EDITORIAL PAGE

Printed by Union Printers Ltd., 550 Powell Street, Vancouver 4, B.C.

TOM McEWEN, Editor — HAL GRIFFIN, Associate Editor — RITA WHYTE, Business Manager.
Published weekly by the Tribune Publishing Company Ltd. at Room 6, 426 Main Street, Vancouver 4, B.C. — MArine 5288
Canada and British Commonwealih countries (except Australia), 1 year $3.00, 6 months $1.60. Australia, U.S., and all other countries, 1 year $4.00, 6 months $2.50.

Authorized as second class mail, Post Office Department, Ottawa

- Tom
McEwen

DAY in Moscow — any day because
in Moscow there are no blue Mondays
or dead Sundays. Each and every day
of the week this teeming city with its
seven million inhabitants throbs with
energetic life. You see and feel it
everywhere; on the streets, in the fac-
tories the, busy stores, the Metro sub-
way, the packed theatres. eo
Here in Moscow I sometimes tune in
on the Voice of America broadcasting
from Munich or Tangier and blasting
away at everything Soviet. To say its
daily program is stupid is to put it
mildly. Most of the time it is sheer
nonsense. After listening to it for a
while I have to go outside to get the air,
out into the living stream of this great’
city, to remind myself how utterly crazy
present: day Yankee anti-Sovieteers are.
, Tonight on Korky Street there seems
’ to be something out of the ordinary g0-
ing on. A lineup of big trucks with
powerful Klieg lights transform night:
into day. I push along the packed side-
walks — sidewalks half as wide as Gran-
Ville Street — to see what’s doing.
Nothing much. Just a group of film
workers “shooting” a movie in their be-
loved city, recording the roar of its
ceaseless traffic and the laughter of its
human rivers. This. movie will take
Moscow to the farthest corner of the
USSR! .
Perhaps you want to go to the ballet,

cinema? Then line up and get your
tickets early because every day of _the
week and several times a day it is a
packed house. And on the street anim-

the rush for more tickets. Hollywoood _
has. no monopoly here—and the artists
are the people! ;
Along the Kusnetsky Most I spot a big
crowd in front of a large bookstore. Ac-
cording to the Voice of America this
should be a “riot” for bread or potatoes
or something it pretends the Russians
should have but can’t get because of a
“ruthless Kremlin regime.” : ;
Too bad! It isn’t anything like that.
Just a few hundred people waiting
around to pay their subscriptions for
their favorite newspapers and magazines
-or to buy books. Such a lineup at 426
‘Main Street to renew subs for the Pacific
‘Tribune would make business manager
Rita Whyte the happiest woman in Van-
couver. But it’s only here they do such
things. ;
Today Charlie Sims and I decided to
‘go shopping. It is “Rest Day” in Mos-
cow, certainly a bad day for shopping,
but we went nevertheless. Charlie
wanted to get a mandolin for his daugh-
ter Naomi and I was on the trail of a
recorded song I heard fifteen years
before!
The stores in, Moscow are filled with
consumers’ goods and the people have
plenty of cash. But the floor space, the
Stairways, the elevators, the cashier
wickets, just weren’t built to handle sev:
n million people. So you walk into
a magnificent jam and you elbow your
‘way out of it. But Charlie, with’a glow
of victory on his face, holds Naomi’s
- mandolin aloft as one would carry Can
ada’s flag on a July 1 parade!
Moscow vibrates with life. What Ot-
tawa or London or Paris or Washington
may do is often scarcely recorded be-
yond the suburban environs of those
_ great cities. But what Moscow does is
always “world news.” Even when its
- people line uv to hear a Tschaikovsky |
opera, the Voice of America puts it down
as a- “riot” for dill pickles. Moscow is
_ like living in tomorrow when one is only
in today.

the opera, the theatre, the circus, the -

ated discussion, criticism, praise — and -

must agree!

the most beautiful ...!

Warmongers stand self-exposed

WE may the daily press la-

ment Prime Minister Sir
Winston Churchill’s disclosure
last week as ‘‘imprudent.”’ ‘The
British Conservative leader's ad-
mission that even before the de-
feat of Nazi Germany was complet-
ed, he contemplated the possibility
of rearming surrendered German
troops to fight the Russians has
destroyed the whole monstrous
pretense of the cold war.

Not only has Churchill destroy

ed the assiduously cultivated lie

that the cold war originated in So-
viet policy, he has demolished all
his own arguments for rearming
West Germany. ;

Now Churchill has made it plain
to the whole world that he and his
U.S. mentors, Truman and Ache-
son, Eisenhower and Dulles, were
fashioning their cold war policies
against their wartime ally even be-
fore the war had ended. Now the

aggressive war plans of the Chur

chill government, as of our own

- goverment, stemming from the im-

Suspend new

PREMIER WwW. A, CG. Bennett, .

whose Social Credit government
is still sensitive to public protest,
has wisely reversed his stand and

agreed to set up a Royal Commis- —

sion to inquire into our forest in-

dustry. And what is happening to

our forest industry under the forest
management license scheme initiat-
ed by the now defunct Coalition
is well brought out by Maurice
Rush’s article in this issue of the
Pacific Tribune. a

- But Premier Bennett still refuses
to suspend granting of further for-
‘est management licenses until the
commission has conducted its in-
quiry and brought down its con-

clusions. His argument is that he

perialist drive of the United States
for world domination, appear in
their full sinister significance.

By contract, Soviet policy is
shown as genuinely directed to the
‘attainment of world peace, to
bringing about the peaceful coex-
istence of capitalist and socialist
states.

No one can doubt after Chur-
chill’s disclosure that the rearming
of West Germany has any other
than an aggressive purpose fraught
with danger to the peace of the
world. What the diehard Nazis
predicted they would do some day
with British and American help,

Churchill and Eisenhower are now
enabling them to do.

The Canadian people must not

allow them to do it. The protest
against the Paris agreements to re-

arm West Germany must -become

so overwhelming, so emphatic, that
parliament will not dare to ratify
them when they come before it in
January. :

forest licenses

does not want to interfere in the in-

dustrial development of the prov- :

_ince. What he means by industrial

development of course, is not estab- ©

lishment © of fabricating industries
based on our forest resources but
-merely industries to produce raw
pulp, at best a semi-processed mat-

erial, for export to the U.S. and.

elsewhere. This too, is part of the
U.S. design for transforming our
country into a source of raw and
_semi-processed materials for its own
industries. :

It is all the more reason-that no
more forest management licenses
should be issued until the entire
situation has been reviewed.

Hal
Griffin

OX of the finest books on.the North is
Alitet Goes to the Hills, a novel by
Tikhon Syomushkin which promises to

. become one of the classics of modern

Soviet literature. The only comparable
book in a Canadian setting is Farley
Mowat’s People of the Deer.

Though not a novel, People of the Deer
is woven from the same material as
Alitet Goes to the Hills. Where Syomush-
kin has taken his own and others’ ex-
periences in the Chukotsk Peninsula,
across the Bering Straits from Alaska,
and given them fictional form, Mowat
recounts his experiences in our own
Barren Lands as reportage. But essenti-
ally they are alike, with one profound
difference.

Mowat tells of the tragedy brought to
the Deer People, Indian and Eskimo
alike, by the white man’s civilization.
He says: *

“The slaughter of the deer and the
destruction of the Deer People had gone
on, is going on, and all that has been
done to halt the twin massacres is this:
agents of the government have been sent
out to tell the survivors of the Idthen
Eldeli that they must learn the arts of
‘conservation.’ The Idthen People listen
to this strange, foreign talk, but in the
privacy of their own tents they recail
how the white trappers who have en-
_ecroached upon their lands kill the mi-
grating deer without compunction and
without restraint... .”

Mowat knows what could be done, but
in his book there is little hope that it
will be done.

Syomushkin too, found a dying people
when he first went to the Chukotsk Pen-
insula in 1924, In his foreword he says:

“Here too, lived so-called representa-
‘tives of civilization — avaricious wolfish
hucksters of diverse nationalitiés, for
the most part Americans. All these
white men, in whose veins ran black- —

‘ blood, cruelly exploited the honest and

trustful hunters. The Chukchi, reduced
to a state of dire poverty, were dying
out, like the numerous Indian tribes in
America, subjugated by the enterprising
civilizers.” :

But Syomushkin’s novel, as he tells of
the struggle against the traders and
their native allies, against the ignorance
and superstition of the Chukchi people
themselves, is full of hope — a hope now
translated into the reality of a people

' restored to their own heritage.

x % a.

The epilogue to this story of similari-
ties and contrasts is contained in a let-
ter written by a man on Vancouver Is-
land. The letter, passed along to me
by Merwyn Marks, manager of the Peo-
ple’s Cooperative Bookstore here, says:

“A couple of months ago I was in your
store and picked up a copy of Alitet
Goes to the Hills. There is a family
living in this district that came from
Siberia at the time of the revolution.
The father was an Australian of English
descent and the mother an Eskimo, The
father was a trader, such as in the book,
and he was driven out by the Reds. The
children were always. very much against
the Communists.

“When I finished reading the book i

_ passed it along to one of the sons (they
are all grown up, married and have

families now). All the sons here read
it and sent it to one sister on the Island
and she sent it to their mother and an-
other sister at New Westminster.

“It has sure changed their ideas a lot,
I can tell you, and you can be sure the
book will be read by a large number
of people before I get it back.” .

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — DECEMBER 3, 1954 — PAGE 5