MODERN RUSSIA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21881, 17 August 1934, Page 11

MODERN RUSSIA

AUTHOR'S REVELATIONS HOW TOURISTS ARE GULLED LONDON, August 6 Jlva Ehrenburg, author of "A Street in Moscow," who is one of the most prominent of Russian writers, has formally complained to the Soviet authorities.* He says that foreign tourists are grossly misled and cheated in the most barefaced way. To give visitors a rosy picture of living conditions in Russia, says the author, the State tourist agency creates a fictitious world. This envelopes the visitors in a false atmosphere of tawdry gaiety, while squalor and hunger are the ordinary lot of the Russian masses.

The agency has special hotels, in which abundant food and dancing are provided to gull foreigners. Ehrenburg says that foreigners should be shown instead the barracks for industrial workers. Young married couples, children, and old people are mixed up there, he says, without partitions, and all eat' together in most insanitary rooms. They should be shown also the empty shops, and the brutalities of man to man, instead of being stuffed with bright fairy tales.

VISITOR FROM SYDNEY IMPRESSIONS STATED LONDON, August 7 After visiting Russia, where he knew the language sufficiently to make his own inquiries, Mr. A. B. Piddington, K.C., of Sydney, told a representative of the Manchester Guardian that he saw many things he did not like, but three impressed him. These were the immense national character of the Soviet's efforts, the amount of real capital that was being created, and young Russians' tremendous hopefulness. Mr. Piddington declared that the scale and sincerity of the efforts being made by Russia had given him much to ponder over.