Snapshots & Salutes

Harrowing was the experience related last week by a young cameraman employed by Soyuzjoto, the State Photographic Trust. Assigned to picture Moscow's All-Union Industrial Academy, he had been ordered to "pick out and photograph some interesting student types." Boldly therefore the cameraman looked over both male and female students.

"You look interesting," he told a young woman who was bending over a retort, heating it gently with a darting Bunsen flame. "Just keep that pose and I'll snap you as you are."

Instead the young woman turned her back, sat down and began to write in her notebook.

"I'm from Soyuzfoto, you know," persisted the cameraman importantly, "and I have my orders. If you please now. Comrade Student, resume your pose."

Furious, flushing darkly, the Comrade Student slammed shut her notebook, jumped up and left the classroom. Whispered another student to the cameraman whose importance instantly collapsed. "Get out. Comrade Photographer, and get out quick! Don't you know she's Mrs. Stalin?"

Most Russians have never seen either Mrs. Stalin or her picture (TIME, April 11). The Soviet Press has not printed her name (Nadya Alliluieva). When she married Dictator Stalin 13 years ago that fact was neither published in Russia nor discovered at the time by foreign newshawks in Moscow.

Soviet papers print no news of births, marriages or deaths--except on rare occasions when an illustrious Comrade dies. Last week all Moscow flew the Soviet mourning flag (red with a black border) and even Dictator Stalin turned out for the funeral of Professor Michael Nikolaivitch Pokrovsky.

Unknown except to radicals, Professor Pokrovsky was mourned last week as "the leading historian of the Russian Revolution." Past an honor guard of Red cavalrymen with drawn sabres the professor's cremated ashes were borne to a niche cut in the Kremlin wall behind Lenin's Tomb, popped in and covered with a bronze tablet while Red soldiers fired a three-volley salute.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.