The People Behind the Iron Curtain (1946)

1

The Pittsburgh Press (October 6, 1946)

Uncensored story of Russia’s people is told by editor

American penetrates ‘Iron Curtain,’ gets facts, photos in 4,000-mile trip

NEW YORK, Oct. 5 – A slim, soft-spoken American from the banks of the Wabash has come out of Russia with the first up-to-the-minute, down-to-earth story of the people behind that baffling barrier to world understanding which Winston Churchill called the “Iron Curtain.”

He is John Strohm, an experience world traveler and editor. As the result of a direct appeal to Joseph Stalin, he was permitted to travel 4,000 miles through the USSR, taking to whomever he pleased with no official guide or censor and taking pictures with four cameras as he went.

He talked to hundreds of workers in the streets, on the farms in the factories and in their homes. He didn’t interview a single Soviet big shot. He has no high-powered observations on international power politics. He does have a detailed highly significant story of Communism at work. His pictures will afford an interesting opportunity for study and comparison by Americans.

The Pittsburgh Press will, beginning tomorrow, under the title “The People Behind the Iron Curtain,” present these illustrated dispatches by special arrangement with NEA Service, Inc. They will appear exclusively in The Press in the Pittsburgh area, in six daily installments.

Took 1,000 pictures

Strohm carried four cameras, shot more than 1,000 pictures – until he ran out of film – and took the exposed film back out of Russia with no questions asked.

The only thing official Russia ever said wo Strohm about what he should write or should say was: “Naturally, we hope you just tell the truth.”

Strohm’s trip through Russia climaxed a reportorial journey through Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, France and England.

It was a writing trip he planned because of his conviction that the real hope of peace lies in understanding between the common peoples of the world – the little people who have no voice.

To make the trip, the 34-year-old president of the American Agricultural Editors’ Association resigned his job as managing editor of Prairie Farmer.

Heard nothing

Until he was almost ready to come home, it looked as if Strohm was not going to be able to get into Russia. His visa application had been forwarded to Moscow and was still there when he sailed for Europe in February.

As he worked his way through Europe, he checked at each Russian embassy and the answer was always the same – no authorization had been received.

U.S. press camp veterans in Berlin wished him luck, but pointed out it had taken six months for the New York Times, the Secretary of State and Ambassador Bedell Smith in Moscow to get the Times correspondent a visa.

Cable to Stalin

Just before he left for Demark and Holland en route home, he picked up a cable blank and sent the following message:

“Applied for visa in February to visit USSR because I want to acquaint Americans with accomplishments of Soviet agriculture and to further understanding between common peoples of two great nations. In this period of food crisis would appreciate being permitted to take story of heroic Soviet people to thirty million Americans. Thank you.”

He addressed the cable to “Prime Minister Stalin, Moscow, USSR.”

‘Come on in!’

Ten days later, while in The Hague, he got a call from Berlin: “Your Russian visa is here – when will you pick it up, please?”

In 48 hours, he boarded a Moscow-bound plane at the Russian military airport in Berlin. At the Moscow airfield, while he wondered how he was going to make the 25-mile trip into the city. two men and a woman insisted Strohm must be a trade union congress delegate. They drove him right out of the airport.

He had penetrated the “iron curtain” without so much as a baggage inspection.

The Ministry of Agriculture was expecting him – and told him, in essence, he could go wherever he wanted. The U.S. Embassy was expecting him – and placed at his disposal Philip Bender, Ambassador Smith’s interpreter.

Moscow accredits few correspondents for American newspapers and press associations. They are compelled to remain in Moscow most of the time, except for brief, chaperoned forays to selected points.

Contradicts President

After he had been in Russia a month, he discovered his name in the newspaper Pravda. It had been used by the Russian news agency, TASS, to comment on President Truman’s statement that American correspondents had been unable to get travel rights in Russia.

The explanation by TASS was, in effect, that the fact that a man named John Strohm, president of the American Agricultural Editors’ Association, was traveling through Russia “according to his desires” was “a sufficiently convincing denial to the… allegations made by Mr. Truman.”

As far as Strohm was concerned, TASS was correct. He had complete freedom to tell the story and take the pictures which will appear in The Press starting tomorrow.

2

The Pittsburgh Press (October 7, 1946)

The People Behind the Iron Curtain…
Average Russian wants peace with U.S., thankful for American food, machines

Present Communism not utopia; workers without shoes, bread
By John Strohm

This is one of a series of articles on “The People Behind the Iron Curtain,” based on an uncensored, unescorted tour of the USSR.

MOSCOW (Special) – The Russian people do not want war.

They want peace, a chance to improve their standard of living, an opportunity to clear the ruins of World War II and build homes, farms and industries for the future.

Those are my dominant impressions after an unparalleled opportunity to travel 4,000 miles through Byelorussia, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Moscow, without official guide or censor.

I do not know what Josef Stalin thinks or what Vyacheslav Molotov thinks but I do know what the Russian factory worker, farmer and common citizen is thinking and saying.

To the best of my knowledge no other newspaperman has been given as great a freedom to go where he pleased, talk with whom he pleased – and rarest of all, to take pictures of life and conditions behind the so-called Iron Curtain.

Appeals to Stalin

This privilege was granted to me only after I had cabled Stalin when six months of efforts to obtain a visa for Russia through regular channels had gained no yardage.

I appealed to Stalin to permit me, as a writer for American farm publications, to talk to the common people of Russia in hope of improving the understanding between our two peoples.

Ten days later, I had the visa.

I have finished my tour with no sterner injunction from official sources than the admonition of the Minister of Agriculture to “tell the truth.”

No official asked to censor my copy.

Barefoot farmers

Much of the territory I covered was in the former “bread basket” of Russia. They’re still spading – the fields barefooted in Byelorussia; they’re still hungry; they’re still living in the debris of the war.

They hate war. Numb, hungry and bleeding from the last conflict, they feel horror at the thought of going through it all again against a nation which many of them assures me earnestly they love.

“America gave us food which kept us from starving,” said a woman on the street in Moscow.

“America gave us the Studebaker trucks which helped win the war,” said a soldier in Stalingrad.

Other impressions which crowd to the fore in the Kaleidoscopic pattern of my travels by plane, jeep, train, auto and afoot include:

  • The Russian citizen knows much more about the U.S. than we have been led to expect, despite the limited reports on the outside world published in the controlled Russian press.

  • There is a genuine gratitude and appreciation not only for the assistance which the U.S. gave the Soviet Union to defeat the Germans but also for the UNRRA food shipments. In some cases, this food must be making the difference between life and widespread starvation in the two republics aided.

  • The people are amazed and baffled to read in their newspapers that the United States is plotting aggression against Russia and brandishing the atomic bomb offensively.

  • Communism, as practiced in Russia, is far from Utopia. In its present phase it features such boogies of U.S. labor leadership as the speed-up, incentive pay and back-breaking work days.

As I traveled through the Soviet Union the feeling grew that the Russian people – I am not talking now of the Soviet press or Soviet leaders – have a deep regard for America and things American.

The night before we left Stalingrad for Moscow, I had callers.

Four 20-year-old girls had come 20 miles from a collective farm, across the Volga to bring me a going-away gift – a basket each of tomatoes, cherries, apples, and cucumbers.

And they wanted to please ask me some questions about America:

Did we have collective farms in America? Did American women fight in the front lines like the Russian women? What did American boys and girls their age do for recreation? Did they have clubs? What sports did I play?

Vet pays to work

“What bureau do you work for?” I asked the disabled soldier who was shining my shoes as I stood on the sidewalk outside the Hotel Savoy in Moscow. (It was hard to get used to the idea of every dry-goods store, lemonade stand and movie being run by the government.)

“I work for myself,” was his surprising answer.

He said he pays 1,500 rubles to the government license inspector when he comes around every month. (That’s $300 a month at the official exchange for a license to operate a shoe-shine business on Moscow’s sidewalks.)

Even though he gets three to five rubles a shine (24 to 40 cents), he said, it keeps him hustling to pay the tax and earn enough additional to take care of his family.

Paid piecework

The Russians have incentives for jobs that American industrial experts never heard of. The industrial piecework system has been transposed completely to the farm.

For example, here’s how a state farm I visited pays the girl who takes care of the race horses: She gets 40 rubles a month for taking care of each mare and cleaning the stable. She gets 150 rubles each time a mare gets pregnant; 50 rubles if the mare has a live and healthy colt; 50 rubles if the colt lives one month; 50 rubles if it lives two months – and so on until each colt is five months old.

They have such an incentive system for every job from hauling manure to experimenting with perennial wheat.

The scientist who develops a new variety of grain, for instance, gets a flat royalty for every acre planted to it. He does very well financially.

The Russian concern today is not beefsteak and autos; it is bread and shoes. A pair of army shoes sells for $100 in the Moscow market. Farm workers go barefoot.

Harvest by hand

In the Ukraine, which claimed to be the most highly mechanized agricultural area in the world before the war, the most striking sight this summer was of women cutting the grain with sickles and cradles, bending over to bind the bundles by hand.

Not all that is due to war loss of combines and tractors, but a lot of it is. If they don’t have combines, they swing cradles and flails.

Just as in Byelorussia, when it came time for spring planting and they had neither tractors nor horses, they spaded half a million acres. Some of those feet pushing the spade into the earth were bare.

Women are doing 80 percent of the work on farms.

In Stalingrad, the gigantic job of clearing the rubble of this blasted city is being done largely by teenaged girls and women.

There are no steam shovels or bull-dozers; these girls patiently carry the stones away on wheel-barrows without wheels, a girl lifting each end of the load.

Rationing continues

I asked Minister of Agriculture Benedictov a question: “When the Soviet Union gets back to normal – oh, say 15 to 20 years from now – how much of the work on farms will then be done by women?”

“Only about 55 percent,” was his answer.

The Soviet Union has just harvested the biggest grain crop since the war started, but rationing will be continued at least until next year.

Basic rations are provided for all at a low price. Thus, everyone has a chance to eat, regardless of the money he earns.

If the worker wants to buy things not on his ration card, he can go to the commercial store or free market. There all he needs is cash. An egg costs 80 cents, a pound of butter $10, and the price tag on a skinny two-pound chicken is $20.

The average industrial worker who makes less than $35 a month doesn’t splurge on chicken.

Farmers eat relatively well. But even they are planting grain in the tiny plots back of their houses which ordinarily would be given over to vegetables or more intensive gardening. Why not grow potatoes, I asked a collective farmer?

“Because I want to be sure of having some bread for my family,” he answered.

I went to Moscow’s Russian Orthodox Church. I almost didn’t get in.

The Cathedral was jammed inside and out. People were even huddled under the windows to hear snatches of the mass and the beautiful music.

It was the same in the country. In a corner of every farm home is a religious ikon.

Teach diplomats?

In Minsk, I was invited to “a cup of tea” – that’s Russian for a banquet – by the foreign minister of Byelorussia, Kuzme V. Kiselov, whom I had met while reporting the United Nations Conference at San Francisco.

“When I was in San Francisco, I talked with many Americans,” he said. “I talked with business men. I talked with teachers and professional men. None of them wanted another war. They all said we could and must work together in peace.”

“Yes, Mr. Minister,” I replied, “and I have just taken a trip through Byelorussia. I talked with your scientists, with your farm people who are working with their hoes and sickles to produce the food you so badly need. They say the same thing. America and the Soviet Union must be friends.”

Kiselov nodded.

“Yes, I am sure that is the way they feel,” he said slowly. “So, it looks like our job is to educate the diplomats. Our diplomats are our main problem – they must be shown the road to peace.”

NEXT: Moscow; first look at an enigma.

3

The Pittsburgh Press (October 8, 1946)

The People Behind the Iron Curtain…
Soviet rationing on starvation level; meat controlled but cant be found

‘Free’ markets also operate – milk 80¢, quart; sugar $12, pound
By John Strohm

This is one of a series of articles on “The People Behind the Iron Curtain” based on an uncensored, unescorted tour of the USSR.

MOSCOW – I wrestled my luggage off the Russian military C-47 which had flown me down from Berlin and stood in the brown dust of the Moscow airport wondering how I would get into the city, 25 miles away.

I felt a little conspicuous with three cameras hanging around my neck and a fourth bulging my pocket. A dozen army officers who had flown with me were disappearing in the direction of the administration building.

Two men and a woman approached.

“Americanski?” one asked. I nodded.

“You trade union?”

“No,” I replied. “I’m a correspondent.”

The three went into a Russian language huddle. Then, beaming, the spokesman burst forth: “Come on, you be trade union. We take you to Moscow.”

They drove a car to the plane, piled me and my bags in, and drove off. Only then did I learn that they were official greeters for delegates to the World Trade Union conference being held in Moscow.

A guard at one of the gates wanted to ask a question or two, but our chauffeur imperiously pointed to “the trade union delegates” in the back seat, drove out of the airport and headed for Moscow.

Not always easy

The American correspondents whom I saw that evening were incredulous.

“I was at the airport four hours, while they went through my stuff,” said one.

“They even made me take the top off my perfume bottle,” said the wife of another.

“Shot pictures of the Moscow airport as you landed? You’re crazy,” declared a third.

“It just proves one thing,” said the first. “Russians are unpredictable. Just because Tuesday followed Monday this week, is no sign it will be the same next week – at least not in the Soviet Union.”

In many countries around the world, I’ve found the American dollar is almighty. But Russia’s not such a country. I found that out when I blithely had a pair of shoes half-soled the next day. The bill was $7.60, for imitation leather on $6 shoes.

Ice cream bar 50¢

The diplomatic rate of exchange makes a ruble worth about eight cents. The official rate for all other foreigners, makes a ruble worth 20 cents. Lucky for me that correspondents are considered as diplomats (for purposes of finances, that is). Otherwise, my half-soles would have cost $19.

I more cautiously picked up an ice cream bar from a street vendor. Six rubles. It doesn’t sound like much, until you get to the arithmetic. Then it adds up to half a dollar, or $1.20 if you’re not a diplomat.

I had planned to take a Russian friend from one of the other embassies “out” for dinner, until he gently pointed out that it might easily cost $30 or so per person.

“A bottle of beer, alone, is $2.25 in your money,” he said.

So instead, I went to his home for dinner. We stopped at a bread store and stood in line for an hour to get his bread ration. One look at his ration card and I was ashamed I had taken advantage of his Russian hospitality.

Bread makes up more than half of the Russian diet. As an office worker, he gets a little over a pound a day. Workers in industry get more.

None available

For the month, he gets two pounds of sugar, one and three-quarters pounds of fat, four and a half pounds of grits or macaroni, and four and eight-tenths pounds of fish or meat.

“Only the last two months my store hasn’t had any fat or meat,” he said.

He had given a railroad friend 100 rubles to get a pound of lard in the country or in one of the small villages he traveled through. “Anything to cook our potatoes with.” (Even if it does cost $8 a pound.)

Rations for his wife and little boy were much less – they are non-productive workers.

“You can’t live on that,” I protested.

He pointed out that he had a garden, and sometimes his wife found mushrooms and berries in the woods outside Moscow. “And the government encourages us to own our own cow or milk goat,” he said.

The free market or commercial store ekes out the meager rations, so we went to a commercial store where you need no ration books – just money. He bought one egg (for my breakfast, I was to learn later). It cost 90 cents.

“We can’t afford to buy much here,” he said, superfluously. Milk was 80 cents a quart. A five-cent chocolate bar was $2.50. Sugar cost $12 a pound. The store was crowded with purchasers, but purchases were few.

The average wage in the Soviet Union is less than 500 rubles a month – $40. A school teacher may get $32, a chauffeur, $80 a month.

“It’s been so long since we really had enough to eat,” observed my friend wistfully. “But Premier Stalin promised this spring that food rationing will be definitely lifted this year.” He brightened at the thought.

Not enough goods

It must have been a cruel disappointment when he heard the recent Kremlin announcement that rationing could not be lifted until sometime in 1947, and still more disappointing when the government tripled ration prices the other day.

“Why don’t you sell your overcoat?” my friend asked me. “You don’t want to carry that back home with you in this hot weather – not when you can get $150 for it here in Moscow.” (My $50 coat had seen a year of service.)

Such sales are legal.

“We don’t have enough consumer goods,” is the simple explanation of the manager of one of these commission stores where you can leave any garment to be sold for a small commission.

And so swap markets have sprung up in all cities and villages. Anyone who has anything to sell or swap is welcome.

You can buy weeds ground up to be used as tobacco, a bit of ribbon, a comb, old clothing. I saw a woman buy one shoe and then go around and try to find a mate for it. Not the mate, just a mate.

Like catalogue

Girls from the American Embassy draw straws to see who takes home the Sears Roebuck catalogue for the evening. They just want to look at “the things that everyone in America has.”

A girl took me to one of the exhibits where “samples of what the Moscow factories are making for the people” were on display.

We saw everything from motorcycles to radios, from furniture to toys.

But another Russian said to me later: “Show me a store where we can buy these things. Those exhibits are nothing but museums.”

That brings us to Communism, which Soviet officials say flatly they don’t have – yet. Yudin, one of the master-minds of political theory, says it this way:

The Soviet Union has Socialism whose slogan is: ‘From each according to his ability – to each according to his work.’ In other words, you get paid for you do. That’s why an unskilled worker may get $24 a month, while a scientist may get $700 a month, plus a car and a house.

“We are just working in the direction of Communism,” says Yudin. Under Communism, the slogan will be: ‘From each according to his ability – to each according to his needs’.” That, he points out, will require a vast stockpile of goods, enough cars, beefsteak, and refrigerators for everyone.

Then there’s the question of religion in Russia. I couldn’t get out of my mind the spectacle I had witnessed at the Moscow Cathedral.

I had barely been able to force my way inside, so tightly were the worshiping thousands packed together. They had stood for nearly three hours, some bare-footed, some pregnant, all of them hungrily drinking in the celebration of the mass.

Sees patriarch

So I went to see Patriarch Alexei, head of the Russian Church.

“Father,” I asked directly, “the people in America want to know – is there freedom of religion in Russia?”

His answer was equally direct and simple. “Yes, we have freedom of religion. Anytime a group of people want to open a new church, they apply to us and we help them organize. The government supplies lumber and materials for building new churches. The government has been very helpful.”

He went on to say there are now 23,000 churches open in the Soviet Union, that they have nearly 40,000 priests and have just established training of their priests.

The government has set up a bureau to maintain contact with the Church which has caused critics to accuse it of being a “kept” church.

On the way to the Patriarch’s house, we passed the place where the gigantic Palace of the Soviets is going to be erected. The Cathedral stood there before the Revolution.

“It was a case of tearing down the past to make way for the future,” one Russian explained to me.

The next day I made arrangements with Communist Party headquarters to visit a Pioneer camp.

The 600 youngsters in this camp were eight to 14 years old, children of Moscow subway workers, and members of the Pioneers, the youth organization sponsored by the Young Communist League.

They spend six weeks each summer in this camp. The sign over the mess hall reads: “Thanks to Comrade Stalin for Our Happy Youth!”

TOMORROW: Minsk – ruined city and an impoverished countryside.

4

The Pittsburgh Press (October 9, 1946)

The People Behind the Iron Curtain…
Russians eager to know about U.S.; even farm families friendly, curious

Forum about American life starts in plane
By John Strohm

This is one of a series of articles on “The People Behind the Iron Curtain” based on an uncensored, unescorted tour of the USSR.

MINSK, USSR – What does America mean to the average Russian? I got a few ideas while flying from Moscow to Minsk.

We’d been in the air an hour. The occasional scraps of idle conversation were lost in the drone of the motors. Some of the passengers dozed. Most of them just stared drearily ahead. I turned to Phil Bender, my interpreter.

“Let’s hand out a couple of ‘Americas.’”

It was almost electric, the way those passengers came to life when they opened the Russian-language magazine put out by the U.S. State Department, lavishly illustrated with color pictures of life in America.

What had been just another plane load of glum-faced Russians, quickly turned into a vigorous two-hour forum on American-Soviet relations, with a brain surgeon, the pilot, an airport engineer, two Red Army men, a girl art student, and a Warsaw Jew pitching questions at me.

The Jew, only member of his family to escape the Nazi gas chambers, had fled to safety in Russia.

He was a pianist. He found a story about George Gershwin in “America,” and promptly wanted to know why “Rhapsody in Blue” isn’t available in Russian music – it’s his favorite.

Better planes on way

The engineer, who was helping build the new Minsk airport, looked at some pictures of our luxury airliners and half apologized for the benches we were sitting on. He explained our plane was a converted army transport.

A soldier, his chest heavy with decorations, wanted to know how we treat immigrants from Germany and Poland and other countries. “Can they get out of your country again if they want out?” he asked.

“If they want out,” I replied. Later, I learned his parents had gone to America years ago, but he had lost track of them.

The other soldier spoke up: “Do you have passports inside your country?” This question was doubtless prompted by the fact all Russians must have a passport or “identity” document.

It is issued by the Department of Interior, the innocent-sounding bureau known more familiarly by its initials, NKVD.

Calls FDR friend

The engineer looked at President Truman’s picture on the cover of “America,” shook his head and said, “We lost our best friend when Roosevelt died.”

The pilot who had joined the group wanted to know how the U.S. stood on letting Jews go to Palestine.

The Polish Jew pitched in for the U.S. on that one, saying the United States was for it, but that Britain was opposed. He told the others that Einstein and LaGuardia were Jews (LaGuardia is of Jewish-Italian descent) and that many prominent Americans were Jews.

The soldier with the medals spoke up again. “You preach radical tolerance in America – why do you lynch Negroes?”

Admitting we had lynchings and gangsters, I said we weren’t proud of them, nor did I think any country could be proud of gangsterism and the use of force instead of law.

The girl changed the subject. “Is Robert Taylor making pictures again? Is he married?”

An older man spoke up for the first time, commenting that he had heard America was going soft towards the Germans. That would be a mistake, he believed.

I learned later he had found only two of his 21 relatives alive when the Red Army re-took Byelorussia. He had lost a wife, two boys and a daughter.

The doctor was returning after performing a delicate brain operation in Moscow.

Censorship query

The soldier with the medals spoke again. “When you return to America will you be under censorship for what you write?”

I shook my head.

“Won’t you have to get permission from anyone on what you write?” he persisted.

“No,” I replied. “In America, we write exactly as we please.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Then tell the people of America that we don’t want to go to war with them,” he said.

The scars left by the war are still the major factors in the Soviet Union today. The destruction of Minsk and Byelorussia is something you must see to believe.

What once was a city the size of Indianapolis is now acre after acre of rubble, dotted here and there with potato patches and dugout homes, with goats grazing where once children played.

But the city had been liberated two years ago, and it was still a mass of ruins: what about reconstruction?

One bright spot

A UNRRA official answered my question with another: “Just how would you go about clearing up the destruction? Remember, they don’t have a single steam shovel or bulldozer in this entire city. In one of our shipments, a jeep was on top of a car. There was no crane in the city to lift it off. A dozen men did the job.”

There is one bright spot in Minsk – the pretentious government building which stands in the midst of rubble like an oasis in a desert. The Germans had used it for headquarters, left its destruction to the last minute – a minute too long.

Partisans cut the wires attached to 35 tons of TNT in the basement and thus saved their beloved building.

Roads are not one of the Soviet Union’s stronger points. In visiting collective farms, we followed wandering wagon tracks, at times taking off across country to avoid the worst mudholes.

A collective farm chairman was a 25-year-old ex-soldier, his arm still in a sling.

Fifteen minutes after we had stopped, we were surrounded by the farm families, friendly and curious.

Small boys, their faces pitifully pinched, stood shyly in their quilted coats. They looked about eight; they turned out to be 12 or 13. Women with wooden rakes over their shoulders dropped by on their way from the hayfields.

And only the chairman wore shoes.

The chairman explained how the farmers were paid. They keep a record of the labor-days each person puts in on the farm during the year. Then they divide the produce of the farm among the workers, after making certain government payments.

Last year, for each labor-day earned, the collective farmer got 1.1 pounds of grain, 13.5 pounds of potatoes, and 20 kopecks (a fifth of a ruble).

Since the average worker earned 280 labor-days, each received a little over five bushels of grain, a little over a ton of potatoes, and about $4.50 for his season’s work.

In addition to the above “wages,” the farm family had the produce from the acre of land each is allocated for private use.

Home neat

“Fifty-six of our families own their own cows, most of them have a pig, a sheep or two, and four or five hens. Our farm permits each family to own one cow, a calf, a sow, 10 sheep, 10 beehives and as many chickens as they can keep.

“But expansion will take time,” the chairman explained.

One of the women invited me into her home. It was a simple log cabin, thatched with a rye straw roof which will shed water for 20 years.

The most striking thing in these homes is the stove – it’s a combination cook stove, hot water heater, and furnace.

Several pets of flowers and green plants gave the house with the hand-hewn floors and wooden walls a homey atmosphere. There were two shrines. In one corner were pictures of Lenin and Stalin, in another were the religious ikons.

It was a neatly-kept home, all the more remarkable when you remember that mother and daughter are the mainstays in the fields. Of the 180 workers on this farm, 140 are women.

We saw them putting up a new house next door – sort of a prefab job. Log cabins are built in the forests. Then, after the logs have been properly fitted together, they’re numbered, the house is taken down, and transported to its permanent site.

These people have a sense of humor. A group of visitors had looked over a collective farm where the machinery didn’t work very well.

Desperately looking for something to brag about to the visitors, the official who was guiding them turned to several mothers with babies in their arms. He remarked what a fine looking bunch of babies they were.

One of the women smiled. “That’s the one thing that hasn’t broken down around here,” she said.

Not enough land

These farms I visited had an average of only seven acres of cultivated land for each worker – 10 acres for each family. If that is typical of Byelorussia, there’s not enough land to provide a very high standard of living.

Vodka and champagne were on display at one end of the Minsk ration store, It’s mostly just display. There’s not much vodka drinking among the masses – a pint bottle sells for $4.80.

The other end of the store displays canned goods, practically all UNRRA goods from America.

The foreign minister of Byelorussia, one of the 16 Soviet Republics, quickly came to the point in my talk with him: “These people who call for a third war should be put in the crazy house immediately!”

He brought up the atomic bomb, and suggested the United States was trying to use it to scare people.

“And what would you suggest, Mr. Minister?” I asked him.

“People are bigger than the atomic bomb,” he replied.

TOMORROW: The Ukraine, where they harvest by hand and dare to talk back.