Stalin v. Cupid

"Goodbye, good luck and please remember our 15 wives," proclaimed the placard. Printed in Russian and held aloft at the London airport by five suppliant Britons, it left the 20 departing members of the Soviet good will mission to Britain as puzzled as the blizzard of questions they had faced at a press conference two days before. "The great interest that is being shown by the British press rather surprises us," said Vasily V. Kuznetsov, the mission's leader.

Ever since Russia's edict last month forbidding marriage between Russians and aliens, Britain's press and public alike had been indignant over the plight of 15 Russian women who had married British servicemen. Some were the wives of captains and sergeants. One was the wife of Brigadier Gordon Redvers Way, chief of the British military mission to Tiflis in 1942. After a three-day honeymoon in Tiflis, Way was ordered to Cairo, has not seen his wife since. Most of the wives were young and comely, and all were anxious to join their husbands. But the Soviet Government refused them exit visas.

Three weeks ago, Ernie Bevin appealed to Stalin himself to let the wives go. It would be "very difficult," said Stalin, to reverse a decree of the Supreme Soviet. "It is clear," wrote the thoughtful Manchester Guardian, "that he [Good-willer Kuznetsov] thought it a very trivial matter. He could hardly be more mistaken. The truth is that to the great majority of Englishmen this means a much simpler test of the virtues and vices of the Soviet system than all the five-year plans and statistics which have come out of Russia."

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