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Intourist simply does not use the direct railway line from Dnepropetrovsk to Ros-tov-on-Don. Instead an Intourist tourist must go all the way back up to Kharkov and then down to Rostov. The Intourist tourist may ask why, but never finds a Russian who seems to know. Ambassador Davies did not have to make this senseless detour, was routed direct. En route he dictated his impressions for transmission later to the State Department, cracked jokes and told Washington yarns in the vein of his good friend Jim Farley. Every winter since anyone can remember the Five-Year Plans, it has happened at Rostov that "snow is delaying car loadings." Last week there was about an inch of snow on the ground and sure enough car loadings were delayed, with costly Soviet farm machinery deteriorating in the open just after being efficiently completed inside.
About 70 combines daily were rolling off the production line last week and the U. S. correspondents were shown no trace of the "sabotage and wrecking by Trotskyists" attributed by the Old Bolsheviks trial to Rostov. Everything was going beautifully except that neither the First nor Second Five-Year Plan has yet shown Plant Manager Kartsashev how to deal with snow. In Rostov is now the largest theatre in Soviet Russia, typical of the diffusion of entertainment to the masses in which Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini are at one with the principles of President Roosevelt's WPA theatres. Cried the Ambassador, "Magnificent!"
The end of the six-day junket brought Mr. Davies and Daughter Emlen back to Moscow, where official newsorgans were pleased to learn from their reporters on the trip that the U. S. Ambassador had asked questions and taken notes on costs, wages, profits, distribution and labor efficiency as figured by Soviet managers; also their sources of labor, ages of workers, percentage of women, clothing, housing, rents, hospitalization, insurance and their definitions of "Stakhanovism"—the most disputed word in Russia (TIME, March 9, 1936).
As every comrade knows, Stakhanov was an obscure coal miner who persuaded three other miners to join with him in working as a gang to use their pneumatic drill more efficiently and thus increase production per man. Stakhanov was taken to Moscow, feted by Stalin, loaded with all sorts of presents, including a phonograph with the record Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, and ever since the whole laboring mass of the Soviet Union has been urged, exhorted, tempted and commanded to emulate Stakhanov. Sluggards who do not want to speed up their work as Stakhanov did, have in some cases assassinated Soviet managers who tried to Stakhanovize their plants (TIME, Dec. 16, 1935).