Behind That Curtain

The Russian iron curtain is nowhere more impenetrable than in Russia itself. Last week came a rare and revealing glimpse behind that curtain into the Soviet Ukraine. John Fischer, Harper's Magazine associate editor on leave with UNRRA, returned from three months of unrestricted work, travel and observation in the Ukraine with the outside world's most direct report on the region since 1933.

Cities and countryside alike had been devastated. Fischer found Poltava and Kremenchug "worse than Berlin," his previous superlative of destruction. Kharkov was almost as bad. The great Donbas industrial basin was one wide ruin. Rural areas were little better off.

Well above Sharecroppers. In the country reconstruction is more advanced than in the cities. The average village is at least one-third rebuilt, with warm, clean log houses well thatched and chinked. The Ukraine is Russia's richest agricultural region; in food and housing its peasants now have a living standard "well below that of an Iowa farmer, but well above that of a Southern sharecropper." This spring the planting was 80% of prewar normal, but drought has already almost halved the expected--and desperately needed--1946 crop.

In urban and industrial reconstruction, the Ukraine has fine executive and technical talent at the top official and engineering levels. Lower down is a notable lack of tools, trained supervisors and skilled labor. At the Dnieper Dam, the three head engineers were pupils of the dam's late famed U.S. builder, Hugh Cooper. Two of them had studied in the U.S. Their assistants, however, are inexperienced young engineers. Qualified foremen are rare and 40% of the labor force is made up of inefficient peasant girls, many of whom are prematurely aged by the hard manual work.

Pigs & Dignity. Russian officials more than fulfilled their promise to give the UNRRA mission full freedom of movement and inspection in carrying out the $189 million relief program. In fact, Russian solicitude was sometimes embarrassing. A Ukrainian peasant and his wife, assigned to clean the mission's Kiev offices, parked a pig in the garden. Officials thought this an affront to UNRRA's dignity, ordered the pig removed. The UNRRA workers said they did not mind the pig. The officials insisted. So the peasant gave the legal two weeks' notice, walked out with his wife and pig.

To Fischer's surprise, he found that the Ukraine has something like a free labor market. Men on the slow, overcrowded trains often said they were going to Odessa or elsewhere to look for better jobs. City shops had Help Wanted signs; newspapers carried Help Wanted ads. Like the pig-loving peasant, many workers could give due notice and then quit if they like, even if it annoyed officials.

The Red Army is still mobilized to a point where its drain on manpower and supply, combined with the other shortages, seriously hampers reconstruction. In its supreme effort to get the job done, the Kremlin is keeping concessions to consumers at a minimum. Life in the postwar Ukraine is dreary, incredibly dreary. It will stay that way for a long time.

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