Red Kipling

Three-quarters of a million Russians passed slowly, sadly, day after day last week through the Writers' Club in Moscow. On a blood-red catafalque lay the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Two of the dead man's dramas were entitled respectively Bathhouse and Bedbug. As long ago as 1910, Poet Mayakovsky founded a school of poetry distinguished by the fact that its members wore canary-yellow blouses, painted their faces according to their moods, green one day, red the next, blue when blue.

When the revolution swept away the Tsar and the past, Futurist Mayakovsky appeared triumphant at Leon Trotsky's right hand. Like Rudyard Kipling, with whom Russians compare him, Vladimir Mayakovsky was at his best as a war poet. More than six feet tall, hairy-chested, huge-voiced, he toured Russia with lean, shrill Trotsky, the organ- izing genius who created the Red Army --today largest on earth.-To the soldiers the statesman would speak in his curt, compelling voice. Then, towering up from nowhere, the poet would take the platform, roar out his latest barrack-room ballad, put fight into the then ragged troops who were battling for the life of the Red State.

Tens of thousands of the mourners who filed through the Writers' Club last week were old soldiers. Not all of them appreciate or understand the poet's later works, the dramas Bathhouse and Bedbug against which even some Moscow dramatic critics carped, one writing that "again like Kipling, our Mayakovsky has never written a great play, however great his poems."

When that other devastating Soviet poet, Sergei Yessenin, onetime husband of the late tempestuous Isadora Duncan, committed suicide (TiME, Jan. n, 1926). Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky savagely criticized his "cowardice," displayed the almost hysterical resentment of a man who fears he, too, may some day take his own life.

Returning to his house after an all-night party last week with a young actress, who had had a small part in Bedbug, Vladimir Mayakovsky sat down in the grey dawn and began to write:

"It isn't a brave way to go out for a revolutionist, but there is no other way out and I can stand it no longer." He then shot himself through the heart.

Because suicide is almost the gravest sin in the rigid Communist code of political morals, the editor of Youth Pravda (news-organ of the Russian organization corresponding to Boy Scouts) found himself in a tight fix. His hero-worshipping young readers worshipped Vladimir Mayakovsky who had now greatly sinned. It was as though Chief Scout Lord Baden-Powell should sin. But the official poet laureate, Demian Bedny, saved the situation, announced as it were ex cathedra that the poet had shot himself while suffering from "temporary insanity," had died in honor, a proper hero for boys under 14. No mention was made in Youth Pravda of the young actress, though, other Moscow papers said that the Red Kipling "killed himself for love." A further motive mentioned was "despondency."

-With 725,000 troops. Armies of other nations rank: second French, 643,675; third British, 394,519; fourth Italian, 353,120; fifth Rumanian, 325,000; sixth Spanish, 243,511; seventh Polish, 229,900; eighth Japanese, 210,000: ninth Czechoslovakian, 158,103; tenth Jugoslavian, 141,568; eleventh the U. S., 136,217.

China has more men ''under arms'' than any other nation, but, being split into groups constantly fighting each other, they cannot be called an army.

fRussia's young Pioneers are taught that Boy Scouts are ''the unpaid dupes of Capitalism," are "bourgeois counter-revolutionary reservists," which is the most insulting thing a Communist can call anybody. Young Pioneers, like Boy and Girl Scouts, are taught to "live clean," to do "good deeds," but the emphasis of the movement is on "pioneer propaganda." such as trying to argue religious members of a young Pioneer's family out of belief in God. teaching peasant children Communistic doctrines, distributing the Soviet Government's instructive pamphlets on every subject from tractors to midwifery.

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