COMMUNISTS: No Words Left?

“Let the people of Yugoslavia know,” said Joseph Stalin’s government last week in a diplomatic note to Josip Broz Tito’s government, “that the Soviet Union looks on the present Yugoslav regime not as a friend and ally but as an enemy . . . [Tito] is more & more joining up with imperialist circles against the U.S.S.R.”

The note was the fourth in a high-pitched controversy about Yugoslavia’s territorial demands on Austrian Carinthia, which Russia first backed, then repudiated (TIME, June 27). Europe’s rumor factories at once produced pertinent whispers: a Soviet airlift across Yugoslavia was reinforcing isolated little Albania”; Marshal Ivan S. Konev was in Bulgaria warming up a Cominform army of 150,000.

The fact was that now both sides had used just about all the strong language in the book. There was not much more that Stalin and Tito could tell each other —in words.