Old Bolshevik & Big-Shots

Just about the most promising American Communist who has made good in the Soviet Union is famed Stepan Semenovich Dybets. After doughty apprenticeship in the I. W. W. he was called from a Hoboken dockyard to Russia in the early days of the revolution, devoted himself tirelessly to instructing comrades in "American technique." Soon he became a Soviet citizen, presently returned to tour U. S. industrial centres and buy, for the U. S. S. R. a total of more than $30,000,000 worth of automotive machinery, plans, parts, cars and tractors. Today the main streets of Moscow are just beginning to present a traffic problem, thanks to several thousand little cars closely resembling Ford sedans, all Soviet manufactured under the management of Old Bolshevik Dybets--kicked last week out of his job as Director of the All-Union Motor Car and Tractor Administration.

Although this Administration has been lagging behind the Plan, Old Bolshevik Dybets recently made supreme and successful efforts to raise production at Russia's largest motor works, the Molotov Plant at Gorky. It is now nearly up to planned production, is turning out daily 400 trucks and 82 little sedans of 4-cylinder Ford type. But while this substantial success at the Molotov Plant may please and flatter Soviet Premier Molotov, for whom the factory was named, Soviet Dictator Stalin has been anything but pleased by such results as Old Bolshevik Dybets has been able to achieve at the Stalin Plant in Moscow. This makes not stubby little 4-cylinder sedans for small-shots of the Communist Party but huge, sleek 8-cylinder cars for bigshots. According to the Plan, the Stalin Plant ought to turn out 24 limousines for bigshots per day, is turning out only six. Its motor truck division is doing pretty well, producing 205 heavy-duty trucks per day (the plan calls for 225), but doughty Old Bolshevik Dybets has been unable to fill the bigshots' demands for Soviet luxury cars and last week he was fired with such abruptness that no successor was announced, and the All-Union Motor Car and Tractor Administration was at latest reports without a head.

Motoring procedure in Moscow is for small-shots to obey the traffic lights. A big-shot will occasionally stop for a red light, usually goes through it at about 20 miles per hour, while small-shots who have the green light with them jam on their brakes. A bigger-shot, his 8-cylinder car followed by a 4-cylinder containing five secret police in caps and leather overcoats, takes the red lights at about 40 miles per hour, horn screeching as he nears the intersection.

J. Stalin, as becomes the Biggest Shot, travels between his Kremlin office and suburban home over streets and roads on which 24 hours per day no car is permitted to park or make a U-turn, not even in the country after Moscow has been left behind. The Dictator's motorcade consists always of three cars, generally enclosed 12-cylinder Hispano-Suizas. These cost in France, where they are made, as high as 250,000 francs ($7,700) for each chassis alone, rank among Europe's fastest cars. In Stalin's case, the tonneau windows of the three Hispanos are fitted on each side with blue glass, concealing the occupants and making it a guess in which car is the Dictator. There is no rear window and the construction suggests that a shot fired after one of these cars would simply bounce off.

To see J. Stalin go home, Russians have only to stroll about the Red Square almost any evening between 10 p. m. and midnight. As the Kremlin gate opens the three Hispanos, already traveling fast, enter the Square and before they have crossed it are doing well over 50. They speed out in the Arbat, then speed out the new military highway, turn off right and climb a twisty macadam road through dense woods to the estate of onetime Prince Galitsin.

Approaching this estate by car, Stalin glimpses the high, ornate red brick walls and arched brick gate (see cut). Buried deep in the woods is the Galitsin Palace, where healthy bouncing Georgian relatives of Russia's Dictator make his home a restful place of relaxation amid strong garlic cooking smells.

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