Marrying Djugashvili?

RUSSIA Marrying Djugashvili?

Surprised in London last week was Spencer Williams, longtime Secretary of the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce. He was surprised because no Moscow correspondent has dared smuggle out the story of handle-bar-mustached Mr. Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili's latest heartthrob.

Since the Dictator lost his second wife (TIME, Nov. 21, 1932) he has "reverted to the Oriental type." The Dictator is from semi-Oriental Georgia, famed for such other torchbearers as the Marrying Mdivanis. First of his friends was the sister of handsome onetime Heavy Industry Commissar Lazar Kaganovich.

That Joseph Stalin would ever go for a mouse seemed unlikely, but Mr. Williams reported that, in the early days of the Finnish War, plain, studious Soviet Aviatrix Marina Raskova began to be seen riding regularly in the Dictator's official car to the Kremlin and also to his country villa. Friends of neat Miss Raskova, who parts her shiny black hair in the middle and draws it back along her skull into a bun at the rear, confirmed to Secretary Williams before 'he left Moscow that she now seems to be accepted by everyone around the Dictator as his wife. That J. Stalin ever went through a marriage ceremony with even his acknowledged first or second wife is as doubtful as whether A. Hitler has been to the altar with Miss Evi Braun (TIME, Dec. 18). One Stalin son and relatives of Wife No. 1, said Mr. Williams, had been jugged by the Soviet Secret Police several years ago, later freed.

Muscovites, of course, read nothing of their Dictator's amours, but Miss Raskova has blossomed in the Soviet press as a frequent writer on the thrills of flying. She effusively described how she felt soar ing over Moscow during the May Day celebration of 1935: "We could see everything ! . . . We knew of surety that there [on the Red Square], surrounded by his friends and comrades, was Stalin, and we were proud in the realization that at that moment, raising his head high, he was gazing at us. Perhaps he was even waving his hand!"

On Sept. 24, 1938 several Soviet air women took off from Moscow with Miss Raskova as their navigator, made a beeline of 3,715 miles to crack up in wild Kerbi swamplands for a new international women's distance record. On urgent orders from Moscow 50 planes and large Soviet land forces searched nine days for the aviatrixes. Afterwards Miss Raskova recalled that she subsisted on wild berries. Later Dictator Stalin, officially welcoming the distance fliers to the Kremlin, sternly observed that more care must be taken not to risk the lives of such heroic women as Miss Raskova "as their lives are more precious than any records." She then settled down, but one of her sister airwomen on that record flight flew Soviet military planes against the Finns recently. Raskova, according to Commerce Chamberman Williams, reminds one of the wooden Soviet female executive played by Garbo in Ninotchka.

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