Babushka & Ballerinas

For seven months the people lived in the woods. They ate berries and huddled against the trees for shelter. Hundreds died of starvation. Thousands of others lived, bags of skin and bones and anger.

Last week the peasants trekked back to what was left of their homes and fields in the recaptured regions east of Rzhev. On their backs they carried children too weak to walk or hold up their heads. A soldier, giving bread to a weeping, toothless, grey-haired woman, asked: "What's wrong, Babushka [Grandmother]?" The fields were tangled with tall, unmown yellow grass; meadows were snarled with burdock and thistle. The few remaining houses were stripped of logs and furniture. German soldiers had taken the wheels off baby buggies and used the prams for easy chairs; they had put their own pictures in Russian picture frames.

The peasants yanked the German pictures out of their frames. They rested at night in damaged German automobiles and trucks. On their first day "home" they strung lines between the trucks and hung out washing to dry. Life went on. It went on throughout all the vast provinces of Russia. The hour had come when the Russian people, their instincts sharpened by grinding centuries of oppression, famine and revolution, remembered the first law--survival.

Fight. Strained, anxious, the Russians still held their morale high. A Soviet writer explained: "There is a point in all Russians beyond which they seem to become oblivious of pain and fatigue. Up to that point, they are stolid and slower to react than most Europeans. Beyond it, they perform feats of endurance far beyond the usual human measure." To survive, the Russians called for feats of endurance from their army and for feats of performance from the Russian workers.

City children were drafted for farm work. Komsomol boys & girls mobilized for tree cutting to replenish the lost coal resources in the Don. Peat and refuse were burned in furnaces. The scythe and sickle reappeared in grainfields. Horses (once-scorned symbols of kulak individualism) replaced tractors. A trade-union investigator was acclaimed a national hero when he found enough rusting scrap metal to make "450 light and medium tanks."

Moscow realized that one of the grimmest winters in grim Russian history was drawing near. Yet New York Timesman Ralph Parker found "little brooding or despondency," even in homes struck by war casualties. The common experience of air raids, battles, occupation and flight drew the people together. As war's sharp elbow kept nudging their ribs, the Russians snatched what pleasures they could.

Fun. Robust young women in drab auxiliary service uniforms walked arm in arm with young soldiers whose tunics were splashed with large and brilliant enameled medals. In the Park of Culture and Rest, a melange of uplift, Coney Island and sylvan charm, family groups sat quietly under the lime trees on rest days. At the ballet Mmes. Lepeshinskaya and Cherkasova fluttered back on their points time after time for encores. Reciters read Pushkin's poetry to the crowded halls. The Red Army chorus sang to packed theaters. Factory girls and soldiers held parties and waltzed swiftly to the tootlings of brass bands. A new play, Russian People, by the war poet, Constantino Simenov, was in rehearsal in hundreds of Soviet theaters. Soviet motion-picture Director Alexander Dovzhenko said that all Russian newsreels purposely showed "the visual aspect of war, completely and unflinchingly" (in contrast to U.S. official squeamishness about the facts of war and death).

Fighting, working, making love, hanging out their clothes to dry, the Russians carried on. It was all they could do except hope. And last week that hope grew dimmer. No longer did the Government send leaflets to the troops reading: "Hold on, help will come soon." Having lost, by unofficial estimate, about 5,000,000 dead or wounded, the Russians were in no mood to sympathize with Dieppe Commando raid losses. Their Ukraine breadbasket was being trampled by hordes of Germans. Germans stood deep in the Caucasus. They spread over the entire, scorched valley of the Don. Bitterness grew at the lack of a second front.

Frustration. Reviewing the political, military and strategic aspects of World War II's third anniversary, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda said: "There must be no fourth anniversary." In the wake of Winston Churchill's flying visit there had been no assurance of a second front. Recalling June 11th's Russo-British-U.S. communiques* after the London and Washington conferences, the Russians felt that a second front had been promised for 1942. Where the people a month ago asked "when," they now wondered "if."

*A promise or major diplomatic blunder was in the wording: "Full understanding was reached . . . with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942."

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