so MTT —MOSCOW. AN Moscow, which this month celebrated the 800th anniversary of its founding, be called a Fur- - pean city? When you look ‘at its broad new thorough- fares, its tall handsome resi- dential puildings, its subway, SPort stadia and theaters; when YOu see the old, ramshackle ‘Overgrown village’ that was Pre-revolutionary Moscow disap- peting and a huge, splendid, B0rous and vital city rising ; its place, you might be €mpted to answer the above Westion in the affirmative. But the next moment you feel YOu are wrong, Because neither ao hew Moscow nor any other Me or reconstructed Soviet the” has much in common with established ‘conception of a Modern European city. Let us take the most famous Reopean capitals. Paris the fautiful, to begin with. The Nch capital owes its beauty se its broad streets running i ally and to its wide straight ' hues and drives, designed by ha famous Haussman, gover- 4 Nee Paris during the time apoleon II. But there is 4 _©xtremely important element is all this magnificance that fir ab evident to the tourist at St—its social character. to el ml WiE> pe : aril 1) 4 NES. Brees ae ie | one Ld Il The poor living in their quar- ters gained nothing from the reconstruction of the French capital. Haussman spent a Dil- lion franes laying out the great boulevards, the Champs Elysees, the Place de l)Opera and other districts inhabited by the weal- thy. But he did not have a centime for the poor who were evicted from their quarters to make way for the reconstruc- Re IN| Ja a STATIN : NE ven i MMi pe.) bs Mveseecerthisselioweii Friday, September 26, 1947 ®@ Peace, jobs and freedom are indivisible Text of a speech by Henry A, Wallace Page 10 © The people are with the Partisans And so they had to move to already crowded and_= squalid sections, where their descend- ants can be found to this day. e IL. MARX wrote that the ‘improvement’ and ‘moderniz- ation’ of cities which accom- pany the growth of their wealth and the razing of their ugly districts, the building of palaces to house banks and the laying of new streets for business, rapidly squeeze out the poor and crowd them into © still worse slums. That Marx was right is proved by the appalling living condi- tions of the people who dwell on the fringes of ‘European’ cities. Tuberculosis thrives in Europ- ean cities, whose splendid lay- out, lovely boulevards and gar- dens charm the eyes of the tourist. These evils are not de- tected at first glance because in these well-ordered towns. the No, Soviet cities, and particu- larly Moscow, are not ‘Europ- ean.’ They are socialist. @ USSIA’S fate might well have been different. Quite enough was done to switch her off into a different path than the one she has chosen. What if all the bloodshed and devastation of the Civil War had ended in the victory of the ‘bour- geoisie? What would have happened to Moscow? It is possible that the ignor- ant, lazy, corrupt ‘city fathers’ of Moscow would have had to give up their places to other, more cultured and _ energetic men, who would undoubtedly have been forced to set about reconstructing the city. For in any case Moscow could not have remained as she was. before the Soviet revolution. It is possible that good houses would have been built, streets paved and the layout students of the in cow the appearance she has Tay "3 F e osco™ -has - sient Aeyond recognition. What does this oft-repeated. phrase mean? ‘We Moscovites are already finding it increasingly difficult to re member what Moscow looked like before reconstruction began. ‘Take those graceful bridges flung so high as to admit large Volga steamers all the way up to the very walls of the Krem- lin. They alone have altered the looks of the river they span and the districts they bind to such an extent that it is diffi- cult to recall the crooked dark alleys that used to wine their way beneath the old low bridges. We cannot imagine Moscow without these majestic struc- tures, and it is. not every Moscovite who can recognize photographs of his city taken 20 years ago. by George Tate a ci nes Page 11 stums are tucked away out of improved. Sooner or later, per- | But the past has been even 6 sight. haps, to a greater or lesser M™0re effectively effaced where Merchants of death Yet in France, for example, extent, Moscow would have ‘hose new districts have risen by CHANBE: Adame (es ee Page ]2 the slums carry away 200,000 come to. resemble many another ©” the outskirts of the city, set people annually, costing nearly European capital. But no city those districts where labor as much in lives as a war. council could have given Mos- (Continued on Page 12)