Moscow Gripping Although Seamy

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28832, 28 February 1959, Page 13

Moscow Gripping Although Seamy

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.) LONDON, February 27. Moscow is * city which needs to be seen to be believed, said the "Manchester Guardian” correspondent who is in Moscow for the Prime Minister’s visit. The Kremlin with its three onion domed cathedrals is almost the only relic of the roaring old Moscow and almost the only object left in the city which is not painful to look at. With a population of some eight million Moscow is one of the world’s great capitals. Was there ever another capital so blindingly ugly, so devoid of taste or style and so dull? The best bits are probably the slums around Novoi Alekseyevskaya street—old timber houses of one and two storeys leaning drunkenly in the snow and due for clearance if they do not fall down of their own accord first.

But the majority of the city’s housing consists of apartment blocks of intermediate age. Everywhere paint is coming off the window frames and window frames off their hinges. Inside them there are often two families to a room, communal kitchens and no baths.

, Housing problems have, always been a millstone round the

Muscovite’s neck but things have become noticeably better during the last few years. Conservative sources reckon three out of 10 families have been rehoused since 1956. The skyscraper blocks of flats, lined with marble and speckled with the steeples to which Soviet architecture sank a few years ago dragging with it human taste to what must be its lowest watermark ever, were found to be too expensive to be resounding to the credit of Soviet accountants and the authorities have now switched to building enormous apartment blocks which are free of any evidence of design whatsoever. These have sprung up fastest and thickest in the south-western district of the city, the so-called new Moscow. Here uniform blocks built in curiously depressing grey brick stretch as far as the eye can see and a forest of power cranes is still at work. It is an odd experience seeing slums actually being built in front of one’s eyes but inside they are light and equipped with bathroom, lavatory and kitchen, which probably counts for more than setting with Muscovites.

There are far fewer drunks on the streets now than there were two years ago and the swarms of beggars who used to shove the raw stumps of their amputated arms in your face have disappeared. There is far more traffic on the wide streets, too. There are still peasants up from the country for a few days and their appearance has changed very little since the last century. There is something about Moscow which grips one in spite of all the seaminess of the place. Perhaps it is just the unforgettable smell of Russia. A combination, it seems, of stale papirosi smoke, sweat, pickled cucumber and cheap scent which goes wherever Soviet rule extends, to Russia’s embassies abroad, even to her aircraft.

Perhaps it is the spirit of the people, still profoundly Slavonic, which bursts forth in the supreme brio of the ballet dancers at the Bolshoi and in the intense humility of thousands of Muscovites, many of them old and bent like the woman with the pigeons, who pack the churches every Sunday to chant the Orthodox Mass and bow their foreheads to the ground, rapt in service, surrendering all hope of any high station in life simply by being there.

Royal Tour Ends.—Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who left Entebbe, Uganda, this morning, is due at London Airport this evening after her three weeks’ tour of Kenya and Uganda. The Queen and Princess Margaret, with members of the Government, will be at the airport to welcome the Queen Mother when she lands in a Comet IV 8.0.A.C. jet liner after her 12-hour flight. —London, February 27.

Visit Cancelled.—The British Embassy in Lima announced yesterday that a visit by the Duchess of Kent and her daughter, Princess Alexandra, to Cuzca City and the Inca ruins at Macchupicchu had been cancelled because British aviation experts decided that Cuzco Airport was unsafe because of its short runway.—Lima, February 27.