Vodka to Super-Fire

Until Pandora, in the person of Adolf Hitler, pried open the Russian box, its contents were a general mystery. But now that the lid is off, all sorts of surprises have popped out.

> "The biggest surprise of all is the Red Army," said Willy Heineberg, a leaf merchant of Alliance Tobacco Co., to a New York Daily News reporter on his arrival back in Manhattan last week. He had been five months in Russia, traveled 22,000 miles and married a girl named Bianca Greif.

Said he: "One gets some impression of [the Army's] enormous size out of a train window, far from the cities, when one stumbles, as I did, on detachments that reached from one horizon to the other.

"As for factories, they've been going up so fast east of the Urals that you can hardly recognize a town if you come back to it a month later. . . ." Heineberg example : Novosibirsk, Western Siberian city with a population of more than a million, which now blazes at night with the lights of new iron and steel, plane and munitions plants. Many another hinterland town, said Heineberg, has been similarly transformed into a modern industrial city of American-style concrete and steel buildings.

"The engineers, architects, intellectuals and Army and Government officials are lavished with money and privileges. Even the very young ones all appear to get the equivalent of about $450 monthly, with large bonuses for working in the new Siberian plants and outposts.

"Some of these youngsters were going westward on one of my trips on the Trans-Siberian. Their pockets bulged with cash. They drank vodka before breakfast and champagne with their meals. The meals alone cost $4 in American money -- I was a piker in such company!"

> An anonymous "aviation authority," who had been in Moscow to teach the Russians about air defenses as London had bitterly learned them, returned to London an amazed man.

He reported:

"Teaching the Russians air defense is like trying to teach the New York Yankees baseball. . . . They think nothing of sending hundreds of planes into the night air, no matter how bad flying conditions are. I've spent nights in London during some of the worst raids and I've spent some in Moscow. There is no comparison. The Nazis simply don't get through this wall of superfire put up by the Soviets.

They have four layers of bursting shells, not one. And each is thicker than a flurry of leaves from autumn trees."

> In answer to German claims that the huge Stalin automobile works had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe, Soviet officials took foreign correspondents on a tour of the plant. One of them reported the factory "operating at full capacity, in no way damaged by raiders, and turning out even more than the regular peacetime production of trucks and cars."

This correspondent, who has visited some of Detroit's and Pittsburgh's largest plants, was impressed by this first tour of what is admittedly one of the best Soviet factories. He noted especially "the considerably larger number of women workers of all sorts, from operators of mammoth stamping hammers to mechanics on the assembly line. . . ."

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