The Restoration

Muscovite workmen were busy last week behind the Kremlin's walls. Foreign correspondents, on a rare sightseeing trip, saw signs of a thoroughgoing restoration project.* The nine gilded, onion-shaped domes of the Cathedral of the Annunciation, stripped of their camouflage paint, shone in the October sun. At the nearby Cathedral of the Archangel (where the Tsars lie buried), and all over the Kremlin's 90 acres, roofs were being fixed and walls painted.

When the job was finished, there would be nothing dingy about the seat of Soviet Government; even the hundreds of murals and icons in the Kremlin's many churches would be restored. Strolling through the Great Palace, where Generalissimo Stalin directed the war from his four-room flat, the correspondents inspected the imperial apartments. In the study, for which the last of the Tsars had no use after 1917, a golden clock ticked away. It was on time.

* For news of another restoriation, just outside the Kremlin, see PEOPLE.

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