Beedle in Wonderland

One chill day in Moscow, U.S. Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith decided he wanted to go fishing. He drove his car out to the Moscow Sea (an artificial lake near the capital) without notifying his MVD guards, who shadowed him everywhere he went. He persuaded the head of a-small fishery to take him out on the lake in the only rowboat in sight. Smith assumed that the guards, who had of course followed him, would wait at the shore. But he had underestimated "the Oriental concept .of hospitality" which he encountered in Russia. Related Smith last week in My Three Years in Moscow, which is running serially in the New York Times and the Satevepost:

"In a few minutes we heard an enormous splashing, and I looked behind to see another small boat, obviously leaking badly, following us with my faithful escort. One was rowing the boat while the two others bailed steadily. They kept just far enough away to allow me casting distance, sitting over their ankles in water.

"I was about to take pity on them and go to shore when another rowboat, occupied by two Russian women, approached. The guards hailed the newly arrived boat, and after a brief but wordy exchange both boats rowed to the shore where they dispossessed the two women, expropriated their less leaky boat and resumed their post... I never saw more rugged souls."

The Boss. "Beedle," Ike Eisenhower's chief of staff during the war, went to Moscow as ambassador in March 1946, came home this year (and became commander of the U.S. First Army). In his account of his day-to-day life in Moscow, he gives the U.S. people a hard look through shrewd, unstarry Hoosier eyes at Joseph Stalin and the men in the Politburo.

Stalin, who will be 70 next month, is methodically husbanding his strength and Smith sees no reason why he should not continue in power for "a number of years." He talked to Stalin at length four times. "Met face to face, Stalin is not by any means the unattractive personality that some writers have depicted . . . While not tall, he is square and erect, giving the impression of great strength . . . [His] fine dark eyes . . . did not impress me either as 'gentle,' as one observer thought, or 'cold as steel,' as others have remarked, but they are alert, expressive and intelligent ... He seems at times actually benign. There is no question but that he can be brutally abrupt . . ."

Is Soviet Russia a one-man show? Says Smith: "[Stalin is not] an absolute dictator on the one hand or a prisoner of the Politburo on the other; his position, I would say, is more that of chairman of the board with the decisive vote. There doubtless are divisions on policy and cliques within the Politburo, but none of them are anti-Stalinist . . .

"When Stalin tells foreign statesmen or journalists that capitalism and Communism can co-exist peaceably in the future, he contradicts his own words, or is speaking in a limited sense . . ."

In his first interview with Stalin, Smith put the question bluntly: " 'How far is Russia going to go?' Looking directly at me, Stalin replied, 'We're not going much further.' " That was in 1946, before the Communists swallowed Czechoslovakia and most of China.

Concludes Smith: "[Stalin is] courageous but cautious; suspicious, revengeful and quick to anger, but coldly ruthless and pitilessly realistic; decisive and swift in the execution of his plans when the objective is clear, but patient, deceptive and Fabian in his tactics when the situation is obscure . . ."

The Heirs. Of Vyacheslav Molotov, still Stalin's heir apparent, Smith reports that when under pressure he stammers noticeably. When Mrs. Kasenkina, the Russian teacher, escaped from the Soviet consulate in New York (TIME, Aug 23, 1948), Molotov was "really flustered." Says Smith: "Like nearly all important Soviet officials, [he] is without redeeming minor vices. He has none of the human qualities of humor or sudden anger that make Vishinsky rather attractive . . . He is repellingly colorless, and it seems impossible for him to be really at ease in the presence of foreigners. . . Only once have I heard him laugh without constraint. . ."

Georgy Malenkov, who, since Smith left Moscow, seems to have hoisted himself to the No. 3 place in the U.S.S.R., "is flat and flabby-looking, with a round, expressionless face. Mentally, he is anything but flabby ... As Stalin's principal 'party man' he always appears in the now very much outmoded party 'uniform,' with drab-colored coat, buttoned up to the throat, with a turned-down collar."

Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov and the others in the Politburo, says Smith, "are, in every sense of the word, dedicated men . . . They represent the most effective form of authoritarian dictatorship, that is, dictatorship by committee. They are, without exception, intelligent, able, disciplined and indefatigable. I doubt that any statesmen in the world work half as hard . . ."

Molotov, Malenkov and MVD Boss Lavrenty Beria will be the key figures when Stalin dies, Smith believes. But he warns the U.S. against counting on a feud among Stalin's heirs. He feels sure that the dictatorship of the Communist Party is supreme, points out that for almost ten years, until very recently, there have been no major changes in the Politburo.

The People. Smith has another warning for the U.S.: Soviet propaganda succeeds inside Russia. "I cannot accept the picture some writers have given of seething resentment against the Communist regime," says he. "The vast majority of people now living in the Soviet Union, in my opinion, have no idea of personal liberty . . . Those Russians who did understand such things don't live there any more."

What every Soviet citizen fears most is the knock on the door by the MVD in the middle of the night. The nocturnal arrest, rather than the mumbo-jumbo of dialectical history, is the true symbol of Communist power. Writes General Smith: "A recurrent Moscow joke, told by Russians with a wry smile, describes the janitor of an apartment building walking through the halls at midnight knocking at the doors and calling out loudly at the same time, 'Don't be afraid comrades, it's only a fire.'"

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