MOSCOW TO-DAY

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 July 1939, Page 13

MOSCOW TO-DAY

A CITY OF CONTRASTS

At night the! red stars on the Krem-

lin spires gleam through the falling snow Jiko gigantic fireflies. The Red

Square is. deserted; the sentries by the Kremlin gates are stiff as snowmen. Suddenly the silence is broken and a large green Lincoln motor-car hurtles across the square. The windshield is bullet-proof, and' the curtains are tightly drawn. As the car sweeps through the Kremlin gates andi disappears in the darkness imagination is stirred; somehow the authority of the Tsars seems pale compared to the power, of the ruler 'of Soviet Russia, writes Virginia Cowles' in the “Sunday Times,” London. The Soviet Union is a. land of contradiction. In Moscow, with' its modern buildings and! its crowded: population, the threads are woven into a strange pattern. Though an air of poverty hangs over the city, you pass brightly coloured posters shouting “Drink Soviet Champagne”; though the shops are barren of fabrics, you pas's counters advertising the latest French dress patterns; though the dwelling houses are dark and overcrowded, you see three magnificent new bridges spanning the Moscow River.

The drinking water is chlorinated, and the gas. is unreliable, blit in. the . streets is the latest type of snow- . sweeper imported from. America; the salary of the average; working man is 240 roubles a month, but a ballet dancer may earn as much as 100,000 roubles a year; and though Soviet . Russia claims to 'be a dictatorship of the proletariat, you find, under the . label of “Intelligentsia,” a class of privilege and power. This class is not confined to the arts. It was defined; by Stalin .in 1936 and includes technicians, pciice officials and bureaucrats as well as writers and artists. Ono sees them dining at the leading hotels, driving through the streets in their State-owned cars, passing' through the corridors 1 of the picture houses, sitting in the best seats at the opera and the ballet. On the night before a “free day,” the Metropole Hotel is- thronged- with noisy crowds. The air is blue with smoke, arid the large marble floor, with an old-fashioned fountain playing in* the middle, is packed with' dancers doing the latest American 1 steps. Most of the woman have' hennaed hair and are dressed in blouses and skirts and white berets. Vodka and champagne flow freely. Most of the men are in uniforms ranging from the khaki of the commissars to the dark-blue tunic and breeches of the ordinary civilian. Hundreds of balloons are distributed, and the guests amuse themselves by wrapping the strings with paped, lighting them and watching them drift up to the ceiling. The explosions sound like an artillery barrage, and the orchestra grows louder in an effort to be heard. The intelligentsia set the standard of elegance. With the rise of this new class many ideas and customs which were formerly classed as bourgeois are now being accepted. Christmas trees, formerly frowned on, have reappeared under the title of Father Frost trees; and though .Soviet citizens do not wear evening clothes, except at official functions, the conductor of tile opera is in tails and' a whit? tie. ( The energies of the intelligentsia are bent on the acquisition of “culture.” This is reflected in every branch' of Soviet life. The main amusement park in Moscow is called “The Park of Rest and Culture”; the. chief organisation that deals with foreign tourists is .labelled “The Society for Cultural Relations.” The word culture, ho.vever, is elastic. It may apply to a restaurant with clean tablecloths as! well as to learning. When a foreign; i- living, in Moscow refused to buy a gas range from a Soviet salesman, saying that he preferred

the coal stove, the salesman 1 replied, “But gas is so cultured.” I foupd the word applied l in an equally strange manner when I visited a cigarette factory in Leningrad. A group of sailors' were; working in the packing roorii's. When I asked why they were there, the director replied that there was a si. ?rtage of labour and they had come to help. He' added that they were friends of the factory workers. “We nave a club,” he explained, “where our girls maintain cultural relations with the Navy.” JAZZ—-AND MUSEUMS. The height of modern culture is symbolised by ja'zz—spelled “djaz.” Most 1 of the movie houses are equipped with jazz orchestras, and the salaries of some ,cf the bund leaders are very high. Concerts are often given, arid the audiences listen to the wailing of the saxophones as intently as if they were hearing by a Brahms symphony. The mus'eums also play a part in the quest for culture. The most popular museum in Moscow is the Museum of the Revolution. It is filled with photographs, charts, and paintings depicting the rise of the Bolsheviks. Museums of a similar character have been erected in all the' greater cities, but during the past few years they have undergone a good deal of reorganisation, for with each fresh purge it Iras' been necessary to remove many of the photographs from the walls; to-day it almost appears' as though Stalin had carried out the revo 1 n’t i o n single-b an d ed. The art galleries are always popular. On rest days they are crowded with factory workers and soldiers, and groups are led from room to room by an instructor, who interprets the pictures in terms 1 of the economic condition's which flourished' at the period in which they were painted. The cinemas also play an important part in Soviet life. During the past few years many new houses have been built, and, though the subjects are largely chosen for propaganda value, the audiences are not lacking in appreciation. One of the most popular films' in Moscow, “The Oppenheim Family,” deals with Nazi persecution of the Jews. On the evening I went, however, the scenes- in which the victims were jailed or sent, off to concentration camps, were, watched' in an uncomfortable silence- which seemed to suggest that the poducer had skirted too close 1 to reality. An interesting feature of the film was that the young Jewish hero was portrayed by a Stribling Nordic type, tall, blonde, and blueeyed, while the Nazi persecutor was distinctly non-Aryan. The brilliance of the Moscow ballet, however, makes up for any lack of artistry in other entertainments. The State depends largely on the theatre, and the magnificence of I he costumes and the sets is unsurpassed. The great Opera House is crowded

night after night, and tickets must be booked' days in advance. The stalls' are filled with Soviet officials, and often the galleries' are turned over to groups of factory, workers. The general drabn'essi of the audience is the more noticeable when the lights dim and, the great curtains sweep apart on a glittering pre-revolu-tionary setting. Princesses and! noblemen move about against a background of luxury which ,is> difficult to reconcile with the Soviet conception of life. The first ballet 1 saw was “The: Prisoner of the Caucasus,” in which Simyonova, the star of Russia, danced. The fact that her husband, a former Ambassador to Turkey, was one of the victims: of the 1937 purge, did not s'eern to dim her popularity, and she was greeted' with wild applause. The love of splendour is- inherent in the Russian character. Though the dwelling’s in! Moscow are dark and overcrowded, work Ims' already begun on a “Palace of the Soviets" which, the guide explained, will ‘be “bigger than the Empire State Building,” and have a statue of Lenin on top “bigger than the Statue of Liberty.” I had! a further example of this’ when I visited the palace of the late Tsar, Nicholas 11, a few mile's outside Leningrad. It is an unpretentious building, filled with stiff Victorian furniture and cluttered up with the knick-knacks and photographs that were the mode in domestic decoration in last! century. Our Russian guide was not at all impressed by the lack of ostentation with which the late Tsar lived here. She 1 compared’ it with the splendour of Catherine the Great’s palace and claimed' that it was an indication of the decadence into which the rcyal house had fallen.

O.fee afternoon I went for a. walk with two foreigners who' were dressed in rather startling lemon-coloured robe's which one of them had brought back from Central Asia. A band of children trailed us down the street arguing vigorously as to our nationality, while polite pedestrians turned’ away their face's to hide their smiles. But an old woman stood stock still in the middle of the road with hands clasped and stared in admiration. “How beautiful!” she sighed. Andi in that sigh was an echo of the past.