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But Salisbury got an eyewitness view of how little Russia has actually changed in a 12,000-mile trip that he made through the Soviet North and eastern Siberia. "It was," says Salisbury, "probably the most extensive survey of this . . . region by an American since the 1880s." That part of Russia, said he, is "an empire-within-an-empire, the slave state of prison labor and forced-residence workers" that extends thousands of miles and is ruled by the MVD. "All life in those regions is incredibly harsh and grim." Salisbury saw hundreds of labor gangs of men and women going blankly about their jobs under the eyes of armed MVD agents. Almost all the buildings in the area are put up by slave-labor construction gangs, but the difference between the working conditions of "free" and slave labor in Siberia is negligible. Salisbury also saw the infamous political prison outside Yakutsk, which Henry Wallace once described in glowing terms after a carefully "conducted" tour. Wallace did not know, said Salisbury, that his guide was the Siberian MVD chief. (Wallace later manfully apologized for his mistaken report.)
Salisbury's grim description of Russian forced labor around Yakutsk was all the more startling in light of a "Picture Report on Siberia'' that ran in the Times barely three months ago, when Salisbury was still in Russia. "The correspondent," said the text accompanying the pictures, "was particularly impressed by the city's cultural institutions" and "excellent" schools. The captions also mentioned the "well-carpentered" houses, city library, and a nursery "somewhat comparable to a U.S. nursery." Nowhere did the picture story mention that the area Salisbury was describing was in the heartland of what he now calls a "horrible stain on the face of the Russian soil and an indictment of the Russian conscience."
Atomic Confidence. From what he has seen since Stalin's death, Salisbury is convinced that no "era of sweetness and light has suddenly descended upon Communist Russia . . . What is new . . . is that Russia has passed into the hands of a group of men who are displaying striking flexibility and adaptability in their handling of domestic and foreign problems." They also, he says, have "a large measure of confidence" as a result of "possession of the hydrogen and atomic fission bombs, a fine fleet of jet aircraft [and] industry to match paces with the U.S." In foreign policy they are determined to convince the world that Russia "is now ruled by a group of 'reasonable men.'" Many Moscow diplomats, said he, "believe that American policy is suffering severely from a failure or an inability to adjust realistically to Moscow's new look."