Ninety & Nine

In a draughty Moscow public dining hall a group of 99 U. S. tourists licked up grey beluga caviar last week, wryly gulped throat-scorching vodka. A band struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner." The tourists, clearing their throats, joined in the chorus. "It was the first time," opined the Associated Press, "that 'The Star-Spangled Banner' had been played in Moscow since the War." The day was the eleventh anniversary of the assassination by Soviet executors of Tsar Nicholas II.

Among the 99 were Albert Ottinger, defeated Republican candidate for New York's governorship; Editor Oswald Garrison Villard of the pinko-liberal U. S. Nation; Norman C. Chambers, famed pneumatic toolman; Miss Rosemary Bauer, Chicago debutante, Liquid Carbonic heiress; Mrs. Mabel S. Ingalls, Manhattan socialite, niece of John Pierpont Morgan.

From the Polish border the tourists had come in a special train of mahogany-trimmed sleeping cars complete with electric fans and shower baths, relics of Imperial Russia. Impressed with the attentions of the Russian conductor, Heiress Bauer-offered him a small gratuity.

"No, many thanks, kind lady," said the punctilious Communist. "Tipping is officially banned in Russia as a bourgeois institution, degrading to workers."

The dinner which the 99 attended in Moscow was tendered them by the Soviet Department for Western Trade. Pursuant to a Soviet request "to kindly leave behind furbelows, top hats, canes and other vanities that might strike a bourgeois note in the communist paradise," the 99 tourists attended in sack suits, travelling dresses. When the star-spangled strains had subsided, Comrade Poliayukov, president of the Russian-American Trading Corporation, rose beaming at the head of the speaker's table and boomed: "Welcome to Soviet Russia. While you are here you are invited to partake of as much vodka and caviar as you like!"

Answered Alex Gumberg of the Chase National Bank: "I am sure that this trip will reveal to all participants business possibilities that they never before anticipated."

Although it is possible to travel well in almost any part of Europe for $10 a day, and sumptuously for $20, the Soviet authorities are abstracting $99,000 from their 99 guests for a 30-day tour of Red Russia--$33.33 per tourist per day.