Foreign News: First Subway

Eleven months ago a U. S. visitor asked the Mayor of Moscow, Comrade Bulganin, “Would you like to send a friendly greeting of any sort to the Mayor of New York?”

Replied Comrade Bulganin, “Tell me about the subways of New York. We are going to build a subway here soon—the first in Russia.”*

Last week the biggest New York subway was in receivers’ hands (TIME, Sept. 5) and Moscovites read the first report by Mayor Bulganin on construction of their new subway. An electrical engineer, Mayor Bulganin spared no technical details, told at dry length what kind of motors will speed what kind of cars over what kind of rails with what consumption of kilowatts. “We are using the London type of deep-sunk tubes,” he stated. “They will radiate like spokes of a wheel from our Central Subway Station which is now partly finished. The first train should traverse the first spoke late in 1933.”

In the first six months of 1932 Mayor Bulganin’s civic government asphalted 350.000 yards of Moscow streets. Such statistics are prime news in Russia. Strictly speaking the “Mayor” is President of the Moscow Soviet and its Presidium is the civic government. Not a burly, two-fisted “Old Bolshevik,” Electrical Engineer Bulganin is small, studious, neatly dressed, a “Modern Bolshevik” much milder in type than Dictator Josef Stalin who used to blow up safes and Tsarist officials “in the name of the Revolution.”

Comrade Bulganin learned his machinist father’s trade and was working in a factory when the Revolution broke. Promptly he threw down his tools, enlisted in the new “Red Army,” fought through several campaigns against the “White Armies,” rose to middling military rank, middling popularity. When Russia’s civil war was over Comrade Bulganin’s prestige carried him to directorship of Moscow’s biggest electrical machinery factory. It did well. He received a Red order of merit, quietly became a power in the Moscow Soviet. He was elected its president—Mayor of Moscow—last year.

Typical of “Modern Bolshevism” is Mayor Bulganin’s recent appointment of Architect Shchusev as “Commandant of Tverskaja” (Moscow’s main street). Under the Commandant’s direction all buildings will be painted, starting at one end of the street and working down to the other. Not the occupants of the buildings but Street Commandant Shchusev will decide what color each building shall be painted, which shall be torn down, which repaired—all by the Municipality.

In Leningrad this system has already been applied to several streets. Last year buildings on both sides of the Nevski Prospect (No. 1 Tsarist boulevard) were painted. The former palace of Grand Duke Dmitri* was daubed brilliant red with glaring white trim. Leningrad’s central ticket office was repainted three times in different color schemes until the Soviet was satisfied that it is “right.” Civic gangs of plumbers and carpenters trailed after the painters, fixing people’s water faucets, floors, roofs at inconvenient times with maximum gusto.

* Russia’s first railway was built in 1837 under Nicholas I, “The Iron Tsar,” to connect St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) with his summer palace at “Tsar’s Village” (now “Children’s Village”) 14 mi. distant.

*Co-assassin with Prince Felix Youssoupov of Rasputin; brother of Marie, best-selling Grand Duchess (The Education of a Princess and A Princess in Exile).