RUSSIA: 13th Birthday

There are no trees, no grass in Red Square, Moscow’s vast bleak oblong. But at least once a year the grey granite pavement (new-laid by a firm of U. S. contractors) sprouts with the thin steel blades of thousands of bayonets. It did so last week for the 13th anniversary of the Soviet state. Hour after hour the troops filed by, impressive in their grey-brown, ankle-length overcoats while airplanes flew back and forth in formation.

One thing made this year’s birthday parade different from all others. For the first time Russians were able to see the fane of Communism, the final, stone tomb of Nikolai Lenin. For years the “Communist saint” rested in a glass case under a truncated pyramid of weathered oak while state architects argued what form the permanent tomb should take.

The new tomb is practically the same shape as the wooden one but one-third higher, larger, built of 10,000 tons of red and black granite. Over the bronze entrance doors is a 50-ton monolith of black granite with the word LENIN inlaid in letters of red porphyry. Inside the doors, a giant hammer and sickle, carved in stone. Embalmed Lenin lies in an underground room 30 ft. square and 30 ft. high on a slab of black granite, under a convex bubble of glass. Just behind the tomb are the bodies of the Soviet “apostles” including two from the U. S.: John Reed of Harvard, Big Bill Haywood of Chicago. To correspondents, Architect A. G. Schuse explained his design: “For five years we have waited for a perfect design for Lenin’s mausoleum but none has been forthcoming. All that time I have worked to improve the original design. … I made hundreds of’ sketches, plans and colored drawings showing how the tombs would harmonize with the ancient kremlin wall behind it in color, shape and line until the Central Committee finally was satisfied. . . . The color scheme is symbolical, black, red, and grey —black and red being the Soviet mourning colors with grey as the workers’ color.” On the lowest step of the tomb stood the leaders of Communism last week to watch the parade. Dictator Josef Stalin in a soldier’s kepi and greatcoat; Commissar of War Clemence Voroshilov; Commissar of Education Andrei Bubnov, et al. Correspondents watching the parade noted two facts: 1) that the uniformed Russian army was noticeably better drilled, better equipped than it was a year ago; 2) that cartoons and effigies of the enemies of Communism carried at the end of the parade no longer represented foreign imperialists but Soviet domestic enemies, kulaks, food profiteers.