The Truth About America

Murphy: And the Russians are just as good as they were during wartime?

Smith: Just the same.

Murphy: Honestly, it's mean of them.

Smith: Why?

Murphy: Because if they were worse it wouldn't be so shameful for us to write such bad things about them.

Messrs. Smith and Murphy are characters in Konstantin Simonov's new play about the U.S., The Russian Question, which keeps up this kind of dialogue for three acts. As the play opened last week at Moscow's Lenin Komsomol Theater amid critical huzzahs, the big news was that the Soviet Government had chosen it as a deliberate device to form Russia's views of the U.S.

The Russian Question was being built up like no other play in Soviet history. Months before the curtain rose, the Soviet press had decreed it a smash hit; it will be produced in more than 500 theaters; it will be made into a movie; and to all the millions of Russians who will see it, it is being advertised by the Soviet radio as the definitive answer to such questions as: "What does America want? What kind of a person is the average American?"

The play's average American hero is Smith, a newspaperman. The average American villain is his employer, a publisher named Charles MacPherson, who is a mixed incarnation of Hearst, McCormick and Rasputin. He sends little Harry Smith to Moscow with orders to write a book on ten reasons why the Russians want war. However, relates Hero Smith: "In Russia I became ashamed of myself--of all us people who dish up poison to Americans with their breakfast every morning." Result: Smith returns with a book on ten reasons why the Russians don't want war, and is promptly fired. On top of that, his pretty wife (played by Valentina Serova, Playwright Simonov's wife) prepares to leave him in a climactic scene (see cut) and he is dispossessed. But in a concluding soliloquy, Smith reassures the audience--he will not hang himself. His honesty unsullied, he will start life all over again, fighting for a better America. Whether or not he takes the subway straight down to Union Square is left to the audience's imagination.

Liquor in the Jukebox. Konstantin ("a playwright must be a politician") Simonov made his source studies when he toured the U.S. last year under the auspices of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.* He brought back a strange picture. According to the play, the Average U.S. Newsman drinks a glass of whiskey, straight, about every two minutes, habitually refers to himself as a pig, and talks of little else except money, being ridden by what Pravda, in a playful mood, recently called "dollarium tremens." In the newsmen's bar of Act I, even the coat hooks are gilded, and the jukebox--in magnificent synthesis of American degeneracy--contains not only jungle jazz but liquor. Said one real U.S. newsman who saw the play: "There are only two convincing characters in it--a couple of furniture movers."

But Russia accepted it all as a true picture of contemporary U.S. life. A Russian girl went to the opening with U.S. Correspondent Newbold Noyes Jr. (whose grandfather--no Rasputin--is president of the Washington Evening Star Newspaper Co. and former president of the Associated Press). She regarded Noyes with "deeper and deeper horror as the evening wore on," finally declared: "Mr. Simonov would not write it if this were not the truth. Here it is not as it is in your country. Here one must be able to prove what one says." Declared the Moscow News: "Simonov's play is really an attack on American illness ... it is nothing but a Wassermann test."

* Currently Simonov is on another "good will" mission in Britain. Explained he last week: "Russia is like a front line, one sector of which is literature."

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