A graduate of the College and of the Law School gained some interesting insights and considerable notoriety this past summer when he attended the World Youth Festival in Moscow.

For fifteen straight days George S. Abrams '54, former managing editor of the CRIMSON, and two other American students at the Festival talked to crowds of up to 5,000 in Moscow's Red Square. They addressed interested Russians on the aims and ideals of the West and, in particular, read to them the U.N. report on Hungary which scathingly denounced Russia's actions in putting down the revolution there.

Abrams had been on a tour of Europe when he received a chance to go to Moscow through the Polish delegation as a non-Communist participant in the Festival. He said he was prompted to make the trip by a desire to see the country and the possibility that he could get the Western message across to some Russians. Once in the Soviet capital, he tended to pass up the Festival itself and concentrated on making more immediate contacts with the Russian people.

Since his return he has recorded his observations in several newspaper and magazine articles. The following material was culled largely from a series he did for the New York Mirror under the title "I Balted the Reds in Red Square" and from various newspaper, television and personal interviews.

Thirsting for Knowledge

Abrams was chiefly struck by the fact that the Russian people "are thirsting for information from the free world." They've been living in a vacuum for too long, he said, and are told only what suits the government.

They didn't know, for example, that their erstwhile champion here, Howard Fast, had deserted the Communist cause last February. Abrams suggested that they find out for themselves whether Fast's books could still be purchased in Soviet shops, but the books had disappeared from the book shelves, and dealers informed prospective purchasers that they didn't know when copies would be available.

Abrams then read to his Russian listeners Fast's lengthy statement on why he was turning his back, not on the Russian people, but on their leaders and their form of government. "As I read it," he said, "the crowd hushed. Towards the end, however, when Fast told of his distress that mail from Soviet admirers was no longer reaching him, there was an outburst of indignation. Two young Muscovites said they had sent Fast a fan letter only recently. Obviously, the Soviet people are still writing to Fast, but their letters are being intercepted."

Shortly after the Festival, Russia's Literary Gazette finally disclosed officially that Fast, winner of the 1953 Stalin Peace Prize, had "deserted under fire" and had written "anti-Soviet slanders."

But the Fast case was only one example among many, and Abrams found the Russians unbelievably curious about everything. They even wanted to know about his family and his home life and his years at school, and they seemed to have an uncanny ability to remember everything he told them about his personal life. Many even got to calling him by his first name, and as he strolled around the city Russians who recognized him would rush up to say hello.

"Everything I told them was the direct result of probing questions from the crowd," Abrams reported in his Mirror series. "There were plenty of willing interpreters for those who couldn't understand English. The crowd was starved for information. The things I told them about were what they wanted to know. They liked me and respected me for standing up and talking to them frankly.

"Along about the tenth day of my Red Square oratory, I began to get very hoarse; I was losing my voice. The crowd became alarmed. People came up to offer me pills; my Russian interpreters spent a good deal of time relaying suggested remedies from listeners. They were worried, too, about the fact that I seemed to be losing weight and began to look tired after the first week.

"Once, I remember, I was talking to a very large crowd in front of the big department store in Red Square. Suddenly it began to rain. I could see the crowd wanted me to keep talking. Two Red Army soldiers standing in the crowd were the only ones with raincoats. Someone said something to one of them, and he took off his raincoat and gave it to me. People asked if I would mind talking in the rain.

"How could I refuse? There they were, willing to stand without raincoats and listen eagerly to what I had to tell them about Hungary and the West."

Abrams reported that he often started talking in the afternoon and kept right on through the night until 3 or 4 or even 6 a.m. When either he or the crowd was exhausted, the gathering would break up, and almost every time his Russian listeners would contest for the right to pay his taxi fare back to his hotel. He tried not to let them pay, but on two occasions they succeeded in reaching the driver before he could stop them. "We made you stay so late, we want to thank you by paying your fare," they would tell him.