Russia Re-Viewed

In five years as a Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, Harrison Salisbury has worked under a double handicap. In Moscow Russian censors never passed a word of his copy that did not fit the Communist line; in New York the Times usually ran Salisbury's dispatches with no warning that the stories had been passed by the world's most ironhanded censorship. As a result, his reports often read more like Red propaganda than accounts of what was really going on inside Russia. Salisbury himself was even accused of being pro-Soviet or a fellow traveler.

Last week, back in Manhattan at his own request for reassignment to the Times's city staff, Salisbury was able to answer his critics by writing "for the first time . . without the restrictions of censorship or the fear of it." His 14-part series was not only a well-written, fresh, firsthand report on Russian Communism. It also vividly demonstrated how misleading many of his censored Times stories were. (Wailed Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker: "Why did Salisbury write one thing from Moscow and the opposite from New York?") Explained Salisbury: "[This is] the real story, not the emasculated one that was all that fearful censors permitted correspondents to cable."

Wit & Charm. Since Stalin's death, wrote Salisbury, Communist Russia has undergone a complete "new look" as drastic as any change in its whole history. In the face of domestic turmoil the new leaders of Russia have abandoned "Stalin's bludgeon for more graceful tactics." Russia is now ruled not by a single dictator but by a group or junta. In comparison to Stalin ("Georgian suspicions, a mountaineer's narrow hatreds . . . the midnight habits of a proscribed revolutionary, the wolflike morals of a hunted bank robber") Salisbury found the junta composed of an outwardly pleasant bunch of men who thus, as a Western diplomat said, "are more dangerous than Stalin."

The junta consists of Premier Georgy Malenkov ("full of old-fashioned grace"), Nikita Khrushchev ("hail fellow well met"), Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov ("quiet, patient and reasonable"), Lazar Kaganovich ("likes his liquor"), N. A. Bulganin ("handsome and witty"), A. I. Mikoyan ("probably the sharpest and cleverest of all"). All are about the same height (5 ft. 4 in.), and all have the common secondary goal of convincing their own people and the West that the "Stalin terror" is over. But Salisbury emphasizes that the change is only on the surface; their primary goal remains the same: worldwide Communist dictatorship.

To acquire power, said Salisbury, the junta may actually have murdered Stalin; everything points to it. Just before Stalin's death, he was preparing for the bloodiest purge in Soviet history. He had already touched off a widespread campaign of violent anti-Semitism with the "doctors' plot." Many longtime party workers had mysteriously disappeared. Molotov's friends and even his wife had been banished to Siberia. "There was not a man in . . . the Politburo who could not feel the hot breath of the purge on his neck . . . Every man in the inner circle was threatened . . . [If] Stalin just happened to be struck down by a ruptured artery in his brain on March 2, it must be recorded as one of the most fortuitous occurrences in history. It saved the lives of some thousands of Russians and . . . it almost certainly spared the lives of the little group of men who stood closest to Stalin."

With Stalin dead, the "little group" was threatened by only one other man: MVD Chief Lavrenty Beria. For 78 hours Beria "held Russia in the hollow of his pudgy hand. [He] might have proclaimed himself dictator." All communications were cut off between Moscow and the world outside as soon as Stalin's death was announced. Beria ordered thousands of his armed MVD men to throw an "iron collar around Moscow's heart." The secret police walled off the city in concentric circles, using their trucks as barriers. Even government leaders who wanted to get in and out of the Kremlin had to get Beria's permission. "[From] the moment Beria sealed off the Kremlin," wrote Salisbury, "he signed his own death warrant." His weakness, says Salisbury, was that "he was not strong enough to rule. But he was too dangerous to any other ruler . . . too big for the triumvirate but not big enough to be dictator."

The Old Look. As the first step in creating a new look in domestic affairs, the junta set to work to erase the memory of Stalin. He had been in his grave barely ten days when his name disappeared from Pravda entirely. (In a single day before, it had sometimes appeared 125 times on Page One alone.) "Since the Kremlin had become synonymous with Stalin," the new leaders of Russia moved their residences out of the fortress headquarters. In domestic affairs they stepped up production of consumer goods (e.g., aluminum pots and pans, cotton prints), freed from political prisons some of Stalin's bitterest enemies, discontinued the Stalin prizes for literature, science and the arts, did away with night work in factory and government offices.

But Salisbury got an eyewitness view of how little Russia has actually changed in a 12,000-mile trip that he made through the Soviet North and eastern Siberia. "It was," says Salisbury, "probably the most extensive survey of this . . . region by an American since the 1880s." That part of Russia, said he, is "an empire-within-an-empire, the slave state of prison labor and forced-residence workers" that extends thousands of miles and is ruled by the MVD. "All life in those regions is incredibly harsh and grim." Salisbury saw hundreds of labor gangs of men and women going blankly about their jobs under the eyes of armed MVD agents. Almost all the buildings in the area are put up by slave-labor construction gangs, but the difference between the working conditions of "free" and slave labor in Siberia is negligible. Salisbury also saw the infamous political prison outside Yakutsk, which Henry Wallace once described in glowing terms after a carefully "conducted" tour. Wallace did not know, said Salisbury, that his guide was the Siberian MVD chief. (Wallace later manfully apologized for his mistaken report.)

Salisbury's grim description of Russian forced labor around Yakutsk was all the more startling in light of a "Picture Report on Siberia'' that ran in the Times barely three months ago, when Salisbury was still in Russia. "The correspondent," said the text accompanying the pictures, "was particularly impressed by the city's cultural institutions" and "excellent" schools. The captions also mentioned the "well-carpentered" houses, city library, and a nursery "somewhat comparable to a U.S. nursery." Nowhere did the picture story mention that the area Salisbury was describing was in the heartland of what he now calls a "horrible stain on the face of the Russian soil and an indictment of the Russian conscience."

Atomic Confidence. From what he has seen since Stalin's death, Salisbury is convinced that no "era of sweetness and light has suddenly descended upon Communist Russia . . . What is new . . . is that Russia has passed into the hands of a group of men who are displaying striking flexibility and adaptability in their handling of domestic and foreign problems." They also, he says, have "a large measure of confidence" as a result of "possession of the hydrogen and atomic fission bombs, a fine fleet of jet aircraft [and] industry to match paces with the U.S." In foreign policy they are determined to convince the world that Russia "is now ruled by a group of 'reasonable men.'" Many Moscow diplomats, said he, "believe that American policy is suffering severely from a failure or an inability to adjust realistically to Moscow's new look."

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