Subway Shrine

Last year Russian engineers prepared to blow their treasured subway system into Moscow's grey winter sky if the Germans entered the city. Last week several hundred thousand Muscovites rode on a new, four-mile subway line connecting central Sverdlov Square with the industrial area close to the immense Stalin auto plant, long ago converted to war production. Moscow's palatial Metro, now about ten miles long, remains at once a symbol of the brave new world the Russians hope to build, and a godsend to factory workers who save two hours daily getting to & from their eleven-hour shifts.

The stations of the new line, like those of the old one in operation since 1935, are granite-floored, clean and glistening, walled with colored marbles, studded with mosaics, friezes, murals and statuettes of Russian workers, soldiers, sailors. An austere statue of Joseph Stalin striding forward, one hand thrust in the breast of his coat, dominates the new terminal platform. The platform was decorated by Professor Vladimir Frolov, who was killed recently in Leningrad after burying mosaics to save them from Nazi shells. A large mural depicts a pilot, a tankman and a tommy-gunner against a background of a mailclad Muscovite warrior standing defiantly beneath the walls of the ancient Kremlin. Three-bank escalators carry crowds of lean grim-faced workers from the glittering platforms to the grey streets.

During the recent months, while millions of men fought for every street and heap of rubble in Stalingrad, Moscow women and a few men were tunneling through clay under the capital, circumventing subterranean streams, pouring reinforced concrete, installing ornate chandeliers and inserting mosaics. For while Russia's leaders have long preached and practiced sacrifice in the name of their country and their ideas, they have always striven to keep before the people some great symbol, beautiful and useful, so that any shawl-swathed peasant woman, any unshaven, fur-clad Siberian trapper could come to Moscow, stare openmouthed in admiration, and then return and tell her village, his people: "This is what we are building for everyone."

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