The Rover Boys in Moscow

All over the U.S. last week, editors read the Moscow traffic that came in over their A.P., U.P. and I.N.S. teletype machines, and wondered. Over the wires from the U.S.S.R.'s capital came dispatches giving the rosiest accounts of life in Russia that the editors had read in many a day. Moscow's "amazingly beautiful" subway, said one wide-eyed U.P. story, combines unmatched "public service, beauty and cultural design." There, were stories about Moscow's "well-dressed" crowds and "kids skipping rope." Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker thought the stories fitted the party line so well that it ran them without doctoring a sentence.

The stories were not written by Russian propagandists or by permanent correspondents in Moscow, who sometimes sound the same (see below). They were the handiwork of a group of U.S. radiomen and newsmen who had unexpectedly been allowed to enter Russia. Mostly editors and publishers of small-town dailies and weeklies, they were aptly dubbed "The Rover Boys in Moscow" by the New York Post. They wrote about Moscow as if they had never seen a big city.

A Toast to Ike. Moscow was their last stop on an eleven-country flying tour of Europe run by James L. Wick, board chairman of the Niles (Ohio) Daily Times (est. circ. 3,634), with interests in seven other small papers, and part owner of the travel bureau that arranged the trip. (Last year, on a similar junket, Wick's group could not get into Russia, but he made headlines nonetheless by cabling Stalin and asking whether the world was moving closer to war. Stalin's answer: No.) This time, already in London and homeward-bound, they suddenly got permission from the Russians to go to Moscow, obviously as part of the new peace campaign (see INTERNATIONAL). Publisher Wick, his wife and eight others hastily boarded a plane.

The Russians, all smiles, were ready for them. Over vodka and shashlik, at a dinner party given for the visiting Americans, one Communist editor rose and proposed a toast to "Mr. Eisenhower and the American people." Just as quickly, Publisher Wiek was on his feet, toasting "the health of Premier Georgy Malenkov." With Potemkin-like efficiency, the group was taken on carefully conducted tours through the subway, to a collective farm, to the new Moscow University building, and to a candy factory.

The editors sounded thoroughly amazed at these marvels. Wrote John H. Biddle. publisher of the Huntingdon (Pa.) Daily News: "The Red October chocolate and candy factory [produces] all kinds of candy, plus wrappers and cartons . . . One of the experts in the chocolate-mixing department . . . smilingly announced that she likes her job very much."

More Marvels. Next day, on a farm "typical ... of the Sovietization of agriculture," they stood dazzled at equipment standard on most big U.S. dairy farms. "Milking is done by a machine " said the U.P. story, "taking the milk in an overhead glass tube to a central point . . . The only familiar note: "We had a good laugh on Jim Wick when he slipped and landed right in a mudhole."

Many stay-at-home editors thought that judged by their fatuous findings, all of the traveling editors had fallen on their faces.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.