COMMUNISTS: News of Adam-zad

In the midst of the festivities, somebody remembered Mom. “This day, let us transfer ourselves to the suburbs of Tbilisi,” wrote Novelist Mikhail (And Quiet Flows the Don) Sholokhov, “and with reverent sorrow and ardent gratitude in our hearts silently bend our heads over the sacred remains of a small, modest Georgian woman, the mother who 70 years ago gave the world him who became humanity’s greatest man, our leader and father.”

It was probably the climax in a week of unrelenting semi-deification bestowed on Joseph Stalin during the celebrations of his 70th birthday. Throughout, a super-lifesized head of the celebrant grinned down from the heavens above the Kremlin upon his worshiping subjects. It was quite a nice trick, too; the head (and a discreet portion of bust, to suggest that it was still fixed to a body) was suspended from balloons and illuminated by huge spotlights.

Co-star of the show in Moscow, next to Stalin, was the fat, up-and-coming Georgy M. Malenkov, who made the principal birthday pronouncement. Western observers thought they detected in it the beginning of yet another of Russia’s recurrent “peace offensives.” Said Malenkov; “The Soviet Union considers the road of peaceful competition with capitalism as quite acceptable.”

Malenkov’s message was accompanied by the establishment of International Stalin Peace Prizes, to be awarded supposedly to citizens of any country and any political belief who further the cause of peace.

While these pacific pyrotechnics dazzled the spectators, Moscow Radio continued, according to S.O.P., to blast Western capitalist democracies and the lackeys of Wall Street. This contrast moved the New York Herald Tribune to recall Kipling’s poem about Adam-zad the bear:

“When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer, That is the time of peril—the time of the Truce of the Bear!” Over and over the story, ending as he began:—”There is no truce with Adam-zad, the Bear that looks like a Man!”