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By ARCHIE JOHNSTONE

Oil shares are booming again.

Sanatorium at Yalta once Tsar's

favorite palace (Now it's mine)

YALTA
te is five hours’ flying time from
Moscow to the Crimea, but if
you judge by the thermometer in-
stead of the chronometer the fly-
ing time is minus five months,
from November back to July.
What passes for winter here is
more summery than England’s
far-famed summer days — both
of them.

Even the Voice of Discipline,
nuw dabbing its nose with three
varts vodka to one part vinegar
(tighly recommended locally in
the early stages of sunburn),
vould excuse me from writing
while on vacation; yet here I am
writing you these few lines while
sitting sun-bathing on our bal-
ecny of the Livadia Palace. The
Voice would explain the contra-
diction not by my zeal for work
but my love for phrases like “our
balcony of the Livadia Palace.”
Obviously the vinegar is winning.

Our balcony of the Livadia
Palace looks out over the Bay of
Yalta, whose beauty, I am glad
to say, is indescribable. The bay,
the port of Yalta, the Livadia
Palace, our balcony, ourselves
and some hundreds of miles of
material for typical sub-tropical
picture postcards, are all caught
in the curve of the Crimean
mountain range which in places
like the Ei Petri escarpment just
behind us rises perpendicularly
fer 1,609 kilometres, or, let us
say, a mile. The range, with its
guarantee of protection from the
north, east and west winds, is the
main reason for this corner of
the world being what it is, which
is something.

Your intrepid correspondent
and the Voice of Discipline scal-
ed the awe-inspiring Ei Petri es-
carpment the other day by a cir-
cuitous route, with only our faith-
ful taxi-driver as guide.

-But about forty years ago a
bunch of the ‘local lads went
straight up it, for technico-politi-
eal reasons. They reached what
must_be the finest natural adver-
tising space in the world, a,
smooth surface of rock about the
size of a city block, and painted
on it ,in letters five stories high,
the words “Doloy Tsarya,” which
meant much more in that time
and place than it means to us
now. s

‘Doloy Tsarya”’ is Russian for
“To Hell with the Tsar,’ and the
hell of it was that the Tsar was
then vacationing at the Livadia
Palace and, for all I know to the
contrary, on this very balcony
where I am. writing these few

lines and where the Voice of Dis-
cipline is now resting from its
labors of dabbing its nose with
three parts vodka to one part of
vinegar.

The Tsar, although he was able
to mobilise hundreds of scrub-
bing brushes and drums of turp-
entine, could not find any volun-
teers among his ever-loving sub-

jects to scale the heights of Ei”

Petri. So they called out the
artillery, and for days and days
they blasted . and blasted the
‘Doloy Tsarya.” Even after the
actual words were obliterated the
blasted rock went on proclaiming
its blasted message.

It is, I think, permissible to re-
call here (a) the case of another
well-known king, Belshazzar, who
had the same kind of thing hap-
pen to him while he, too, was
throwing a party, although, of
course, the writing on the wall
about his being weighed in the
balances and found wanting was
in much smaller type; (b) the
moving finger which writes, and
having writ moves on; nor all thy
Piety nor wit shall lure it back
ta cancel half a line; and (c) the
fact that there is quite a bit of
writing on the wall all over oc-
cupied Europe these days.

ae et xX

Crimea is full — too full for
my time and space — of historic
and prehistoric remains and of
legends and stories about ghosts
and bogles and things that go
bump in the night.

No wonder. Since the Early
Stone Age it has been populated,
depopulated and repopulated re-
peatedly. There are cave dwel-
lings and paleolithic remains all
over the shop, especially at Sim-
feropol, the capital. 7

“Simferopol” meaqus Busytown; _

its centuries-old civic emblem is
a beehive and it seems to have
been a busy little place for rather
more than a hundred thousand
years, which makes Romulus’s
founding of Rome in 753 B.C.
seem like yesterday.

To add to the legend material

- there have been invasions and

uccupations by Scythians, Greeks,
Romans, Mongols and Tartars, not
to speak of the British, French,
Turks and (for some reason that
beats me) Cardinians whose cas
ualties in the Crimean War of ex-
ectly 100 years ago upped the
ghost population by quarter of a
million. Theirs not to reason
why; theirs but to do or die —

witches’ arms and fingers.

‘bedchamber with

a sentiment whose purity is sur-
passed only by the purity of the
good Lord ‘Tennyson’s rhyme,
“yolleyed and thundered .
noble six hunderred.”

Then there were Denikin and
that other unlucky British in-
vestment, Wrangel, to add to the
crimes of Crimea, not to speak of
the Nazis who also left their
traces, including, typically
enough, the wreckage of 109 out
of 169 sanatoria. That loss, of
course has been much more than
made good in recent years.

The spook capital of the pen-
insula is a valley in the mountain
range near here which is strewn
with boulders like petrified ogres
and with overhanging trees
whose blasted branches and ex-
posed roots stretch out like
The
valley has had different names in
Greek, Tartar, Russian and so on,
but they all mean—yes, you’ve
guessed it — Ghost Valley.

But back to our balcony, which

should have its own quota of
spirits more disembodied than
its present Voice of Discipline.

-Livadia Palace was opened last

- year aS a sanatorium and vaca-

ton home for a thousand persons
et a time. In 1945 it was the
scene of the Yalta Conference
(which suggests. the question:
How high does F.D.R.’s name
stand om the official black list
compared, say, with Abe Lin-
coln’s?). Before the Revolution
it was the Tsar’s favorite palace.
Now it’s mine.

Our neighbors, four girls site
a Kiev factory, invited us in to
see their quarters, the Tsarina’s
its beautiful
wood-panelling and its little priv-
ate staircase which allowed Ras-
putin to minister to the Tsarina’s
spiritual needs without arousing
too much uncharitable comment.
With my peculiar flair for that
sort of thing. I learn that “Ras-
putin” means son of rasputnik,
which in its turn means son of a
so-and-so.

I asked the girls if:they ever
heard the stair-treads creaking;
buit it seems that, with the pres-
ence of a thousand materialistic-
minded vacationists, Livadia is
no happy hunting ground for a
disembodied monk.

It seems, indeed, that none of
the old regime stands a ghost of
a chance in the new regime.

By WILLIAM KASHTAN

What does GAW

T is now apparent that the

Guaranteed Annual Wage —
GAW for short — and other im-
portant demands will be the basis
of negotiations between the Unit-
ed Auto Workers and the Gen-.
eral Motors chain in 1955.

UAW President Walter Reuth-
er is reported as saying it may
first be fought out in the GM
chain in Canada. If this is so it
looks as if a major battle is shap-
ing up, the outcome of which may
have an important bearing on the
future of the labor movement.

Certainly sucha battle deserves
and must receive the support. of

_ every section of organized labor.

GAW has received a lot of pub-
licity. Both the TLC and CCL
have expressed support for it. In-
terest in it is bound to grow.

Generally speaking the positive
attitude of workers to GAW mir-
rors the deep ‘sense of insecurity
which prevails in face of contin-
ual layoffs.

Will GAW do everything its
supporters claim? -

At various times the terms
“guaranteed annual wage” and
“guaranteed employment plan”
have been used to express what
is being advocated. Actually it
is neither, for it guaranteer neith-
er year-round employment or
year-round payment of wages.

Is it a guaranteed wage? No,
it isn’t. There is no suggestion,
at least so far, that workers
would get wages 52 weeks of the
year whether they work or not.

What is suggested is that work-
ers who are laid off receive com-
pensation or supplementary un-
employment insurance from the
company for which they worked.

Tsatt a: guaranteed employment
plan?

There is no suggestion that the
proposal would guarantee year-
round employment. While it
might not be a factor in prevent-
ing some aspects of layoffs, GAW
could not prevent layoffs in gen-
eral — or an economic crisis.

®
It might have been better to

call the Proposal a form of guar- |

anteed annual income. For if it
were won on the basis indicated
by the union, the companies con-
cerned would be committed to
paying additional compensation
over and above the unemploy-
ment insurance benefits workers
would ordinarily receive.

For example, when a worker is

mean to workers?

laid off, depending upon his or
her seniority status and the num-
ber of weeks worked, he would
receive credits at the ratio of
one for every two weeks work-
ed. The company would pay so
much per week over and above
unemployment insurance benefits
to every worker covered by the
guarantee.

This is the guts of the proposal.
Does this mean that workers

‘should be indifferent to GAW?:

Not at all.

Any measure or proposal which
protects and advances labor’s real
interests and: living standards
should be actively supported and
fought for. But it must do pre-
cisely that and not victimize any
group of workers in the process.

Autoworkers might do well to
ask the following questions:

“Will GAW be spelled out so
that it guarantees at least 75 per-
cent of their ,earnings on the
basis of the 40 hour work week
during the entire period of the
layoff?”

“Will it include all workers
on seniority or only those who
have two years seniority?”

These are the two minimum |
provisions which must be clearly
spelled out.

It should also be noted that
GAW comes up against a snag 1n
Canada.

As the unemployment Insur-
ance Act now reads, no worker
could receive this type of compen-
sation from his employer and also ©
receive unemployment insurance.

Therefore two other things are
required — either the present
Act would have to be amended
or, the employers would have to
compensate the worker by that
amount — highly unlikely.

If a properly worked out GAW
is to be won, there must be a
strong united pressure by or-
ganized labor on government for
such amendments, and avart from
GAW, what is also needed are
amendments -which would sharp-
ly increase payments for the en-
tire period of layoffs for every
worker.

*

The other side of the problem
of course, is basic — the need for
labor to take up the fight for new
national policies of full employ-
ment. GAW deals. with layoffs
as they occur. What is needed
are policies which would prevent
layoffs.

Soausy |
= Sans