The Russian iron curtain is nowhere more impenetrable than in Russia itself. Last week came a rare and revealing glimpse behind that curtain into the Soviet Ukraine. John Fischer, Harper's Magazine associate editor on leave with UNRRA, returned from three months of unrestricted work, travel and observation in the Ukraine with the outside world's most direct report on the region since 1933.
Cities and countryside alike had been devastated. Fischer found Poltava and Kremenchug "worse than Berlin," his previous superlative of destruction. Kharkov was almost as bad. The great Donbas industrial basin was one wide ruin. Rural areas were little better...
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