In the Kremlin

Scene: A somber, high-walled room in the Kremlin.

Time: AUGUST, 1942.

Joseph Stalin stands behind a paper-littered work table. He is smoking a pipe and wears the rough clothes of a peasant soldier. Enter Prime Minister Winston Churchill, followed by Special U.S. Envoy William Christian Bullitt. Churchill is wearing a seagoing cap and a short pea jacket; he is puffing on a long cigar. Bullitt is wearing grey striped trousers and cutaway coat with a dark red carnation in the buttonhole.

Characters. Thus, if all three men were present and in character, would Stalin the dictator, Churchill the imperialist and Bullitt the diplomat have appeared last week. But whether Churchill or Bullitt, or even Stalin, was actually in Moscow none but Nazi radio announcers professed to know. Even so, it was a good bet that they were, and that somewhere inside the Kremlin there was being played out an amazing scene in the drama of World War II.

A short and sudden secret session of the British House of Commons, the problems of a second front, the urgency of Russia's military position, all were clues to a conference of high strategic importance.

Known to be representing the U.S. in "urgent conferences on means to save Russia now" were Admiral William Harrison Standley, U.S. Ambassador to Russia, who flew from the Soviet Union's alternate capital, Kuibyshev, and Major General Follett Bradley of the U.S. Army Air Forces, who flew from Washington with a personal message to Stalin from President Roosevelt. Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, British Ambassador to Russia, also flew in from Kuibyshev. Others were Roger Garreau, head of the Fighting French mission to Moscow, and Major General William Steffens, Norwegian military attache.

Plot. What these men discussed the Nazis would have given tanks to know. Fearing that closer liaison would result in increased United Nations military action against the Reich, the Nazis inspired a burst of reported reports via Stockholm that the Russians might soon sue for peace. As if in answer, the Russians revealed that last winter they had rounded up and executed scores of Nazi parachute spies, had crushed out cells of fifth columnists--"disaffected youths, former Tsarist officials and civil servants"--in Leningrad.

This did not sound as if the Russians were ready to give in, no matter how desperately the war was going against them in the valley of the Don (see p. 22). Neither did the Russian people show signs of wanting a break with their allies. The Russians wanted a second front and said so. Their newspapers printed accounts of second-front rallies in the U.S. and Britain. But there was no carping criticism of their allies' war efforts. In the Caspian, the Volga valley and in Moscow the man-in-the-street hailed U.S. and British citizens with three fingers held up together, a symbol of the Soviet-U.S.-British triple alliance.

Off Stage. In Moscow the visiting diplomatic and military missions were dined and vodkaed at an elaborate dinner in the National Hotel. Toasts went round to "Our Glorious Red Army . . . Our Glorious Allies . . . Our Glorious Leader, Tovarish Stalin." If Churchill and Bullitt were in Moscow, they, too, were toasted. It was no secret that Ambassador Standley whiled away his spare time hitting golf balls against a backyard screen. General Bradley, abed with mild grippe, was unable to attend Thursday's ballet with Brigadier

General Philip R. Faymonville, U.S. Lend-Lease expeditor. But these were tidbits of news, possibly significant, possibly unimportant.

Curtain. What all newsmen in Moscow may have been itching to report was that Churchill and Bullitt actually were in Moscow. If so, the Kremlin shrouded drama of the highest order.

It was Churchill who spurred on the unsuccessful Anglo-U.S. military campaign against Red Russia which wound up World War I in 1919. It was Bullitt, a dashing young liberal, who went with the late Lincoln Steffens on a special mission to Moscow for President Wilson later in the same year. It was Bullitt, too, who said after the Paris Peace Conference that he was going to the Riviera "to lie on the sand and watch the world go to hell." The world did not go to hell, and in 1933 Bullitt was back in Russia as the first U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. He left three years later with a sour taste in his mouth.

If he were back again last week, another strange cycle had been completed in a strange war. With Churchill, he might well have recalled Dostoevski's comment: "Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything."

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