Foreign News: ONE MAN'S LOOK AT RUSSIA

• Share

One of the few Westerners recently to get a peek behind the Iron Curtain is a lanky young London banker named John Lindsay Eric Smith. Scion of a family who have been bankers since 1688, Smith went to Eton and Oxford, served in the fleet air arm, and is now a managing director of Coutts' bank. Excerpts from his report on Russia in The National & English Review, a Conservative monthly:

LAST month I visited Russia; unofficially and briefly it is true — but since I went neither as a fellow traveler nor as part of a Democratic Delegation, I was at least able to use my eyes. Being unguided and unhustled, although watched and followed, I saw enough to alter all my views.

The first illusion to vanish was that Russia is irresistible. Russia may be strong militarily, and ready to launch a blitzkrieg on the German pattern, but I do not believe she could again — and this time without Lease-Lend aid — mount anything like a sustained offensive war.

My first and most powerful impression of Russia was one of fantastic decrepitude; almost everything — roads and railways, buildings new or old — is in a state of the utmost decay. Leaving Moscow, the main roads are of tar for a certain distance, and then either dwindle into narrow strips, or revert to broken and undulating cobbles and to earth.

I do not believe there is a railway or a road in Russia on which one could travel at an average of more than 30 miles an hour. Lorries are either very ancient affairs or else ten-wheeled American trucks. There is no heavy road transport, or roads capable of taking it. It is quite clear that the Russian transport system is already strained to bursting point, without the added load of war traffic.

Telltale Curtains. The same is true of Russian building; the conditions under which most urban Russians live is worse than anything I have seen, even in the worst spots of Dublin or of Naples. The overcrowding is incredible — I found eleven families living in one small church. The houses that survive from Czarist days, of stucco or wood, have been untouched since the Revolution; they tilt and sag and crumble till it would be impossible to believe that they are inhabited, were it not for the lace curtains inside each window.

The modern buildings are little better; even if they have been completed — which is seldom — they resemble exhibition architecture that has been allowed to stand too long.

After making every allowance for the stiffening influence of the police state, and for an Asiatic disregard of poverty, it is still hard to believe that the Soviet Union, whatever the equipment of her armies at the front, could remain on the offensive with equipment such as this in the rear.

Beehive. These shortcomings do not make it impossible for the Russians to wage war, but their present internal policy must dissuade them from it. My first impression of Russia was one of fantastic decrepitude; my second of fantastic activity to make this good. Factories, blocks of flats, railways and roads are being built on all sides — no doubt slowly and badly and at the expense of the Russian standard of living —but none the less it is possible to see more capital work being undertaken in one day in Russia than in a month in Britain. War could do nothing tut damage, the program.