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In Moscow last week Mr. & Mrs. Davies said they were preparing to sail by ocean liner shortly to Manhattan, then sail back across the Atlantic in their enormous oil-burning yacht Sea Cloud, which can most decoratively unfurl itself into an old-fashioned four-masted bark. The Sea Cloud was the Hussar when Mrs. Davies was Mrs. Edward F. Hutton (TIME, Dec. 23, 1935) and $95,000 duty was paid when it entered the U. S. after having been built at Kiel during blackest years of German depression. Sea Cloud ranks as one of the world's most opulent yachts, roughly matching in swank the Nahlin rented by Edward VIII for his Balkan cruise last summer. Coronation time it will lie off Southampton, taking the Davieses cruising to the Spithead naval review, and after the English festivities are over, according to Ambassador Davies this week, the Sea Cloud will cruise across the North Sea into the Baltic and tie up at Leningrad—the first right royally splendiferous yacht to make that port since it was Petrograd and yachts of Grand Dukes galore lay in the breathtakingly beauteous harbor of "the Venice of the North."
Fortnight ago the Davieses had a grand time in Leningrad, even today a city which retains in its architecture much smack of Capitalist pomp. It is also a chief Soviet industrial centre — most unfortunately from a strategic point of view. For that matter the industrial centres of the Ukraine visited by Mr. Davies last week are located much too near the European frontier of Russia for the peace of the Soviet's military minds. Imperial Russia had enormously larger buffer territories, holding Finland, the Baltic States, Poland and great areas now part of the Balkans— but part of Lenin's genius in founding Soviet Russia was in perceiving that unless he abandoned and threw to predatory Europe great chunks of Imperial Russia he would never be permitted to get away with founding a Communist State at all. Today Dictator Stalin is creating as much in the way of Russian centres of industry and war bases as possible behind the Ural Mountains. It is no secret that the Soviet General Staff have plans ready, in case Russia is attacked by the "alliance of Capitalist powers" her propagandists talk about, to abandon Leningrad, Moscow and the whole portion of the Soviet Union which just now forms Mr. & Mrs. Davies' world and "retreat behind the Urals." That would be the most tragic expedient the Russian nation has adopted since it "saved" Moscow by burning it down around Napoleon.
In Leningrad the Davieses sat in the same Great Opera Theatre as did the Tsars & Tsarinas. They even saw the same typically Capitalist sort of opera, namely Eugene Onegin, presented as handsomely as under the Romanovs. The theme of this opera is a poem of at times ridiculous and always entirely bourgeois flirtation and frustration—unless one is a Russian, for all Russians, whether Communists or not, love the poet author of Eugene Onegin, faintly black-blooded Pushkin, "The Russian Shakespeare."
That Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin have never seen cause to suppress Boris Godunov, Eugene Onegin or even excessively bourgeois Madame Butterfly goes far to explain how Soviet Russia is now managing to like supercapitalistic Mr. & Mrs. Davies and support quietly a growing bureaucracy of Babbitt Bolsheviks.