How to Skin a Bear

TIME Bureau Chief Emmet Hughes cabled this account of how the Russians' steady, day-after-day squeeze was working in Berlin:

Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky is a courteous man who likes Jane Austen's novels and earthy Russian proverbs. His favorite version of his favorite proverb before he walked out of the Allied Control Council meetings was: "I want to skin this bear before I shoot it." The bear is Berlin's city symbol. By this week, the Berlin bear looked pretty well skinned--and 3 1/2 million Berliners wondered how close the Marshal's well-manicured finger was to the trigger.

How did the Soviets do their skinning? Simple. You turn back 27 freight trains loaded with coal for Berlin factories, because the "cars are defective." You halt passenger traffic because "the stations are congested." Then you close the Autobahn bridge across the Elbe for "urgent repairs." Now, on the one precarious road to the West still open to the Western powers, jeeps and buses bounce over ten miles of a cobblestone detour, push onto a creeping, motorless ferry. When someone asks the German policeman aboard how the bridge repairs are coming, he grins: "You don't think they are real, do you?"

The grimmest Russian pressure is not directly on the Allies, but on Berlin's people. One night this week, slim, dark Fritz Mueller, 27, left Berlin for good. From scrap & rubble, he had built up a little clothing shop. Business was a hopeless tangle--he couldn't get thread or needles from the Western sectors, his delivery boys were detained for days at a time by Russian patrols. Last week, because he was "politically unreliable," Fritz's shop was confiscated. Oddly, it was confiscated by the same German official who ten years ago seized his furniture because he was a Jew. Said Fritz: "Berlin is dead for me."

But the fight continues. One day Sokolovsky proclaimed Berlin an integral part of the Soviet zone. On the same day, at an emergency session of the City Assembly, plucky Mayor Louise Schroeder introduced a resolution saying that Berlin belonged to all four occupation powers. Russian observers watched grimly as the resolution was overwhelmingly passed. Said Kurt Lansberg, a Christian Democratic history professor: "Anyone who leaves Berlin is a traitor."

The bear of Berlin has lost a lot of skin--but not much of its heart.

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