MOSCOW FOR THE TOURIST

THE tourist who decides for Moscow next year will risk his life, not in the dark cells of the Lubianka prison below Dzerzhinsky Square, but in the wildly undisciplined traffic above. Moscow's streets are full of big, fast automobiles, all driven apparently by Sturmovik pilots intent on dive-bombing pedestrians. Or, as a recent visitor put it: "Dodging in and out of lanes, with nary a signal and with wild shouts of profanity at other cars, the Russian driver seems to be recapturing the elation felt by the Cossack of old when he swooped down from the steppes to carve up a few Persians."

If there are traffic regulations, neither cops nor drivers heed them, nor do the pedestrians, who jaywalk and ignore traffic lights with grim fatalism. There is an incessant blowing of horns, but since all the horns sound alike (apparently having been made in the same factory), the result is a constant and unidentifiable shriek, except for horns on the cars of commissars which have a slightly varied pitch, at the first murmur of which the cops switch the manually operated traffic lights to green. Says U.S. Travel Expert John Stanton, just back from surveying the possibility of Cook's touring through Russia: "In Moscow I always hesitated before starting across a street. They are so wide you are vulnerable for so long."

A Sense of Power. If the amber lights now being shown by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. do not change to red in coming months, travel to Moscow should gain, travel experts estimate, by several hundred Americans next year. Russia, too, is sending forth travelers, but they are men with a mission, whether political, like Bulganin and Khrushchev in India (see FOREIGN NEWS), or cultural, like Violinist David Oistrakh (see Music). Not for them the satisfaction of idle interests.

To the wandering American. Moscow, long hidden by the Iron Curtain, a source of conspiracy, strange dogmas and menacing dangers, is a legitimate object of U.S. curiosity. With some 5.000.000 people within its city limits and another 2,000.000 in surrounding suburbia, it is probably the third-largest city in the world.

Western visitors will find their advent well prepared for. In the past seven years, a feverish activity has seized Moscow: broad new thoroughfares have been dynamited through the old quarters, big buildings have been lifted and put down in new alignments, broad plazas and parks have been created. Eight skyscrapers, 20 to 38 stories high, have sprung up like corn, and more than a million trees have been planted.

The visitor will find fountains playing in exhibition grounds and the old churches, e.g., St. Basil's, brilliantly painted (see cuts). Open to him will be scores of theaters and concert halls and a dozen museums and art galleries. He will note that Moscow is one of the cleanest cities he has ever set foot in. The rush of people and automobiles at all hours will leave him in no doubt that Moscow is the headquarters of 57 huge state commissariats, the government center of 16 nations, the imperial seat of some ten subjugated countries. Wrote TIME Correspondent James Bell after a recent visit: "Moscow gives the impression of bursting at the seams. It's packed, bustling and full of life . . . Then you realize that these people represent enormous power, and it's frightening." A sense of their power is what the Russians have to sell in Moscow: they would like everybody to be a little scared.

The Red Curtain. The selling starts as the visitor steps aboard the "international" sleeping car leaving Leningrad at 11:55 Pm. and finds himself in a red plush and mahogany-paneled private compartment larger than in a U.S. Pullman. At 9:45 next morning in Moscow, he steps out into a station built of marble and granite blocks, as huge as the exhibition hall of a World's Fair.

From the moment he arrives he is the charge of Intourist. the Soviet travel organization, which has two categories of tourist: De Luxe ($30 a day) and Superior A ($21 a day). An English-speaking official will guide him to one of three hotels, the National, the eleven-story Moskva, or the 55-year-old Metropole, where he will turn in his passport, but will not have to sign a register. De Luxe or Superior, he will probably find himself in a lofty-ceilinged suite jammed with bric-a-brac and heavy furniture (in some suites, grand pianos) after the style of a plush Manhattan hotel circa 1900.

Hot water is likely to be scarce at certain hours (cold shaving before 8 a.m.), but laundry will be prompt, and even his socks will be pressed. As he enters his suite at the National (or the Moskva), the guide will draw the heavy red curtains at the window, and he will see. just across the way. the tall red brick crenelated walls of the Kremlin. Says much-traveled John Stanton: "It is quite a feeling."

What to See. The Kremlin, with its armory and collections of sacred objects and czarist jewels, its old (15th and 16th century) onion-domed Orthodox churches, is staple tourist fare; so is the Historical Museum in neighboring Red Square and the art galleries with their homegrown anecdotal paintings and recently dusted-off Picassos and Gauguins. But at the Bolshoi Theater (ballet or opera), he will see something that corresponds to the Russian people's hunger for the sumptuous and the magnificent. He may even see people weep for joy and, observing heavily powdered women in the audience, will suddenly realize why women in the street seem so pale: outside the theater, virtually no woman in Moscow wears makeup, not even lipstick.

Smiles are rarely seen in Moscow's streets. Below the clamor of traffic there is the sound of millions of shuffling feet, never the click of a woman's shoe. Occasionally, there is a whiff of rank perfume (called Kremlin and sold in bottles shaped like the Spassky clock tower), but no man turns for another glimpse of a trim ankle. Lovers do not stroll hand in hand in Moscow. There is no searching of faces, and a person looked at will turn away. Gorky Street may be as crowded as Fifth Avenue at lunchtime, but there is little or no window shopping, and there are always drunks .feeling their way along the walls. The best people do not walk and the visitor may be surprised by the number of chauffeur-driven limousines bearing small scrubbed boys.

The mass of people on the streets are mostly peasants in padded jackets, minor bureaucrats in bell-bottomed trousers and women workers in potato-sack dresses. One in ten carries a small bundled-up infant. To see Russians smile, the visitor must observe them playing with their children in the parks of culture and rest. In the back streets, scores of old men and women shuffle along hopelessly, but although they may look like beggars, it is unlikely that they will ask a recognizable foreigner for alms.

There are queues everywhere, most of all in the GUM, the big department store on Red Square, half Oriental bazaar and half Woolworth, where store police direct orderly lanes of purchasers first at the counters, then at the cashiers, finally at the delivery windows. The tourist is not likely to find anything he will want to buy at GUM. In the Metro underground, with its palatial stations of marble and glittering chrome, where escalators move at twice the speed of those in the New York subways, Muscovites seem just as glum and incurious as those in the streets. Many will carry newspapers, but they will not be reading them.

The Spectacle. Behind almost every window in Moscow lives a family, and at night in every window a light burns. It is a brilliant spectacle. Over the Kremlin hang huge, glowing ruby stars, around" Izvestia's office the news headlines run in lights like those on the New York Times building in Times Square. There are plenty of taxicabs (all checker banded) to take the visitor to a restaurant--the Aragva, the Praga, the Peking, the New Yar--where he will probably hear American jazz badly played and pay possibly $20 for an indifferent meal, though the caviar, the tea and the ice cream will be excellent. But Moscow night life, except for a furtive prostitute outside the Moskva Hotel and, in almost any bar, the sight of a solitary Russian throwing back innumerable vodkas will remain closed to the Western visitor.

About this time the visitor will begin to realize that the supercolossal production which is Moscow today is not being staged for him but for another kind of tourist. He will be aware that he is outnumbered, perhaps a hundred to one, by visitors from Asia.

Coming in delegations, in organized droves, from China, Mongolia, North Korea and North Viet Nam, India, Burma and Afghanistan, these visitors, many of whom have never seen a large city before, are awesomely impressed by Moscow, by the gilt and the grandiosity, and see no incongruity in the joylessness of Muscovites. At the red granite tomb of Lenin and Stalin in Red Square, day after day they queue behind their guides waiting for the moment to file silently past the embalmed Communist leaders, their wax en faces still faintly saturnine. Here, as at the Bolshoi, the Western visitor, brought quickly to the head of the line, may see a man or a woman weeping. He will understand then the real power of Moscow, the new Mecca of the East.

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