COMMUNISTS: Scraps of Paper

Foreign Office wastebaskets in Eastern Europe overflowed last week; Communists were tearing up treaties. Stalin began by formally denouncing Russia’s treaty of mutual assistance with Tito’s Yugoslavia. Sensing the Kremlin’s Tito-indigestion, Russia’s satellites dutifully burped: one by one they denounced the treaties with Yugoslavia which had been fanfared to the world in 1946 and 1947.

Russia annulled her treaty with Yugoslavia on the ground that the confessions of Laszlo Rajk, onetime Communist Hungarian Foreign Minister, in the Budapest show trial, had proved the existence of a Tito-U.S. conspiracy against Russia.*

Tito in his reply to Moscow complained of Russia’s “demonstrative Soviet troop movements in the neighboring countries along the Yugoslav border”; these, he said, were intended “to intimidate the Yugoslav peoples and to exercise pressure upon them.” His most immediate worry was not that Yugoslavia would be invaded but that Yugoslav Communists would split under the Red army pressure.

Last week Tito pumped up some counterpressure by having the Yugoslav army stage the greatest maneuvers it had ever held. Tanks, with such slogans as “We Are Ready to Defend Our Country!” and “Tito Is Ours,” rolled past the well-fed dictator in the Sumadija, a hilly area of Serbia. Belgrade papers printed an officially inspired opinion that the army had shown “exceptional readiness.”

*Commented Tito’s Old Communist Mosa Pijade, on the Rajk trial: “It is mostly reminiscent of the trials held in the Soviet Union in 1936 … And now, when the then Public Prosecutor [Andrei Vishinsky] is Minister of Foreign Affairs, this type of trial is transferred to the international arena . . . an article of export.”