Plugging, Patching

Tall Dictator Josef Stalin recently sent his smallish, smart handyman Andrey Andreevich Andreev to plug and patch the biggest 1931 gap in Russia's Five Year Plan--the failure of Russian railways to haul their planned quotas (TIME, Jan. 4). Last week the new Commissar for Transport showed himself a chip off Stalin's block, plugged and patched ruthlessly right and left.

In Khabarovsk, Siberia, four railwaymen of the famed Trans-Siberia Railway were arrested for "gross criminal negligence," swiftly tried and sentenced to "the supreme measure of social defense--execution by shooting."

A fireman will die because he did not report the engineer drunk, a conductor because he was responsible for the conduct of the train crew, a stationmaster and train despatcher because they did not hold the train at the station but let it pass through and crash into another train. Among lives lost in the wreck was that of the drunken engineer.

From his Moscow desk Commissar Andreev ordered Red railwaymen throughout the Union to "stop writing uselessly long reports," announced that Red railway executives will hereafter devote at least one third of their time to outdoor railway work. He decreed that within five days 25% of all railway office workers must be transferred to "permanent manual field work": cleaning locomotives, sweeping platforms, greasing cars, working switches.

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