Evening Star Newspaper, May 7, 1933, Page 68

with its dreary magnificence over- d with sordidness. Here were beauti- ful buildings, uncared for, the back- ground to crowded street cars, shabby droshkys with shabby drivers and thin horses under tall, clumsy yokes; grave people in shoddy thread-bare clothes and cheap shoes, the men wearing caps ‘and the women headkerchiefs, mostly red; girls directing street traffic; little boys with bags on their backs; soldiers marching and singing. It is joyless and yet triumphant, this . Russian singing, making one shiver and wonder. The Russians have got some- .thing, if only a new wild faith in mass consciousness and mass action. But like the battleship gray of the Soviet build- ings, they are gray in effect, standing in their poignant bread lines, or else prodding along wearily and steadily. 8o many empty and pallid faces; no one laughing; no one but the young smiling, Not many automobiles were to be seen. A child threw a stone and a man shook his fists at us as we drove to the hotel, The Russian girl beside me said: “This is what they are saying: ‘The bourgeois have food; they come here to look at us, the animals’ And another says: ‘Why should they ride when I dig potatoes all day and-have not enough to eat?’” As we walked into the hotel, some of the spectators surreptitiously felt the clothes o_f_ a man of the party, and said: “I didn’t know there was cloth like this in the world. His suit must have cost 500 rubles. Would you say 160 for the boots? No, 200. Look at the thick soles.” These prices were breath-taking. Nearly $100 for good boots. More than $225 for a good suit. We were not sur- prised later to be charged $1 for a bottle of beer and, $2 to have a suit pressed. We could pay, but we wondered how people managed on wages of $30 a month. T dinner we felt again the cost to Russia of the Soviet ideal in the attitude of those of our party who already had met their relations. They were subdued; not a gesture among them, talking little because of spies among the waiters. One woman had as guests a couple just married. Their eyes were intent on their food. They said there had been no meat and no butter in Leningrad, except in the hotels for foreigners, for three weeks. The bride had tried for two years to get an appli- cation filled for cloth for a dress. Her husband, who, being a Communist, had various privileges, bought at minimum cost, a man’s suit, and somehow it had been made over into a wedding dress. The skirt was narrow, and scars of sewn-up pockets showed, but the girl was proud of it. The husband had been living in a dormitory while she shared a room with two girls, Another married couple, going on a week’s vacation, had lent the pair their room. Afterward they would have to go back to their pre- marital arrangements until they could find a room. This might take months since all the large cities in Russia are overcrowded. Homes cannot be built; the money goes for machines. I had been told in New York that Rus- | ‘slan touring was well organized. I was told that there was a paucity of auto- busses, but that there were some 300 cars, a hundred of them in Moscow, each with a chauffeur., But the organization sounded better than it worked—at least for our party. ; When we inquired into sightseeing plans, we found that a rigid routine had ~ been arranged and that the Soviet would not keep its promise of letting us go where we pleased. 8ix of us had not come to visit relatives; we had in mind specific places and projects. As we were paying from $15 to $20 a day, we wanted to make the most of our time. We in- tended to visit the palace of the late Czar, a few miles outside Leningrad, now turned into museums, a children'’s village and rest homes for the workers. Im- possible, the Soviet said; that would mean cutting out important sights in Leningrad or delaying the other members™ of the party. Not at all, we said; let the Russian-Americans go to Moscow while we stayed in Leningrad. Impos- sible; no autobus could be spared at Moscow to meet the train, so there would be four hours of walking. Very well; we were in good training. Impossible; impossible, We had been told that parties of as few as five could be formed with a guide, 50 we asked $0 be separated . THE SUNDAY STAR, -WASHINGTON, D. C, MAY 7, 1933, Russian peasant women homeward bound efter a day in the fields. from our fellow-tourists whose interests were different from ours. Again—im- possible. A cynical American resident told us that if we were disappointed by our deprivations in Leningrad, we’d be more disappointed in Moscow. And we were. Not in the city itself, so thrilling with its golden domes under the ‘sunshine; and the red square where people march forever to see Lenin in his burial home of dark-red marble; the Kremlin be- yond, where the authorities have kept the golden eagle of the Romanoffs near their own red flags with the emblem of the hammer and the sickle. The Kremlin we saw, but not what we strenuously demanded, the Amo tractor factory, managed, I believe, by American executives and employing American workmen. Impossible; the director could not be reached or the factory was closed ; or there was some other excuse. One tourist suggested that perhaps the workmen would talk too freely to us. WE asked to see the collective farms a few miles from Moscow. Im- possible; we must see those near Rostov or Kiev. In Kiev the man from Illinois, the only one who had kept on fighting with me for our objective, withdrew. “I'm through,” he said. “I've paid for three more days in this city and I'm giving them up. You won’t get your farms.” And I didn’t. The tourist officer in that it was only matural for want his own land to work way. o We also asked to go to the movies and this was the best in Moscow. .We did see an opera in Leningrad and a ballet in Moscow, both beautifully done; but all struggles to get to the Moscow Art Theater failed. Besides this, our main disappointments in Moscow had to do with wasted time and ineffective transportation. First and second class tourists were supposed to use autobusses for sightseeing. Apart from a general ride around the city, and transportation to, not from, the ballet, we were given an autobus only once. It took us to the rubber factory which routine allowed, but we had to walk to and from the factory kindergarten, some three miles. And, by the way, the guides moved us quickly through the factory when they found we were talking. to the workers. The director had just told us that a piece-worker could make as much as 180 rubles a month, but a blue-eyed girl said she got only 35 rubles and would starve except that her parents worked. An- other middle-aged woman whispered to us the address of her cousin in New York who she thought might be able to help her out of her misery. On the day we expected to make a long visit to the courts, our guide told us at 10 o’clock that we must first walk to the Hotel Metropole and pay for the tickets to our next destination. Walking there and paying for the tickets took an hour and a half. We were told to return at 3:30 for the tickets. Then we set out for the courts on foot and by street cars. The cars are almost as crowded as the New York subway in rush hours, and harder to negotiate because there is only one exit.. You are pushed and prodded and trampled and lain on by comrades. It took more than two hours of such travel to get to and from the courts, where we were allowed a scant hour be- cause we had to return by 3:30 for our tickets—which, incidentally, were not ready until 5:30. - : But if Russia broke its promise to show some of us what we wanted to see, if it scamped us on transportation and refused to put us in a’small party, if by wasting our time it kept us from extra sightseeing for which we had energy and inclination, at least, so far as Leningrad and Moscow are concerned, it did well in regard to room and board. A typical dinner consisted of soup, fish or meat balls, spaghetti, turnips, ice cream, sweet biscuits or cake, and tea. Trm hotel in Leningrad was second rate, but sufficiently comfortable, The hotel in Moscow, advertised as having excellent bed rooms and views, six ele= vators and a roof dining room seating 1,000 persons, fell a bit short in that there were only two elevators ready, and the dining room was unfinished. - In the one we used there was a plethora of flies, no window screens and not even fly-paper. The hotel in Kiev was gener- ally inexcusable. My stay in Russia was profitable but not happy. .Just as sure as I lost myself in beauty something painful would in- trude In alarge food factory serving a great region of workers, we saw three dining rooms, one for the 860 employes; one for workers with low wages who seemed mostly to be eating rich soup, and one for the better paid, where the tables had white cloths and attractive china. One worker said, desperately: “What am I to do? I earn a ruble and a half a day, I come here and eat it up and am still hungry and have nothing for shoes and clothes.” Yet in the same factory another wom- an told us that the Soviet had given her a happiness she had never before known. She and her husband were each getting 200 rubles a month. They had a big room. She left her child in school all day, sure that he would be well fed and well taught. Her husband, who had never. been able to get an education, now could study. What I minded most was the bread lines. I saw them in Baku in 1920, and in 12 years the Soviet had not found a way of abolishing this drain on the ener- gies of the workers. Visiting markets and churches was not part of our routine, but I went when I was supposed to be resting. Some of the traders I saw were pathetic cre- atures trying to exchange a few potatoes for a threadbare coat, or a couple of shabby dresses for a pair of shoes. But there were touches of prosperity, people selling white bread or butter for plenty of rubles. One man said he would rather buy in the open market when he could afford it, as he had been over- charged in certain government stores. In Leningrad we visited an admirable clinic which took care of people who, in the old regime, would have been left to die. One of the Russian tourists asked a tubercular looking man what was wrong with him, and he replied: “Hunger. The job I was on ended three days ago. I went next day and was in line four hours at the employment bu- reau. They said they had nothing and to return next day. So I didn’t eat. Yesterday I went and they said to come back. When I went today and they said come back tomorrow, I fainted. They brought me here and when I came to myself I asked the nurse if she couldn’t give me something to eat. She said, ‘My poor man, I have nothing for myself.’” The Russian girl offered him two rubles, but he refused them. “If I took the money,” he said, “they would think I had stolen it for they know I have no work.” THERE certainly isn’t liberty in Russia, and apparently equality is not ex- pected in the first stages of Communism, “From each according to his ability; to ‘each according to his work” is the slogan. Some day it may be: “From each according to his ability; to each accorde ‘ing to his needs.” Perhaps I am wreng in deploring the heaviness of the pfice the people are paying—the children who ‘don’t laugh enough, the men who fail at the machines not from stupidity, but from hunger; the middle-aged and old in the churches, so few, so unhappy, and the priests and rabbis who seem afraid that the tourists will speak to them. When I told one guide that I was r the Soviet was trying to liquidate God because the old sometimes had left but God, she replied, impatiently: “It will be better for Russia w] old and middle-aged are gone. " me,” she added, tossing back her strong, young head, “I don’t need God. I myself.” These young people are a weapon the Soviet just as important as Continued on Fifteenth Pagé.