxons and in particular of the anglo american war effort of which like most russians he has seen nothing his articles led the soviet journalistic clamor for a premature second front when the anglo americans finally opened their normandy offensive he explained the rapidity of their advance from the normandy beachhead as being largely due to the effectiveness of the french maquis what might be called the amerlean american fifth column has never bothered to go underground even during the war large sections of our people openly favored the axis before it began and since we got in powerful newspapers have con continued ti aued caustic criticism of our british and russian allies by contrast with this russia seems a miracle of national unity with not a dissenting voice but if russians are contemptuous of us because all of our newspapers do not support roosevelt with that degree of doglike devotion with which russian newspapers support stalin we can retort that t so tar far none of our generals has deserted to join either the germans or the japanese moscow has not widely publicized that general Vlas sov charged in the early days of the war with th the e defense of the russa sector went over to the enemy with his entire army corps mostly ukrainians the germans soon discovered it W was Is not safe to arm these men tor for combat on the eastern front for many 0 of ft them hem would desert again to join the partisans we generously praise the mu morale ale ot of the red army and sometimes complain that our boys do not not seem to know what they are fight fighting I 1 ng for or but for the record we should remember that out of the tha many anglo american prisoners the germans hold they have tailed failed to organize a single battalion bartall on willing to fight to in nazi uniform we have read many stories of the heroism her 0 ism of 0 mos moscow e ow when the enemy wa was s at I 1 its t s gates thousands of women left their homes to dig fortifications in the suburbs saving the city to the embarrassment of our amerlean american experts who had bad predicted that it would tall fall such stories e s are true and are typical of the great majority but I 1 should like to give a few other stories which altho although u gh typical only of a minority are e equally bally well authenticated the moscow panic described tor for me began october 1941 as the germans approached the town the foreigners and the government had gone As the fighting got closer rumors arose people began destroying all evidence which would prove they were ever sympathetic with the party they burned up those pictures of stalin lento lenin and molotov which are in ma many y russian rusian homes and burned their communist books doing such a thorough job that it Is still difficult to buy this type of Utera literature ture because of the paper shortage the government has not got around to replacing it the germans were dropping not only reprints of winston Chur chills early speeches attacking the belshe vika but also attacks on jews but bu german propaganda was not solely responsible for the rising in moscow russian propaganda also contributed in an effort to arouse patriotism in the russian people the bolsheviks had turned to history lar izing the discarded heroes of czarist times generals and czars azars who in the past had heaved out invaders in the name of holy mother russia we know reasoned a prominent bolshevik that the people are not fighting tor for communism they are fighting for russia it was true and the bolsheviks capitalized on it but pride of race cuts both ways it if you convince a people that an unusual amount of heroism goes along with their possession of slavic blood they take the further logical step ol of concluding that something Is tong with anyone not similarly blessed this popularization of the old medieval slavic skull austers busters resulted naturally in a rising contempt lor for jews the anti semitism did not directly em embarrass barrasi the kremlin tor for since the purges of 1837 1937 very few jews remained in high government positions they have recently taken steps to correct the trend by so soft ft pedaling publicity about the slavic skull busters austers of antiquity the czars azars often encouraged anti semitism and one of the admirable things about the soviet regime Is its uncompromising attitude toward any form of race prejudice which it holds down with a no small task in dealing with the Russian people in whom anti antl semitism has been a tradition for centuries but the government has done a good job in keeping it down with the result that anti antl semitism to 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 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 in g they felt the sooner it was over the better my informant friend with one blue eye and one brown had the habit ol of wearing in his buttonhole button hole 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 oil of his little enamel flag because it got him into too many arguments strangers would come up to him on the street or on on the subway and say why are you silly people sending bending help to the re regime girne dont you know youre only prolonging the war if mind your own business it would be over sooner and if anyone started making a patriotic speech someone might remark sourly the matter with you anyway are you a jew in general the evacuees es were not popular rumors circulated as to enormous prices they were paying for automobiles to make their getaway and other rumors to the effect that peasants were stopping them on the highways to relieve them of hoarded boarded valuables the situation got worse the militiamen on the corner had disappeared also those guarding vacant e embassies m basales against looting levies LevIe ot green troops hastily raised to defend the capital had broken at haick isk and run away there were near riots at food sto stores res russians are not by nature an orderly people and as soon as they discovered the militia was gone the slow moving food queues b became 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 17 ordered all stored food dumped on the market allowing g 11 X 51 M C sevastopol typical of ruined mined russian cities people to buy in unlimited quantities it if the germans were to take moscow it was better to have it in the cupboards of the people than in warehouses tor for the germans the people were so busy scrambling tor for this f food that they had no time lor for rumors i TO sia BB CONTINUED |
