RUSSIA: Dragoon's Day

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I love a dragoon

I love the young one

I love the young one

Right out of a brave regiment.

He had barely arrived

When he had to leave

And his beauty-darling

Sobs and cries

Sobs and cries

Begs him to stay.

Stay with me my lovely darling

Another night.

Spend the night my love

I'll wake you early

I'll wake you early.

—Song of the Russian Dragoons

In the 10th Regiment of the Novgorod Dragoons, few were younger and none was braver than Georgy Zhukov, the kid from Kaluga Province. While their beauty-darlings sobbed and cried, the 10th dashed in behind the German lines and with saber and carbine cut down the enemy gunners. This was World War I, and twice young Georgy received the coveted St. George Cross, awarded only for valor in battle. In his black tunic, blue breeches and patent-leather kepi with bronze double-eagle, he was a doughty figure in the Czarist army.

This week, in a scene reminiscent of the Czarist days at their most imperial, ex-Dragoon Zhukov, now a chunky, 59-year-old marshal, reviewed the crack regiments of the world's largest army. Standing in a pale blue Zis limousine, his broad chest loaded with decorations, his hand in a stiff salute, Zhukov watched the young cadets of Russia's top military academies goose-step their way through Moscow's Red Square in unwavering, platoon-wide lines. The cadets wore smart new uniforms; steel-blue with sleeves laced with gold-braided laurel leaves; their officers wore striped yellow-and-white moiré belts from which hung short gilt swords.

After the cadets came the steel-helmeted motorized infantry in green armored cars, tanks with Tommy gunners at the ready, air-force officers in new dark blue uniforms, and then the day's showpiece: a huge, gleaming cannon, mounted on a rubber-tired platform, thought by some military observers to be an atomic weapon (one of the "daring discoveries" of Soviet science, said Radio Moscow).

A 1,000-man massed band, from whose front line of trumpeters fluttered scarlet banners and golden tassels, struck up a martial air. Rain had canceled the air flypast, and Party Secretary Khrushchev, clad in a fawn raincoat and bright green hat, had stolen some of the show by escorting attractive Ekaterina Furtseva, a Moscow party official, to the podium. But now, after the trumpets, Zhukov, with all the pomp and ceremony which the occasion demanded, went to center stage to deliver the official speech.