Foreign News: Capitalist in Russia

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No one likes a good dinner better than Joseph Edward Davies, onetime (1936-38) U.S. Ambassador to Soviet Russia. While in Moscow he loved to serve his Communist friends whacking feeds "with all the capitalistic trimmings." In the U.S., during the past weeks, Joe Davies has been getting many good dinners free, collecting—often at the expense of U.S.

Army officers—bets he made on the durability of the Russian war machine. For, ever since his Moscow mission, Joe Davies has been one of the few U.S. citizens who has insisted that Russia would be hard, if not impossible, to lick.

Joe Davies' prophetic shrewdness was revealed in full last week when he published a collection of his Ambassadorial dispatches, diary entries and correspondence,* a rare collection of almost-current history, by one of the world's friendliest extroverts.

From the outside, Ambassador Davies' *Mission to Moscow; Simon & Schuster; $3. Moscow mission looked like some super Sinclair Lewis saga of a Babbitt among the Bolsheviks. A rich, self-made corporation lawyer from Wisconsin, he ran Woodrow Wilson's Western campaign in 1912, later headed the Federal Trade Commission, in 1913 refused the Ambassadorship to Russia. Accepting the post 23 years later, he took with him his second wife, Mrs. Marjorie Post Close Hutton Davies, who inherited $20,000,000 from her father (Postum), was used to a 54-room triplex Manhattan apartment, owned a massive steam& -square-rigged yacht, Sea Cloud, which bugged the eyes of Leningrad. To be secure from hunger Ambassador and Mrs. Davies took with them 25 refrigerators containing 2,000 pints of frozen cream.

Popularity. But such capitalist baggage did not prevent Joe Davies from giving Russia a detached once-over. The extrovert Ambassador saw Russia, rather than his own prejudgments of Russia. While most Moscow emissaries stayed in their salons and tried to imagine they were in London or Paris, Joe Davies rustled around looking at industry in Leningrad, agriculture in the Ukraine.

Everywhere he went he breezily announced that he was a capitalist, proud of it, willing to argue about it. The Russians called him an "honest" man and were transparently delighted with him. To his table of frozen foods came Russians of many stripes, from the Army to the ballet.

Finally, just before he left, he reached the hitherto-unsealed pinnacle of Moscow diplomatic prestige — a long, personal interview with Joseph Stalin.

Prophecies. In January 1937 he wrote of the inevitability of European war, noting that Germany and Russia alone seemed to take it seriously. In February 1937 he was told by the German Military Attache in Moscow that the Russian Army was strong, and long before Joe Davies left Moscow he pronounced the Red Army first-class. That February several diplomats told him that, to insure her own peace, Russia might well make a pact with Germany. Joe Davies came almost to expect it, especially after England and France snubbed Russia by leaving her out of Munich.