Essentially "MAY DAY", Moscow 1935.

William C. Bullitt | 30 April 2006 | W. Paul Tabaka

[W. Paul Tabaka]

The May Day

Moscow, 1935

 

William Christian Bullitt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Moscow
May 1, 1935

Dear Mr. President:

I have just come back from the May Day parade on the Red Square. It has been a great show with tanks galloping across at 60 miles per hour and new pursuit airplanes at 400 kilometers p.h. Stalin came late and left early due, I was told, to a last minute hitch in the negotiations with the French. It was also noticeable that when he walked the short space from the Kremlin wall to Lenin’s tomb he held a handkerchief to his face. He may really, after all, be a bit frightened as indicated in the very confidential dispatch I am sending by this pouch which I have asked the Secretary to send over to you.

Physically, Moscow is a pleasanter place than this time last year. The subway has been completed. Blocks of old buildings have been turned into streets and squares, and the paving of the streets has been improved. Emotionally, however, Moscow is by no means so pleasant a place. The terror, always present, has risen to such a pitch that the least of the Muscovites, as well as the greatest, is in fear. Almost no one dares have any contact with foreigners and this is not unbased fear but a proper sense of reality. The chief engineer of the Amo works, now the largest producers of trucks in the world, has just spent eight months in jail because he ventured to call on the Latvian Minister, a very old friend of his. Every single acquaintance, even the most casual, of the Japanese language students in Leningrad, has been exiled. The only real friend of this Embassy, George Andreytchine, whom I asked you to pardon last year, is in the Lyublianka prison awaiting either death or exile. The only decent guide in the Soviet Union who took my cousin, Marshall, and his family around the country last year and is a thoroughly good friend of mine, has been exiled. Everyone who has had any contact with the Japanese Embassy, even down to the tailor, has been exiled. And the three not-too-awful dentists of the town suffered the same fate, leaving members of the American Embassy hanging on to temporary filings!

It is extraordinarily difficult to preserve a sweet and loving exterior under the circumstances. I can, of course, do nothing to save anyone. In fact, strictly between ourselves, I got a message from Andreytchine, sent by grapevine from the OGPU Lyublianka prison, asking me for God’s sake to do nothing to try to save him, if I should, he would certainly be shot.

(Etc.)

For the President, personal and secret;
correspondence between Roosevelt
and William C. Bullitt. Orville H. Bullitt, editor.
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1972, pages 115 - 116.

[Just mythoughts]

Wonder what was the very first May Day celebration historically speaking?

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

I was wondering if anyone would notice the link between the May Day protests (tomorrow) and Communism. I did a search on the word Communism, and your thread came up.