Triumph of Transport

How Dictator Stalin gets things done, occasionally spurring his subordinates to perform the flatly impossible, appeared last week when Commissar for Transport Lazar Kaganovich announced 13,423,000 freight car loadings for the first seven months of 1935, whereas experts had considered it impossible for him to fulfill the goal of 13,356,000 loadings set by Comrade Stalin.

When Comrade Kaganovich, hardest-boiled protege of the hard-boiled Dictator, was appointed Commissar for Transport, the most broken-down part of Russia's economic structure was her railways. For years Comrade Stalin had been having railwaymen shot after every wreck, ignoring their pleas that they desperately needed new equipment.

As a crony of Stalin, Kaganovich has lately been winning his boss around to buying some Russian railway equipment. Meanwhile, however, he had to perform the impossible to keep Stalin's favor, had to load more Russian freight cars than could be loaded--unless. This "unless" was Comrade Kaganovich's inspiration, his stroke of Bolshevik genius. Seeing that freight car loadings could not be increased unless passenger service, already inadequate, was ruthlessly curtailed, the Commissar for Transport has been busy reducing the number of Russian passenger trains, cutting out sleeping cars except those used by foreign tourists, slashing the number of tickets stationmasters are permitted to sell for each train, and discouraging Russians by every means from travel.

Since every Soviet citizen tries to get away from home and down to the Russian Riviera during vacation, all lodgings and food in that favorite area have been sharply upped in price this summer by the State to help Transport's Commissar discourage human transport and spur freight. Should Kaganovich ever cease to be Stalin's pet, Russians agreed last week, he can fairly be made the star defendant in a Bolshevik "Propaganda Trial" to discover what "capitalist hireling" sabotaged the entire passenger transport service of the Soviet Union.

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