above all on the frosty nights...
And likewise television, which scarcely any home is without. For art is a powerful element in Soviet life.
Q — How do they meet, in Russia, the problem of religion and of education?
— Education, as you know, is compulsory for both sexes. This year secondary education became compulsory. Illiteracy has been wiped out even among the tribes of the Cossack country.
As for religion, the constitution provides for the freedom to preach it — and to preach against it — within its limits. In Moscow you hear neither the pealing of bells nor the voices of the minarets. And whereas Moscow alone once had a thousand six hundred churches — so that it was called, in their tongue, the city of the "forty times forty" churches — its churches now number about a hundred. Freedom of worship is absolute.
We, as one writer has said, "carry our environment with us," and we form among ourselves a special international society of our own. Yet it must be said that wherever we come into contact with the Russian people — in their parks, their shops, or their streets — we find them a kindly people, rustic in the main, calm and very patient; no national fanaticism shows in them, and they cast no hostile glance at a stranger.
