Eyes Front

Commencement time had come & gone again. To schoolchildren the world over it meant once more a time of haunting fears and vaunting dreams, a time when anything seemed possible. What did some of them hope for? In Soviet Russia the magazine Ogonek (The Little Light) polled a few of the 200,000 young folk ready to enter universities this year, reported their notions of what lies ahead.

By 1960, gay, bright-eyed officer's son Vladimir Turukhin hopes to be a designer in a brave new world powered by atomic energy and free at last of all the bad habits of capitalist society. Teresa Kleinerman wants to devote her whole life to medicine and have enough left over to study a little singing.

"My dreams," wrote Teresa, "carry me to a small village in the Caucasus . . . Sick people come to me and I cure them. Nobody thinks about money because everyone has all he needs. Special rays replace sunlight in factories. Work is easy because the heaviest part is done by machines. Anyone who wants one can have an automobile." As time goes by, Teresa can even see herself entering the evening of life a "surgeon in a great clinic," and the inventor of "an important medicine."

Trim, tidy little Maria Ripinskaya is not quite so certain of herself. She hopes to be a schoolteacher and by 1953 "visualize myself starting literature lessons. The following spring my pupils pass their examinations." But blond, slant-eyed Vladimir Barkov has no doubts whatever concerning the year 1963. By then, believes Vladimir, triumphant Soviet science will have perfected atomic control and powered a voyage to the moon. Out of thousands of applicants, three young men will be chosen to man the first Mars-bound ship. Vladimir will be one. "Before starting," he writes, "I peruse my diaries and see how happy were my years of study and research which led to this interplanetary trip. In our collective efforts, I never felt the loneliness experienced by scientists in capitalist countries."

Stubborn, jut-jawed Veniamin Veis, whose father works in a Soviet fishery, is no scientist, but he too dreams big dreams for himself and Russia. "I want to give all my strength to the victory of Communism," writes Veniamin. "Consequently I want to become a diplomat. I can imagine myself defending the interests of the Soviet Union. I want to be like Molotov. But to become a diplomat of the Molotov type, one must study a lot."

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