Gunpowder Crumb

Baba-Yaga was a bloodthirsty witch who flitted through the skazki (fairy tales) of old Russia. She had a false leg fashioned from the polished thighbone of a young boy. She lived in a house that hopped on chicken-footed stilts, around which was an iron fence ornamented with skulls. After dark, the eye sockets of the skulls glowed with fire to light her way. Her chariot was a mortar, which she pushed with a pestle, using her besom to erase her singular track. Innocent children were her favorite fare, but once a girl child, who might have been her dinner, foiled her with bread. Fleeing from Baba-Yaga, this miraculous child strewed the forest with crumbs, each of which sprouted a tree, and the trees grew so tall and thick and fast in Baba-Yaga's path that the child outran the old witch's seven-league mortar to safety.

In the new Russia there is little room for such ideologically unorthodox characters as Baba-Yaga. Since Lenin, writers of the new Soviet skazki have been instructed to fashion their fairy tales as "pictures of the Socialist way of life."* But Soviet writers cannot always follow Soviet Socialism. In Moscow last week Baba-Yaga might have chuckled a hearty witch's chuckle. Two of her Socialist successors--Bread Crumb and Gunpowder Crumb--were being boiled in oil.

Bread Crumb and Gunpowder Crumb were hero and villain of a new fairy tale written by Soviet Author Andrei Platonov for Pionerskaya Pravda, which aims to show the Socialist way to children under 14. Author Platonov put his two Crumbs in a hunter's beard, and there got them into arguments. Gunpowder Crumb threatened to blow up not only Bread Crumb, but self, beard and hunter. At the moment of crisis, a sparrow snatched Gunpowder from the hunter's brush and was heroically destroyed when Gunpowder exploded. Bread Crumb, meanwhile, came to his appointed happy end. The hunter ate him. Platonov's moral: "Bread gave the hunter strength. Gunpowder wanted to singe the whole world but only burned a sparrow." In Baba-Yaga's Russia such a feeble, artless fable would have had a hard time finding a publisher. But in Soviet Russia its publication evoked a thunderstorm. Pravda blasted: "Reeks of cheap pacifism*. . . both false and harmful. 'Peace on earth, good will to men,' our planet has not yet arrived at this ideal. Of course, man needs bread, but man also needs gunpowder."

*In Berlin, the American authorities refused to approve a Soviet version of Tom Sawyer for German schools. The reason was a preface which said: "Twain's scorn is directed primarily against the semi-education of parvenus and refined people who imitate the European way of life. . . . The whole mendacity of the capitalistic class, the hypocrisy and bigotry in the U.S. of his time are attacked without leniency or mercy." However, without U.S. sanction, 400,000 Berlin children go on using Soviet-proposed books because the U.S. has not supplied any schoolbooks of its own.

*Among Bolsheviks, a danger-laden deviation. Lenin said: "Pacifism is ... Popish sentimentality."

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