Bull's-Eye

To illustrate a story on Stalin's death last week, the New York Times printed a photo of a solemn-faced Moscow crowd. Their mood seemed to fit the prose of the Times's Moscow Correspondent Harrison Salisbury: "One had the feeling that here were persons who had suffered a heavy and severe blow."

Actually, the editors had dug out an old Sovfoto picture taken back in 1937, when Joseph Stalin was busily purging his Old Bolshevik pals and grinding out propaganda that they were traitors who deserved to be shot. One sharp-eyed Times reader, Editor, Author and ex-Communist Max Eastman, who reads Russian, spotted something the Times editors had missed on a propaganda poster raised above the crowd. Wrote Eastman to the Times: the Salisbury story gave "the impression of an entire nation orphaned and in deep mourning. Perhaps it would help toward an understanding of the deeper state of mind of that nation if you would translate the Russian word so plainly visible . . . above the heads . . . of the crowd . . . The [picture] caption reads: 'The People: Great masses are at Malenkov's disposal for peace or war.' The word on the poster is 'rasstreliat!' which means 'execute by shooting.' "

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