Visitor from Moscow

Another Russian had been taking a good close look at the U.S. But Tamara Chernashova, unlike her more famous and less candid countryman, Journalist Ilya Ehrenburg (TIME, July 8), had no ax to grind.

Tamara is the pretty, 24-year-old wife of plump, jovial Eddy Gilmore, the A.P.'s Moscow Bureau chief, now on leave in the U.S. It took a cable from Wendell Willkie to Joseph Stalin to make their marriage possible. Tamara Chernashova was a dancer in Moscow's famous ballet until some bureaucrat transferred her so that she would not see too much of the American reporter. (Their two-year-old daughter is named Victoria Wendell.)

Last week, nearing the end of her first eye-opening trip outside Russia. Tamara dipped carefully into her small stock of English words, came up with: "American life is surrounded by washing machines but there is more underneath." Like Ilya Ehrenburg, she had spent a large part of her time in the South (Gilmore's home is in Selma, Ala.). She was astonished at the friendliness of average people. "They send you flowers and cake and never say who it is from." At Maxwell Field, Alabama, she had an experience that amazed her: the commanding general conducted her all over the air base. In Russia it just couldn't happen to a stranger, let alone a foreigner. Said she: "General, aren't you afraid I might be a Russian spy?"

Tamara wonders at the easy lot of U.S. women ("in Russia they work like men"), admires endlessly what seems to her the luxury of average American homes. There is far more to America than she had ever heard about in Russia, and more to Russian life than one reads about here. "People here think we have a terrible life in Russia. We have a terrible life and a wonderful life, too."

Most of all she had been impressed by Americans' free talk with no worry about who might be listening. It was something new to hear Government officials criticized by ordinary individuals, to go from city to city over huge distances without being stopped for passes and answering endless questions. American talk of food and goods shortages struck her as some kind of elaborate joke. She was buying now for Moscow, everything from a radio-phonograph to progressively larger-size clothes for the baby.

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