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This lunch was by no means "diplomatic." It was instead an affair of the earthy type of Big Reds who are fist-deep in Russia's toughest problems and rather scorn the Soviet Foreign Commissar, "Maxie" Litvinoff, and his English wife Ivy. Later Ambassador Davies was feted at the Litvinoff dacha and had plenty of chance to see that these country places, plus the official limousines and luxuries of their owners, make the nominally small salaries of J. Stalin & Friends of no real importance, set them definitely off from Russia's masses as Mr. & Mrs. Davies are set off in the U. S. by their wealth. By a joker in the new Soviet Constitution, "The Most Democratic In The World" as Democrat Stalin's propaganda calls it (TIME, Dec. 7 et ante), many property rights have been restored to Russia's "toiling masses"—and thus to the prosperous Big Red class which today owns so much, and can now, under the new Constitution, bequeath it by inheritance to sometimes pampered offspring.* Moscow correspondents report that the new top-class in Moscow is now feeling so secure in its opulence that at Embassy parties the wives of Big Reds are dressed at least as well as and often better than the wives of the foreign diplomats; they get their gowns somehow from Paris—an impossibility for a Russian without heavy political pull at the Kremlin.
An almost daily habit of Ambassador & Mrs. Davies is to walk about two miles from their home in white marble Spasso Palace around the vast, tall-turreted Kremlin Fortress. Embassy offices are in a brand-new Soviet marble building, not in the modernistic style which used to be characteristic of Communist architecture, but an affair of Corinthian columns with acanthus-leaf capitals suggesting the First National Bank in an Ohio or Illinois city. There are not many of these new bourgeois buildings yet in Red Moscow, but they bear out in unmistakably bourgeois architecture the fact that J. Stalin & Co.— although favoring the World Revolution of the World Proletariat abroad—are becoming almost Babbitt Bolsheviks at home in the Soviet Union.
Industrial Ambassador. Nine agents of the Ogpu, or NKVD as J. Stalin now prefers to call Soviet secret police, went last week with Ambassador Davies in the special train put at his disposal to tour Soviet industrial centres in the primarily agricultural Ukraine. His private car, furnished free by the Government, was what Russians now know as a "Commissar's Saloon Car," for really big Reds today have a private car thrown in with their State jobs. There was an ordinary sleeping car for the NKVD and correspondents, another for the Davies party to use at night and a diner in which all food was exclusively the quick-frozen U. S. product of Heiress Davies' company. Though they did take into Russia 25 refrigerators containing 2,000 pints of quick-frozen cream (TIME, Dec. 28), Ambassador Davies deprecates press references to the well-publicized Davies commissary. Says he: "The exaggerations give both Mrs. Davies and me a big laugh!"