Education: MOSCOW FOR THE TOURIST

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THE tourist who decides for Moscow next year will risk his life, not in the dark cells of the Lubianka prison below Dzerzhinsky Square, but in the wildly undisciplined traffic above. Moscow's streets are full of big, fast automobiles, all driven apparently by Sturmovik pilots intent on dive-bombing pedestrians. Or, as a recent visitor put it: "Dodging in and out of lanes, with nary a signal and with wild shouts of profanity at other cars, the Russian driver seems to be recapturing the elation felt by the Cossack of old when he swooped down from the steppes to carve up a few Persians."

If there are traffic regulations, neither cops nor drivers heed them, nor do the pedestrians, who jaywalk and ignore traffic lights with grim fatalism. There is an incessant blowing of horns, but since all the horns sound alike (apparently having been made in the same factory), the result is a constant and unidentifiable shriek, except for horns on the cars of commissars which have a slightly varied pitch, at the first murmur of which the cops switch the manually operated traffic lights to green. Says U.S. Travel Expert John Stanton, just back from surveying the possibility of Cook's touring through Russia: "In Moscow I always hesitated before starting across a street. They are so wide you are vulnerable for so long."

A Sense of Power. If the amber lights now being shown by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. do not change to red in coming months, travel to Moscow should gain, travel experts estimate, by several hundred Americans next year. Russia, too, is sending forth travelers, but they are men with a mission, whether political, like Bulganin and Khrushchev in India (see FOREIGN NEWS), or cultural, like Violinist David Oistrakh (see Music). Not for them the satisfaction of idle interests.

To the wandering American. Moscow, long hidden by the Iron Curtain, a source of conspiracy, strange dogmas and menacing dangers, is a legitimate object of U.S. curiosity. With some 5.000.000 people within its city limits and another 2,000.000 in surrounding suburbia, it is probably the third-largest city in the world.

Western visitors will find their advent well prepared for. In the past seven years, a feverish activity has seized Moscow: broad new thoroughfares have been dynamited through the old quarters, big buildings have been lifted and put down in new alignments, broad plazas and parks have been created. Eight skyscrapers, 20 to 38 stories high, have sprung up like corn, and more than a million trees have been planted.