SOVIET PRIDE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 January 1943, Page 4

SOVIET PRIDE

IN CITV OF STALINGRAD HOPES & PLANS BEFORE THE WAR. % DAYS OF VOLGA VOYAGING. (By Eleanor Bisbee, in the “Christian Science Monitor.”) I went to Stalingrad from Rostov-sur-Don and up the Volga the year the war began. By now these two cities had expected to be wed. The wedding ring would have been the new canal linking the Volga and the Don Rivers. The dowry was to have been the rich trade of the Volga and the Black Sea flowing back and forth through this waterway. Instead, Rostov has been kidnapped by invaders, and Stalingrad’s defenders still fight to break the enemy’s grip on territory which Russia will never admit to be lost. In line with regular Soviet planning, the annual budgets approved in Moscow for the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, of which Stalingrad is a major .city, gave the city a reasonably well-bal-anced development of industry, housing, transportation, recreation, and education. In thirty years, 1910 to 1940) its population increased from 100,000 to 445,000 and there was a proportionate increase in buildings and facilities for housing, employing and educating its residents. In thirty days in 1942 it was reduced to rubble, yet the people went on fighting from heap to heap to keep that rubble their own. CENTURIES OF HISTORY. Stalingrad, called Tsaritsyn for seven centuries, is a fine example of Soviet spirit. City names in Soviet Russia are given more as a promise of what shall be than as a memorial of what has been. If the latter had been the intent, Tblissi (Tiflis) would have been re-named Stalingrad for that was where Stalin made his start, where he rendered his first services to the Revolution with a secret printing plant still proudly displayed. In 1589 Stalingrad was founded as a fort against the steppe nomads. They could not pass that point then, and now, 352 years later, the greatest single force known to history has been unable to pass it. Stalin’s name was given instead to Tsaritsyn and Stalingrad then was converted into a great industrial centre. With an inter-river canal, more trade than ever can pass through it from all sides, from the Saspian, Black, and Baltic Seas, Moscow, and all the Ukraine. As the guns of the Volga boats boomed in defence of Stalingrad, there must have been gloomy moments of nostalgia for the popular vacation voyages of the Volga, a six to nine-day trip of 1,000 miles between Gorki (formerly Nizhni Novgorod, the market city), now a great auto city, and Stalingrad, the great tractor city. The Volga with its 2,200 miles, as compared with _ the American Mississippi’s 2,500, winds mostly through level meadows. Along its banks are great cement works. Transported on it are the inexhaustible grain, timber and oil supplies. It serves a basin of one-half million square miles, but because of gradients sometimes as low as two and one-half inches per mile, ten million or more acres of it are steppe. The Soviet started work in the present five-year plan on dams to create reservoirs for irrigation, and one is to be a lake of 2,900 square miles. They had started work for hydro-electric stations to have, when completed, almost twice the capacity of the Grand Coulee station on the Columbia River. DEFENCE OF THE VOLGA. However Stalingrad may be valued from the military standpoint, Soviet planners know that projects postponed by the war can be resumed with a rrpnimum of delay. , The fight for Stalingrad has been the fight for a site though not a building should remain on it, for the glory of the man of steel for whom it is named, and for the Volga, the river which the Russians would not surrender while breath was left in their bodies. The Russians, prizing the Volga development as the heart of a bright future, were on guard before there ever was a war. On a peaceful August day in 1939, as I lazed on the deck of a Volga excursion boat amid Russian vacationers apparently contented and at ease, with all the post-Munich alarms and fears seeming incongruous and incredible, suddenly the decks were cleared, passengers were hustled inside, and the doors were closed and guarded. “What’s this?” I asked, and I was told, “We are going under a bridge.” “But,” I persisted, "why come inside for that? Is the bridge falling down?” “No, of course not,” my informant answered, “’but we have many enemies. It would be so easy to throw a bomb.”

At every bridge this precaution was regularly taken. War of any kind was then still a month away, and war for Russia was pratically a year and ahalf away, but the Russians kept up a perpetual “alert.” Raids finally came to the key city, with bombs from 1,000 planes at a time. Again and again the enemy returned to the attack. But the Russians would not give up Stalingrad.