The Press: Needle-Wit

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For a newspaper correspondent in Moscow, the trick was to write dispatches with tongue in cheek, which the Soviet censors wouldn't notice, but any U.S. reader would. The New York Times's soft-voiced, scholarly Brooks Atkinson was a master at it. Drew Middleton, his chubby, aggressive successor in Moscow, has proved equally adept.

In Trud, the trade-union paper, he found a young shoe-factory foreman named Vassily Matrosov being praised to the Red skies for the "amazing" changes by which he had boosted output. To hear Trud tell it, Comrade Matrosov was a combination Bedaux, Stakhanov and Henry Ford. Last week, in a straight-faced cable, Middleton described Matrosov's amazing changes. The foreman "found that much of a cutter's time was lost in carrying leather to the cutting machine. ... He figured out that this could be done by an auxiliary worker. . . ." Also the "needle-witted Mr. Matrosov" had noticed that workers of various heights stood on small steps before their machines; some had to bend, while others stood on tiptoe. "After thinking awhile, Mr. Matrosov figured out that the height of the steps could be adjusted to the height of the man. . , . A number of other such marvelous improvements helped."