MISS BUCAR'S GOOD-BYE
DALLIN, DAVID J.
Miss Bucar's Good-Bye By Dam J. Dallin ALITTLE RUSSIAN book entitled 'Truth About American Diplomats" by Anal*-lls Bucar, recently published in Moscow, is, n<> doubt, intended as the...
...Mechanically, materially, America and Europe have advanced beyond the wildest dreams of Aunt Mattie's generation...
...The farm group was practically independent...
...The first railways were being built...
...They would listen, listen voluntarily and eagerly, while the little old lady cleared her throat and told about how the soldiers filed into the trains to go off to the Civil War...
...When Aunt Mattie was a girl, we took four month* to cross the continent...
...It greatly irritates them...
...In her letter, she protested against "reactionaries" intending to create animosity between the American and the Soviet people...
...1 am a simple Amei ican woman...
...Did they realize what it meant'1 During thirteen months Miss Bucar observed everything going on in the Embassy...
...But added to the personal impressions of the "simple American woman" are economic and sociological investigations on why the United States wants to fight Russia and why subjugation of the world is its program...
...The grain was harvested with scythes and cradles...
...her niain fury is directed again George Kcnnan (who spent a certain time in Moscow), Elbridge Durbrow, and Frederick Bernhardt...
...The population of this country grew from about 30,000.000 to nearly 150.000,000...
...But they were not yet widely in use...
...how they ti ust then (' o in in u n i s t I'ai ty...
...THERE WAS only one nook in Aunt Mattie's picture gallery that really fascinated the youngsters...
...Sewing machines had started to hum...
...I told onla bout t Ii i n g s \\ Inch evei y tin prejudiced Ampi - ican or any other foreigner can observe in the Soviet Union...
...how free every honest American feels in Russia, and how freely all of the Russian people hvt...
...From Miss Bucar's report about the magazine Amerika, published in Russian (circulation 50,000 copies), it appears that this publication is an eyesore to the Soviet authorities...
...Lapshin, meeting an American Embassy clerk was not only dangerous but impossible unless the MGB gave its blessing...
...WHILE THE CLERGYMAN was speaking the fine and well-remembered words over the little old body lying there, my mind kept shuttling back and forth between 1857 and 1949...
...She mentions the names of Bender and Zagorodnyi, two Soviet citi/eus employed by the American Embassy, who allegedly had the task of selling goods on the black market for Ambassador Bedell Smith...
...There is no jet propulsion about our thinking...
...Blushing shyly at having people listening to her, Aunt Mattie would describe the alien sort of activities which engaged hands and minds seventy or eighty yenrs ago...
...The only power on the old farm was furnished by horses and oxen...
...was obviously reported to the authorities...
...MISS BUCAR was a State Department employe in Washington from 1945 to 1946, and there, she says, she began to lean towards the Soviet policy...
...While the little girl was learning how to spin and weave, most of the inventions which transformed the world had been made...
...IT IS EVIDENT that the Soviet Intelligence and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were well aware of what w.ent on in the American Embassy, and many diplomatic secrets, were divulged...
...The fact struck them into an awed silence...
...Was her marriage known to her superiors...
...But as regards the main requirements for living, Aunt Mattie's people in 1865 were as independent as their ancestors in the Middle Ages...
...SHE CONTINUED her work, however, obviously instructed by the MGB to do so...
...But when I read Abraham Lincoln's speeches and compare them with those which are broadcast round the world in these days, I wonder whether we have made any progress in our minds and morals...
...The only items required from the merchant were shoes and an occasional tool or piece of hardware...
...When the last thrill had been extracted from the recital of wartime adventures, I would say: "Please, Aunt Mattie, tell us how you used to live on the farm...
...As I stood among them there...
...Their transforming effect/ was not yet felt...
...As so many Soviet citizens before and after that time, Lapshin would be accused of espionage if he did not report to the secret police...
...As a child she learned to card wool, to spin yarn and to weave it into cloth...
...Now we do -H in four hours...
...Besides, "I found my personal happiness here, having fallen in love with a Russian man" In her book, written in the fall 1948, Miss Bucar mentions a son boi n to her in Russia who will "enjoy all privileges of a free Soviet citizen...
...Friends and relatives who had not seen one another for thirty or forty years tried to make out in each other's aging features the lineaments which they had known in vouth...
...For it was a clandestine marriage...
...Not one single detail distinguishes the simple American woman from the official Pruvdu line...
...She talks of them in the worst possible terms and accuses them ol all possible crimes...
...Oh, yes—salt and spices had to be brought in...
...From time to time she heard about diplomatic correspondence with Washington...
...The telegraph was carrying its magic messages...
...Nearly all of the people—in this and all other countries —still lived and thought as their ancestors had from the beginning...
...I kept saying to one after another: "She was born in 1857...
...from the outside...
...Ajj obscure affair occurred two months after Miss Bucar left, when Sgt James MacMillin, cipher clerk to the American Military Attache in Moscow, quit in May, 1948, praising the Soviet system and accusing the United States of 'aggressive policies " The State Department only stated that MacMilhn's motives were not political...
...The reapers and mowing machines were making a new sort of music which was replacing that of the scythes and the cradles...
...This, too...
...Mostly old men and women, they come to the American Consulates and tell the story of their relatives who emigrated years before...
...The descriptions of the returning wounded being carried through the streets on litters and, especially, the account of the halt of Lincoln's funeral train on the way from Washington to Philadelphia would hold them silent and awe-struck...
...Does it reach them, however...
...Is there any reason to believe that it is not successful in this task...
...She does not report much of the Ambassadors themselves...
...The blacksmith performed the only service that was sought from the outside world...
...She became a loyal and useful memIkm' of the MGB family...
...From the time that she was a small child, she and all of the other members of the family would rise at four or five o'clock in the morning and labor without stopping, except for meals, until late at night...
...AUNT MATTIE always commented 'on tales of these mechanical miracles in terms of self-congratulation...
...But our thoughts hardly keep up with our bodies...
...She had to talk to the MGB...
...And while the clergyman was intoning a Psalm ibout the age of the rocks and the mountains that go on from everlasting to everlasting, I was thinking of the mountains of history which the human race has crossed between Aunt Mattie's birth and her death...
...In January, 1947, thirteen months before that letter was written, she had already married Konstan\in Lapshin, a Russian singer...
...These charges acquire certain importance, since their actual origin is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow...
...She took notes on political conversations in the Embassy, on secret meetings with certain Soviet citizens, on Soviet personnel hired by American agencies...
...Was Miss Bucar instrumental in the "liquidation" of these people...
...Obviously, her letter to the Ambassador was written at the last possible moment...
...But this one little wispy woman lived to see our part of the world tumultously transformed...
...She looked frail and somehow elegant lying there among the over-gay flowers with the orchid in her work-worn hand...
...and h o w they I ii v c then supreme Leader...
...It is powerful propaganda, ii it really reaches its readers...
...Steamboats were crossing the sea...
...she said the Embassy's work was directed against the Russian people, and therefore it was impossible for her to continue work there...
...The Home Front By WILLIAM E. BOHN The World and Aunt Mattie WE BURIED Aunt Mattie the other day...
...And while the clergyman was speaking those sacred words about God remaining the same from everlasting to everlasting, I thought, too, how Aunt Mattie had remained the same while the rest of the world has gone catapulting ahead without ever inquiring its direction...
...After her marriage, her ties with the Soviet family and the Soviet police became closer than those with the American Embassy...
...In 1940 she went to Moscow to work in the American Embassy...
...It seems, moreover, that the MGB had a major role in the whole Bucar affair...
...In Miss Bucar's book the American Embassy in Moscow is run by a bunch of crazy Soviet-haters, reactionaries of little political intelligence and low morals...
...It carried them back to a time for which their minds furnished no pictures...
...In 1947 the MGB arrested Miss Irina Matusis and a few other Soviet citizens in Vladivostok, accusing them of "espionage...
...They are questioned in the Consulates and then are often arrested by the MGB...
...Miss Bucar's Good-Bye By Dam J. Dallin ALITTLE RUSSIAN book entitled 'Truth About American Diplomats" by Anal*-lls Bucar, recently published in Moscow, is, n<> doubt, intended as the answer to Kiavchenko Miss Bucar explains why the "chose freedom...
...In her book she mentions numerous Soviet citizens, would-be emigrants to to the United States...
...The smarter ones among the youthful listeners realized that I was using these wartime memories as mere bait for more educational items...
...a few weeks latei her marriage could not be kept secret any longer...
...Then she loyally reported to the Soviet authorities...
...All means are certainly applied by the network of the MGB to prevent its mass circulation...
...New states, new cities, new industries, new ways of doing practically everything made each decade seem old and quaint compared to the next one...
...Wonderful...
...i One question arises, however, which should be clarified by the State Department...
...When her young folks would tell about their airplane trips, she would sit there practically breathless and murmer: "Wonderful...
...This was the puce for her little personal happiness: she was 32 when she married and she did not want to take chances...
...Who knows if Miss Bucar was not among those who supplied their names to the secret police...
...She knew about every leaving and arriving official...
...She even continued to live in the American Information Service building...
...To Mr...
...The hand of the MOB (heir to the NKVD) is obvious, at least in the editing of the book...
...Many new devices, in their first crude forms, were on the market...
...The telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the radio, the atom bomb crowded crazily on one another's heels...
...And the blessing would certainly be refused if Miss Bucar did not prove her loyalty by word and deed...
...This was a breach of diplomatic privileges," Miss Bucar remarks...
...A few times, she says, she observed Robert Magidov...
...Yet, secrete he knew, including codes, were piobably disclosed...
...In February, 194!',, she wrote a letter to the American Ambassador in Moscow announcing her decision to quit...
...The only light was furnished by candles which were made in the kitchen in ancient candle-molds...
...the American correspondent, leaving packages to be sent over by diplomatic pouch...
Vol. 32 • March 1949 • No. 12
