Evening Star Newspaper, May 7, 1933, Page 67

Fiction Features PART 7 The %umla‘y Shat Magaszine WASHING l‘ON D. C, MAY 7, 1933, == Art Notes Books 16 PAGES. = —————— e s e o o - A Tourist Tries to See Russia T his American W, rtter Made a Sovzet—Conducted Tour to Learn the T ruth, but She Had Difficulties in Her Travels—Attempting to Find What the People Feel Toward Communism— Barriers Placed Against Too Close an Investigation. { church in Moscow turned into a granary. When the Russians bring in their wheat, it is recorded by a commissar, and then added to the pile. OR the last four years now Russia has angled for visitors. The Rus- sians are too absorbed in their five-year plan and too straitened as to food and transportation really to want us, but they need foreign money, since th2 nations which sell to them refuse payment in rubles. This year Russia offers a choice of 15 pre- cisely planned tours occupying from 5 to 31 days. Also, there is a medical tour designed for doctors and dentists. Fur- ther, this year there was a special May day tour. Last year the attention of the American public was not especially di- rected toward May day celebrations and the tourists who came were mostly dele- gates from American Communistic groups. There is another change. The adver- tising material sent me for this season does not make quite such exuberant promises as those that lured me over last Summer. The tourist then was told that he would be given, “the best of every- thing . . . signify your wishes in sight- seeing and they are complied with. Go where you want to go and see what you came to see. Your guide . . . will accom- pany you only if you wish it.” Cars to and from the stations and auto-busses for sightseeing. And I really believed it! There were organized friendship tours, clubwomen’s and students’ and business men’s tours, arranged, naturally, with a view to favorable publicity. But I avoided the intelligentsia parties. No one knew that I was a writer. I wanted By MAUDE RADFORD WARREN to see how common or garden tourists were treated, so I joined an undistin- guished party of 40-odd in which there were only three other Gentiles, because I knew that some of the Jews could translate what the people were really saying. And what follows is what I saw and heard; just the experience of one among several thousand people who “saw Russia.” SO there, about, the first day of June, I stood at the border of Soviet Russia, listening to the hysterical weeping of a woman from whom the customs officials had just taken a dozen dresses and six pairs of shoes. She was a Russian Jewess, escaped before 1917, and she was bringing those articles as presents for her people. “They need them so bad, and I fool my husband to buy them,” she wept. “The customs say I can have them when I leave Russia, but I don’t come back this way, so it is all lost.” The cynical face of a butcher from Coney Island told where he thought the things would go. He had a father and six brothers in Russia. The officials had just sequestered from him 28 shirts, seven suits of clothes and seven pairs of shoes. Other tourists had been similarly \ treated. For myself, I did not mind the meticulous examination of luggage, the registering of jewelry and money, the changing of a good dollar into one ruble, 94 kopeks, and being asked if I had boot- legged in rubles which can be bought in certain places outside at 30 to the dollar. What I minded was not being allowed to keep my passport. It was as if the right to individuality were snapped off. The customs passed, we landed in Leningrad, where a youth talked to us beamingly of his good luck in being in Russia. He had been born in Poland, educated in American schools and trained with us as a carpenter. Two years before he had joined the Soviet, surrendering his American citizenship. He was working for the highest Soviet wages—250 rubies a month. He said he paid 11 rubles for his share of a room, 65 for board, and had the rest for amuse- ment and clothes. No need, he said, to save in Russia; old age was taken care of. He did not mention how much was subtracted from his pay envelope each month for dues and government bonds. No unprejudiced observer can be in Russia without feeling both dejected and uplifted. Except for the new ideal of creating a proletarian republic, there is nothing in Russia that has not already -2,200 people. Copyright by Underwood & Underwoed, been thought out and practiced in other countries, from welfare organizations to great mechanical undertakings. And it is obvious that a couple of million Communists are imposing their will firmly on 147,000,000 people, and making them pay in work and blood and bone and spirit for-a daring experiment. The results are worth seeing—the giant farm machinery and silos; the achieve- ments in water power; the factories which make everything from tractors to frying pans and which are making the workers machinery-minded. And also the social accomplishments—courts and schools and kindergartens; houses of culture and homes for rest and recuper- ation; hospitals and restaurants and beautiful parks. The Workers’ House of Culture in Leningrad, for example, has -rooms for technical instruction, exhibi- tion rooms, a library of 35,000 volumes, rooms for special meetings, a kindergar- ten and nursery and a theater seating All unexampled benefits for the proletariat. BUT the cost shows. You might mur- der a man and not be executed, but if you commit sabotage you are shot just as if you were a counter-revolutionist. If you ever neglect your machine you are guilty of “cruelty to machines” and are punished. I felt that cruelty tohuman beings, however, was sometimes taken as - & matter of course or as a part of the price for making over Russia. The price appeared as we drove through Lenine