The New York Times, by Hedrick Smith

By Hedrick Smith

MOSCOW, March 4 — Two decades after his death on March 5, 1953, Stalin enjoys great latent prestige among the Soviet people and a much more favorable popular reputation than Nikita S. Khrushchev, the man who dared denounce him for his vast political purges.

Not only has Stalin been officially rehabilitated to a modest role in Soviet history, but there is an undercurrent of nostalgia for what many people now feel were in some ways the good old days of Stalin's rule, from 1924 to 1953.

This is a far cry, of course, from the outpouring of praise and adulation heaped upon Stalin during his lifetime. But it represents a distinct comeback from the Khrushchev era when he was either denounced or treated as a nonperson.

Today, approval is far from universal and Stalin's excesses are on occasion obliquely criticized. But there is clear sympathy for crediting the former “friend and teacher” of the Soviet people with achievements of the past as well is a tendency in many quarters to idealize his leadership style.

With Stalin clearly in mind, many Russians comment privately that what the country needs is a “krepky khozyain” — a strong master.

A factory director, bedeviled by problems of labor turnover, alcoholism and absenteeism, will wistfully recall to friends the tight discipline maintained under Stalin when a worker could be harshly penalized, even jailed, for showing up 10 minutes late.

Older people, political conservatives, militia officers irritated by the miniskirts, jeans, long hair, rock music and other fashions that trickle in from outside — hanker for the “order” of the Stalinist days when youth was more manageable.

Many ordinary people, grumbling about rising prices or never‐ending shortages, remember Stalin's annual and highly publicized practice of reducing prices on a few items, though they, usually forget that there were often hidden increases on others.

A Longing to Be Awed

Still other people, criticizing Khrushchev as a bungler who tinkered unsuccessfully with the Soviet system, and dissatisfied with what they describe as the grayness of the present leadership, long to be awed, once more by a ruler of Stalin's imposing mysteries and terrible presence.

“The present leadership has no sense of decorum or ceremony, but Stalin knew how to impress people,” commented an Establishment intellectual. “People now feel that when he was alive, other countries respected and feared us more.”

Sympathies for Stalin often emerge spontaneously. Sometimes when he appears in documentary movie or fictionalized film history of World War II, an audience will break into applause. Not long ago, a West European diplomat was surprised to find himself at a small party with a group of middle‐aged, middle‐level Russian officials who toasted Stalin's health more than half a dozen times with no more pretext than that they were drinking one of Stalin's favorite Georgian wines.

Purges Are Defended

In random conversations with foreigners, many ordinary Russians will excuse or even defend Stalin on the issue of the purges. Some months ago, an engineer explained that Stalin was a great man but that others committed mistakes in his name. A teacher in her late 20's said that people generally remembered him well “in spite of the fact that he was a hard man.”

“Maybe he had to be a hard man at that time, maybe it was necessary,” she said.

Liberal, urban intellectuals and outright dissidents, who personally oppose and vehemently criticize Stalin and neo-Stalinism, acknowledge that the general opinion of Stalin is improving, and is especially strong in the countryside.

“Out there,” said a writer in his 60's who spent years in a Stalinist labor camp, “Stalin has a real hold on the people. They feel that he built the country and he won the war. Now they see disorder in agriculture, disorder in industry, disorder everywhere in the economy and they see no end to it. They think that when there was a tough ruler, we did not have such troubles. People forget that things were bad then, too, and they forget the terrible price that we paid.”

Politically minded Soviet citizens offer several explanations for the resurgence of Stalin's reputation. In part, they say, it is a reaction against Khrushchev and dissatisfaction with the present. With his de‐Stalinization campaign and other programs, Khrushchev offended the vested interests of powerful segments In the Communist party, the military, and the police system. Some, it is said, are inclined to glorify Stalin precisely because Khrushchev attacked him so sharply.

Rhythm of History In part, Stalin's improved Image reflects the passage of time, some say. In the two decades since his death, many of those who lived through the worst Stalinist purges of the nineteen‐thirties have died and the memories of millions of others have mellowed.

One dissident suggested that the resurgence of Stalin's popularity reflected the natural rhythms of history. When thousands were rehabilitated and returning from Stalinist camps there was a revulsion toward With the passing of a Generation, the counterreaction began, the dissident reasoned. “After all,” he said, “it took about 30 years after Napoleon's exile from France in 1815 for his nephew to come to power as emperor but Bonapartism as political movement emerged after only about 20 years. So, is not so unnatural for there to be in upsurge of neo‐Stalinist sentiment here now.”

Roy Medvedev, a dissident who chronicled the Stalinist purges in his major work, “Let History Judge,” observed in 1968 that not only was Stalin's official public image refurbished, but that “some party officials openly and proudly call themselves Stalinists, without risking expulsion from the party.”

Other noncomformist thinkers are concerned that the vigorous campaign of suppression against dissident activists in the last 18 months is evidence of a neo‐Stalinist mood in the party. None, however, suggests that the latest campaign remotely compares to the Stalinist repressions in either numbers or methods.

Another reason for what might be termed Stalin's comeback is his improved treatment in the press.

In the first years after his death, the glorification of Stalin was gradually downgraded by his successors preparing the way for Khrushchev's stunning and aggressive de‐Stalinization program.

Famous ‘Secret Speech’

This began sensationally with the famous “secret speech” at the 20th Communist party Congress in 1956 when Khrushchev condemned the Stalinist purges and “the cult of Stalin's personality.” Thousands of his victims were freed from camps and cleared of charges.

Hundreds of towns, streets and sites bearing Stalin's name were renamed, including Stalingrad, where the battle the Russians consider the turning point of the war was fought. The city became Volgograd and the battle became the Battle on the Volga.

Stalin was derided as an ineffective wartime leader who had failed to anticipate the Nazi attack in 1941, had not prepared the country for war and had panicked when the attack came. As a peacetime leader, he was held to have made some contributions until 1934 and after that pictured as a suspicious powermad leader who decimated a generation with his purges. To underscore his fall from grace, his body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square. Anti‐Stalinist poems and prose began appearing.

After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, his successors reversed the trend. They signaled the end of de‐Stalinization in May, 1965, during celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the allied victory over Germany. The blackout on Stalin was lifted, Stalin appeared for the first time on television screens as wartime leader and father figure for the Soviet people. The battle of Stalingrad regained its original name.

More Public Honors

In 1969, the leadership formally celebrated the 90th anniversary of Stalin's birth, padsing him for “the gigantic transformation,” as well as for his wartime leadership and for having fought such maverick Communists as Trotsky, though his “unjustified repressions” of the nineteen‐thirties were criticized.

In June, 1970, a bust of Stalin was placed over what had been his virtually unmarked grave behind the Lenin Mausoleum. Last year the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Soviet Union was commemorated on Stalin's birthday, Dec. 21, rather than on the proper date nine days later a subtle acknowledgement of his role in Soviet history.

The current leadership has walked a careful, balanced line. It has restored much of Stalin's historical importance but rejected his methods. It has not forgiven Stalin's faults, but it has generally barred publication of works that expose them.

The result is that Soviet citizens know far less about Stalinist repressions than many people abroad. The famous “secret speech” has never been published here. Even allusions to it are rare.

Moreover, though the press continues to print ritual memorials to the most famous victims of‐ Stalin's purges on anniversaries of their birth, it does so without any indication of how they died. This happened most recently with Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, shot in June, 1937, along with other generals during the army purge.

Although an article in the Khrushchev era on the 70th anniversary of Marshal Tukhachevsky's birthday described these events in detail, this year's article simply stopped recounting his career when it reached 1935.

Poised and Dignified

Mention of Stalin in the press, books, magazines or television is limited, though generally sympathetic. He usually appears in the memoirs of retired generals or documentary or fictionalized movies about World War II — a man of great poise and dignity, decisive and respected but neither imperious nor threatening.

He is portrayed as a wise, kindly and reasonable military leader, accessible to his subordinates and tireless in his service to the country.

The latest installment of a serialized World War II novel, “Blockade” by Aleksandr Chakovsky, editor of the Writers Union weekly, Literatumaya Gazeta, pictures Stalin as a masterful statesman struggling with the lonely decisions of supreme command, acknowledging only in the most minimal way that there were some “mistakes, miscalculations” at the start of World War II.

Moreover, “Blockade” contains only the gentlest possible allusion to the bloody purges —by merely mentioning the year 1937, when the purges were at their peak—and implies that it was the secret police chiefs, not Stalin, who were responsible.

Typically, the account omits any reference to Stalin's fierce temper or any hint of his fears of conspiracies that inspired extreme security measures in his later years.

Play Upon Patriotism

Such accounts, although low key, play upon the naturally strong feelings of patriotism and thereby improve his popular image by linking him with the successful, if painful, war effort.

On occasion, either direct or implied criticism of Stalinist repressions emerges. The most striking current example is a play, “The Ascent of Mount Fuji,” the story of four middleaged men arguing over their guilt in the secret denunciation of a close friend for writing pacifist poem during World War II.

Stalin is never mentioned. Nor are the secret police or the purges generally. But the play dramatizes forcibly for the first time since the Khrushchev era not only the problem of the Stalinist repressions but also the hypocrisy of the current silence about them.

“It's true,” explained a leading Soviet poet, “a few people do want to bring up that issue and face it. But the great majority—the great majority—want to forget about it.”

Similarly, very little is said or written about Stalin's role in the forced collectivization of agriculture in the late nineteen-twenties or his role as prime mover in the industrialization of the country.

Anthem Without Words

The result is a distinct gap in Soviet history‐writing and some peculiar social anachronisms. Because the words to the Soviet national anthem mentioned Stalin in a flattering way, Khrushchev decreed that the words would no longer be sung. A commission was to be appointed to produce new lyrics, but none have ever been accepted. So, at major public events, Soviet citizens stand in silence while their national anthem is played, On Soviet calendars, which honor the birthdays of much lesser figures, Stalin is unmentioned.

More significant, some Soviet parents think, is the fact that a generation of young people is growing up without learning much about a long and crucial period of the country's history.

Some parents and teachers in higher educational institutions assert that there is a sharp polarization among today's young st‐a minority that consider the Stalinist purges an unforgivable black mark in Soviet history. Evidently a larger minority feel that the achievements of the, Stalinist period far outweigh, and perhaps even justify the repressions.

“The issue for most of these young people is not whether they are for Stalin or against him, not whether the Stalinist period was a good thing for the country or a bad thing,” said a man with a daughter studying at Moscow State University. “What my daughter's friends want to know is simply what happened. They feel as though it is part of the country's history and it should not be kept from them.”

A Contrast of Eras

Others draw a contrast between today's youth, which seems relatively unconcerned with Stalinism as an issue, with the youth of a decade ago when university students were sharply challenging their parents about it.

One middle‐aged woman expressed shock when a boy of 16 was unable even to identity Iosif Dzhugashvili, using Stalin's original Georgian name. (He took the name Stalin when he became a Bolshevik revolutionary.) It would be roughly equivalent tor an American teen‐ager not to be able to identify “Ike” as President Eisenhower.

Few things illustrate the gap between Soviet generations more starkly than the relative ignorance of youth about Stalin.

People in their 50's and 60's tend to recall the purges when talking with friends in private, and argue pro or con. Those in their late 30's and early 40's recall the jolt of disillusion at learning what had gone on under Stalin.

“Our generation was the hardest hit,” said one white‐collar worker. “When Stalin died, we were in university, and we thought it was the end of the universe. But we found out that we could go on even without Stalin.”

“Then, we were terribly disillusioned to find out that so many innocent people had been killed and so much history had been falsified,” he said. “Ours was the generation of fathers and sons, when sons asked their parents, Where were you when so‐and‐so was killed and you knew he was a good man and innocent? or ‘Why were you silent?’ Now that's all over. You don't hear that much any more.”

His Death Recalled

Still others vividly recall rushing out to the Kremlin to try to see the body of Stalin, the man who had been the center of the world, when they heard the news of his death, only to be caught up in riots that left hundreds dead and injured in the streets, crushed in the struggle between people and the police. His end was as stormy as his life, they say.

Many recount the surprising re‐emergence of the invisible imprints of his rule, attitudes he encouraged toward previous iron‐handed Russian rulers, like Ivan the Terrible, or fragments of memorized praise of Stalin.

“Not long ago, I was visiting with friends and we started singing,” the white‐collar worker recalled. “The next thing we knew we were singing a song about Stalin that we had memorized in school. We were surprised that we knew almost all the words. It was shocking to hear all those glorious words of praise coming out, as if our minds had been tape ‐ recorders.”

Opinions about Stalin differ not only from generation to generation but also from region to region. Although few generalizations will hold up completely, few dispute that Stalin is still regarded as a saint in his native Georgia and very fondly remembered in the Central Asian republics, but strongly disliked in the Baltic republic and in part of the Ukraine.

So far at least, opinion appears to be generally united on only one issue: whatever respect has been restored to Stalin as a leader who forced achievements upon the country and led the nation to victory in war, no one openly advocates a return to his devastating methods of political control.

By Hedrick Smith

BERLIN — When Leonid Brezhnev came here for a visit in mid‐May, officials of the East German Communist party marshaled thousands of young people to pay him a proper welcome.

Many of those who lined his motorcade route were in the blue jackets of the party's Free German Youth. But even some of those young stalwarts of East German socialism, as well as swarms of other youths, were toting guitars and sporting hip‐hugging, bell‐bottomed slacks and stringy unisex hair long enough to qualify both boys and girls for the Berkeley campus.

While they were waiting for the Soviet leader, number of groups entertained themselves with Western folk rock. Over the crowd rose sounds of American spirituals or “Guantanamera.” One blue jacketed ensemble had even worked out a rockbeat propaganda tune with a rhythmic refrain of “Solidaritat—Ooh-Ah‐Ah.”

Just one of a number of scenes in Eastern Europe for a traveler from Moscow.

Western tourists often overlook the cultural signposts that strike the Muscovite as daring or unusual or openly bourgeois.

For often it is the little things that most quickly mark the lands so long known as Soviet satellites as a different world from Mother Russia and suggest a changing life‐style that has already softened the postwar political rigidities in Eastern Europe.

Not to mention the generally more stylish cut of clothes, the greater density of private cars, and the headlong rush to build private homes, other little things convey a more relaxed, less severe life‐style:

Telephone books in Budapest phone booths (there are none in Moscow); bright new swings, slides and see‐saws or kids on roller skates and shiny bikes in East German playgrounds; American cola served in a local tavern in rural northeast Rumania or the famous Soviet Stolichnaya vodka, denied to Russian consumers for the sake of earning hard currency abroad, marketed in Bucharest; a store for Bibles, prayer books and religious objects given highly visible location on a fashionable Warsaw shopping street; books on Freud in a Budapest bookstore or a simple but up‐to‐date outdoor car‐wash stand in a provincial Hungarian town, or the almost alarming paucity of Lenin statues, which are a constant feature of Soviet life.

In Warsaw, architectural symbols of Eastem Europe as halfway house between Russia and the West, balancing carefully between the past and the future, face each other across Marszalkowska Boulevard.

One side stands the Stalinist Ministry of Culture build;Mg, a towering monument to the. Soviet presence in Poland, built in the pompous, mock gothic, wedding cake style so favored by Stalin for some of Moscow's most famous landmarks. For a couple of decades it has dominated the Warsaw skyline.

Now, cater‐corner a cross the boulevard, a new symbol of Polish ambivalence is rising to share a place in the sun: a square-cut, clean-lined modern Inter‐Continental Hotel, designed to lure Western tourists and help attract more Western trade.

In Bucharest, which sometimes has an unjust reputation as one of the most orthodox of East European capitals, a small, street‐level art gallery near the conservative Central Army House offers a show of modern abstract art that would prompt many a Muscovite to worry that the character-building virtues of Socialist realism were being forgotten.

Op‐art, pop‐art and other Rorschach‐like paintings mingle with bright orange plastic mobiles in the globe, beaker and tube shapes of a modern laboratory or metallic cubes, gears or piping in disarray are mounted in an abstract industrial motif. Patiently, a slender, dark‐haired young woman in a belted sweater and flared corduroys explains derivations from Andy Warhol to less cosmopolitan Rumanians.

There is no pattern for how Western goods or styles are obtained or copied but there is little doubt that this is what people want, young or old.

Pensioners are just about the only people now allowed to leave East Germany on private visits and on a Saturday night near the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint just inside the East sector of Berlin, one can see 40 or 50 elderly women and a few men just returned from the West and patiently waiting in a line for taxis, their shopping bags bulging with modest treasures.

A Dutch woman nearby, visiting East German friends, displays a shopping bag with smoked fish, asparagus, a bottle of Rhine wine, some toothpaste and shampoo.

“They have a lot of consumer things here, but my friends say they have terrible toothpaste and soap,” she explains. “This is what my friends wanted and you're not allowed to bring much.”

Poland, among other countries, has decided to tap not only the urge for Western goods but the uncontrollable flow of hard currency from relatives and foreign travelers —through a network of hard currency stores, open to Poles as well as foreigners.

A Muscovite is startled to watch two young boys walk up to the counter of the shop at the Francuski Hotel in the Cracow and plunk down an American $10 bill to buy a jeans jacket — no questions asked.

A simple enough act, but revolutionary for a Russian because mere possession of hard currency in the Soviet Union — let alone its casual use to buy imported products — would be cause for arrest in most circumstances.

National idiosyncrasies add color to the pattern. A pair of Bulgarian tourists in East Berlin were openly impressed, not only by the sense of prosperity there but also by the discipline of East German pedestrians waiting at traffic lights even when there was no traffic in sight.

“Like the Russians,” explained one of the visitors, “in Bulgaria, we do not wait.” Also like the Russians, the Bulgarians said they liked an early evening stroll and found the emptiness of East Berlin streets on Saturday afternoon or any normal evening a bit eerie.

“But you must not think like some Westerners do that it's because of the system we have,” the professor counseled. “It's the German discipline again. They have strong family character. The men go home early. Children are put in bed at 8 sharp. And ‘they all get up early and go to work on time.’

His Slavic soul was full of admiration and amazement for this punctuality.

But an East German intellectual offered a different explanation for the strange emptiness of downtown East Berlin. “They've all gone home early,” he said, "so they can watch West German TV.”

There are other national variations, as well. The Hungarian‐Austrian border is relatively relaxed. But there is no mistaking where East meets West in Berlin. Even for a traveler accustomed to crossing well‐marked, well-defended Soviet borders, the Berlin wall comes as a shock. The word “wall” is inadequate to describe this concentration camp‐like obstacle that seals off West ‘Berlin from East Germany.

Within yards of East Berlin's Schönefeld International Airport, the Western‐bound traveler is confronted by a formidable barrier: first one and then another electrified barbed wire fence, a plowed strip and an asphalt road, then another plowed strip and jagged concrete tank barriers, a final strip of earth and a 15 foot high wall.

Watchtower guards, owl-eyed behind their huge binoculars, stare down and watch every move as cars and buses undergo not only a thorough search but a zigzag gantlet through a field of, concrete barriers that insure against any speedy getaways.

There are other images, that.evoke Russia itself, especially in the countryside. Bare‐handed, bareheaded peasants in Rumania, caught by a surprisingly late spring snowstorm, haul pails of water by hand from village wells to their roadside homes. Everywhere clusters of peasants gather ‘along country roads with bundles and boxes, hopefully waving at passing cars, no matter how full, anxious for a ride to the next town. their, peasant patience exhausted by the long wait for the next tired bus.

On weekends city‐dwellers as well as farmers in Poland, Rumania, East Germany or Hungary bend low tending their little private garden plots, growing vegetables for the family table.

Almost nowhere in Hungary, East Germany or Poland does a traveler encounter any of the thousands of Soviet soldiers maintaining guard over the region.

“They're carefully segregated from the people here,” explained a French diplomat in one Eastern country. “Occasionally, you come across an encampment with a high wall and Russian writing or some other sign of Russian presence. But they do not mix. It's not just that there are no incidents but they are hardly even visible.”

One saw them nowhere except at the Czechoslovak border town of Decin, on the frontier with East Germany, where they mingled quite freely in uniform among the Czechoslovak crowd at the railroad station.

By Hedrick Smith

BREST, U.S.S.R.—Here on the Soviet‐Polish frontier an unusual feat of engineering occurs every day: Entire trains are lifted off their carriages, car by car, and fitted with new sets of wheels to pass out the Soviet Union into Europe.

They enter Brest on the wide gauge wheel carriages used Russia since Czarist times and an hour and a half later they leave Brest on the narrow wheels that fit the tracks of the rest of Europe. They are ready to travel onward not only to Poland and East Germany but through Berlin to West Germany and the Low Countries and on to the English Channel, because East and West Europe are on the same track.

Symbolically, this shift marks an important cultural divide at the Soviet frontier. It sets off Eastern Europe as world different from the Soviet Union itself, a region with deep historical links to the West, cultural way station between the West and Moscow, and, often, a conveyor belt to the Soviet Union for Western culture and technology. This impression is reinforced in countless ways during the trip from Moscow through Eastern Europe.

A traveler entering the region from the West may note that many basic institutions follow the Soviet model—Communist party rule, a controlled press, five‐year economic plans, police controls and cumbersome bureaucracy.

What strikes the traveler from Moscow are the differences from the Soviet system and the variations in lifestyle. He leaves a nation closed and suspicious, living in continental isolation, and discovers a region of peoples who are fairly broad and open contact with the rest of the world, who practice more flexible forms of Communism, indulge in consumer urges beyond the reach of ordinary Russians, who tolerate artistic and literary forms banned at home by the Kremlin and who allow religion, private agriculture and small private trade a role in Communist society.

Moscow, with its industry and its seven million people conveys size and power, but for international flavor it does not match the smaller capitals of Eastern Europe, with their hotels and airline offices, their more modish shops and fashions, their swarms of tourists.

‘No More Parking Space’

Many little differences greet the visitor from Moscow: the surprising number of Bulgarians driving Mercedes cars Sofia; the appearance of Edward Albee's “Who's Afraid Virginia Woolf?” or Arthur Kopit's “Indians” on the Rumanian stage or “The Flintstones” on Rumanian television; an East Berlin supermarket and department store on the Alexanderplatz that could pass easily in Atlanta; a Polish journalist driving around the block in Gdansk moaning, “Poor old Poland, no more parking space.”

And then there is the constant talk of Eastern European youth about travel abroad; Jimi Hendrix or Mahalia Jackson booming out over a Hungarian radio station; East Germans admitting they listen to the American Armed Forces Radio in Berlin for the latest Western music; the sniping at censor ship, police informers and Com munist‐bloc solidarity in Polish and Hungarian political cabarets; groups of Bulgarians and Rumanians clustered outside the American Embassies in their capitals studying photo exhibits of the Skylab space mission, whereas in Moscow ordinary Russians scurry past the em bassy as if it were a cemetery under military guard.

Eastern Europeans are generally more conversant than Russians with a host of topics dealing with the outside world, from Watergate and West German politics to the latest antics of their favorite Western movie stars and athletes. They know much more about Soviet‐American wheat deals than the Russians themselves. They are less inhibited than most Russians. The Poles, though they do not have freedom of the press, often practice startling freedom of conversation—though even in Poland people sometimes turn up the radio when kitchen talk turns to intellectual dissent.

Persistent Restrictions

The pattern varies from country to country. Hungary and Poland are much more liberal, open and experimental than orthodox Bulgaria. East Germany, Rumania and Czechoslovakia fall between.

Restrictions and limitations persist, but by comparison with the Soviet Union the atmosphere is decidedly relaxed. There is a much more palpable drive to copy Western life styles, a far greater knowledge about the world at home and abroad, greater realism and willingness among officials to admit shortcomings, less ideological pretension and sloganeering. Ordinary people seem to he getting a better break and public opinion Seems to count for something with the political leadership. Moreover, in scores of conversations one encounters surprisingly strong private expressions of anti Soviet feeling.

In fields where Eastern Europeans have no choice—foreign policy, defense and, to a lesser degree, foreign trade, they follow Moscow's lead, though Rumania asserts independence even in these. Com munist parties remain in firm control everywhere, but they interpret their Marxist writ with considerable variations.

In the last three years the Soviet Union has succeeded in winning Western acquiescence to its political hegemony in Eastern Europe. It has managed to resolidify Communist rule in East Germany and has even induced Yugoslavia and Rumania to patch over the sharp differences that developed with Mos cow after the Soviet‐led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, The continuing presence of Soviet troops remains a vital fact of life, and there as little visible pressure, except from Rumania, for Moscow to reduce withdraw its forces.

Freedom to Maneuver

In the current international climate the Kremlin has had to grant Eastern European Communist leaders more maneuvering room in, domestic economic and cultural affairs and, recently, in foreign trade, in the interest of holding popular support and modernizing their economies. Some Eastern Europeans and Western diplomats think that an irreversible loosening is taking place.

But each national leadership is moving carefully, spending the coin of limited flexibility to suit itself—the Rumanians in foreign policy, the Hungarians in fashioning a profit‐oriented New Economic mechanism, the Poles in their cultural openness and now, joined by the East Germans and the Czechoslovaks, in growing consumerism.

For all of them the memory of Czechoslovakia and the fate of the defrocked liberal leader, Alexander Dubcek, re main a primary deterrent against going too far too fast. “Anyone who thinks that be cause of detente that there would not be another Czecho slovakia if the Soviets felt sufficiently provoked by one of these countries ought to have his head examined,” a high American diplomat in Eastern Europe remarked privately. Knowledgeable Eastern Europeans say much the same.

The net result is a balancing act that is often personal as well as national. A Polish computer specialist or a Hungarian writer will do a stint in Moscow to balance off a grant from the United States or West Germany. Hungarian, Rumanian and Czechoslovakia theater companies or rock groups match off trips to the West with trips to the Soviet Union to earn the next trip westward. Periodically the Governments go through phases of cultural tightening. And everywhere, especially in Hungary, people are careful to contain or soft pedal their liberal urges to avoid provoking Moscow and losing what many have come to feel is—as a Budapest intel lectual described it—“a pretty reasonable life.”

Outlet: Nationalism

“Every member of our Politburo keeps up with the economic situation,” a high Hungarian official confided to a Western diplomat. “This is not a Dubcek country, and it never will be.”

The compensating outlet for some Eastern Europeans is a strong assertion of nationalism as well as Broadening cultural ties with the West. In Poland one of the first moves by the party chief, Edward Gierek, to gain popular support after taking over in December, 1970, was to announce that the Government would rebuild the 16th‐century royal castle of Warsaw as a gesture of national unity. In Rumania, President Nicolae Ceauccscu regularly rallies support with declarations of independence, which everyone understands to mean independence from the Soviet Union. In Hungary the leaders have pointedly left standing the empty pedestal for the statue of Stalin pulled down during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Czechoslovakia has a reputation for anti Soviet jokes and violent sports rivalry with the Russians.

Though, theoretically, the West is the enemy of all, and though many East Europeans voice their gratitude for the Soviet defeat of the Nazis, they make equally plain their feeling that the Soviet Union is the power with which they must contend today.

Anti‐Russian sentiments come out in a variety of ways, East Germans complain bitterly about continuing economic “reparations.” Rumanians say bluntly that they dislike Russians. Polish dock workers in Gdynia engaged last fall in a potato‐throwing fight with Soviet seamen after the Rus sians had allegedly dumped into the sea evidently spoiled potatoes loaded by the Poles onto Soviet ships. A Polish edi for explained that press censorship was necessary in his coun try “or we would have another Czechoslovakia” because a completely free press would inevitably print articles offensive to Moscow.

Russian Not Popular

Surprisingly few ordinary people outside the official establishment in most Eastern European countries speak Russian, though in all countries but Rumania it is a compulsory course for several years. At a Warsaw museum a guide, refusing to talk Russian, said curtly, “We speak Polish here,” Two young East German border guards smirked helplessly when an American addressed them in Russian, and one mumbled a melange; “Ich kann nicht Russky sprechen.” In Rumania Russian ranks as the fifth choice among children after French, German, English and Italian.

Eastern Europeans say that on trips to the Soviet Union they often feel as much outsiders as Western tourists do. “We can take a private trip anywhere except Russia,” an East German said. “There it's group tours or delegations—the same for us as for you.” Schedules are fixed and routes prescribed. An Eastern European journalist added that when he worked in Moscow he was subject to the same travel restrictions, telephone taps and occasional surveillance as Western newsmen.

Western culture, like Western technology, enjoys far greater prestige in Eastern Europe than Soviet culture. Intellectuals make no secret not only of their general preference for modern Western works—though Russian classics are admired—but also of their feeling that recognition from the West constitutes the real hallmark of success for their writers, directors and pop stars. Western movies are enormously popular, especially with the young, who often make a fetish of keeping up with the latest Western music and fashions as well.

Unlike Western youth, Eastern European youth seems to have no special voice of its own. Young people are tied much more to their parents, not for money but for hous ing, because living space is tight, and to the state, for work. The constant preoccupation of many young people is travel to the West, something still hard to arrange, though in Hungary and Poland more and more are finding ways.

‘We All Have the Same Roots’

In the theater and book publishing worlds, Eastern Europeans have accepted a host of Western authors barred in the Soviet Union, among them Beckett, Ionesco, Albee, James Joyce, Gunter Grass, Camus, Yeats, Kafka and William Golding, not to mention Hungarian editions of Alexander Werth's distinctly Western oriented “History of World War II,” John Le Carre's, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” and Aldous Huxley's “Brave New World.”

For most intellectuals the historic pull of Western culture is strong. “We all have the same roots,” a Hungarian writer explained. “The Renaissance came to Italy before Northern Europe. We did not get our Gothic architecture until the 19th century. But we're part of the same spirit.”

The exception is Bulgaria which, as a Slavic country with a language and alphabet close to Russian, has an old affinity for Moscow, her liberator in the 19th century from 500 years of Turkish rule as well as her protector today.

Elsewhere openness to Western influence has made for a more lively and usually more liberal intellectual life as well as a generally higher standard of living than in the Soviet Union. As a result leaders like Janos Kadar, the party chief in Hungary and Mr. Gierek in Poland enjoy genuine popularity that Eastern Europeans say was impossible a few years ago.

“Kadar is the first Hungarian leader in this century with common sense,” a Hungarian writer commented. “He is a clever maneuverer, of course, but he seems to know something about how the common man feels and wants to live. He talks about it in his speeches. I'm not a Communist, but I respect him.”

By Hedrick Smith

Sometimes the defensive reactions of Eastern Europe today are more heavy‐handed, and they signal a tightening reflex in the Communist world pre cisely when the West has been insisting that real relaxation should mean freer movement of people and ideas.

East Germany, after agreeing last year to ease travel rules for West Germans to see their relatives in the East, made large numbers of Government, party and other officials pledge that they would have no such con tacts.

In the middle of 1971 the Rumanian Communist party published a decree requiring its people tit report to security of ficials on their contacts with foreigneri. It had a chilling effect at first, but now the situation is more relaxed.

Crackdown, Soviet Style

Throughout 1972 the Soviet Union's security services cracked down on nationalists and other dissidents and, near the year's end, promulgated a secret decree making it illegal for Soviet citizens to meet with foreigners and pass on any thing the state considers false or slanderous information about it.

Czechoslovakia conducted her own crackdown last summer by holding a series of political trials of intellectuals associated with the brief period of liberal ization in 1968 and by estab lishing closer surveillance of unauthorized contacts with foreigners. Western journalists have been refused visas and are closely followed when admit ted. This correspondent's notes dealing with other Eastern European countries were seized by the Czechoslovak security authorities.

Even in relatively relaxed Hungary, party leaders have censured sociologists whose work suggests that present‐day Hungary and the West are con verging.

Perhaps most significant in today's electronic world, the Soviet Union has proposed that the United Nations adopt a con vention barring satellite‐relay television from one country to private viewers in another without the approval of the host country.

What worries the watchdogs and the conservatives is what a Bulgarian Communist party newspaper called a Western policy of “peaceful interference that puts greater emphasis on undermining socialism from within.” It warned against cul tural offensives and psychologi cal warfare and propaganda that play on nationalist feelings or on trends of liberalization.

Youth a Prime Target

Other Communist editors make it plain that youth is of special concern because of its attraction to Western culture and indifference to Communist ideology, despite years of Marx ist‐Leninist courses.

Rumania has been weeding out university‐age slackers and putting them to work, as well as threatening to expel medio cre students. Poland has just shaken up her youth groups to give them more spine, though young people say the main at traction of the new youth or ganization is its power to ar range cheap travel to other Communist countries.

The one issue that seems to chafe young Eastern Europeans most is restrictions on travel to the West. Even in liberalized Poland and Hungary only about one in six applications for visas to the West is granted, and then only with limited funds.

Yet for all the rhetoric and administrative antidotes, im purities from the West keep flowing in through trade, tour ism and television. In fairness, most of the measures taken to contain this flow have been spotty.

The sheer volume of tourism exposes most Eastern Euro peans to new ideas and fash ions from the West, and it con tinues to mount. Last year every Eastern European country had more foreign visitors than the Soviet Union—usually three, four or fives times as many.

Most Are Not Airtight

Bulgaria can remain largely insulated by shiping Western tourist groups to resort hotels on the Black Sea and mini mizing contacts with the public. But other countries cannot re main airtight. Even party offi cials in Czechoslovakia have acknowledged the impossibility of stopping about four million people from watching Austrian television; jamming would dis rupt Prague's own programs.

East Germany is almost to tally exposed. A few years, ago party officials and young Com munists used to berate home owners whose antennas pointed west. But growing numbers of people openly resisted, and this spring the party chief, Erich Honecker, officially granted East Germans the right to listen to West German radio and television.

Such exposure has direct im pact not only on consumer urges but on Communist media as well.

Last year, for example, Ber lin television viewers noticed an abrupt change in East Ger man coverage of the Munich Olympic Games because of Western competition. On opening day East German announcers were full of extravagant praise for Communist athletes and even made disparaging com ments about Western sports men.

But, East Germans say, when the authorities learned that East Germans were following the event on West German TV, the East German network changed its style, toning down propa ganda and focusing on sports.

Nudity, Long Hair, Mockery

Movie‐makers, too, have been forced to compete. The cur rent screen hit in East Berlin is “The Legend of Paul and Paula,” a lusty story of marital infidelities and a funny but sad love affair, done in the modish idiom of “The Graduate.” It has plenty of nude bedroom scenes, long hair, rock and mocking snipes at East German life without a dollop of propa ganda.

Although Rumanian televi sion has dropped “The Untouch ables” and there has been some minor pruning of. Western works elsewhere, a lot still comes into Eastern Europe.

During one week, for exam ple, Polish theaters were stag ing such modern Western plays as Kafka's “America,” Ionesco's “Macbeth,” Peter Ustinov's “Photo Finish,” Neil Simon's “Odd Couple,” Peter Schaf fer's “Black Comedy,” “The Exiles” by James Joyce,” “The Devil's Disciple,” by Shaw, a stage version of Hemingway's “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” D'Neill's “Mourning Becomes Electra” and Meredith Wilson's “Music Man” as well as “Man of La Mancha.” There were only two contemporary Soviet plays.

A similar disproportion quite Dften appears in theaters and movies houses in Bucharest, Prague and Budapest. Except In Bulgaria, Soviet cultural in fluence comes off decidedly second to the West in Eastern Europe. An East German Marx ist remarked that most of his friends so disdained Soviet pro ductions that “it takes two months for the word to get around when we get something good from Moscow.”

Moreover, Communist ideology is mellowing and becoming more pragmatic. In most of Eastern Europe the Communist party, with all its lectures, fac tory slogans and youth clubs, seems less a source of ideals and inspiration than a policy setting apparatus and an im portant stepladder for the ambi tious.

The consumerism that most Eastern European parties now tolerate has a bourgeois quality. East Germany may have purified its socialism by recently nationalizing the remaining sector of semiprivate enter prise as an antidote, but Poland's Communist leaders have been giving new incentives to private farming and the small sector of private trade.

In a region where facts have long been bent to suit doctrine and common sense warped to ideology, no leader talks or operates more pragmatically than Janos Kadar of Hungary.

“Our Marxist‐Leninist ideology,”.he said in a remarkably realistic 60th‐birthday speech last year, “cannot be against common sense. Our theory has to be more than plain, every day human understanding, but it must not conflict with it. For if it does there is something wrong with it.”

Even religion enjoys more tolerance in Eastern Europe than in the Soviet Union. This is true not only in Poland, where the strength of Roman Catholicism is legendary, but also in Czechoslovakia, where intellectuals jammed the con secration ceremony for three bishops this spring, and Ru mania where President Nicolae Ceaucescu's father was given a religious funeral attended by Mr. Ceaucescu and other high officials and covered by na tional television.

There is an ambivalence to ward intellectual life that was captured by that Hungarian folk‐rock musical. Cultural af fairs are caught between old restraints and new urges. But everywhere except in Bulgaria, and perhaps Czechoslovakia temporarily, Eastern European cultural life seems more ‘alive and flexible than that in the Soviet Union. Though the de gree of officially tolerated lib eralism varies with the coun try and the medium, there’ usually is more freedom of ex pression than in Moscow.

More Hopeful Than Russians

Perhaps for that reason East ern European intellectuals seem more hopeful than Soviet lib erals and less inclined to turn to active dissent and under ground publishing than do freethinking. Soviet intellectu als. People in this part of the Communist world are more prone to work within the system despite the obvious limits it imposes.

There are numerous outlets. Political cabarets in Poland, East Germany and Hungary—a medium unknown in Moscow—dare to snipe at censorship, police informers, fatuous bureau crats and the privileged elite and to gibe gently at the foibles of the Warsaw Pact.

Sociologists In Poland and Hungary probe beneath the flat Communist cliches about work ing‐class solidarity to examine inequalities between managers and white‐collar, blue‐collar and unskilled workers and the bias against poor youngsters in schools.

Censors seem a bit less nerv ous and prudish than their Soviet counterparts. Nudity is almost a staple of Polish mov ies and, only slightly less so, of those in Hungary and East Germany. Moreover, domestic social criticism is more daring than in the Soviet Union.

Play About a Dropout

The latest theatrical hit in East Berlin, where cultural life is finally loosening up, is a play about a young Communist dropout. A Hungarian student film studio has done a frank documentary on a school for juvenile delinquents, and an other current film, “Foto grafia,” captures the poverty, narrowness, simplicity and la tent violence in rural life. Polish playwrights portray the submissiveness of people under tyranny or the dehumanization of life in technological society, with obvious local meaning.

Painting and sculpture in a country like Poland Nave long been more closely tied with the outside world of modern experimentation than with Moscow's canons of socialist realism. Similarly, Rumanian salons, display interesting ven tures in the modern medium, and judging by traveling shows, Czechoslovak painters are engaged in abstractions and fantasies still taboo in the Soviet Union.

However, the Eastern Europeans, just as they erect occa sional defenses against the West, are careful not to offend the Russians directly. Publish ers do not put out Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and other Soviet authors still banned in Mos cow. Polish museum officials steer visiting Soviet delegations away from galleries of Polish cubism, colorism or abstract art. Censors sometimes hold up movies for months over a couplet they think the Soviet Ambassador will dislike.

The brief theatrical rage in Rumania last winter was an unorthodox version of Gogol's “Inspector General.” It had swinging finale in which all the actors peeled off their 19th century costumes and stepped out in modern dress, obviously intending the satire on power and official hypocrisy to have modern meaning. But after three performances, Rumanians say, the Soviet Ambassador complained. The play shut down and its director went to cool off in Yugoslavia for a while.

By Hedrick Smith

MOSCOW, June 15—The Soviet Union of Leonid I. Brezhnev is a land that is immensely powerful and yet strangely in secure, eager to promote recon ciliation and yet anxious to limit its impact at home, reach ing out to the world and yet trying to hold it at bay.

Under Mr. Brezhnev's leadership, the Soviet Union has achieved global and nuclear parity with the United States and has shrewdly consolidated its dominance in Eastern Eu rope, yet it remains obsessed by rivalry with China, a country far weaker in economic and military terms.

To an outsider its political structure looks solid and secure, and its society, by Western standards, seems a model of law and order. Yet it has tight ened cultural controls and its secret police have been engaged in a relentless campaign to crush a small scattering of nationalists and other dissidents as if they somehow presented a real threat to Soviet power.

Mr. Brezhnev arrives in the United States this weekend to see President Nixon as the representative of a country publicly triumphant and pri vately defensive, constantly vaunting its socialist superior ity and yet evidently fearful of falling still further behind the capitalist West. It has become industrialized yet not really modern. It has gained growth but lost momentum.

Today its leaders seem mo tivated not only by a messianic ideology but, like Russian rulers in centuries past, by a hatred of backwardness and a consuming desire to be taken as equals by the West, especially by Wash ington. Like czars since Peter the Great, they are borrowing and adapting techniques from major adversaries — currently the United States and West Germany—the better to com Pete with them peacefully.

In the service of this cause of relaxation of tensions Mr. Brezhnev made a historic trip to West Germany last month and told the people there that the Soviet Union did not want to live in isolation from the world. Nonetheless, the Soviet Public remains strikingly cut off from the mainstream of life and ideas abroad.

So proud and secretive is Soviet society that its mass media can extol the benefits of cooperation with the West without disclosing the enormous grain purchases from Western nations last year. Western bank ers are asked to put up billions in loans but are forbidden normal financial facts of the country's foreign‐exchange re serves and gold supply. Foreign enterprises are negotiating for long‐term deals in natural gas but are not permitted to have their specialists check the size of the Soviet fields. The Soviet leaders talk of opening up East West relations yet demand a ban on satellite television relay from one country to citi zens in another, except with prior approval of the programs.

This is a country of such anomalies that almost no por trait is quite accurate.

The Communist leadership has invested enormous amounts of money and reams of iropa ganda on industrialization and has now discovered that, as far as the world at large is con cerned, the real national riches are not machines but natural resources — oil, gas, uranium, diamonds, gold—and they are vast indeed.

This is supposed to be a class less society, yet many people seem to be more rank‐and status‐conscious than Ameri cans. The political, economic and cultural elite is served by a special network of well stocked cut‐rate stores and enjoys a host of privileges that are beyond the reach of the common man and are often, more important than money in this economy of consumer shortages.

The Soviet people have a reputation abroad of being wary of outsiders and suspi cious toward them, and in pub lic they often act that way on chance contact. But once ac quaintance is made they are among the warmest, friendliest, most generous and hospitable people in the world.

They Think It's the Best

Their standard of living is not only below that in the de veloped West but also below that in most if not all of Eastern urope, yet many ordinary Rus sians genuinely seem to con sider their system the best in the world and can conceive of no other. What matters most to them is that they live better than a decade or two ago.

The emigration of 60,000 Soviet Jews in the last 30 months points to serious dis affection among some segments of the population, but most Western specialists doubt that there would be any great exodus if the doors were sud denly thrown open to all. For the Russians are a proudly nationalist people and remain deeply rooted to their land in a way that Americans, as a nation of immigrants, can hardly comprehend.

Moreover, in spite of years of cold‐war propaganda, im proved relations with the Unit ed States correspond to the public mood, for the people are as strongly and genuinely for peace as their leaders pro claim. The staggering loss of 20 million people in World War II is a memory as palpable for most Russians even today as is Vietnam in the United States.

Good and Bad Side by Side

At American exhibitions of consumer goods Russians ask whether an improvement in relations means that they will be able to buy such products. The answer of high Soviet of ficials is that it will come, but only in the long run after Moscow has reaped the finan cial benefits of the big deals it is making now for the nineteen eighties.

Defensive as Russians often are about comparisons with the capitalist West, they are im mensely curious about the United States, and their patchy impressions of it are often an inconsistent collage of exag gerations of how bad and how good it is. At one and the same time they can imagine that un employment means virtual certain death by starvation and that being bourgeois means being able to afford anything one wants.

In part this reflects their skimpy information, but it also may reflect an unconscious projection of Soviet reality be cause here the good and bad, the extremes of advancement and underdevelopment, exist side by side.

The economy has been ca pable of great achievements—the first Sputnik of 1957 and the first manned space flight in 1961, the building of huge dams at Bratsk and Krasno yarsk, the extremely rapid de velopment of the western Siberian oil fields and the build‐up of an advanced mili tary arsenal. But development has been lopsided; signs are everywhere.

At Voronezh, about 300 miles south of Moscow, Westerners occasionally visit the plant that manufactures the sleek new 1,500‐mile‐an‐hour Tupolev‐144 transport plane and come away impressed with the plant and the engineering techniques. “They're doing things with titanium that we haven't gotten to yet,” a knowledgeable Ameri can visitor said.

Then the visitors are sped past the weatherbeaten log homes of peasants and little shack‐like coptry stores. In the bitter cold of winter, farmers tote their water from village wells in two buckets dangling from a shoulder yoke, and in warmer weather, peasant women do their wash by hand in meandering streams.

“When you see those vil lages,” a foreigner remarked, “you simply cannot believe they could produce such a plane. And when you see the plane, you cannot believe they could be as poor as those vil lages. The two just don't fit together?”

Another industrial project, equally typical of Soviet plan ning and its gigantomania, is the truck‐manufacturing com plex rising on the banks of the Kama River 500 miles east of Moscow. It is a prime symbol of the Soviet passion for big ness and the faith that bigger means better and more efficient.

When finished, the complex will be the largest truck plant in the world, capable of rolling out 150,000 big trucks and 250,000 diesel engines a year, dwarfing anything in Detroit or the Ruhr. American, French, West German, Japanese and other foreign concerns have contracted to put more than $1‐billion worth of up‐to‐date equipment into buildings that Soviet construction teams are racing to finish this year.

It is such massive crash projects that the Russians relish. Two years ago they started from scratch. What was then an open rye field near a sleepy rural community of about 20,000, has been trans formed into a throbbing, rapidly growing city of 100,000 with high‐rise apartments for work ers wall to wall on the horizon.

“They look great at a dis tance,” a recent American visitor commented, “but up close they're falling apart al ready”—victims of the instant aging that afflicts so much Soviet architecture. When the American asked a Russian why the workmanship on such proj ects was so often shoddy, the Russian replied, “No one owns it so no one cares.”

Typically, Soviet industry has developed the kind of brute strength represented by the Kama River project. Now the Soviet leaders have discovered that while their country has recorded impressive economic growth, the West has been racing ahead in technology. In stead of boasting of “burying capitalism,” as the late Nikita S. Khrushchev did, Mr. Brezh nev is going to seek the help of capitalism and buy Western technology wholesale—ranging from steel plants and fertilizer factories to computers and gas liquefication plants — to mod ernize his country.

Missing: Competition

The centrally planned Soviet economy, in the view of West ern specialists, has simply been unable to generate enough good technology and to convert it into production fast enough. It lacks the driving force of com petition that stimulates tech nological development in the West, and Communist planners and theorists have not yet de vised an adequate substitute.

Even managers who come up with new gadgets, no matter how simple, find it frustrating to battle the top‐heavy bureau cracy. “To get approval for the production of an aluminum cup,” an executive complained to the press, “it was necessary to receive consent from 18 organizations — not only in Moscow but in other cities of the country.” Another plant manager reported battling for 10 months to get a price on a simple clothes rack his factory wanted to make.

Moscow has another basic economic problem. Quite apart from the bad harvest last year, the impressive economic growth rates of the postwar period are declining. The reasons are complex, generally a reflection of growing complexity of later stages of economic develop ment. But the message is clear: The Soviet Union can no longer achieve growth so easily by adding to its labor force, as it did in the sixties; from now on, growth depends primarily on greater efficiency, never a strong suit of the Soviet economy.

Moreover, a new generation of mathematical economists argues that the headlong rush to build up selected basic in dustries was inefficient because growth was not well coordi nated. They cite such classic examples as the completion of the Bratsk hydroelectric project in 1967 without the major intended consumer, an alumi num factory, which has still not been completed.

In similar fashion, the leader ship plunged into mass produc tion of private cars with the help of Fiat of Italy without taking Italian advice to estab lish a service and maintenance system simultaneously. Cars deluged the old repair shops. This year, with 500,000 Zhiguli Fiats due off the assembly lines, the Russians are belatedly trying to build a nationwide network of 33 vast service centers, but few are finished and many will eventually serve areas larger than California.

With limited supplies of cars and larger supplies of television sets, radios, cameras, vacuum cleaners, sewing machines and primitive washers, the Soviet consumer—though hardly well off by Western standards — is noticeably , better off than a decade or two ago.

Big Rise in Housing

During the Brezhnev era, since 1964, more than five bil lion square feet of housing has been built in urban areas. For millions this has meant getting their own apartments for the first time. For others it has meant reducing the terrible overcrowding in communal apartments—in a typical case 50 people were sharing 9 rooms, a kitchen and a bath room 10 years ago; now the member is 27. Nonetheless, housing remains desperately short and, according to Western analysis, the average Soviet citizen lives in about a fourth the space occupied by an aver age American.

In the last two decades meat, milk And vegetable consumption has roughly doubled from the grim early fifties, though starches still make up more than half the ordinary diet. Industrial wages have more than doubled since 1952, to an average of 144 rubles—roughly $190 a month at the official but highly artificial rate of ex change.

With cheap rent and trans portation, almost no medical expenditures and some low‐cost partly subsidized vacations, the working couple have spend ing money despite high food and clothing prices. Their nightmare is the shortage of food and its poor quality.

Soviet consumers are passive compared with meat‐boycott ing and supermarket‐picketing American housewives, but even they show signs of resistance. A Leningrad University bulletin reported that in one year 40 million pairs of shoes went un sold and that for three years stocks of footwear and cloth ing in the retail network shot up much faster than retail sales while savings ‐bank deposits were climbing. The consumer, the bulletin reasoned, is re fusing to buy shoddy goods.

Pravda, the Communist party's authoritative news paper, added that most con sumer durables were 20 years out of date.

The dominant fact of con sumer life is still the inordinate wait in line for everything, “Two hours of waiting in line to shop each day,” a middle aged woman groused, “is so much misery after a day's work,” In spring and summer food lines are not too bad; in winter people talk of a three hour wait to buy cabbage. A Moscow magazine computed this spring that Russians, mostly women, spend a stagger ing 30 billion hours a year standing in line, and private estimates are triple that figure.

In their stoical way ordinary Russians endure without pro test. “Their situation has im proved and they don't stop to think that there have been im provements elsewhere in the world too,” a liberal scientist explained to a Westerner. “They don't compare their situation with yours. They com pare it with their own past. So they are satisfied.”

What is more, elements of American life genuinely dismay Russians, as they do Americans —unemployment, crime, politi cal assassinations, drugs, the high cost of medical care and college education. Taken to gether these problems, normally played up in the Soviet press, are enough, in the view of most Russians to outweigh the dis advantages of censorship, police controls, arbitrary arrests, la bor camps and enforced intel lectual conformity.

On the other hand the young unabashedly admire American cars and Western stereo sets and other technology, and fol low Western rock groups. Bour geois ideological impurities, trafficked for high prices on the black market; often show up in odd places: a recording from “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” in a restaurant in the provincial town of Vladimir, a beat group deep in Siberia that has record ed from foreign radio and has imitated Englebert Humper dinck and Jimi Hendrix, the names of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles painted on the walls of a hockey rink in the greenbelt suburban village of Barvikha, where many of the elite have dachas.

Researchers Well Informed

Researchers in specialized institutes keep up with Western scientific and business thinking, and the staffs of major news papers and magazines have sub scriptions to Western publica tions. But ordinary citizens and most intellectuals, being cut off, find it hard to form coherent picture of life abroad. Their isolation often comes out naive comments or ques tions.

A young linguist attentive to things Western but oblivious of the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon papers asked a West ern Correspondent quite seri ously which censorship he thought stricter — Soviet or American.

A customs inspector, after leafing through an American magazine on hotrod cars, hand ed it back to an American with the comment: “Of course, they don't really have all those cars. It's just pictures made up for children.”

A scholar who knows several foreign languages and follows academic matters abroad is astonished to discover on his first visit to Rome that kiosks sell Pravda. A young woman finds it hard to believe that many Western young people regard the Soviet Union as conservative power and society, not a pillar of world progres sivism.

A middle‐aged researcher, discussing freedom of expres sion in the United States, re jects an American's assertion that he could stand up in pub lic and criticize President Nixon. “Of course you could,” the Russian says sarcastically, and “They'd put you in an insane asylum!”

Trial of Dissidents Seen

As if to preserve this insula tion, the Soviet authorities have tightened domestic controls and warned people not to expect political relaxation. Establish ment writers complain that censorship is as tight as it had been in the post‐Stalin period, though some social criticism emerges. Western diplomats be lieve that one of Moscow's major motives for joining the International Copyright Con vention this spring was to gain a new method of blocking for eign publication of dissident authors such as Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.

The crackdowns against Ukrainian nationalists and the tiny group of dissidents calling themselves the Democratic Movement have been intense since early July; trials are ex pected after Mr. Brezhnev's visit to the United States.

According to Western diplo mats’ estimates, roughly a mil lion people, about 10,000 to 15,000 of them political prison ers, are in Soviet labor camps. In a limited way foreign con tacts, those in which Soviet leaders see advantage, are in creasing: business dealings, cultural and scientific ex changes that send the Bolshoi Ballet abroad or bring Amer ican cancer researchers and en vironmental experts here. But this touches only a tiny fraction of the Soviet people, and the contacts well monitored.

Of nearly 250 million people only about 2 million went abroad last year, roughly the same number as from Czecho slovakia. About three‐quarters went to Eastern Europe, and the vast majority were members of organized cultural, sports, economic and student exchanges or official delegations. Of 7,000 visitors to the United States, only 400 had tourist visas, and those mostly for groups. In dividual, unofficial foreign travel is infinitesimal.

Given such restrictions, the surprising thing about the emi gration of Soviet Jews is that it is being allowed in such large numbers. Other less visthie groups — Armenian‐Americans; Ukrainian‐Canadians, ethnic Germans—are also having difficulty emigrating, though there is a trickle.

Foreign visitors normally travel well‐beaten paths and make contact primarily with a highly selected and monitored group of Soviet guides or sim ilar officials, yet the farther from politically conscious Moscow one travels, the more open people become and the more curious about foreigners. A car breakdown can produce not only willing help but a gener ous dinner invitation. Memories of wartime collaboration with Americans against the Nazis flood from middle‐aged men.

Wariness and Suspicion

There are many cases of wariness and suspicion as well —people who turn away in quiries or rebuff conversations. A traveler who stops to photo graph a filling station is be rated and the militia are sum moned. He strays mistakenly off a fixed route for a mile and policemen appear to turn him back. A correspondent wants to buy a newspaper in a pro vincial city and a Soviet of ficial insists on accompanying him to the kiosk 50 yards from his hotel.

Suspicion toward foreigners, a Soviet official commented to an American acquaintance, is a tradition that predates Com munism. Like so much of the Soviet Union of today, it is part of the past. Pushkin and Dos toevski, like free‐thinking in tellectuals today, battled the czarist censors and served their periods of political exile. At Tolstoy's death photographers were not allowed to take pic tures of his body while it lay in a provincial railroad station, The May Day and Revolution Day parades through Red Square, when huge portraits of Soviet leaders are borne aloft, are reminiscent of religious processions of the past. Even some of the braid on Soviet officers’ uniforms and the Prus sian‐style goose step of honor guards predate the Revolution.

Mr. Brezhnev's turn to the West for technology and even for foreign technicians fits within the fluctuating pattern of Russian history since Peter the Great opened his celebrated “window to the West” in the early 18th century. The best is borrowed or copied, but the outside world is never really admitted, For all the techniques from without, Russia remains a continent unto itself.

By Hedrick Smith

"I don’t sell neckties or shirts or buttons or tractors or combine harvesters. [We have] natural wealth, including rare metals, ores and very important minerals—deposits that will enable us to plan our development for 200 and even 300 years ahead.

“Trade has to be of a large-scale nature, worthy of the scale of our two great countries. I'm all in favor of that kind of trade." This broad talk on the need to think big commercially came not from the head of some wealthy Western multinational corporation but from General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev, the son of a steel worker and lifelong Communist party administrator, now in effect chairman of the board of the world’s largest integrated economic establishment, the Soviet economy.

His remarks to American correspondents illustrate the burly, bushy-browed Soviet leader’s mounting personal interest and involvement in commerce, capture the pragmatic nature of his improvement in relations with the West, and even hint at his corporate style of leadership.

For if Lenin's name is associated with the Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of Soviet power, Stalin’s with collectivization and the purges, and Khrushchev’s with de-Stalinization and the virgin land program, Mr. Brezhnev is well on his way to making his trademarks the turn to détente with the West and his current bold venture at cooperative East-West commerce, especially in developing Siberia.

As these policies have gained momentum over the last three years, Mr. Brezhnev has emerged with greater authority at home as well as greater visibility, stature and poise as the Kremlin’s principal delegate to the West.

After initial leadership years as a hidden figure, he has gained a reputation in the West for his taste for food, drink, hunting and fast cars, and problems with weight and smoking. A rising flow of Western visitors has found him gregarious and talkative and has come away more struck by his warm smile than by the black eyebrows that cartoonists used to make look so satanic in the months after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In the post-Czechoslovakia years, Soviet propagandists made a deliberate effort to humanize Mr. Brezhnev in the West. Official photographers have caught him in shirtsleeves in talks with Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany, greeting women factory workers in Yugoslavia with a kiss on the lips, hoisting up young children in Poland, or in a sporty pose wearing dark glasses and open-necked windbreaker leaning against the gunwhales of a yacht.

All this is a marked contrast from the early years of the Brezhnev-led coalition that toppled Mr. Khrushchev in 1964, when Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin was Moscow's negotiator with the West and when Mr. Brezhnev, in 1966, rebuffed some private suggestions on a Berlin settlement from de Gaulle by reading the French leader a hardline Kremlin position paper and then re-reading it when de Gaulle tried to carry the dialogue further.

“When I first met Brezhnev," Chancellor Brandt recalls, “he carried his briefing book in front of him. When we discussed the Middle East, he turned to that section and read a statement. When we discussed Berlin, he did the same. When I went hack a few months later, there was no briefing hook. Brezhnev knew what he wanted to say on all subjects and said it. He's a fast learner."

High-level American visitors have also found the 66-year-old Soviet leader knowledgeable and relaxed, a man with a definite gift for gab and the cordial manner of a Southern politician.

He cannot match Mr. Khrushchev for quotable anecdotes but he manages jokes and often comes across with pithy, informal comments such as his remark to a Western visitor who inquired about the long-term prospects for coexistence of capitalism and Communism. That could be opposed, Mr. Brezhnev declared, only by people “who have nothing in their heads but sausages and coffee.”

In general, he projects an air of realism, calmness and stability in the Kremlin after the erratic exuberance of Khrushchev and the arbitrary tyranny of Stalin. This has evidently won him a strong following in the Communist party hierarchy, though the Soviet people generally seem fairly indifferent to him as a leader.

On television and in photographs, Mr. Brezhnev’s heavy figure, fleshy face, and wavy graying hair give an impression of force and size that leaves visitors surprised not to find him taller than his 5 feet 11 inches when they meet him. He is not a particularly good speaker and is at his best in conversations with small groups.

There are some interesting parallels in the life and career of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev with that of Richard Milhous Nixon. Both came from humble beginnings. Mr. Brezhnev was born on Dec. 19, 1906, of Russian parents in the Ukrainian river town of Kamenskoye, now the industrial city of Dneprodzerzhinsk. He began working in a steel mill when he was 15.

Later he studied metallurgical engineering and has retained an interest in machinery and mechanics. He got his first political job as deputy mayor of his hometown in 1937 and rose rapidly under the patronage of Mr. Khrushchev as other senior men were falling victims of the Stalinist purges. In the war years, he continued his rise as a political commissar in the army, beginning a long connection with the defense establishment.

Like President Nixon, he emerged on the national scene in 1952, when Mr. Nixon became Vice President. Mr. Brezhnev became one of the 10 senior secretaries of the Communist party and an alternate member of the Presidium, as the ruling Politburo was then called. Also, like Mr. Nixon, he had some ups and downs before becoming First Secretary and the top figure in the Politburo after overthrowing his mentor. Mr. Khrushchev.

Moreover, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Brezhnev share a pragmatism in their approach to foreign policy after more conservative earlier years. Some of Mr. Brezhnev’s earlier speeches are studded with Marxist references to the corruption and decline of capitalism that are the other side of Mr. Nixon's earlier rigid anti-Communism.

Just as Mr. Brezhnev has distinguished himself as a superb tactician in foreign affairs, consolidating the Soviet hold in Eastern Europe and then managing the policy of détente with the West, he has proved himself a masterful tactician in the Kremlin’s inner workings.

Having come to power on a platform of collective leadership, he has gradually accumulated personal power without arousing fears of his colleagues about a return to one-man rule. He quickly neutralized the ambitious and powerful Politburo member, Aleksandr N. Shelepin, by shifting him out of control of the secret police. And he persuaded Nikolai V. Podgonny to give up a key party secretary’s job for the more ceremonial post of President.

In 1971, he packed the Politburo with four new men, all his supporters, and then this spring had enough power to ease out two foes, Pyotr Y. Shelest and Gennady I. Voronov. Although always more powerful in the post-Khrushchev coalition than Premier Kosygin, he began to upstage Mr. Kosygin publicly in late 1969 on domestic affairs and a year later on foreign affairs with his first meeting with Chancellor Brandt.

Even so, he does not appear to be a leader of unlimited power, but carefully shepherds the Politburo consensus behind the politics he wants to promote, balancing the interests of the “steel-eaters" of heavy industry with the rising needs of consumers, prodding the traditionalists to move into the computer age and yet clamping down on dissidents.

Nor does Mr. Brezhnev seem to thrive on power in the way that Stalin or Khrushchev did, though he has his vanities. He has been seen at state receptions pausing to comb his hair before a mirror. He has the facial lines air-brushed out of his official photographs. A Time magazine correspondent was expelled from Moscow in 1970, reportedly because Mr. Brezhnev was irritated about an unflattering cover story on him.

And he has pointedly shifted away from the baggy dark suits of Soviet leaders into well-tailored clothes with gold cuff links, an occasional diamond tiepin and a gold Japanese watch with a crocodile-leather wristband.

His taste for executed style cars has become so well known that other leaders now pointedly cater to it. He began with a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud to which President Pompidou added a Citroen-Maserati executive style sports car. Chancellor Brandt contributed a Mercedes 450 SLC, and President Nixon a Cadillac. In Moscow, driven to work about 8:45 and back home about 10:30, he travels in a chauffeured Zil, a Soviet limousine. But he likes to drive himself outside the city. “When I am driving I relax," he once said. “Behind the wheel, I have the impression that nothing can happen.“

Although he once was a sportsman (skating, cross-country skiing and long-distance cycling) he now settles for hunting pheasant, duck, deer and wild boar in the swamps and forests around Zavidovo, about 90 miles northwest of Moscow, where he took Henry A. Kissinger this spring for their private talks. In town he follows the Dynamo soccer team much the way President Nixon roots for the Washington Redskins.

Tobacco is such a problem for Mr. Brezhnev, who now smokes Philip Morris Multifilters, that he got a cigarette box with a timed lock to slow down his pace. But, he confessed, to one visitor, "I keep a reserve pack in the other pocket."

Periodically he goes on weight-trimming campaigns. “I sit all day at a desk and when I don’t smoke, the appetite stands right beside me," he confessed. "'Go away,'” I say, ‘go away.’ But Comrade Appetite doesn’t move.”

He lives relatively modestly in a five-room apartment on Moscow's broad Kutuzovsky Prospekt with not a mark on the building to signify that the Soviet Union’s most powerful man is its resident. With him live his wife, Viktoria Petrovna, his mother, Natasha, now 86, and a granddaughter, Viktoria, from an earlier marriage of his daughter, Galena. His daughter has worked for the Novosti Press Agency, which often employs people from leading families. His son, Yuri, a middle-level trade official, lives with his own family.

None are accompanying him on the present trip, but Mr. Brezhnev emphasizes that he expects to exchange more visits with President Nixon “so they will have time.”

Although he suffered a mild heart attack several years ago, has problems with insomnia and had an illness or an operation that briefly put him out of commission last fall, he has bounced back and is quick to assure visitors that longevity is common in his family. “I am still young and full of vigor," he said to American correspondents.

By Hedrick Smith

MOSCOW, July 8—The gregarious, hand‐shaking, backslapping political style that Leonid I. Brezhnev employed before American television audiences during his recent visit to the United States already seems a thing of the past.

It was a brief and untypical interlude in the more staid traditional style of Soviet diplomacy. The afterglow of paeans for the successes of the Soviet leader's visit to America have rolled on in the Soviet press, but Mr. Brezhnev himself has disappeared behind the Governmental curtain of security and secrecy that cuts him off from public view except for formal occasions and national celebrations.

In the last few days, he has given up the limelight to Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin's trip to Austria and President Nikolai V. Podgorny's visit to Bulgaria.

Both men have been models of conservative comportment, shown in the media being greeted formally by their hosts or signing communiques—none of the levity and ebullience of Mr. Brezhnev's American interlude.

Like many Russian travelers, the Soviet Communist party chief seemed more genuinely relaxed abroad than in public at home, though those who have met him in small groups in the Kremlin say he is, in private here, much as he was in America.

Some Russians, as well as Western diplomats, regard his good‐fellowship diplomacy in America as a bit of deliberate salesmanship intended to thaw American reservations about large‐scale economic credits and long‐term deals with the Kremlin. The Soviet press gave little hint of his gregariousness in its coverage of the visit.

But Soviet television coverage of his clowning and open-handed good fellowship with President Nixon and other American leaders aroused the curiosity of ordinary Russians who have never seen their 66‐year‐old leader so relaxed and informal.

“He showed a human face in the West,” a young Muscovite remarked to a foreign friend. “Why doesn't he do it here?”

A few conservatively inclined intellectuals winced at Mr. Brezhnev's clowning in America especially when he virtually threw himself to the arms of the movie star Chuck Connors, who hoisted the visitor into the air for a raucous, bear‐hug farewell at San Clemente. “I didn't like that at all,” said a middle‐aged man here.

But many Russians seemed pleased to see their leader playing an outgoing role and to read reports that he had found a warm reception and had left a good impression.

“Will it last?” a woman asked, “or is all this only temporary?”

“He did it with more style than Khrushchev,” her husband interjected, without permitting a foreigner to answer her question. “Khrushchev was a boor. Brezhnev was informal with the Americans, but he did not show bad taste. He was always well-dressed and there was none of that shoe-banging.”

He was referring to the incident in 1960 when Premier Nikita Khrushchev took off his shoe and pounded on his table during a debate at the United Nations, an event that has embarrassed Russians ever since.

If any Politburo members had misgivings about the Brezhnev style in America, there has been no public indication yet. The visit was given the customary “full and complete” endorsement of the Politburo, Council of Ministers and Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. His “great personal contribution” to the success of the talks has been warmly applauded in the press for several days running.

His current willingness to take a back seat and let Mr. Kosygin and Mr. Podgorny have their days in the sun with visits to less important countries is in keeping with his periodic tactic of promoting a show of collective leadership immediately after personally undertaking important initiatives.

Mr. Brezhnev may have been especially alert to the sensitivities of his senior colleagues after having disclosed to reporters that Mikhail A. Suslov and Andrei P. Kirilenko, party secretaries, took his place running the Politburo in his absence, rather than Premier Kosygin or President Podgorny.

This careful political technique has won Mr. Brezhnev the reputation of being a consensus leader, much in the manner of President Johnson's early years—carefully tending a ruling coalition to insure his own pre‐eminence.

Moreover, by retiring from view after making an enormous splash in headlines and on television, he is reducing the risk of being charged with fostering a cult of personality.

In sum, his more modest bearing at home seems intended to suit the demands of his most important domestic audience—the top hierarchy of the Communist party—just as his ebullient performance in the United States was tailored to the taste of American audiences.

By Hedrick Smith

JURMALA, U.S.S.R.—It is hardly Miami Beach, Biarritz or Corfu, but in the Soviet Union many people consider it “going west,” and they do not mean just geographically.

The summer resorts here in Latvia and in the other Baltic republics facing out toward Scandinavia have a reputation and an ambiance that more nearly approach those of the West than do other parts of the Soviet Union—without losing a distinctly Soviet character.

For 20 miles an immaculate, well-equipped, sandy beach curls around the Gulf of Riga past the grand old turn‐ofthe‐century sanitarium at Kemri and the rambling frame houses sheltered for decades in the pine forests near Dzintari and other communities in the area.

Older folk come for the sulphur treatments, medical mud baths, solariums and special inhalations at the sanitariums and for the prescribed promenades along the miles of beach dressed in anything from dark, baggy suits to slacks and undershirts. The young, “traveling wild,” as they say in Russian, rent single beds for $2 a night and hunt out the open-air dance hall at Asari or the traveling Czechoslovak amusement park that offers modest Coney Island rides (no roller coasters).

In July a special attraction was the centennial celebration of the Latvian day of song. More than 20,000 amateur singers and dancers, all costumed in their bright traditional dress, held huge outdoor songfest, gaily throwing the directors of the leading choirs into the air.

Down at the sea there was surprisingly little boating or water‐skiing. On the beach large signs carefully delineate zones of passive rest” from “zones of active rest” to separate throngs of languid sun‐worshipers from those fixtures of the Soviet scene, the energetic devotees of physical fitness ever engaged in volleyball and soccer.

Amid the sprawling bodies ubiquitous transistor radios could be overheard picking up the B.B.C., Radio Stockholm or a Polish station playing something by Simon and Garfunkel. The Juras Perle restaurant, jutting out over the sands at Bulduri, boasts a Saturday night show with Dixieland jazz and honest‐to‐goodness can‐can routines by leggy girls in bikinis that puzzle as well as titillate the middle‐aged Establishment figures who often seem to wangle the sought-after tables.

“What are you looking at, Yevgeny?” a woman mocked as her silver‐haired husband stood up for a better view.

The city of Riga, just 10 miles from the beaches, projects a European flavor with spires of Lutheran and Roman Catholic cathedrals and peaked Germanic roofs evoking its Hanseatic history — not to mention more contemporary high‐stooled Italian‐style coffee bars, American‐style Good Humor sticks and eye‐catching Latvian girls in form-fitting sweaters and stylish slacks or bright skirts that do not find their way into the Soviet heartland all that often.

Socialist morality is preserved by some Riga cafes, which shut before sundown. The young cognoscenti gather until after midnight at the Apollo Cafe to dance or listen to Latvia's best combo, the Rigonda, playing such Western hits as “Love Me Tender” and “The Shadow of Your Smile.”

The Riga area is far less known in the Soviet Union as a holiday resort than Yalta. Sochi. Pitsunda and other Black Sea spots, but by local accounts it is growing rapidly.

The population of the Jurmala beach community swells from about 50,000 to 200,000 in the summer and on a sunny Sunday another 200,000 flock to the beach from Riga. Commuter trains running every 10 minutes, with people jammed six abreast on hard wooden seats, can barely cope with the crowd.

For all of Riga's Western flavor, the Soviet vacationer par excellence is a man like Ivan Yakovlevich Safronov, a husky, ruddy‐faced, 56‐year‐old World War II veteran whose heavily subsidized, highly supervised holidays illustrate the attractions and the limitations of Soviet socialism. He is vacationing this year at the bright new 500‐bed sanitarium at Yaunkemeri.

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In April, 1944, during the fighting on the Ukrainian front, he was wounded “from head to toe,” he said, gesturing at a nickel‐sized dent in his forehead and motioning at legs bothered by rheumatism. As a war invalid and as an official of the People's Control Commission in Tashkent, he is a man with good connections and access to choice vacation sites.

For the entire postwar period, Mr. Safronov said, he has gone each year to Government‐built sanitariums operated by the Soviet trade union federations. By Western standards all this has been unbelievably cheap, though it is often conducted with a highly organized and collectivized routine that some Westerners would find confining.

The key to his economical holidays is the putyovka, or annual pass, issued by the trade unions on advice of doctors and entitling Mr. Safronov not only to a 24‐day stay at a sanitarium but to a union subsidy for all but 30 per cent of the cost. This year his share for room and board plus treatment came to 48 rubles ($66) for 24 days.

Not everyone is privileged enough to get a sanitarium putyovka. Last year, a doctor said, about seven million of the population of 250 million did so.

Elvira Y. Kliger, a secretary of the Latvian trade unions, noted that there were other subsidized vacation spots. In Latvia alone, she said, there is space enough for 170,000 people —half from Latvia, half from other republics—in sanitariums, rest houses and pensions. Passes to Use Cabins

By her account, 49,000 more get putyovkas to five tourist bases—modest dormitory hotels with cafeterias—and 110,000 vacation passes are granted to Latvian workers by their factories for one‐family cabins. Also, about 65,000 children go to Young Pioneer camps each year for nominal fees.

Nonetheless, Mrs; Kliger said in an interview, “We cannot satisfy all those who want to come and that is our problem.” More sanitariums are under construction, she added.

A man like Mr. Safronov has problems mingled with the benefits of his subsidized vacation. His wife, who works for another Government agency, could not arrange her vacation schedule to coincide with his, and she has to care for her bedridden mother.

This is a predicament that many Soviet citizens face because so many wives work. “Our vacations are given according to a schedule at the factory,” a Latvian construction worker explained. “My wife works at the airport. It's hard to get off in summer, especially for both of us at the same time, so we go at different times. I go to see my sister and she goes to see her parents.”

For a vast number of Russians, staying with relatives is the key to a low‐cost vacation, which is a necessity for many.

Mr. Safronov and his sort may have it easier, but their holidays are not exactly what could be called a fling. Mr. Safronov must follow the routine: up at 7:30, group morning exercises, breakfast, medical treatment, a prescribed walk on the beach (all by the clock), lunch, a free hour, then a quiet hour in his room, afternoon tea, collective cultural activities or excursions, supper, a prescribed evening walk, a collective show or concert, yogurt at 10 P.M. (“We give it to everyone,” the chief doctor said; “we consider it like medicine”), and lights out at 11.

The diet is prescribed, one of 15 planned by an institute in Moscow, which also sets the schedule of alternating mud baths, sulphur immersions and massages.

“But what if someone comes back late?” a visitor asked. “No one ever does,” a doctor replied firmly, as if surprised by the question.

When the visitor looked skeptical, a Latvian journalist who had arranged the visit explained that he knew of a man a bit in his cups, who came back late one evening, only to get a written reprimand in his work record—a black mark that killed all hopes of more putyovkas.

“I took one swim—on the sly,” Mr. Safronov confessed with an uncertain grin. But he hastened to add, “That was before I began my treatments.” A doctor, hovering near, quickly interjected: “Ocean swimming is not recommended for patients who take mud baths and sulphur treatments”–90 per cent of those at Yaunkemeri.

Pot Luck at ‘Kemping’

Younger people tend to balk at such routine and settle for more modest accommodations. Those with friends or friends of friends living in the Riga area rent private rooms; others take their chances at “kemping” grounds.

Valentina Podvalnaya, a biochemist from Moscow, landed happily at the metal-roofed cottages at Vaivari Kemping, sharing a bright but spartan 8‐by‐10‐foot room with her husband and 4‐year‐old son for a quiet month near the beach. They signed up in spring but did not learn until the last minute that her husband's employer had arranged the space.

Mrs. Podvalnaya and her family traveled by train, Unlike the increasing number of people who own private cars and take them on vacation. But some consider them a handicap. “No point in going on vacation by car,” commented a beer‐drinking Ukrainian worker. “On vacation you want to drink a bit, right? But just one beer, and if they catch you behind the wheel, you can lose your license, so I go by train.”

Nadya, a plump, giggly, auburn‐haired Latvian from Jurmala, was telling a visitor how much fun it was to meet young men from all over the Soviet Union on the beaches in the summer.

“You must have a vacation year‐round,” a visitor suggested.

“No,” she replied somewhat sadly. “It's only gay like this in summertime. In the winter it's boring. There aren't enough other young people. Besides, they shut down the amusement park and the outdoor dance hall at Asari. So it's not much fun here out of season.”

By Hedrick Smith

MOSCOW, Oct. 24—The Soviet basketball team scored the controversial, second upset victory the United States at the 1972 Olympics is now the scandal of the Soviet sports world.

Its players are publicly accused of becoming overconfident prima donnas accustomed to “hothouse” privileges, and chastised for losing the European basketball championship (to Spain) for the first time in 19 years partly because the Olympic victory went to their heads.

Worse yet, some players are being taken to court for trying to smuggle in Westem goods from their foreign tours—a practice that many big‐time Soviet athletes and traveling cultural groups take for granted as one of the main privileges of their crafts.

The decline and fall of the basketball team, as reported by the Young Communist newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, reveals much about the world of major sports in the Soviet Union, which deliberately coddles top athletes and then expects them to deliver championships for the sake of national prestige.

The basketball players, who lost several games on tour in the United States and elsewhere, find themselves held up as a national disgrace and admonished that their slack moral fiber was their undoing.

Their case illustrates a perennial problem for Soviet authorities — how to maintain Communist discipline among big‐time national athletes who get a taste of fame, glory, special privileges and the outside world.

“The national team returned home burdened not with a heap of victories, but with a heap of unprecedented customs violations,” Komsomolskaya Pravda's sports editor wrote testily.

“Our national team has never committed such single ‘fouls.’ It is only too understandable that the dirty play of certain sportsmen on the national team has become an object of attention not of sports referees but of other judges.”

A similar scandal arose a few years ago when a Moscow soccer team came home from a similarly unsuccessful tour with suitcases loaded with Western appliances, radios, textiles and other choice items unavailable to Soviet consumers. This time there were hints that some basketball players had run afoul of the law, though the paper was hazy on details.

Komsomolskaya Pravda seemed most concerned with getting at the root of the team's defeat two weeks ago at the European championships in Barcelona, Spain. Soviet basketball fans, thinking the unprecedented victory over the Americans at the Olympics had opened a new era, were stunned when the Spanish beat their team, 80‐76, in the semifinals.

“No one could have expected this,” said V. Shablinsky, the Kiev basketball coach, “We have been the champions of Europe, for 18 years. Neither our coaches nor our players were psychologically ready for the championship. The team played very primitively.”

S. Bashkin, the national team coach, sought to explain the loss by observing that the team had a 50 per cent influx of new players since the Olympics, and that the newcomers had cracked under pressure.

But Komsomolskaya Pravda, evidently speaking for the political supervisors of the sports establishment, was not accepting so simple an explanation. It noted that the team had lost four to eight games in America and two more in a tour of Panama. And, in the first such comment in the Soviet press, it said that the original team had not played so impressively in the Olympics against what was “not the best team the U.S.A. could have put forward.”

Since then, the paper went on, the players had got too exalted a view of their importance as “the best team in Soviet history,” and had come to expect “the hothouse conditions created for the whole national team.”

The implication was that the players had become accustomed to exemption from regular political indoctrination, immunity from customs checks and normal supervision of their personal behavior and to receiving liberal expense and travel allowances.

Moreover, the paper suggested, the sports establishment is guilty of protecting its favorites too much.

As the team began to tour more and more frequently, the paper objected that “there was practically no time for indoctrination work with the team, even for ordinary training.”

Ultimately, it said, “the team became absolutely unaccountable to any social authority.”