In the Russian Wake

Eight months after they had marched in, the Red Army prepared to march out of Changchun, Manchuria's capital. As usual, the Russians were careful to leave chaos behind. Some 2,000 airborne Chinese Government troops, aided by 5,000 local auxiliaries, were inside the city. Outside was a Chinese Communist siege army, 60,000 to 70,000 strong. Slogging up from the south to relieve their beleaguered comrades was the Government's crack, U.S.-trained First Army. At Kaiyuan, a rail stop 115 miles away, the 40,000 regulars broke through Communist lines in the first serious battle between China's factions for control of Manchuria.

Since Government and Communists had agreed to extend their uneasy truce to the northeast, the fighting at Kaiyuan seemed ominous. Chungking reported that disagreement on "fundamentals" had delayed the flight of Government-Communist-U.S. truce teams into the trouble zones. Mukden, where U.S. truce officers had arrived, was a prime exhibit in the Manchurian mixup. Items:

The moment U.S. officers appeared, Chinese officials took down Soviet-style portraits of Lenin and Sun Yatsen, substituted Truman and Attlee. They did not remove the posters of Stalin and Chiang.

On Mukden's cart-jammed main street, still called "Stalin Prospect," a merchant, who claimed his shop had been looted by the Russians, said he would reopen "when the American consulate tells stores to reopen." Told that the American consulate had no such power, he winked knowingly and persisted: "Then when the American consulate tells the Chinese officials to tell us to reopen stores."

Twenty Soviet businessmen, left behind by the Red Army, grumbled because their Government had been denied permission to land a plane that would transport them out of Mukden. Inscrutable Chinese officials had no comment.

Also left behind by the Red Army were 1,300 "White" Russians, who were recently welcomed back to Mother Russia's ample bosom (TIME, Feb. 18). These onetime Czarist zealots, including many an old Manchurian hand, now hold 145 important Mukden properties (apartments, shops, offices, factories), which the Soviet Government had turned over to them from the defeated Japanese.