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Show Report on the "russians ' INSTALLMENT FIVE ' This morning," says Kirilov, as j climb . into the waiting Zees, visit fur factory." In his bright 'icon, a factory is any place ' Ere something is produced. This n turns out to be a collective mink Vs m. It was once a village. The 'Vises still stand along the mud .:et. The biggest, which probably ponged to a thrifty kulak who was r lidated in the thirties, is now the 'Xninistration building. The com-(nal com-(nal kitchen and dining room is he second biggest house. A nurs- school is in a third. 7 h the director's room Is the usual ture of Stalin, the usual carved ;.Viiture. The director is a lean, tle farmer. His face and neck weather-beaten. So are his fds. So are the faces and hands Jiis assistants. These are rugged, flligent farmers such as you -jht find In the Farm Bureau Of- of Lyon County, Kansas, his director gives us some statis- His collective has 1,200 hec-:s hec-:s (hectare-21 acres), of which i Evnal cages occupy about forty. It ?re;es minks, silver foxes, sables gt martins. Mink pelts bring alls al-ls tit $12 each, and at a wholesale e of about $800, you can buy the ;nty necessary for a coat, which J retail at about $2,500. It takes y.Jt sixty-five sable skins to make )at, and these pelts are sold at i;es ranging from $50 to $600 or"; 1. Only one or two sables are nbeni m a litter and it sometimes 'S a hunter two weeks to find and a single animal. Wild sable ml,3 sometimes bring $500 each. darkest and silkiest made up ' Pst! a coat bring as high as $45,000. actically all of them are sold in ' York. In normal times, also Ion and Paris. Very few In the et Union. jet a brief attack of social con- ice. Here this half-starved na- is forced to put skilled farm-i farm-i I to raising useless animals for 'jj) -ream of the foreign luxury mar-,f?so mar-,f?so that Russia may buy useful nines. 'e mink farm is orderly and Ix and the sturdy farmers seem 'Mnow their business thoroughly. fyt,e supervisors, both men and JSjjien, are "agronomes." They jj degrees from agricultural 8 vols in veterinary science. J visit to what Kirilov calls a factory, which is, however, not leaj:3ck farm but a packing house. Iienye it is food, we are again garbed h "c!impled, slightly soiled white. It "to'1"8 little from an American ckajtJng house, but they show us "thing they say Is a Soviet In-jiwion. In-jiwion. The cow. Instead of being ed with a hammer, Is struck at the base of the skull with a .!In, tipped by an electrically lL ieed needle. This stuns but does .kill. Her heart continues to ( Ap out blood after her throat is and while, suspended by the fpis, she moves down the dis-f-nbly line to be skinned. -vA ay 'jshe" advisedly for Soviet consists almost entirely of -out old milk cows, calves, or .j relccasional bull whose romantic , have burned to embers. Al-6 Al-6 f1 no cattle are raised to matu- purcly as beef. Here it is the product of the dairy business, ! a Is over most of Europe, jj ffl the Soviet Union tenderness iJ(L''s little difference since, due to jj'ick of refrigeration, almost all ""ineat Is prepared as smoked iige. During our entire stay In 1 p.ountry, only twice were we of- I steak. it fci were surprised at this plant to .Uint the basic wage was only jubles a month Instead of the !7Xmary 750. However, the fact Jointly comes out that workers M0(;'overfulfill their norms (almost vtf them do) get an extra divl" , A' inuiiey dui in meat, o. ' is infinitely more important. H-rvj.ce and Eric return wide-eyed - today's trip. They visited a Russian military hospital, a m of which Is devoted to the r of genital wounds. They have ( kicvclPed surgical technique f l:at men who have had their IqR! blown away In battle. s5l0Ugh visiting Soviet doctors Jlfree access to AUied hospitals Western fronts, it Is most ACKS lit 'or Allied medical observ-wiws-'3 visit Soviet field hospitals, you'rtls not entirely because of the :n.dCf ional Russ'an suspicion of for-,e for-,e bi;'. They are a proud people, 'd""' !onceal Ulelr weaknesses. Their .eyd!i'al standard of medical care b trl:'t compare with that of the rn countries. y spend freely on the more ,icular branches of medical re-n, re-n, but under this top crust, the Xlse Russian doctor has less MJr' ig than a good American ' gf So when permission to visit W Psian hospital is refused by the B " metliod of delay and post-onPo.ient, post-onPo.ient, Oie real reason often is : thf e Russians know the foreigner foreign-er Culd learn nothing new except they eagerness of their equipment. the!1 ;;e general poverty of the coun-:es coun-:es uf t'tends to medicine. Yet even 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 n I h i t 1 -'.vww-v H -'- "J' jjjvjj 3 "" -J I X )' f vA , "? Z t' 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 ramshackle ram-shackle boxcar was hooked on behind. be-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, tney 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 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 already al-ready clearing 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 ' women 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 a few shattered, branchless trunks protrude above the shell holes. Here 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 Leningradin Len-ingradin 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 is a former Leningrad plant, returning return-ing from its wartime exile in the Urals. As we drive from the Leningrad station to our hotel, we get a good look at the city. It is a beautiful, j spacious, 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 the shores of the Baltic, giving Russia Rus-sia a window on the civilized outside world. There is in its beautiful, clean architecture little suggestion 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 buildings 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 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 almost intact, except for broken window win-dow glass and nicked cornices. Shell or bomb craters are rare. 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 squirms with Byzantine ornament over which float onion-shaped spires. It is Russia, and back of Russia, the Eastern Empire of Constantinople, Constantino-ple, and back of that Bagdad and the temples of Asia. Before the war most of Russia's 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 before be-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 ) |