International: Diagnosis

The record of the present is not a straightforward chronicle of things happening and words spoken. It is a vast and cryptographic detective story, a labyrinth of hidden meanings and motives. How could it be otherwise when the chief figure on the international scene, Joseph Stalin, has written: “Words must have no relation to actions—otherwise what kind of diplomacy is it? Words are one thing, actions another. Good words are a mask for concealment of bad deeds. Sincere diplomacy is no more possible than dry water or wooden iron.”

Miszlalcowice Mystery. So last week the world’s statesmen (successors to Lecoq and Sherlock Holmes, rather than to Pitt and James Madison) were trying to unravel the real meaning of what happened when 17 men and a woman met at a hunting lodge in Miszlakowice, Poland, and there created a thing that Communists called the “Cominform” (meaning Communist Information Bureau) and which most of the rest of the world called the “New Comintern” or the “Little Comintern.” To help them figure it out, the detective-statesmen had Dr. Watsons who were experts in everything from gamma rays to Lenin’s writings. Piecing together a clue here and a clue there, the chancelleries had, by last weekend, made a little progress in solving the Mystery of Miszlakowice.

On its face, the Cominform Manifesto looked like a mistake. France’s Foreign Minister Georges Bidault called it “just one more blunder.” Millions of French and Italian voters had been deluded into believing that Communist national parties in their countries were not subject to outside orders. What did the Communists gain by advertising, at this point, the fact that their national parties were not independent? That was the mystery.

“Serious Shortcoming.” The Communist announcement itself was a little help. Tucked away in the political billingsgate assailing Western “imperialism” were two important clues: 1) the worst invective was directed at the European Socialists, and 2) the meeting in Poland noted “absence of connections between Communist parties” as “a serious shortcoming.”

These words, of course, had a good deal of Stalin’s “wooden iron” in them. That Communist parties in various countries have been quite effectively connected was proved when French Communist Jacques Duclos fired U.S. Communist Earl Browder by writing an unfriendly article about him in Cahiers du Communisme. The meeting in Poland seemed to have decided that the mostly clandestine connection between Communist parties was not close enough. Mistakes had been made. Italian and Yugoslav Communist parties had differed over the Trieste issue. Worse, the parties in France and Italy, fat with postwar recruits, showed a certain sluggishness in jumping to the Moscow whip. Public adherence to an international “Information Bureau” would make deviation more difficult.

“Adieu, Maurice.” Moscow, for instance, is known to be worried about certain tendencies in the French party. Maurice Thorez, the official leader, did not go to Miszlakowice. He leads the wing of the party which has stressed independence of Moscow, wants collaboration—temporarily—with democratic parties and wants to hang on to those 5,500,000 Communist votes.

Until recently, Duclos was supporting Thorez against the wing led by old André Marty, who favored a tough, out & out revolutionary line. Duclos saw the handwriting on the wall just in time. He asked to be sent to Poland; the party also sent Etienne Fajon, a Marty man, to watch him. For Thorez, there was literally handwriting on a wall last week. Scrawled outside Pere Lachaise Cemetery were the words Adieu, Maurice Thorez. Que Dieu ait son dme (May God have his soul), Marty’s tough line will lose voters, but it will free the party from any inhibitions it might have in attacking the Marshall Plan.

TIME’S Paris Bureau summed it up: “The Polish declaration will lose hundreds of thousands of voters for the French Communists. But the smaller the party gets, the more dangerous it will become. The immediate results will be an intensification of active opposition and the hastening to office of a strong anti-Communist Government of which the likeliest leader is De Gaulle. Now the Communist party in France moves definitely into final opposition—until it can assume sole power. The strength of an anti-Communist government here depends on the vigor and speed with which declared U.S. policies are applied in Western Europe.”

The Unbuttoned Coat. TIME’S Rome Bureau reported a parallel situation: “The Marshall Plan, a solid propaganda success, pinned the Italian Communists down to an excruciatingly painful issue. How could they ask the Italian people to trust them with the task of reconstruction when everybody knew that the only grain, coal and money that Italy could get had to come from the U.S.?

“Dismay, touched by despair, was spreading in Communist ranks. Communists cannot rally the working class of Western Europe against the Marshall Plan, because many of the Socialist leaders are for the plan. The Polish declaration is an attempt to gain the appearance of having the initiative. In Italy a bloodless civil war has begun. There is no sign that the Reds will be so foolhardy as to start a military civil war. The decorous blue serge suit is still prescribed Communist fashion; but last week the Communists, in effect, unbuttoned the double-breasted coat long enough for the world to get a look at the brace of pistols underneath.”

“If Trouble Starts.” Four-power Military Government rules prohibited the German Communist Party from sending delegates to Miszlakowice. Western observers in Berlin, however, believe that Germany is the real key to Moscow’s European policy and that the Cominform declaration was timed to prepare the way for a major Communist drive in Western Germany in a few weeks. Britain and the U.S. are about to publish a list of more than 800 factories to be dismantled for reparations. In their zone the Russians dismantled two years ago, before the Germans had a chance to pick themselves up and dust themselves off. Today there are German political parties, unions and newspapers which can express the almost unanimous German opposition to dismantling.

Communist headquarters in Berlin have instructed their agents in Western Germany to “utilize to the fullest possible extent the dismantling issue to mobilize toilers in a militant protest against Anglo-American reaction.” If such protests are effective, German production will be cut and realization of the Marshall Plan will be hamstrung.

TIME’S Berlin Bureau warned: “Strikes are almost certain to occur and Social-Democratic and Catholic unionists may stop Anglo-American bullets on the picket lines if trouble starts. If some trigger-happy Tommies or G.I.s begin shooting, Germany’s all-important working class center (members of the Socialist and Christian Democratic Union parties) might be pushed right into the Communist lap, where they will be reassured to feel that they had the ‘support of brother working class parties of the Cominform countries.'”

“Two Polar Systems.” And what of the effect of the Polish declaration on the U.S.? It should make adoption of the Marshall Plan far easier, in spite of those Americans who were still insisting last week that the Communists would have been good little boys if the U.S. had continued to humor them.

For these Americans, the dossier held a clue. Stalin has said: “Two principal but polar systems of attraction are being created in the world: the Anglo-American center for the bourgeois governments, and the Soviet Union for the workers of the West and the revolutionary East.”

Stalin said that in 1925, when George Marshall was a lieutenant colonel in China, Arthur Vandenberg an editor in Grand Rapids and Harry Truman, having just helped to found the Kansas City Automobile Club, was soliciting members for it. Stalin, even then, was thinking along the lines that led to the organization of the Cominform to fight the Marshall Plan.