Train No. I 3, Where Are You?

As the guardian of Soviet morality, junior grade, the Communist Party youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda frequently berates students for hooliganism, debaucheries, or ideological lapses unworthy of Marxists. Fortnight ago, the newspaper turned with relish on a new target: a group of 44 U.S. students from U.C.L.A. and other schools whose low jinks aboard the Moscow-Warsaw express would, if true, have stirred a furor on the Atchison. Topeka & Santa Fe.

The students called the newspaper's account highly exaggerated. But Komsomolskaya Pravda insisted that the railroad revel began in Moscow, when the college kids approached train No. 13, "bawling bawdy songs and clinging to each other like sailors during a storm." No sooner had the wheels begun to roll than "these savages from overseas started to guzzle liquor and shriek wildly. They tossed pillows at each other and stuck lampshades on their heads. Then they took their clothes off and began running after the girls in their own delegation."

The party was still going full blast at 2 a.m., when the train pulled into Vyazma, a small town 150 miles west of Moscow. A group of collective farmers, goggling at a brightly lighted sleeper compartment, saw two young men cavorting in the raw on a table top; the farmers assumed they were watching the antics of mental patients en route to an asylum.

The irate onlookers protested to train officials, but the conductor insisted that he could do nothing. The visitors, he explained, were not subject to Soviet law; the nude gambolers were the losers in a decadent Western game that the Americans called "strip poker." Among stilyagi, the Soviet Teddy boys on whom Komsomolskaya Pravda lavishes most of its sermons, it could catch on like the Twist.

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