欧宝娱乐

What Stalin was thinking about, the plans of the Russian General Staff, the disposition of troops, experiments with atomic weapons and guided missiles, all of this by people who had not been there, and whose sources were not above reproach. And it occurred to us that there were some things that nobody wrote about Russia鈥hat do the people wear there? What do they serve at dinner? Do they have parties? What food is there? How do they make love, and how do they die? What do they talk about? Do they dance, and sing, and play? Do the children go to school?鈥e wanted to get to the Russian people if we could.

We knew there would be many things we couldn鈥檛 understand, many things we wouldn鈥檛 like, many things that would make us uncomfortable. This is always true of a foreign country. But we determined that if there should be criticism, it would be criticism of the thing after seeing it, not before.

The customs man was very polite, and very kind鈥ut, as he proceeded, it became clear to us that he was not looking for anything in particular, he was just interested. He turned over our shining equipment and fingered it lovingly. He lifted out every roll of film but he did nothing about it and he questioned nothing. He just seems to be interested in foreign things鈥�

[Kyiv] at one time must have been a beautiful city. It is much older than Moscow. It is the mother of Russian cities. Seated on its hill beside the Dnieper, it spreads down into the plain. Its monasteries and churches and fortresses date from the 11th century...now it is a semi-ruin. Every public building, every library, every theater, destroyed, not with gunfire, not through fighting, but with fire and dynamite.

Counting soldiers, there would be many more, but six million out of forty-five million civilians have been killed...Every piece of machinery in the Ukraine has been destroyed or removed, so that now, until more can be made, everything must be done by hand. Every stone and brick of the ruined city must be lifted and carried with the hands, for there are no bulldozers. And while they are rebuilding, the Ukrainians must produce food, for theirs is the great granary of the nation.听

Here in white plaster [in the museum] was a model of the new city. A grandiose, fabulous city to be built of white marble, the lines classical, the buildings huge...the people come through the wreckage...to look at the plaster cities of the future. In Russia it is always the future that is thought of. It is the crops next year, it is the comfort that will come in ten years, it is the clothes that will be made very soon.

Later we went to Red Square, where a queue of people at least a quarter of a mile long stood waiting to go through Lenin鈥檚 tomb鈥ll afternoon, and nearly every afternoon, a slow thread of people marches through the tomb to look at the dead face of Lenin in his glass casket鈥t is like a religious thing, although they would not call it religious.

In nothing is the difference between the Americans and the Soviets so marked as in the attitude, not only toward writers, but of writers towards their system. For in the Soviet Union the writer鈥檚 job is to encourage, to celebrate, to explain, and in every way to carry forward the Soviet system. Whereas in America, and in England, a good writer is the watch-dog of society. His job is to satirize its silliness, to attack its injustices, to stigmatize its faults. And this is the reason that in America neither society nor government is very fond of writers. The two are completely opposite approaches toward literature. And it must be said that in the time of the great Russian writers, of Tolstoi, of Dostoevski, of Turgenev, of Chekhov, and of the early Gorki, the same was true of the Russians. And only time can tell whether the architect of the soul approach to writing can produce as great a literature as the watch-dog of society approach. So far, it must be admitted, the architect school has not produced a great piece of writing.

To Americans, with their fear and hatred of power invested in one man, this is a frightening thing...at public celebrations the pictures of Stalin outgrow every bound of reason. We spoke...to a number of Russians and had several answers. One was that the Russian people had been used to pictures of the czar and the czar's family...another was that the icon is a Russian habit of mind, and this was a kind of an icon. A third, that the Russians love Stalin so much that they want him ever present. A fourth, that Stalin himself does not like this and has asked that it be discontinued. But it seems to us that Stalin's dislike for anything else causes its removal...