RUSSIA REVISITED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 230, 28 September 1935, Page 7

RUSSIA REVISITED.

"WILD" BOY PROBLEMS

SURVIVALS AFTER 17 YEARS.

PATHETIC RELICS OF PAST.

(By WILLIAM F. McDERMOTT.) (No. V.) Every Russian street has its tale to tell. Past and future meet in these roadways as nowhere else, and small matters have significance. You have heard of the homeless waifs who wander the streets, begging and stealing. After the revolution there was an army of these wild, ragged boys roaming around the city walks and railway stations. Most of them have been dragged into State homes and some of them have made good Soviet citizens.

The wild boys, living like stray cats in doorways and alleyways, are supposed to have been "liquidated," and most of them have been. But 17 years after the chaos of the revolutionary period a few of them still exist. I saw one the other day, a dirty-faced, incredibly ragged boy of about ten. He was being arrested and taken to a home by about six men, several of them in police uniform. It required the efforts of all six to subdue him. They were trying to load him into a truck. The boy scratched, bit, yelled, kicked and pummelled. His energy was maniacal. He was not a boy, but an enraged, frightened young animal. Hatred and fear blazed from him.

Like Stray Wild Dog. He was like a stray dog that had run wild for years, or like a particularly vicious bird that somebody was trying to cage. If there had been only three men to fight I believe he would have had a chance. But he was not a match for half a dozen, and they soon had him safe and still kicking in the truck. There was something in the scene not glibly explicable. I asked a Russian frienj ij.vho was with me how it hap--ch as this one were

still a problem so long after the revolution. Since he was not more than 10 years old, he must have been born and nurtured under the Soviet system.

My friend answered, "He is probably the. child of a kulak who abandoned him." Kulaks, as most readers know, are formerly rich peasants and the bete noir of Bolshevik Russia.

But that was not a complete answer. Kulaks, whatever their political errors from the Communist viewpoint, are made of the same human stuff as other folk and they do not abandon their children willingly. If this boy was the son of a kulak why had he been left to forage and steal and starve like an unwanted dog? Had his parents been exiled, was the boy separated and lost?

Again, whatever the boy's parentage, how did it come in his few short years that he had learned to hate restraint with such fierce virulence? That is a question which ought to interest the formulators of an ideal state, for an ideal state presupposes that men are essentially tractable and socially useful whenever economic and political conditions are made right. Yet here was a boy who had lived all his life in a State that does its utmost to conciliate the young and he had learned to hate regimentation and to prefer, with an intensity of passion his small body could hardly contain, the wildest kind of individualism.

I have met some of the wild boys who were reclaimed. They lived their early childhood like rats in the gutters, were forced into State homes and then turned out to bo good engineers and useful citizens. But there must be a fringe of humanity whose anti-social qualities are not due to economic causes, but who are naturally and incorrigibly individualistic and incapable of discipline.

If that were not true, you would expect that these wild boys would have completely disappeared from Russia in 17 years. But perhajKi it is a matter of time. The boy I saw loaded into the truck may one day be Commissar of Education. He had the natural energy to make a good one.

Begging is not so common on Moscow streets as it was, but there is still rather more of it than there is in New York or Cleveland. Many of the beggars are small boys, tattered and patched and triumphantly dirty. They have the pestiferousness of Oriental beggars and most of them are obviously Asiatic.

They 'will follow you for half a block, pleading and whining, but they are not particularly abject. Their eyes are alert and when you give them a few cents in foreign money, or valuta, their voices ring with delight. The central streets are full of flower sellers, who are a species of beggar. Many are dark gypsy children who will chase you for blocks trying to pin a huge bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley into your unwilling lapel.

Russians are exceedingly fond of flowers and many street stands drive a flourishing and legitimate trade in blossoms. It is odd to see a bearded Russian peasant 011 a holiday in Moscow, carrying a bunch of lilacs more luxuriant than his whiskers.

Symbols Of Dead Luxury. The shop windows of Moscow are among the most interesting in the world. The variety of the goods they display is still relatively small and shabby. But, in many windows, you will see beautiful things, fine paintings, rich embroideries and dinner services fit for a palace. Many such objects of art undoubtedly have decorated palaces. You can see silver champagne buckets of vast ornatenessf or crystalware three feet high, set on carved gold bases, or delicately inlaid tables of probably eighteenth century French manufacture. What stories must lie buried in these windows. Where, now, are the people who owned this fine vase and these dainty things of ivory and these splendid plates and gorgeous Chinese screens? In eacli of them is blood and death, a family torn apart, a home disrupted, a life in ruins, a dead world. There is no place in new Russia for the life that they lived and even the symbols of their being, their household treasures, are now homeless, for nobody in Muscovy can afford such ostentation. In another Petrovka shop window I saw a display-emblematic of the new world that is struggling into being. It was an array of women's hats. Is there anything more dejected or forlorn than a woman's outmoded hat? These were pathetic specimens, little affairs of straw and lace that aimed to be fine, that might once have been, but were now painful, dingy, shapeless fripperies. They were the sublimation of shabbiness and in their effort to be what they were not there was pathos. — N.A.N.A. (To be continued.)