RUSSIAN UNITY

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 April 1937, Page 11

RUSSIAN UNITY

JOURNEY OF MONGOLIAN GIRLS

Joseph Stalin is building Russia — making men out of mice ami putting courage, backbone, and unity into a people that haye been slaves for centuries, wrote Walter Duranty from Moscow to the “New York Times” on March U. That is Stalin's job which Lenin set for him and while Leon Trotsky talks about world revolution Stalin is trying Io do his job. The job has two essential factors — to bind together this vast country with its multifarious and multilingual races and to give them a common cause, aims, and hopes. America, in a sense, has the same problem—which is called the melting pot—of assimilating former Europeans into the integrated life of the United States.

That is comparatively easy, but in the U.S.S.R. there are seventy-nine major languages and hundreds of dialects and to make a soup of this mixture requires a skilled cook.

To-day we saw how Stalin brews his broth. Five young girlo from Buriat, Mongolia, on the edge of China,

came into the sport stadium Dynamo, which is the headquarters of the Soviet. Physical Culture League. In 137 days, they had covered 4000 miles and their plump, cheerful faces to-day adorn the front pages of Moscow newspapers.

Two are quite pretty and one, who is only seventeen years old, has the most attractive and serious small face. With them in the photographs there is a tall Russian man, who “ran the trip.” And that is the answer to Stalin’s soup. The Russians and the Russian Communist Party are training, driving, badgering, and bustling these backward 170,000,000 people to make them men, not mice or slaves. Thirty thousand people at the stadium cheered uproariously when the Mongol girls came in. They felt a vicarious pride in the girls’ achievement, because it was done for Russia and as a tribute to “Women's Day.”

You can say this sounds like nonsense, but when Charles A. Lindbergh flow the Atlantic weren't you thrilled? That is how the Russians feel and bow Stalin is solving the national problem here. These Mongolian girls and the welcome they received in the

Soviet capital are symbolic and tremendously important because it means a new Russia which is one and undivided.

And there are new games of skill and courage, like ice hockey, for a people that were slaves and knew no games. After the drrival of the Mongolian girls, the final men’s and women's championship hockey matches were played. The rules allow' no body checking which makes the game slow to anyone who has seen American hockey. But it is a hot struggle and the crowd went mad. That is the way they are building this new Russia.