EUROPE: Bread & Circuses

In Rome, as May Day began, five armed raiders slipped into the radio station at suburban Monte Mario, overpowered attendants, seized the master transmitter. Into the microphone they shouted the Blackshirt war cry, “Duce, a noi!”—”Duce, to us!” They played a recording of the Blackshirt war song, Giovinezza. They declaimed: “Italians! Remember Mussolini made our country great and powerful! We have not been freed but occupied. Slaves, arise and liberate yourselves!”

Twelve minutes after their arrival, the raiders fled. Police cars sent out to pursue them made a wrong turning, pulled up at an insane asylum.

In Berlin, 150,000 leftists, wearing red armbands and red carnations, trudged down Unter den Linden to the Lustgarten. Spark and spontaneity were lacking. “Mensch!” exclaimed a German who remembered May Day parades under Goebbels and Ley. “There is no spirit here—it’s a funeral procession.”

In Belgrade, Marshal Tito reviewed a parade of 200,000.

In Moscow, Generalissimo Stalin reviewed a parade of 2,000,000. Proclaimed Russia’s dictator: “We should not forget for a single minute the intrigues of international reaction, which is hatching plans of a new war. … It is necessary to be constantly vigilant, to protect, as the apple of one’s eye, the armed forces and defensive power of our country. . . .”

As the Red Army’s vigilant rocket guns and long-range artillery rolled through Red Square, Stalin stood on the topmost level of Lenin’s tomb. Smiling affably, he leaned over to the level below, bright with bemedaled Red Army officers, and invited Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov to come up and stand beside him. Down on the streets, the proletariat clustered around cheap food stands, dance bands and vaudeville shows.*

* For news of other May Day marchers, see LATIN AMERICA.