IMPRESSIONS OF RUSSIA IN 1957

It may seem – indeed it is – rather presumptuous to read a paper on my Russian impressions after a visit of a little under a month in that vast country. But I have one or two excuses for doing so (and I do not include among them the very kind invitation of the Committee on Arrangements and Exercises). One excuse is that I really think that my impressions were enriched, or at any rate were made more vivid, by the fact that only six months earlier my wife – hereinafter referred to as “Helen” – and I had made a fairly extensive visit to the interior parts of Yugoslavia. The similarities and, even more, the sharp contrasts, between the two Communist countries added, I am sure, a great deal to the vividness of the Russian impressions. Another – and probably my principal – excuse is that so few Americans have been to Russia since the war that even a short visit is an exceptional thing. “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”

For your part I am having to ask you to remember that I am claiming only to be giving you impressions, not authoritative analyses – impressions, scattered and unrelated, such as any one of us might harvest on a similar visit.

To fit things into their proper frame, we entered Russia, by air from East Berlin to Moscow, the beginning of April, spent a week there, and then flew to the Crimea – more specifically to Simferopol and Yalta. From there we went to Odessa, the great Black Sea port. After that we headed north again, first to Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, and then, by way of Minsk, to Leningrad, from which we made a happy exit by train for Finland. Other people staying the same length of time might have completely different impressions from mine, or I, if I’d stayed longer, might have changed mine, but I really don’t think either would in fact be the case, though of course it is a possibility.

One thing more. Since the impressions are necessarily very disconnected, it is hopeless to try to make a cohesive whole of them. Instead, I am simply going to ask myself the questions that I have found people ask me most often, and give the best reply I can. So here we go with the number one question – and it’s quite a poser. “What do you think of Russia, and did you enjoy it?” I think pretty much the same of it as I did before the trip. In other words, the experience did not so much change my expectations as confirm them. As for enjoying the trip, “enjoy” is the wrong word. It was tremendously interesting, and we were glad we went. But right from the beginning we were counting the days till we’d be out again. It is a grim country, and the people seem jolly well aware that life is a grim business. I don’t recall a single time when I saw people standing and talking and laughing on a Moscow sidewalk. They were always hurrying along, usually singly, always keeping to the right, in two unending streams that looked, from our hotel window, exactly like army ants. That was not merely the impression made by the scene as a whole. Individually too the faces were heavy and unsmiling. I must admit, though, that the clothing did not add a gayer touch. Even in the capital city itself very many of the people – men and women alike – were wearing quilted coats and heavy felt boots, the men with a flat cap and the women with a shawl as headgear.

But even under the best of circumstances I think it would be hard to be gay in so dreary and drab a city as Moscow. (Emphatically this does not apply to handsome Leningrad.) Moscow literally does not have one single handsome or interesting vista – barring the Kremlin – in all the miles and miles of its jerry-built tenements.

I need, though, to make three qualifications that do not, actually, modify what I have just said. Outside Moscow, to the north, there are the really handsome grounds of the permanent Agricultural Fair, whose purpose is to make propaganda for the collectivized and state farm systems. Unfortunately it was closed when we were there. The second qualification is as to the enormous 32-story University Building, out of town to the west, and on the very height from which Napoleon had his first and last looks at Moscow. In one enormous structure they have everything – class rooms, libraries, dormitories, auditoriums, swimming pools, everything – for some 20,000 students. (About the students I’ll have something to say a little later.) We saw a great deal of the building, but much was closed off because – with obvious truthfulness – it was “undergoing repairs” – one more of the many evidences of the shoddy nature, seemingly, of Russian construction. Finally, there is the Moscow subway. It really is all it is cracked up to be. If it impresses us, with all our experience of mechanical conveniences, no wonder that it has completely captivated the imagination of a people to whom everything mechanical was only recently a novelty. The amazing stations are all different, and each has its theme. One is an Egyptian temple, with majestic Karnak-like columns, another a hall of statuary, still another a memorial to the Crimean War, and so on. And the trains are fast, frequent, comfortable and scrupulously clean. Indeed from the speed with which I saw a man who had let fall a small piece of paper, stoop to pick it up, I wondered whether the lesson in cleanliness had once been taught by liquidating offenders.

Next question: “Could you go anywhere you wanted to? Talk to anyone? Take pictures?” The answer is “yes and no.” To begin with, in your visa application you must specify exactly what cities you plan to visit and exactly when you are arriving in, and departing from, each one. We only applied for non-secret towns, and got them, but that does not mean that we’d have had the same result if we had asked for a military or naval place like, for example, Sebastopol, the great base on the Black Sea. Once you are in the country, it is still hard to say how tied down you are. In the main we only wanted to see the things that they for their part wanted us to see, so there was no conflict of interests. Three times, however, we did express a wish that was out of the routine line. The first two were in Moscow. I wanted to see a court and Helen a nursery for the children of working mothers, and in both cases we had a good deal of trouble in getting permission. But that, I am inclined to think, was merely a natural reaction of bureaucracy. The little official, everywhere, confronted with anything the least out of the ordinary, draws into his shell like a snail and says no. It’s safer, particularly in Russia. In both instances appeal to a higher-up got us full approval. The funny thing is that they were actually tremendously proud of the nursery, and with very good reason, too. The children were happy and well-fed – but, then, that is true everywhere in the Soviet Union -; the teachers were skillful and sympathetic; and the equipment was excellent. We asked Mr. Bohlen, who was still there as our ambassador, whether he thought we’d been taken to a show place, and he answered emphatically not. They were all like that – nothing was too good for the children.

The third special request that we made was different – very different, and Mr. Bohlen, again to quote him, said we’d be wonders if we got it. (We didn’t prove to be wonders!) We suggested that in one of our days in Yalta it’d be interesting to drive the 45 miles or so to Sebastopol. Then we ran into an interesting phenomenon. Where a request is startling enough to call for immediate reference to a higher official, and where he has decided not to grant it, apparently the last thing he will say is no. Instead we got an enthusiastic “yes, a fine idea.” Then, some hours later, a telephone call. “Such a pity! The only road from Yalta is closed for repairs.” (How familiar that sounds!) My reply: “All right, then instead of doing it from Yalta, we’ll do it from Simferopol. That’s just as close.” “Of course! That’s a fine idea!” (As if it wasn’t a perfectly obvious one.) Then I waited to see what would happen next. Sure enough, another call. “Such a pity! Simferopol is only a little place.” (It isn’t. It is fairly large.) “It is impossible to get a car there.” And so it goes. The final result is inevitable, but not one single “no” will have figured in it.

So much for going places. Could we take pictures? Yes, I never was interfered with a single time. But I should add I never tried to take anything of a military nature. And my camera was always packed away at the airports. Finally, could we talk to anyone we wanted to? Frankly, I doubt it. But the language barrier made it useless to try. What about the curiosity and friendliness that some writers – for example – Mr. Justice Douglas – have emphasized? Personally, we found very little of either. As for curiosity, in the large cities there seemed to be none. In the small places and in the country people would pass you by without a glance, apparently unaware of you, but if, after passing, you turned suddenly, like as not they’d have come to a stop and be standing looking back at you. Were they friendly? Here I want to caution you again to remember how limited my experience was. At any rate, I did not encounter a single case of outgoing friendliness. And I do recall various instances of what, at the very least, would have to be called strong bruskness. I am the more inclined to give weight to this impression because it is in such sharp contrast to the feeling one gets in both the cities and countryside in Yugoslavia. But I must make one qualification: What I have just said applies to Russia. It does not apply to the Ukraine. Indeed, we remember, with a vividness made stronger, no doubt, by the contrast, the smiling peasants in the free market in Odessa and, in the same city, the pleasure shown by the audience at an excellent little circus, when we showed our amusement. Perhaps, even in Russia it was merely an absence of what we bourgeois would call good manners. I shall give only one instance, itself supremely unimportant, but illustrative of many, many others. It was in Moscow, in Red Square, and I was trying to take a picture of the Lenin-Stalin Tomb – by the way, now always referred to simply as the Lenin Tomb, although Stalin is still in residence. I was having a good deal of trouble, as a high wind and low clouds were constantly alternating deep shadow and bright sunshine. Whenever I got things adjusted, a truck would come along and block the view. Finally I got my picture. A Russian next to me had been having the same experience, and snapped his picture at the same moment. I turned to him with a smile and a slight shake of the head, as much as to say, “well, that was a toughy, wasn’t it?” In return I got a stony glare and a sharp turn on the heel. Does this sort of incident signify anything? Or nothing? I don’t know.

But before I leave the subject of our relationship, or rather, non-relationship with the people, I must tell about one Russian of whom we saw a very great deal – far too much for our pleasure, in fact. Every foreigner, on entering Russia, immediately has assigned to him a person designated as a “guide.” This is a misnomer, because in every town local guides are provided who really perform this function. Our guide was a young woman of twenty-four or thereabouts. From our arrival in Moscow to our departure from Leningrad she never left our side except for the night – thank God! – and breakfast. We got to hate the sight of her, even though she was not unattractive, with heavily henna-ed hair and surprisingly – a most uncommunist heavy make-up. I won’t say Vera was not useful to us – she was, very. She took charge of everything, from airplane tickets and hotels to taxis and museum admission fees. We neither saw nor handled either coupons or cash for any of these. She even ordered our meals – after due consultation with us. Her English was excellent and she was our universal interpreter. Yes, even though, obviously, a large part of her job was to watch us, she was useful to us – and thoroughly obnoxious. Even, in a way, sinister, because she was a daily example of what the communist educational system can make out of a youngster who has never had a look at any other. (I’m going to come back to their schools a little later.) The worst thing wasn’t her satisfaction with everything in the Peoples’ Free Democracies or in the way in which she did not attempt to hide the ugly side of things, simply because she obviously didn’t even realize that it was ugly or that it might be different elsewhere. No, the worst was her complete lack of curiosity about the non-communist world. I wish I could, but I can’t, pay her the compliment of thinking she was afraid to show interest. She was the successful product of an educational system that seeks – not always successfully, let us hope – above all other things to kill off interest in the outside world. Any comment by us about the western world plainly bored her. Any comparison, even when highly favorable to her world, left her cold. Of course, it was better – everybody knew that. She was truly a strange combination of intelligence and information, and dull, almost robot-like lack of interest or curiosity. Two incidents, to cite only two, are almost comical but really revealing. The first was soon after our arrival in Moscow. We were in a former church, now a museum, and were enthusiastically admiring the superlative collection of medieval ikons. Finally she could stand it no longer. “You call that beautiful: But wait till you see our subway!” The second incident was at the other end of our stay, in Leningrad. We were at the Hermitage, that incomparable museum that makes even the Louvre fall into a subordinate class. We entered a huge room completely filled with hundreds of portraits of military men in uniforms of a hundred and forty to a hundred and fifty years ago. These, Vera explained to me, were all officers in the Russian Army that beat Napoleon. I spelled out the names with difficulty, and was amazed when a huge picture, of a man in a red coat, turned out to bear the name “Wellington.” My surprise must have shown on my face, because she quickly explained, “Oh, there were lots of foreigners in the Russian Army in those days.” “But this was the English commander at Waterloo.” A blank expression. I asked “You’ve heard of the battle of Waterloo?” “No.” The subject was dropped. Waterloo, and interest in Waterloo, doesn’t figure in Russian education. All in all, we had the feeling that Vera was a perfectly safe person to expose to Western contacts!

“How were the food and hotels, and were there many tourists?” Taking the latter first, no, there were very few tourists. In all Russia, prior to our last stop – Leningrad – we saw only one American. In Leningrad we saw five and two English, as well as a bus-load of Finns. We also saw three Frenchmen in Moscow. That’s all. In Moscow at our hotel there were a dozen or so men who spoke German, but I am inclined to believe that they were in fact from various satellite countries who were using German as a common language. After all, even in a single country, Yugoslavia, that is often the only way that Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins, etc. can communicate with each other. In Moscow there were fairly large numbers of Chinese, but I am not sure whether they were tourists or delegations of some sort or other.

As to the hotels, without exception they were the more or less faded, fun-down relics of pre-Revolutionary grandeur. Our suites were sometimes appalling in their size. In Leningrad we had a huge entrance hall, a salon, complete with fireplace and piano, a dining room, a bedroom and a bath. Only in Kiev were we – to our secret satisfaction – snugly put into a normal room and bath, and then Vera raised such a fuss that they darned-near wanted a statement in writing that we did not wish to change to “something more suitable” and that we weren’t in the least angry. The grandeur, however, pretty much ends with the layout of the rooms. On arrival you are more likely than not to be handed a key and left by yourself to find the room and get your bags to it. The rooms and linen were uniformly clean, though in Odessa we thought for a moment that we had run into an exception. The window glass seemed so dirty that the big harbor outside looked almost as if in a fog. It turned out, however, to be merely the poor quality of the glass. Our main problem everywhere centered on the wash basin. Always there was only one faucet. Mostly it ran cold water, but usually during certain hours it ran hot – scalding hot. Never in a single instance was a means provided to stop the drain. This raised a net problem, as the water would be much too hot to splash on one’s face. If it was a single round opening a cork was, of course, the answer. If there were many small holes, adhesive tape worked very well. But in one place I thought I was stuck. The drain was covered with a sort of raised net-work, on which the tape could not possibly be stuck flat. There was an answer though. Put a towel in the basis, let it soak up the hot water and cool a little, and then use it and never try to keep any water in the basin at all. One thing more about the hotels: In Moscow and in the south every hotel had on every floor a portrait of Lenin and a portrait of Stalin. Their absence in the north ties in with some other comments that I shall make later on.

So much for the hotels. What about the trains, autos, airplanes? Were they comfortable and modern or not? I don’t know much about the trains. We had only one train ride – from Leningrad to Helsinki. The first class (the only one, as it was a deluxe train) was comfortable enough, but there was no diner, though unlimited quantities of tea were served gratis. It was very slow, and though the Finnish border was only ninety miles away, it was nine hours before we crossed it and got into a different world. As to autos, there are three makes, and three makes only, to be seen in Russia. Commonest is a car small by our standards, the Pobeda. It comes in various colors, but no two-tones, be it said to their credit. Much rarer is the always black Buick-like Zim, which was the one provided for our needs. Very rare and also always black was the top-ranking Zis, an exact copy of an old Packard. It seems to be used only by functionaries high in the government scale, and is always equipped with thick, white curtains, that effectively hide the occupants. Incidentally, the names Zim and Zis are really merely the initials of the make, just as is the case with Fiat. The Zi stands for “automobile works,” and Zim is the Molotov Automobile Works. One guess as to what Zis stands for! While the autos are comfortable enough, the use of them is, as you could expect, not so convenient as here. The roads (as we could see from our airplanes) are merely unsurfaced dirt, except in the vicinity of the biggest cities and in the resort area around Yalta. There are absolutely no roadside filling stations in the whole country. The only advantage that they have over us is that there is no parking problem, even in downtown Moscow.

Airplanes and airplane service are by our standards rather poor, to say the least. The planes are small and old and sometimes half cargo. There is no capitalist nonsense such as seat belts, or sitting down and not smoking at take-offs or landings. No food is served even on long flights, though it can be had at en route stops. The stewardesses – yes, they have them! – are not picked for looks and do not wear uniforms. At least one of them wore a shawl on her head, a quilted jacket, and felt boots. The planes, not being pressurized, fly very low, giving one a chance to see the country very well. Except for Moscow and Leningrad, I do not recall any paved landing strips – only the bare hard earth. How they do it in wet weather I do not know, but they do. And anyway the pilots impress one as being very able. Incidentally, in the airports we were never required – or would “allowed” be the better word? – to sit in the same waiting space with other people, but were always put into a room entirely to ourselves.

I’d almost forgotten that I was going to say something about the food. In quantity it leaves nothing to be desired. In fact it is rather overwhelming, with four meals a day provided, if you wish. We didn’t wish. The quality and skill of preparation are different matters. Frying in much fat seems the almost universal way of cooking, as might be expected in a country that is so cold much of the year. The chicken wouldn’t have been bad, except for the greasiness. The beef is extremely poor – tough and gristly – as might be expected. The raising of livestock has been the major failure in Russian agriculture, to date, and with a larger human population the livestock population is still far below what it was before collectivization began. As a result slaughtering for meat is limited to cows and bulls that, so far as their regular careers are concerned, have become emeritus. We soon largely concentrated on fried eggs, omelettes, and borsch – that excellent cabbage soup. To start, in order to have some zip, we more often than not began with caviar – excellent – and vodka. The latter we “paid for” by trading in our fourth meal for it.

That expression, “paid for” brings me to the group of questions that, I think, we have been asked most often: “What about prices in Russia? What can you buy there? What can the people themselves buy?” First as to our spending and what prices were like to us. Strange as it may seem I have little – indeed almost no – idea how much the services that we used cost. The reason is that when you arrange with Intourist – as arrange you must, in order to get a visa – exactly what your visit is to include, you are quoted a definite price. In our case this came to $36.50 per day per person. There was no break-down whatsoever, and everything was included. We were even paid twenty-five rubles a day per person as an allowance for spending money, which we used for vodka and ballet tickets. Actually we needed somewhat more than this allowance and found it perfectly possible to cash traveler’s checks, though a slow process, with the bank tellers (all women) doing all their calculating on abacuses, just as in China. I said a moment ago that I couldn’t figure out the level in prices because I did not have any break-down of our costs, but when I bought rubles with dollars and then spent the rubles for definite things I could, of course, figure out how much those things cost me. Thus it brought the best tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet to $3.30 and vodka to $0.70 for a tenth of a liter. That is a good deal of vodka, and packs quite a punch, especially when, Ukrainian fashion, they put a pepper in the bottle. But to get back to costs. Converting into dollars is in fact completely uninforming, so far as costs to a Russian are concerned. This is so because the exchange rate for dollars into rubles is exactly what the government wants it to be. The would-be buyer of rubles can then pay that price or refuse to buy any, but what he can’t do is to shop around and find another seller who will offer a better price. We arrived in Russia on April 5^th. Until April 1^st the Russian government had sold rubles at two and a half to the dollar. On that date it changed the price and gave us ten for a dollar. That did not mean that the ruble had collapsed or that the Russian economy had gone into a tailspin. It simply meant that the only seller of rubles had, for reasons satisfactory to it, decided drastically to lower the price. But it did not in any way, shape or manner alter the internal Soviet price-level. The only real way to figure prices is to see how many hours of labor a worker has to put in to buy a given article and that involved a knowledge of wages that we did not have. Even without any such calculation, however, it was easy to tell that prices were extremely high. But before I get into the matter of shops and shopping opportunities I must remind you that there is private property in the Soviet Union today. Everything that one has for one’s personal use – clothing, furniture, goods, and so on – must be bought and paid for out of wages (the only source of income) just as they must elsewhere. There is no private ownership, however, of anything that results in production or that provides jobs for others. Thus if Ivan Ivanovitch is a barber and you go to his home for a haircut, he can keep the pay for himself – at least in periods when the government isn’t in a strict mood. But he cannot hire another barber to help him, no matter how good business may be. Now to get back to the shops and shopping. Merchandise is still in very short supply, even if not quite so much so as to a few years ago, at least in the cities. Everything calls for standing in line. The great department store of Russia – the Marshall Field of Moscow – is the Gum Store, on Red Square. It is an ant hill of humanity. But every department and every sub-department is in a separate room, and everywhere long lines are waiting to get into each room. The merchandise that the patient buyer, with enough money and time, is finally able to buy, even in Moscow, is by our standards incredibly drab and shoddy. The best – or more accurately – the least bad of the trash is, of course, to be found in the window displays, pathetically gawked at by admiring crowds. But one must not assume that the articles thus on display are necessarily available for purchase. More often than not they are merely permanent exhibits. Often the exhibits are allowed to remain long after it would seem wise to remove them. For example, a food store, whose display ham had begun to flake off, disclosing it as only painted plaster. Somewhat better looking are the florist shops, which isn’t as surprising as it sounds, as all their flowers are artificial. The household furnishing stores have moderately good-looking glassware from Czecho-Slavakia and invariably – I repeat invariably – one and (I think) only one article of bric-a-brac, always exactly the same – a foot and a half long polar bear.

All this leads up to a unique problem confronting the high-salaried Russian – and there are plenty of high-salaried ones. What can he spend his money for? He can’t keep on buying polar bears and Czecho-Slovakian glassware. He can buy an auto after a two-year wait – less if he has pull. But supposed he has bought his auto, what then? He can’t buy jewelry or paintings or antiques, or any other kind of luxury articles, because they aren’t to be had. He can’t travel in foreign countries, because his government won’t let him have a passport. Perhaps he can take a twenty-four-day trip to Yalta or Sochi – that is, if he has pull enough to get a certificate from the Ministry of Health saying that he needs it. But even that doesn’t help too much in spending his money, since the government pays two-thirds of the cost of the trip. What is left? Two things. He can, and indeed he must, “voluntarily” buy government bonds, a discouraging prospect, now that the government has just repudiated all its domestic debt, as an anti-inflation measure. Incidentally, the power of the government is strikingly show by the complete absence of any audible complaint that what must have been a highly disagreeable action. The other thing he can do is to spend his money, regardless of cost, for whatever entertainment is available. As there are no cafes or night clubs, this means dining at the leading hotel, preferably on Saturday night, and above all it means the theatre, opera and ballet. Thus the fine support given these three is not all, and solely, due to high appreciation of the arts. I say that, even while willing to agree that a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet is an esthetic experience such as I have never had elsewhere. We had wonderful luck there, as in one of the performances that we went to, the leading role was danced by the incomparable Ulanova, who now dances only once a month. As she effortlessly floats, she gives a strange illusion of being entirely unaffected by the law of gravity.

That about concludes my comments on shops and shopping. It is hardly surprising that our purchases of souvenirs were limited to a Ukrainian blouse and three enameled wooden boxes – the only attractive items that we saw in the whole Soviet Union. Oh! one thing more about possible shopping. In the big cities the government runs what are called commission shops, to which people having personal items that they wish to sell can bring them, with the shop retaining a percentage of the proceeds. We never saw anything to tempt us, which was fortunate, as the prices, when converted into dollars, were fantastically high.

The next question that I want to take a try at is very different: “Do you still see a lot of pictures, and so on, of Lenin? Have those of Stalin all disappeared?” To my surprise we found that the answer must vary a great deal, depending on the part of the country where one is. To begin with Moscow, Lenin and Stalin – “L and S” as we came to call them or even more simply, just “they” – are everywhere. Every subway station has a bust or even a life-sized statue of each. The huge Tretyakov art gallery, given to the city in the czarist days by a very wealthy industrialist, used to have a statue of Tretyakov in the front courtyard, very appropriately. Now it has been replaced by one of Uncle Joe. In the hotel every floor had a portrait of each of them. Incidentally, a favorite theme is a young, black-haired Stalin, standing beside a seated Lenin, with both looking across wheat fields at a rising sun; on the horizon are huge industrial plants. Then of course as further reminders where are the Stalin Automobile Works, the Lenin Library, the Lenin Museums and so on and on, until you begin to wonder how it is that a nation of 200,000,000 has apparently succeeded in producing only two great men! Finally, there is – the Tomb. This is a simple, dignified, beautiful and impressive structure, of deep red marble, highly polished. It stands between the wall of the Kremlin and Red Square, and is a low, rather than a high, structure. In front of it, and snaking away – sometimes for as much as two miles – is almost always a packed, three-man deep column of reverent idolaters – this is the only thing one can call them – come to visit the shrine of the twin gods of their religion. (And it is a religion. That is one reason why it is so hostile to the Orthodox Church.) In this land of the People’s Free Democracies we foreigners are inserted into the line a few hundred yards from its end, with never a sign of protest. A hundred yards or so from the Tomb every man takes off his cap, and as the column moves fairly rapidly you soon find yourself in the dim interior – a thrilling moment, I assure you. The way leads down gentle steps and around a corner, with silent guards to see that no one stumbles or loiters, and suddenly you find yourself in a brightly lighted room. In it lie the two bodies on stone slabs, and you pass within a few feet of each, first Lenin and then Stalin. The faces are almost wax-like in appearance and undoubtedly have been touched up with color. I was surprised to see that Stalin’s mustache and hair, instead of being jet black, or at least iron-grey, as the pictures always showed them, were in fact pure white. There was, of course, no chance to stop and look at length. Another moment and we were outdoors again. But brief as it was, the visit was a major experience.

In the Crimea it was much the same as in Moscow, with busts and paintings of them everywhere, Stalin always with his hand pushed into his coat-front and Lenin always pointing up toward the sky. But in the Crimea – perhaps because it was a vacation area – something else was added, something that we nicknamed “pep-them-up” statues. Endlessly repeated – in a sixty-mile drive we counted over thirty grounds of statuary – there were handsome, clean-limbed workers with picks, pointing upwards, workers with shovels, pointing upwards, men workers, women workers, little boys, pointing you-know-where, little girls doing the same, swimmers, runners, even – God save the mark! – beautiful girl tennis players, of all things! Incidentally, it raises in one’s mind a little wonderment as to whether the contrast with reality might not be a mite on the subversive side. I didn’t warn them, though! In the towns there was an added feature, great billboards showing bricklayers, bridge builders, and so on, happily at work. Another theme – a very popular one – showed Stalin and assorted Soviet leaders shaking hands with all sorts of foreign types, bearing their national flags. Invariably the bearer of the United States flag was a Negro. But to get back to L and S. As we moved north again, into the Ukraine, we were in for a real surprise. The evidences of Stalin completely – and I repeat, completely – disappeared. Stranger yet, even Lenin was scarcely more in evidence. In Kiev the sole reminders of him that I can recall were a big statue on the main street and a medallion on the proscenium arch of the opera house, where, incidentally, we heard a fine performance of Aida, sung partly in Italian and partly in Russian. In Leningrad it has gone even farther. There is a statue of Lenin in Lenin Square, and that was absolutely all, so far as we saw. The big curtain in the opera does not even have the otherwise uniform hammer-and-sickle design any more. Does all this mean that Leningrad is less hide-bound in the Soviet pattern? Are its long-time contacts with the West making it less chauvinistic than Moscow? If there is a difference, is it increasing, and how important is it, anyway? I wish I were enough of an expert to make a try at answering these questions. But they make one wonder. And maybe hope a little.

Besides the major hero-worship of Lenin and – less but still active – of Stalin, there is a small but important one of the three great expansionist czars of Russia – Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catharine the Great. That all three, but especially Ivan, were merciless tyrants is completely unimportant. The only thing that counts is that they furthered Russia’s progress as an empire. Today’s leaders have rejected democracy, it seems, even as a vague, far-off ideal. Political power, mastery, for Russia is the only goal. These czars count, therefore, as respected predecessors of the real communist messiahs.

I said, a long time ago, that I wanted to say something about the university in Moscow and the few things, much too few, that we had a chance to see, about their educational set-up. As to the university we were in luck. I had a letter of introduction, from a common friend, to a young French woman who had been a student there for about a year and who spoke Russian fluently. She was no communist and she was very willing to talk, even though she conceded with complete unconcern that it was entirely possible that someone was listening in the hotel room adjoining our spacious private salon. “I won’t say anything that can get me into trouble,” she remarked, cheerily. To our great surprise she stated sweepingly that the intellectual level of the university, so far as she had had a chance to observe it, was very low. The instruction, she said, was superficial and poor. The students came to the university poorly prepared and, while there, were mostly a lazy lot. But she emphatically pointed out that she had knowledge only of the situation in her field of the humanities. She knew nothing about how it was in the sciences and in engineering. But it makes one wonder, and hope a little, that they too are not quite all that they are cracked up to be. (I mean to come back to that question before I close.) Had she made any friends among the students or faculty, with whom she could speak frankly? Absolutely not one, and she didn’t expect to. All still shied away from anything more than a bare nodding acquaintance. Furthermore, when she first arrived in Moscow her embassy had particularly requested her and some other French students, not to ask what it called “embarrassing questions” – questions such as “where does Mr. Khrushchev live,” etc., the kind of thing that anyone would be able to answer in a real democracy. So she had not got, and never would get below the surface with anybody. Nor would she ever get to see anyone’s living quarters. Just as the people were shut off from her, so too were some areas of travel. Of course this included certain industrial areas – one took that for granted. What was more interesting was that she had never been allowed to see a single one of what she called the “old” villages – villages not yet spruced up for inspection. But even with all these handicaps she had learned a lot. I asked her how far there really was liberty, now, to criticize, or whether in truth there was no liberty of that sort. It depended, she said, on what you proposed to criticize. You could freely and safely criticize individuals, provided you did not aim too high. You could make accusations of inefficiency and even of dishonesty. But you could not question the doctrine of Communism, now any more than in the past. That must be accepted, blindly and absolutely. Here is an instance of allowable criticism. It appeared in their very popular humorous weekly, Crokodil, while we were there. With the heading “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go,” it showed a gang of men going off, equipped with pencils, fountain pens, and so on, and another gang, this time of women, with picks, shovels, wheel barrows and that sort of thing. You don’t have to be in Russia more than a day or two, to realize how well deserved this jibe is. Pravda too carries plenty of bitter criticism. But it is all – believe me – in bounds, so to speak.

But to return to our French acquaintance. An inevitable question to ask her was, of course, what did the Russians themselves think of the Soviet intervention in Hungary? Did they believe their government’s assertion that they were merely rescuing that country from fascism? And did they approve of what had been done? Yes, she said, everybody approved, the great majority because they completely believed the government’s story. An intelligent minority knew that the story was a fabrication, but at the same time knew that anything less drastic would have brought the collapse of the satellite empire. “It had to be done,” was their attitude.

But to get back to the university for a final comment. I had a pretty good look at the library, where they let me go through the stacks. On only a very superficial look, I must admit, I was impressed by the number of books whose call slips showed that they had never been asked for at all. A little incident occurred at this time which has left me genuinely puzzled. I asked the librarian whether the students had access to the stacks. “Oh, no” was her reply. I was too tactful to answer that at my own university, Princeton, they could come and go as they liked, but instead agreed that such permission would create an impossible traffic situation. “And,” I added, “it would, of course be impossible to safeguard your books from disappearing.” Instantly there came a queer reply: “Oh, no student in the Soviet Union would steal a book!” What led an educated, sensible person to utter such nonsense? Especially when she knew I had just seen that they were not allowed to take briefcases even into the reading room. Did she really believe it herself? Not very flattering to her intelligence. Or did she think I would believe it? Not very flattering to mine. Or was it merely one more of those expressions of satisfaction and approval that the Communist tyranny has made mandatory and completely automatic? I wonder.

As for the schools below the university level, we had no chance to visit any. But we did see a Pioneer house. The Pioneers roughly correspond to our Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. The house was a fairly large former palace. Each room was devoted to some particular interest that a child might have. Thus there was a room for music, one for drama, one for sculpture, and so on, whatever the child’s bent might be. Naturally, we felt deserved admiration for all this. And then, as seems always the case in the Soviet Union, came the element that turned admiration into revulsion and disgust. It was in the architecture and the botany rooms. The former was filled with photographs of what were called “the great architectural achievements of mankind.” There were pictures of the Kremlin, of the Hermitage Palace, of the Imperial Palace in Peking, of the Taj Mahal. But not of St. Peters. Or of any other building in Rome. There wasn’t one of Paris. Or of London. Or of New York or Washington. In other words, the while capitalist world has not produced a single building worth photographing! The botany room showed, in huge picture maps, the plant life of all the world. In Russia – and China too – there were great forests in the north. South of them came wheat fields, then grapes and cotton and other alluring plants, winding up with roses and oranges filling the south. In North America, it will interest you to learn, only two plants grow – in the south, cactus, and in the north, moss. The purpose of both rooms was apparent: the outside world must be portrayed as a dreary expanse, empty of anything worth-while, empty of interest. Only so could curiosity about it be reduced to a minimum.

So far as education for adults was concerned, we had little chance to judge. The museums were crowded with people of the peasant and worker type, and that, no doubt, is all to the good. But I liked to watch them, as they plodded along at a steady, unvarying gait, and couldn’t help noticing what a huge fraction of them, as they entered a room, fixed their eyes on the exit and never let them stray, either to the right or to the left. You can lead a horse – or force? – to water, but does it sometimes refuse to drink?

As for bookstores and books, they were large and seemed to be well-stocked, but of course the language barrier prevented me from knowing how well-rounded they were. Very poorly, I suspect. In Kiev we asked whether English books were available – perhaps an unfair question, as I hardly think many of our shops are notably strong in Russian works. We were assured that they were to be had, so we asked to see them. There were only three, and their titles were as surprising as they were amusing. One was a novel translated from Rumanian, heavy with propaganda of the boy-loves-girl – girl-loves-tractor type. Another was an anthology of such similar writers as Charles Dickens, Fenimore Cooper and Lewis Carroll. The third was a sprightly collection of the leading manifestos of the English Chartist movement of 1838.

One more impression and I shall have hit all the high spots. It would be raised by the question: “What impression did you get of Russian efficiency?” It was sometimes a little hard to be calm about that – for instance, when around midnight every night, as we looked out of our Moscow hotel window on tremendously wide Gorki Street, we would see the troops passing by for night maneuvers – cannons, light and heavy, by the hundreds, men by the thousands. It was rather frightening to see all this power, even when, during the day, one had been encouraged by some outstanding demonstration of inefficiency. I have time to cite only two, but you may be assured that they are typical. For one thing, it is utterly impossible to get any correct airplane flight time schedules, except for the city where one asks. As to other cities, much, detailed, so-called information will be supplied. But never, even coincidentally, is it correct. The other instance is rather amusing. In Moscow we discovered that our visas, which, as I have told you, were precisely tailored to our needs, required us to leave Leningrad the morning of the last day for which we had paid. So we asked Intourist to see if a day’s extension could be got. In three days the passports came back. They had been changed one day all right, yes. But they had been shortened by a day! I asked Mr. Bohlen whether he did not think that in the event of any conflict we might take this inefficiency into account as a big factor. His answer, I think was revealing. He said, definitely yes, if we would also always remember that there were two areas where inefficiency was not tolerated in the least degree – military and police. That, rather effectively, took the joy out of my observation.

Well, this just about sums up my most lively impressions of the Soviet Union. I have made clear, I think, that I did not like it. Perhaps unfairly, I have said nothing of the simple, friendly, old-fashioned people of the holy city of Zagorsk – almost untouched by change – or of the really heart-warming welcome we got at the Easter services in Leningrad’s principal active church. To which will the Russia of the future belong – to the hard, cruel suspiciousness of Communism, or to the simple kindliness of Before-the-Revolution? I don’t know. I am only guessing. And your guess is as good as mine.