Day of Culture and Rest

Bright red banners wavered in the soft spring air. A tremendous color portrait of Stalin in his marshal's sand-hued greatcoat smiled benignly from the ornate facade of the Historical Museum. Old women scrubbed shop windows, old men hosed the streets, anxious housewives queued up for special holiday goodies and 10,000 Red Army men gathered one evening before the Bolshoi Theater to practice mass singing. Moscow was ready for May Day; people said that there might be an oldtime monster parade across Red Square, the first since 1941.

But the only parade was American. Promptly at noon 40 full-dressed members of the U.S. military and naval missions emerged from the Embassy in the Mokhovaya, walked sheepishly back & forth and around the block for the benefit of the newsreels. Asked one little boy of a sailor: "Is this the Second Front?"

Partially to compensate for the lack of a parade, Soviet officialdom declared a Charlie Chaplin festival, ordered a Shakespeare revival. Last year admiring Russians sent Chaplin a bear cub in the care of Tanker Skipper Mihail Katzel (see cut). Last week, at a gala showing of The Gold Rush (with sound), Red intellectuals again saluted the little man who, in Russian eyes, can do no wrong. Keynoted Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Jewish Art Theater: "Who are these . . . mercenary tricksters of the Hearst and McCormick tabloid press . . . who started slinging mud . . . morally to discredit Chaplin's name so as to weaken the force of his ideology? . . . Trotskyites!"

Said Stalin on May Day morning: "Tens of millions of Soviet peoples have been delivered from Fascist slavery. . . . The successes of the Red Army were made possible by correct strategy, high morale, first-rate Soviet war equipment. ... A considerable contribution to our success has been made by our great allies. ... To rid our country and the countries allied with us from the danger of enslavement, we must pursue the wounded German beast ... to its lair. . . . This problem . . . can be solved by means of coordinated blows from the east. by our troops and from the west by troops of our allies."

Lest the hint escape, Pravda chimed in briskly: "The time has arrived to inflict devastating blows in the west as well."

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