"Write with the Heart"

After ten weeks in Russia, TIME Correspondent Samuel Welles went on to Finland and Sweden and, without censorship, reported:

At 5 in the morning, the train from Leningrad stopped near the Finnish frontier. A captain, in the green-tabbed uniform of the Soviet Security Police, and a buxom woman interpreter came into my compartment. The woman pulled my bed apart and turned over the mattress. The pair found only one thing which pleased them: the embossed, lavender-colored propusk (pass) to Red Square for the May Day parade. The woman said in awe: "Neither of us has ever seen one of these. . . . Did you see Stalin?"

"Very clearly," I replied. "Through field glasses from about 60 feet. He is getting greyer, but his face has much more animation than I would have guessed from pictures. He never paused to catch his breath as he climbed up Lenin's tomb."

Said the captain with feeling: "We too would like to see Stalin."

The Two Stories. At long last, all my belongings were passed. The woman again turned to me. Her intense eyes looked straight into mine. "When you write about Russia, you will have your opinion," she said, "but write with the heart. We don't want any more war. We had enough. Remember the terrible destruction we suffered, and the pale faces of our children. Write with the heart."

Hardheaded patience and firmness the West will need in dealing with Russia; but understanding and compassion it will need too. To consider Russia "with the heart" means to sense two stories--the story of her great warm people, and the story of the cold bureaucracy of lies and murder which grips the people's lives. You cannot know a jail without having seen the prisoners.

Russia Passes By. For weeks before May Day, all over Moscow, I had seen civilian columns practicing for the impending "spontaneous" demonstration. This had made me feel a little cynical; but I was not prepared for what was to come. Only part of the parade turned out to be organized. Most of it was people, just sauntering along. The tide of Russia's human power flowed by, mothers walking hand-in-hand with little girls & boys, fathers with still smaller children perched on their shoulders. There were kids tugging at toy balloons.

The people moved on hour after hour over the whole length and width of Red Square, without a break or a gap. Most of them were smiling. A voice from the loudspeaker regularly bade the crowd to "Hurrah for Stalin." But all quite naturally turned their faces up toward him. No other procession I ever saw had the force, impact or sheer splendor of that ragged million. It was Russia that had passed, in the shape of her patient, pliant, tireless people.

But it was another Russia that stood and watched, in the shape of her present masters--the Politburo, lined up atop Lenin's tomb and surrounded by an army of secret policemen. All over Russia, in less dramatic settings, you sense those same counterpoints between the people and their leaders, between the lives the people would like to lead and the lives they are made to lead. You sensed them on the very train that carried me out of Russia.

The Two World's. It was a three-car train, moving into a small, defeated neighbor country with a Government friendly to Moscow; nevertheless, it was guarded by 100 able-bodied young security policemen. In the next car, a "hard" car (i.e., without cushions), 70 Soviet sailors were riding toward an unknown destination; they were not told where they were bound, nor did these servants of a "classless" society dare ask their officers. They preferred to ask me, a foreigner. Most revealing of all was the view from the train's windows. On the Russian side of the border, I saw ruined, largely unrestored towns that had been part of Finland. Viipuri was ghostlike and still in the morning sun. The people were in rags. They were still living in dugouts and log houses. Few of the fields were plowed. Everything seemed static.

The change at the frontier was electric. Just at the border was a big Finnish lumberyard which would have done credit to Seattle. A birch-burning engine shunted briskly up & down the sidings. A row of roughly shaped granite rocks--crude anti-tank barriers left over from the war--dotted a hill; behind a brown horse, a sturdy, towheaded Finn who had already plowed several acres on either side was now plowing between the boulders. His neat house with its red tile roof and his brand-new red barn stood proudly at the top of the hill.

The Stalingrad Ratio. What is the reason for this striking contrast? The more I saw of Russia, the more I was convinced that it was because Russia's leaders put machines ahead of men, industrial recovery ahead of human recovery. Perhaps the clearest example of the coldblooded way the Kremlin handles Russian reconstruction is Stalingrad.

The war reduced Stalingrad's population from 500,000 to 22,000, its housing to 5% of prewar, its plant capacity to zero. Today, according to the state's priority system, the city has 70% of its prewar plant capacity, 60% of its prewar population and 20% of its prewar housing. Up to a point, the Kremlin is right to concentrate on long-range reconstruction of industry rather than on immediate comforts, such as housing and consumer goods; but under the brutal 70-60-20 Stalingrad ratio, which puts men at least ten years behind machines, human beings do not and cannot work most effectively.

The Stalingrad ratio is in evidence all over Russia.

A Pig for Ourselves. At the collective farm of Lenino, 26 miles northwest of Moscow, more than half of the population (200) were killed. Every house was ruined. Of 38 horses, three were saved. Lenino's 70 cows were evacuated to the Urals; there are only 15 now. The collective barn was the first building to be restored. Next to the barn was a steaming manure pile and a thickly thatched vegetable cellar with Lenino's treasure--40 tons of seed potatoes. But Lenino would see little of the profits. While I was in Moscow, the Soviet state was buying potatoes at $5.84 a ton and selling them at $220 in ration stores, at $1,240 in "commercial" (unrationed) ones. (In Russia, where even the black market is planned, sales taxes average 350%.)

Near Lenino, I talked to a mechanic at a new tractor station which had been built on the site of a former hog farm; before the war, there had been 2,500 pigs, but the pigs had been evacuated and were not brought back. The mechanic, a lean, leather-faced man, showed no emotion until he began talking of the pigs; then he grew almost lyrical: "I was the mechanic for the trucks that brought the pig food from Moscow. We got the slop from the best restaurants and hotels. We even got the spoiled candy from candy factories. Those pigs lived well! According to the plan, they were to gain 800 grams a day, but on food like that, they gained 1,200. With that many pigs gaining that fast," he added wistfully, "we could all have a pig for ourselves."

A farm youth, who was only a baby when Russia's farms were collectivized, asked me: "Do you have collective farms in America?" When I said no, and added that I myself had a farm, he said: "I would like land of my own. If I farmed it well, I would get something from it. If I did it badly or the weather was against me, I would be the one who suffered. Either way, it would be up to me." I remember the Soviet intellectual to whom I quoted that statement. His sadly wise comment was: "We can very seldom say it now, but, you see, Russians are more like Americans than you might think."

Olga Buys a Sweater. City folk yearn for simple consumer goods as the farm youth for a place of his own. Even if the consumer-goods goal of the current Five-Year Plan is met (an unprecedented occurrence in the history of five-year planning), the Russian people will not live as well in 1950 as they did in 1938.

The biggest department store in Moscow (pop. 7,000,000), is smaller and has a far poorer selection than most smalltown department stores in the U.S. But the people act much the same. At this store's sweater counter I watched a young matron as she shopped. She had brought along two friends about her age--the late twenties--who called her Olga. She waited in line a while.

When she finally got a salesgirl, she had her bring down half a dozen sweaters. Eventually she chose three--a plaid, a navy blue with red piping, and a burnt-orange--to model at the mirror by the window. She tried on all three, pirouetting, fitting them carefully around her shoulders, trying the necklines up, down and turned in, chattering a blue streak.

"This orange is not quite becoming to my complexion. . . . Will the plaid go with that scarf Dmitri got me in Budapest? . . . My dear, what do you think?" She settled on the navy blue, changed her mind again, almost picked a brown one with yellow daisies embroidered round the cuffs, discarded it for a dusty pink one with white scallops at the neck, and then decided she really wanted the navy blue after all, while her friends clucked sympathetically. The salesgirl wrote a slip, did up the sweater in butcherlike wrapping paper. Olga's last words were: "I hope Dmitri likes it. But you can never tell about men."

Her sweater, which would cost about $6 in my home town of Trenton, N.J., had cost her $71.25. It was probably the one major new purchase Olga was making for her spring and summer wardrobe--and she spent a couple of months' salary on it.

Another difference was the way Olga was dressed. Because of the Kremlin's 70-60-20 ratio, Olga wore cotton stockings, her hair was straight, her complexion sallow, her dress ill-fitting. One American in Russia summed up the women's dress situation this way: "There isn't a girdle in the entire Soviet Union."

Where People Live. A Russian cannot move anywhere, say to Moscow, without the state's permission; if he is caught without a permit, he is sentenced to hard labor. He cannot even visit places like the Kremlin. I remember the Russian girl I met only once for a few minutes, during which we happened to walk past the Kremlin. Said she: "We Russians envy you foreigners. You can visit the Kremlin. We cannot."

But the Russian people are docile. They do not complain about their rulers, far less threaten them. There is no sign of any major purges. I heard a great deal of genuine, voluntary admiration for Stalin, some for Molotov and Zhdanov. But I never heard any Russian volunteer a single word of praise for Lavrenti Beria, head of the omnipresent secret police. But then few people love policemen, and Russians have less reason to love them than most.

The estimates I heard about Russians kept in slave labor camps ranged from 3 to 15 million. Usually the state does not bother to hide slave laborers (Russian or foreign); they are seen working everywhere. Only in Moscow are there occasional attempts to hide ugly facts. Once I drove past notorious Lubyanka prison with an Intourist guide. I asked deliberately: "What is that large, impressive building over there?" "Oh," she replied, "people live there."

The Protected Books. What taught me, perhaps, most about the people's life in Russia was a library, not a prison--though the difference was hard to tell. It was the Lenin Library in Moscow. Russian propaganda calls it "the world's greatest library," and speaks proudly of its twelve million volumes. It stands, massive and modern, at the start of Kalinin Street near the Kremlin, with a gigantic block-long bookstack.

A portress stopped me by the cloakroom at the main entrance. "Where is your pass?"

"I have no pass," I said, "I simply want to see a little of the library."

"No one can see any part of it without a pass," she proclaimed.

I explained that I was an American correspondent. She became my champion. She went to a phone and began calling people. Finally: "Go out and to the far side of the library. There you can get a visitor's pass."

Through the slush outside I trudged to the far side of the library. I was again met with suspicion, but again the guardian of the gate became my champion. It was a man this time--and he, too, began phoning people.

"You must go to an office under the bookstacks," he said. "There they are qualified to issue a temporary pass. You would never find it. It is far too complicated. I will summon an escort."

The escort turned out to be a secret police officer. It seemed untactful to ask what the secret police were doing in a library. But soon the secret policeman was also on my side. He took me to the right man, argued him into cooperation. Then the man finally agreed that I ought to see the library, but said he could not take the responsibility for issuing the pass. The policeman now began phoning in all directions.

At last he got some high official and turned the phone over to me. The voice at the far end of the wire was cordial, but firm; it could not assume the responsibility for admitting an unauthorized stranger.

I pleaded: "I have never been refused admission to any library in any country of the world. Libraries are meant to be visited and used. What could be the possible harm in my being allowed to admire this one--the 'world's greatest?' "

The voice said: "A very fine pamphlet has been published about the Lenin Library. Why don't you go home and read that?"

The hour I had spent at the great library was the Soviet Union in miniature--there had been the suspicion, the fear of responsibility, the ultimate frustration. Lenin himself, always the restless, striving intellectual, had been welcome in the libraries of the West. But when he was so busy as the head of the Soviet Union that he could not do his research during ordinary library hours, he wrote the head librarian of the Rumyantsev Museum, now the Lenin Library, asking if he could not, please, under these extenuating circumstances, borrow certain reference works just for the night. He promised to have them back the minute the library opened in the morning.

Beware the People. In Russia, the U.S. visitor cannot escape comparing Lenin to Abraham Lincoln, especially when he visits Lenin's tomb, as I did on five occasions. That grim monument symbolizes the spirit of Soviet Russia in its capital, as the Lincoln Memorial is the monument that best symbolizes the spirit of America in our capital. In both monuments you find the plain people of the country.

In the Lincoln Memorial, you see them lingering, pondering, gazing down the vista to the Capitol and the tall white shaft of the Washington Monument, or at Lincoln himself and the words of the Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural Addresses at either side of him.

In Lenin's tomb there are no vistas. On entering it from the center of Red Square, you go underground. That itself seems almost symbolic. The glass coffin rests in a vaulted chamber. Lenin's mighty brow, the slight sardonic pucker of the lips, the slim-fingered expressive hands are all exactly as countless pictures have shown. But you have only a few seconds to take it all in. There are a dozen armed soldiers in the room, and the rule is: keep moving. Every time I tried to pause, or even slow down, a soldier started toward me, his hand tightening a little on his rifle.

The two men and their two monuments incarnate the dominant notes in their systems. Both were great men. But it was Lincoln who said: "God must have loved the common people, he made so many of them." And it was Lenin who said: "One would like to caress the people, but one cannot; they bite."

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