Three Years, Three Moscows

Aloof as the College of Cardinals is the Caspian where Russia's future is charted in an endless series of successive Five Year Plans by a group of clannish Bolsheviks who form a sort of plan priesthood. Last week they were ready to advise Dictator Joseph Stalin what to do about overcrowded, stinking, sprawling Moscow. As usual their advice was super-drastic.

The Dictator was invited by his plan priesthood to choose between three alternatives: 1) Abandon the metropolis altogether, establishing Russia's capital elsewhere and enshrining the more picturesque parts of Moscow as a permanent "Museum City." 2) Destroy the present city of Moscow and build a modernistic capital on its site. 3) Preserve the tall-towered Kremlin and fantastic St. Basil's Cathedral, but destroy the whole encircling rabbit warren of crooked streets; enlarge the vast Red Square to twice its present size, and generally turn Moscow into a city of wide boulevards, imposing squares and grandiose parks.

Comrade Stalin, an Oriental who has taken root behind the Kremlin walls as secretively as any tsar, promptly chose the third alternative and gave it the force of law by his potent fiat. The present Moscow of 3,500,000 Russians squashed into 70 square miles will be expanded, Stalin decreed, into a Moscow of 5,000,000 in 230 square miles. Most of this vast reconstruction was ordered rushed to completion within three years, but seven more years are allotted to finish up and smooth out New Moscow's inevitable kinks.

Revel. In Old Moscow last week was held the first Carnival permitted by earnest Bolsheviks since the Revolution of 1917. With returning bourgeois gaiety, 100,000 Russians were encouraged to enjoy a madcap masked revel which lasted nearly all night in the Park of Culture & Rest, the State supplying masks and soft drinks, with all alcoholic tipples barred. Since the habit of censorship has become ingrained under Stalin, arriving revelers were inspected at the gates by censors who said that their purpose was "to keep out joy killers." Barred was a Russian who arrived in a tight black suit painted to make him look like a skeleton.

"Comrade, this is a night of joy!" the censor admonished him. "Go home and put on more cheerful clothes."

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