Hearings regarding the communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, first session. Public law 601 (section 121, subsection Q (1947)

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84 COMMUNISM IN MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY swans ov sailboats in the foreground. Then you see a Moscow restaurant that just never existed there. In my time, when I was in Russia, there was only one such restaurant, which was nowhere as luxurious as that and no one could enter it except commissars and l)rofiteers. Certainly a ^irl from a villa<ie, who in the first place would never have been allowed to come voluntarily, without permission, to Moscow, could not afford to enter it, even if she worked 10 years. However, there is a Russian restaurant with a menu such as never existed in Russia at all and which I doubt even existed before the revolution. From this restaurant they 0,0 on to this tour of Moscow. The streets are clean and prosperous-looking. There are no food lines anywhere. You see shots of the marble subway — the famous Russian subway out of which they make such propaganda capital. There is a marble statue of Stalin thrown in. There is a park where you see hapjoy little children in white blouses running around. I don't know whose children they are, but they are really happy kiddies. They are not homeless children in rags, such as I have seen in Russia. Then you see an excursion boat, on which the Russian people are smiling, sitting around very cheerfully, dressed m some sort of satin blouses such as they only wear in Russian restaurants here. Then they attend a luxurious dance. I don't know where they got the idea of the clothes and the settings that thev used at the ball Mr. Stimplino. Is that a ballroom scene? Miss Rand. Yes; the ballroom — where they dance. It was an exaggeration even for this country. I have never seen anybody wearing such clothes and dancing to such exotic nuisic when I was there. Of course, it didn't say whose ballroom it is or how they get there. But there they are — free and dancing very happily. Incidentally, I must say at this point that I understand from correspondents who have left Russia and been there later than I was and from people who escaped from there later than I did that the time I saw it, which was in 1926. was the best time since the Russian revolution. At that time conditions were a little better than they have become since. In my time we were a bunch of ragged, starved, dirty, miserable people who had only two thoughts in our mind. That was our complete terror — afraid to look at one another, afraid to say anything for fear of who is listening and would report us — and where to get the next meal. You have no idea what it means to live in a country where nobody has any concern except food, where all the conversation is about food because everybody is so hungry that that is all they can think about and that is all they can afford to do. They have no idea of politics. They have no idea of any pleasant romances or love — nothing but food and fear. That is what I saw up to 1926. That is not what the picture shows. Now, after this tour of Moscow, the hero — the Ameriran conductor— goes to the Soviet village. The Russian villages are something — so miserable and so filthy. They were even before the revolution. They weren't much even then. What they have become ncnv I am afraid to think. You have all i-ead about the program for the collectivization of the farms in 1938. at which time the Soviet Government admits that 8,000.000 peasants died of starvation. Other people claim there were seven and a half million, but 8,000,000 is the figure