IRON CURTAIN: The Big Year

While NATO has been building up an army in Europe,* what has the Red army been doing? Reports from behind the Iron Curtain to TIME'S correspondents in Berlin, Bonn, Munich and Vienna add up to this answer: Russia is standing pat on its 450,000 soldaty, keeping them in top fettle, making no moves that directly indicate offensive intentions.

Russia's 400,000 troops in Germany have gone back to their barracks after the annual lengthy summer and fall maneuvers. The maneuvers, for outfits up to divisions in strength, concentrated on river crossings—both offensive and retreating. Troops are rotated constantly, to bring in new hands, and possibly to keep the oldtimers from being contaminated by the West; the last of Russia's veterans of World War II are now going home, and are being replaced by tough teen-agers from the Soviet Union. In recent months the Russians have shifted their troop concentrations to Thuringia, southwest. corner of the Soviet zone, to counter growing U.S. strength across the border.

In Austria, Red army strength remains at 50,000. There are still no signs of Soviet troop concentrations in Czechoslovakia, but the Russians there have been working on an experiment: landing MIGs, which have wide, tough undercarriages and soft tires, on sod fields. If it works, and plain fields turn out to be usable as jet airports, the Soviet potential for striking out suddenly from hundreds of places would be immeasurably increased. Airfields are being strengthened, but there are few indications of extensive rail and road building, the kind that would be necessary for a long, sustained war, as distinct from a quick blitz. Western intelligence officers regard 1952 as "the big year" of supreme tension, but the cautious hunch of almost every qualified observer is: "No war."