Why Joseph Stalin, always lavish with Russia's millions in buying tractors, remains a tightwad as to railways, choosing to have hapless Soviet railwaymen shot for "sabotage" rather than buy them good modern rolling stock and signals, remains perhaps the Kremlin's major mystery. Last week Soviet trains were still being hauled by Tsarist locomotives, and after more than three full years of shooting Soviet railwaymen, Dictator Stalin's zealous Comrade Andrey Andreyev had had enough of being Commissar of Railways.
Not in disgrace, since everyone knows whose fault it is that Soviet railways remain...