White Red City

Standing beside the Tomb of Lenin, Joseph Stalin used to watch thousands upon thousands of bright-cheeked Red soldiers, male & female, marching smartly past Moscow's Red Square on May Day. No Russian or foreigner who ever saw the Red Army on these occasions failed to be impressed by its might.

To see the Red Army in a real test of might, last week Joseph Stalin would have had to go 35 miles north of Leningrad. If he went to Leningrad, if he watched any of his bright-cheeked soldiers floundering through the snow on the Karelian Isthmus, no word of it leaked out: Leningrad is the only one of the world's ten largest cities without a foreign correspondent. But one thing was certain: that to celebrate its 22nd anniversary last week the Red Army did not take Viipuri. If Joseph Stalin was disappointed, that was nothing to the chagrin of his best friend, Andrei Zhdanov.

In Leningrad last week Joseph Stalin's best friend could hear the rumble of distant artillery. He could see long trains loaded with men and supplies departing for the front, returning trains unloading their wounded. In spite of an absence of blackouts and air-raid alarms, Leningrad was a city at war -- the only city in Russia where the Finnish war seemed real. For that war is not so much Russia's war as it is Leningrad's. Although Russia's army comes from as far south as the Caucasus and its material from the banks of the Volga, the direction of the campaign is entirely under the control of the Leningrad Military District, whose boss is Andrei Zhdanov.

Dear Friend No. 2. It is a Soviet tradition that the No. 2 Bolshevik shall run the No. 2 Russian city. The job used to be held by Stalin's "Dear Friend" Sergei Kirov, whose bumping-off in 1934 gave the world a new word: purge. To succeed Kirov, Stalin picked chubby little Andrei Alexandrovitch Zhdanov, who up to that time had been a fairly inconspicuous Soviet administrator. He had picked up the Order of Lenin for successfully organizing a motorcar industry in the Nizni-Novgorod district. By the time Kirov was shot, Andrei Zhdanov, 38, had become a member of the Party's Central Committee and he had the ear of Stalin. No sooner had Stalin made him Party secretary of Leningrad than he proved his importance by getting shot in the chest by a plotter.

Hitler-mustached Zhdanov admires German efficiency, German methods. As long ago as 1936 he made an impassioned speech before the All-Union Congress of the Soviets urging annexation of the Baltic States and Finland. Last summer it was Zhdanov who paved the way for agreement with Germany. As Chairman of the Parliamentary Commission for Foreign Affairs, he has an influence in foreign affairs greater than that of Molotov.

As Russia extends her hegemony around the Baltic and reaches back toward maritime power, Zhdanov gains in prestige. For Leningrad is Russia's No. 1 seaport--in area, the world's second largest--and headquarters of the Red Fleet. And if Russia's power spreads through Scandinavia to the Atlantic, Zhdanov will be the man who wields it.

Zhdanov's Bailiwick at present is a region of 55,500 square miles bordering on Estonia, Latvia and Finland. To the west it is a land of vast fields; to the east, of dense forests. Its principal crops, besides forests, are flax and fodder; its resources are peat, quartz and bauxite. It manufactures aluminum, cellulose, paper, fertilizers, glass and wood articles. It contains 7,000,000 people.

More than 3,000,000 of them live in Leningrad itself, where beats the pulse of all northwestern Russia. Into Leningrad funnel five railroads. Largest industrial centre of the U. S. S. R., Leningrad was its industrial kindergarten, where was built the first Russian tractor, first dynamo, first blooming mill; today it is the aristocrat of Russian manufacturing centres, specializing in finishing processes, in machine tools, chemical goods (including explosives), shipbuilding; in making watches, binoculars, electric bulbs, hosiery, shoes, rubber goods, electrical appliances, locomotives, tractors, motorcycles. In 1937 Leningrad produced 9,000,000,000 rubles ($1,800,000,000) worth of goods.

This was the plant that Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov sought to protect against aggression by the wild & woolly Finns. But Leningrad is worth far more to the rulers of Russia than its industrial plant. Strategically it is the gateway to & from Russia. And culturally it is the one heritage left from the rule of the Tsars. Although Soviet Russians are proletarians and Moscow is their proletarian capital, they are also, like all parvenus, snobs; and in Leningrad, though it is self-consciously proletarianized, they have carefully and religiously preserved all the monuments and landmarks of their oppressors.

Peter the Great built his European capital on islands and marshes at bargain-counter rates in human lives. The city grew in all directions from the wooden Admiralty, built in 1703. Later rulers drained the swamps, threw bridges across the Neva, laid out parks. In the mid-18th Century Rastrelli designed a series of baroque buildings, including the Winter Palace (scene of the 1905 massacre) and the Smolny Monastery, next door to the Smolny Institute (where Nikolai Lenin historically observed: "We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist orders"). Under Catherine II classicism replaced the baroque. Alexander I introduced "architectural landscapes" and the city took on the low-lying appearance it still has, with church towers and the slender, gilded spire of the new Admiralty pointing gracefully at the sky.

In the "white nights" of May, Leningrad is particularly beautiful, with the sky aglow from Arctic lights and the birch trees in the parks shining against the dark earth. Students study at their windows, needing no artificial light; sometimes they go out and stroll along the embankment behind the Winter Palace (now the Palace of Art), where, across the Neva, they can see the great bulk of the Peter and Paul Fortress, in which are buried many Tsars. Along the Prospect of the 25th of October (the Nevsky Prospect of Tolstoy's heroes' time) sparrows are thick in the trees. On this street is one of the world's largest libraries (5,000,000 volumes), one of 511 in Leningrad. It passes October Station, from which Bolsheviks used to leave for Siberia, and ends near the cemetery where lie the bones of Moussorgsky, Dostoevsky, Tschaikowsky and many another famed Russian artist.

Leningrad has 60 institutions of higher learning, 103 technical schools, 487 elementary and secondary schools (412,000 pupils), 25 theatres, 42 moving picture houses, 37 museums, 107 scientific research institutes, 89 hospitals, 262 dispensaries, 240 nurseries and 21 stadiums including the huge K. I. M. (Communist Youth International) stadium west of Vasilyevski Ostrov (island), Leningrad's Greenwich Village. Tsarist slums have been replaced by modern workers' houses, gutters by sewers, alleys by paved streets. In 1938 Leningrad spent 364,000,000 rubles ($72,800,000) on construction work alone. The city's total budget was 1,140,000,000 rubles ($228,000,000).

All this investment seemed safe last week to Comrade Zhdanov. If all went well, he may have told himself, Leningrad might become the capital of northern Europe. Last week the Marine War Museum in the Admiralty opened an exhibition depicting Russian naval history since Peter the Great, but Russia's naval history has never glowed too brightly. Comrade Zhdanov may just possibly have been thinking about a British fleet off Petsamo.

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