RUSSIA REVISITED: The People Begin to Speak

Before he joined TIME, Philadelphia-born John Scott worked as a master welder at Magnitogorsk in the Urals, attended a Soviet engineering school, married a Russian mathematics teacher. In 1941, two weeks before the Nazi invasion, the Russians ejected Author-Journalist Scott (for reporting friction between the two countries). Last week, after winding up his first visit to Russia in 17 years, Scott wrote:

FOR ten days I walked and rode around Moscow from stem to stern, down into the Metro (there are now nearly 70 stations), out into the parks, up into the private apartments of old friends—engineers, professional people, several Russian journalists. There was no case when anyone I tried to see refused to see me. This is remarkable. Most of those I saw, including party members, were quite willing to talk about anything at all, including concentration camps, the secret police and other things which in prewar days were never even mentioned.

Foreigners, particularly diplomats and newsmen, are still under a good bit of surveillance, uniformed police in front of their houses, and tails on most embassy cars. But the tourists, and there were about 10,000 of them in the U.S.S.R. at the time, seemed free to do anything they wanted to, including standing in the lobby of the Moskva Hotel as one American girl did, waving a $20 bill until someone came up to her and bought it at 25 rubles per dollar. (The official rate is four to the dollar; tourists get ten at the bank.)

Personally, I made no attempt not to look like a foreigner and was approached a score of times on the street, often near the big hotels that all have uniformed militiamen standing outside them. Sometimes people just wanted to talk, sometimes to buy dollars. (I tried to find out what they wanted them for; all said they were buying them for “friends”—perhaps Soviet tourists, of whom hundreds are currently loose in groups in Europe.) Sometimes teen-agers wanted to exchange Soviet emblems, officers’ pips, even medals for chewing gum, foreign clothes, pens and dollars. In most cases, these people were not disturbed when I spoke to them in Russian.

First impression is this: the Soviet Union is still a shoddy, grim, rude place. Stores and public transportation are badly crowded; the new buildings are poor in quality, as is most clothing; service is slow even in the National, overlooking the Kremlin, which is Moscow’s best hotel; the faces on the street are unsmiling, preoccupied, severe.

On the other hand, things are vastly improved in many ways. Most important in human terms is that people are no longer scared to death. Second, they are getting enough to eat. Not that you would have any fun with the meals eaten by even upper-class Russians. But they have plenty of healthy food—bread, meat, vegetables, even fruits and delicacies at prices which people can afford. People are much better dressed. I saw not a single pair of the crude bast sandals, visible everywhere 20 years ago. The clothes chiefly lack elegance and charm, but in most cases they are sturdy. Housing, though still bad, is better than it was. Moscow’s 5,000,000 people mostly have elementary privacy, in Russian terms, i.e., not more than one family to a room.

In short, things are still grim compared to the West, but compared to Russia itself, they are better than they have ever been. And now that their elementary material wants are fairly well satisfied, many Russians are demanding improvement in other fields—they want more freedom. They want information, they want to travel abroad, they want the right to go to church if they choose and to discuss political matters without looking over their shoulders. They want to be told the truth about their government and its operations.

These desires are being satisfied more each year. I went to several churches on Sunday, and all were jammed. Outside the Baptist Church, a hundred or so people were standing in the sun, greeting each other, discussing the sermon—and other matters, including Lebanon and even Hungary—while a cop on the corner twirled his stick and whistled. I was told of, but did not see, leaflets which have appeared criticizing government policies. The Lubianka, the huge secret police building where in the ’30s the lights burned most of every night, now looks nearly deserted, and, indeed, people who should know said that after the Beria affair the police budget was cut to pieces.

My visit to Riga was interesting in this respect. There, the Russians complain that the Latvians are “discriminating against us.” The Latvian language is replacing Russian in many educational institutions and in some state organizations. Result: some Russians are leaving. In Estonia I was told the process is more noticeable; Estonians refuse to speak Russian and turn their backs on the Russians in stores. And the Russians are taking it.

Of course, the Soviet Union is still a dictatorship. But the people are freer now than they were last year, and many of them told me they expected that soon there would be opposition newspapers and groups. You did not find an opinion like that before the war.

Will the government be able to keep the population directed toward Communism? This is a major unanswered question. Ordinary Russians show signs of a to-hell-with-Communism, give-us-more-consumer-goods attitude that the government cannot ignore, and even of old-style Midwestern isolationist resentment against Soviet “giveaways” to China and India. But in any case, we must face this generalization: any changes in the Soviet Union within the next few years will be within the Soviet system and not against it. The Soviet people do not want to be liberated.