LIFE IN SOVIET RUSSIA TO-DAY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23405, 22 July 1939, Page 11 (Supplement)

LIFE IN SOVIET RUSSIA TO-DAY

less—from which all is to be removed that can give cover to an invader. Their economic policy is isolationist. They want to make of the Soviet Union a completely self-supporting unit, independent of foreign imports. They have plenty of gold. Somo economists say Russia has one of the largest gold hoards in the world today. But they refuse to spend any of it on importing manufactured goods like cloth and cotton, which they are as yet unable to produce in adequate quantities themselves for their population. They prefer even to produce synthetically raw materials such *as rubber, although the cost of importing them would be a fraction of what it costs to produce the much inferior home-made material. For a time they had a large number ot foreign experts helping them to organise their factories. Most of these have been sent home now. The ones to remain aro those who have become Soviet citizens. I watched the Customs officers searching the baggage of somo travellers who had come in oh the same train as we had. Every article was lifted out of the bags and carefully examined. When wo had settled ourselves, into our compartment on the train I wanted to get out and walk up and down the platform until the train started. But the doors of tho carriage had been locked behind us. They remained locked until just before we arrived in Moscow. "J Am Careful" In Moscow I engaged an interpreter, not one of the official interpreters supplied by the tourist agency, but a freelance who had worked for other journalists. N "How is it that you can work for foreigners?" I asked him. "Don't you ever get into trouble with the police?" "No," ho said, "I never 'have any trouble. I am careful. I do not associate with Russians. The people I see are all foreigners." In order to work for' foreigners he had practically become one himself. Only recently a doctor and a dentist specially selected by the police have been deputed to attend to foreigners. That decision was made after one foreign diplomat almost died of appendicitis owing to the impossibility of persuading a Russian to take the risk of attending a foreigner. A Frencli friend of mine told me how on several occasions when he visited foreign embassies; he was stopped by the G.PTIJ. guards, who made him produce his papers to prove he was not a Russian. Russians Were not allowed to enter, they said. Qld Lady's Story One day I lunched with a foreign diplomat at his house in Moscow. He lived in the former palace of a merchant prince, which he had rented from the Soviet. (All the Moscow embassies are rented from the Soviet. The old pre-revolution embassies which were owned outright by tho various Powers aro in the former capital, Leningrad.) From his dining room I could see out into the back yard. The G.P.U. had put a special fence around it so as to prevent anyone from climbing in oyer tne hack wall and paying a forbidden call.

YOU know how it is. The first day after you .arrive in a strange town you wake up and wonder for a second or two where you are. Not that this happens to me often nowadays. I have become accustomed to waking up in strange places. But in Moscow this time it did happen to me —but only on the first morning. It took me three days before I bocame used to the black-coated •waiter with the hairless face walking into my room in the morning and waking me with a gentle '.'Breakfast, pleess?" He was a pleasant waiter, in appearance and deportment as ancien regime as the German grand piano in my sitting room, the lace pillow on my bed and'/ the picture of deer drinking at, sunset on the wall. Right across to my bed be would come and hold under xny nose the bill of faro typed on. the rough, dirty grey pa,per of Soviet Russia. Outside the Kremlin It was a ritual wo went through every morning. Every morning I would pretend to look it through and then say in my imitation of Russian, "Dva ayitzi, hleb y masla, y adin stakan chai," which was supposed to mean, "Two eggs, bread and butter, and a glass of. tea.". To which the waiter would reply in English: "Veez or veezout lemon?'■' Tljat would cost me seven shillings and sixpence. Which alone should have been enough to wake me, up . to the fact that I was in Moscow, the world's most expensive city. And yet it took me at least three days to become accustomed to xny immediate surroundings—the windows

■sealed up with stamp paper to keep the icy wind from whistling through tho cracks; the Kremlin with its red illuminated Soviet stars twinkling from the spiresj the soldiers with gas masks and machine guns standing watchfully in the gates and 011 tho roof; the red and green signal lights flashing, and alarm bells' ringing as cars entered and left this great medieval castle of red brick which still dominates Moscow. And' the long queue of ill-dressed, underfed men and women, peasants and factory workers, shuffling in their worn-down goloshes past the longcoated, booted guards 011 their way to do- homage at the shrine of Lenin with the samo devotion they formerly showed at the shrines of Russia's saints. "Suspect Aliens" I never for a moment lost that sense of isolation that every foreigner has in Russia, of being forcibly excluded from the lifo of the country by a taboo that threatens death to natives communing with tho foreign infidel; of moving about as one of a little group of suspect aliens shut off from all but the few Russians specially deputed to deal >with you. This suspicion of foreigners is a characteristic of Russia's Orientalism, part of that same xenophobia shared by almost all races of the Orient from the Jews to the Chinese. Russia's isolationism is with you from the moment you cross the frontier. At Negoroloje, the Russian frontier station, the train that has crossed the frontiers of France, Belgium, Germany, and Poland, can travel 110 further. Why? The Russians have not the same rail gauge as the rest of Europe. In the old tsarist days they had decided they would be safer from invasion :if no foreign rolling-stock could run on their tracks. For the same reason the strategists of to-day have left tlie frontier' districts without motor roads. For the same reason they have planned a barren area —treeless, house-

The Moscow People Do Not Fraternise With Visitors From Other Lands • » 1 ENGLISHMAN MEETS SOME QUAINT CHARACTERS

By SEFTON DELMER-(Copyright Reserved)

The diplomat's wife told me a moving little story. Until a few weeks before, they had had living with them in one room of the palace tho wife of the former owner of the house. The old lady, who was well over seventy, had begged them to allow her to live there as she had lived in the house most of her life and she wanted to die there. Then a few weeks ago the tragic thing happened. She went out for 'a walk and was run over by a motor-car. She was brought back to her old home badly injured. "I advised her," said tho diplomat's Avifo, "to let us send her to hospital so that she could be taken care of .properly by doctors. "The old lady shook her head and said she wanted to stay. Then I said to her, 'Look; Mamoutchka, if you go to hospital your daughter who is living in Moscow will.be able to come and see you. .Here she cannot visit you. Tho police will not let her in.' " The old lady went to hospital. She was able to see her daughter before she died. The Comintern This anti-foreign spirit in the new super-nationalist Russia where patriotism is once more restored to honour as a civic virtue, where the film hcroifying Peter the Great is tho big box office success, has had its effect on the 'Comintern, the organisation whose task it is to spread the gospel of Communism and world revolution abroad. It is an organisation that has declined greatly in importance. Symbol of

this decline is its change of address. First the Comintern worked in a large six-storey house within a stone's throw of the Kremlin. Cominternists could pop around and see the Kremlin chiefs at a moment's notice. But when, soon after Stalin's advent to power, their influence began to lessen, they were shifted to a building in the suburbs of Moscow. It was ip. the suburbs —but it was a very big, important building. Now they have had to move again. Their old home has been entirely taken over by .the Russian trade unions' organisation, and tho Comintern has been banished to a much smaller building in a slushy side road miles outside Moscow, just off the main road to Zagorsk. German Ambitions And many of tho Comintern's institutions in Russia itself have been closed down. As for instance its model German school for the children of German Communists. Its former chief, the Bulgarian, Dimitroff, is on the way to being replaced by the Russian, Manoilski. ! And yet with all this anti-foreign spirit and isolationism, there is nothing paradoxical, in my view, in Russia's entering an alliance with Britain and France. It is Stalin's safest method of jjiaking his country safe for isolation, . safe against attack from the Germans, who want to como in and make a colony of Western and Southern Russia.