ZIK's Week

Unlike other Parliaments, Russia's is a sort of picnic. Three times a year waddling Eskimo delegates, wild-eyed Yakuts, bland Mongols, swaggering Tartars and other elected representatives of the Russian peoples are given a good time in Moscow and sent home as soon as possible. Last week Dictator Josef Stalin staged one more picnic Parliament with his usual firm finesse.

Known collectively as the ZIK (from the initials in Russian of "Central Executive Committee"), the 472 delegates:

P: Punctuated their first session in the new theatre of the Kremlin Military School last week with four distinct and deafening bouts of cheering for Comrade Josef Stalin.

P: Received from Stalin's genial old Front Man, peasant-President Mikhail Kalinin, the news that "while unemployment has been abolished in the Soviet Union it has become in the Capitalist world an epic comparable to Erich Maria Remarque's story of the World War in All Quiet on the Western Front."

Pleased with this simile, "Papa" Kalinin rambled on, drew deafening cheers with an announcement that when Russia's largest "chemical city" is shortly completed he will rename the place Stalinogorsk--this making the 15th Soviet city to be named after Stalin, not to mention mountain peaks and islands.

P: Thundered approval as spectacled Premier Vyacheslav Michaelovich Molotov, after burrowing through his usual mound of statistics, emerged to say that the Second Five-Year Plan, now entering its second year, will "make life brighter and better for our people." Claiming that the production of Russia's heavy industries was upped 11% last year and that bumper crops had wiped out the grain shortage, Premier Molotov admitted that the meat shortage is still acute.

P: Cheered chubby, astute Foreign Minister Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff, fresh from his triumph at Washington.

"Mr. Roosevelt must be given credit for his shrewdness," said Comrade Litvinoff modestly. "He saw the futility of further struggle against us for the sake of Capitalism."

In the course of a 12,000-word review of world affairs, Orator Litvinoff devoted 3,000 words to the Japanese menace, 1,500 words to the German. Both these nations, he seemed to think, might attack Soviet Russia without warning at almost any moment.

Calling Chancellor Hitler a man bent on achieving Germany's destiny "by fire and sword," calling Japan "the darkest storm cloud on the political horizon," Comrade Litvinoff said flatly: "I disagree with President Roosevelt when he says that only 8% of the people in the world want war. Those 8% are the people in power in certain countries. . . . Between Germany and Japan exists a common spirituality--a desire to fight."

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