A REPORTER AMONG THE PEOPLE

The Kremlin's masters tell the Russian people that the West has forgotten their great sacrifices in the war. In an eloquent Pravda article, Leonid Leonov, a Russian novelist, cried: "Under [Russian] ground, 7,000,000 warriors lie buried, the men who defended the world against the dark forces. . . . The more easterly the meridian on which blood is shed, the cheaper the blood." In fact, the West does not forget--or hold cheaply--the Russian people, dead or living. It would know more about them except for restrictions imposed by the Kremlin's masters. Last week TIME Correspondent Samuel Welles went to Stalingrad, cabled:

Somehow I had never expected Stalingrad, the worst blitzed city of the war, to be cheerful. But the people are as chipper as chipmunks. A woman with the fine, warm features of an old coin stopped to say: "This was a beautiful city." A friendly little fellow, quietly steeping himself in vodka at the hotel bar, came over to condemn Truman and then explained that tonight he was going to get only "culturally" drunk, that is to say, not stinkingly so. Another man saw us walking along the street by the theater, and because we were dressed differently from Stalingradites, took us for the orchestra of a variety show that was playing at the theater. He doffed his cap to us and smilingly called: "Hail to the musicians. Thanks for coming to this city."

The theater is completely rebuilt. We asked a city architect why it had been rushed when housing was so desperately short. He answered: "We wanted our people, who have endured so much, to have some happiness now and a visible pledge of more happiness to come."

Life on the Volga. The outskirts are full of little 50 by 60 plots, fenced in with any stray piece of wood or wire. Kids romp in the wide-rutted clay streets, while fathers & mothers are off rebuilding the city, and an old babushka hangs out the washing on a line stretched over a gooseberry bush from a young peach tree to a young cherry tree. Even in the middle of the city, chickens scrabble among the ruins.

In one block that seemed just a hopeless heap of rubble, we saw one evening a wisp of smoke curling upwards. We picked our way down a broken flight of steps and knocked at a battered wooden door. A woman opened it and urged us to enter. In a room 12 ft. by 16 ft. we found a minor miracle of family planning. Seven people lived, cooked, ate and slept in this space, whose only privacy was a tiny curtained cubicle behind a big brick Russian stove, on top of which a boy slept at night. The room, a salvaged bit of cellar with a 2 by 3 ft. window, was as neat as ninepence.

My last morning in Stalingrad I got up at dawn and strolled down to take a ferry across the Volga. One does not have to be long on the Volga to realize that its part in Russia's traffic is about what the Mississippi's was to ours in Mark Twain's day. Remembering Mark Twain made a lot of things suddenly click. For as the Volga is like the Mississippi of his pilot days, so these people living along it are like the free-&-easy, friendly Midwesterners of his books. There were neat, small, wooden houses with Victorian fretwork along the eaves, lace curtains and begonias and geraniums in the windows. The houses and. roads had the same unpainted, unpaved frontier look. The trim wooden fences could have done with Tom Sawyer's or any other system of whitewashing. A lad of about Tom's age came past, dragging his feet on his way to school the way Tom did. He had a 2-ft. birch whittling stick, from which his shiny-bladed penknife was 'making shavings fly first at one end and then at the other; he was a real Stakhanovite among whittlers. Tom would have liked to know him.

But even at its most Middle Western, Russia can go suddenly Middle Eastern. I saw two camels hitched to a hay-cutter of the exact model we use on my farm in New Jersey.

Parthenon Above the Rubble. From the ferry returning to Stalingrad, the structure that stood out most prominently in the sun's slanting rays was the theater. On the high point of the bluff above the water, with its white-columned portico and low classical pediment, it recalled the Parthenon above Athens. The resemblance was not just physical. For what the architect told us was true. Since dialectical materialism rules out a next life, the good things of this life are the best hope the Soviet system has to offer. What their temples meant to the ancient Greeks, theaters symbolize to modern Russians. They are indeed "happiness and a pledge of more happiness to come."

No one can go to the Soviet Union without hoping from the bottom of his heart that these wonderful, hardworking people may have happiness and prosperity in that full measure which has never been theirs, and which no people more richly deserve.

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