COMMUNISTS: The Literary Life

During the war Dictator Stalin helped to set up Dictator Tito in Yugoslavia. The Soviet Encyclopedia (1946 edition) says: “Led by Tito, the People’s Liberation Army together with the Red Army smashed the Germans in 1944 … He has a brilliant talent for army leadership, he has a great personal courage combined with a great charm and with the talent of an outstanding politician and statesman.”

Last week, Moscow’s Literary Gazette proved once again that Soviet truth is relative, flexible and pragmatic. Said the Literary Gazette: “It is well known that [during the war] the coward Tito and his entourage were spending their time on the island of Vis, attending drinking parties with Randolph Churchill in the port of Bari, while [Soviet] Marshal Tolbukhin’s armies, after annihilating Hitler’s divisions, were occupying Belgrade . . . Such are the facts of history.”

The Literary Gazette continued with further literary remarks on onetime Hero Tito: “The workers [of Yugoslavia] have long since discerned the repulsive and vile snout of the Belgrade deserter to the camp of imperialism, hireling spy and murderer, bankrupt fascist traitor to his country and to the cause of Socialism.” The people are not deceived, said the Literary Gazette, when “the Wall Street gentlemen spare no dollars to make the insolent dwarf Tito appear a giant.”

The dwarf epithet was interesting; Tito’s height of 5 feet 7½ inches (average for southern Slavs) is on record in London at Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks—whence he sent it along with one of his fancy uniforms to drape his ozocerite likeness. The Literary Gazette’s own Joseph Stalin in 1936 had refused to give Tussaud’s any data, and they had mistakenly reconstructed him as 5 ft. 8.

Last week Tussaud’s was shaken; their reputation for accuracy was at stake; if Stalin was too tall, they stood prepared to cut him down. Said Randolph Churchill, wartime liaison officer with Yugoslav guerrillas, “Having seen both Tito and Stalin, I would have no hesitation in asserting that Stalin is several inches shorter than Tito—and is certainly in no position to go around calling him a dwarf.”