Major Mystery

Why Joseph Stalin, always lavish with Russia's millions in buying tractors, remains a tightwad as to railways, choosing to have hapless Soviet railwaymen shot for "sabotage" rather than buy them good modern rolling stock and signals, remains perhaps the Kremlin's major mystery. Last week Soviet trains were still being hauled by Tsarist locomotives, and after more than three full years of shooting Soviet railwaymen, Dictator Stalin's zealous Comrade Andrey Andreyev had had enough of being Commissar of Railways.

Not in disgrace, since everyone knows whose fault it is that Soviet railways remain in an appalling mess, Comrade Andreyev was honored by being appointed one of the four potent secretaries of the Communist Party Central Committee. Into the curiously bloody and repugnant job of Commissar of Railways, Dictator Stalin last week put big. iron-nerved Comrade Lazar Kaganovich who has just built the first eight miles of Moscow's projected 50-mile subway.

Last year another Big Red, Commissar for Heavy Industry Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze, denounced "the fact that right now 450,000 carloads of manufactured goods are awaiting shipment in our warehouses for lack of rail transport!" Last week Pravda, careful not to blame anybody, grumbled: "The country can no longer allow backwardness in this vital link in our economic chain. The interests of Socialist construction, the interests of production and, last but not least, the interests of national defense demand a solution of the railroad problem this year and not later."

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