Trip Behind the Iron Curtain

Six weeks ago, William Vlahos, boss of the Cathedral Painting & Decorating Co. in Washington, D.C., landed what looked like a good deal--repainting the interior of the Soviet Embassy on 16th Street. Last week, out of temper and out of pocket, William Vlahos pulled his men off the job. The Washington representatives of the proletarian state had turned out to be lousy employers.

Said Frank De Marco, one of Vlahos' painters: "Those Russians used to get everybody from the top man to the cook to decide on the color of the paint . . . We'd go ahead and paint. As soon as we'd finished, they'd come around poking their fingers at it and say, 'No good, no good.' They'd find a little pimple on the wall or a small dig. We were supposed to do it over for nothing . . . We painted 15 or 16 rooms, and they wanted it done over again. We just stood to lose by going on."

What really bothered Employee De Marco, however, were the working conditions. "They had guards on us all the time . . . They went with us when we ate, when we got a drink of water; they even followed us into the toilet . . . One of the guards could talk English pretty good. He always used to say we shouldn't take offense. This guarding wasn't personal, he said. He used to say, 'We can't trust no one, not even ourselves.' "

Vlahos' men got pretty tired of Russian propaganda, too. Says De Marco: "Russia .was the greatest country, it had the greatest army, its soldiers were the toughest . . . They sure got mad, though, when the Russians lost the Olympics. One of them fellows told me if he was at the Olympics he woulda beat them Russian athletes with a whip. Can you beat that?"

"These people," pondered Painter De Marco last week, "they're very funny. I never had anything against the Russian people. But when you get in there with them like that, you get to thinking how you'd like to kick the hell out of them."

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