COMMUNISTS: You Can’t Do Business …

In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt said to Poland’s Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk: “But of one thing I am certain. Stalin is not an imperialist.” Mikolajczyk learned differently, and he told about it last week in his book, The Rape of Poland (Whittlesey; $4). The rough blocks of his story the world has known about: his battle against the Teheran deal in which Roosevelt and Churchill let Stalin take eastern Poland; his postwar struggle to survive as a leader of a coalition government that included Communists, and his final flight to the West.

A Pat on the Back. Mikolajczyk tried to do business with Communists of high & low degree, and of all shades of temperament. Every experience boiled down to a doublecross. Most interesting doublecrosser was Stalin himself, not the bland, genial Stalin of the photographs, but an unpredictable Georgian who could rave one minute and cajole the next, but who never took his eye off the ball—control of Poland.

In July 1944, Mikolajczyk and Professor Stanislaw Grabski, an elderly Polish democrat, flew from London to Moscow. Stalin wanted the Polish government in London to merge with his own Lublin Committee, consisting of Polish Communists and stooge socialists. As bait, he offered to ease the Teheran partitioning (the Curzon Line). Mention of the Curzon Line and of the Lublin Poles set Grabski off. He “began to beat on Stalin’s table. He spoke for 45 minutes in Russian about the criminal injustices that were being heaped on Poland. When Grabski finished, winded, Stalin got up and patted the indignant old gentleman on the back and laughed, ‘You’re a good agitator.’ ”

In August 1945, the now-merged coalition government at Warsaw was summoned by a phone call to Moscow. Stalin wanted even more Polish territory than the Curzon Line gave him. Molotov saw the Poles first. He tried to soothe them by saying they could send their shipping from the landlocked Polish port of Elbing through a channel that ran near Konigsberg into the Bay of Danzig. Then the party went to Stalin’s office for his approval.

Mikolajczyk writes: “Stalin . . . was angrier than I had ever seen him. He turned on Osobka-Morawski and Bierut [Lublin Poles] and roared a demand that they immediately renew their agreement to the frontier that had been established [secretly in 1944] without the knowledge of the legal Polish government in London. They hurriedly complied. Stalin then turned on Molotov and rebuked him thunderously. ‘You had no right to agree to let these people use those waters for their shipping,’ he stormed. ‘I will not have it! I will not have foreign spies spying on Konigsberg! You know very well we have established a military sea base there.’ We were dismissed like vassals and told to return to Warsaw.”

A Kick In the Teeth. Another satellite ex-Premier who had to flee, Ferenc Nagy (pronounced Nod-ye) of Hungary, told his story last week in The Struggle Behind the Iron Curtain (Macmillan; $6). He, too, paints a picture of Stalin; this one, Stalin the Genial Conciliator.

In April 1946, Nagy and others in the Hungarian coalition took their grievances to the Kremlin. To their surprise, they found Stalin the soul of magnanimity.

Nagy opened the talks by complaining of the onerous reparations. Stalin interrupted : “We want to help you, so we shall extend the time for the payment.”

Nagy then asked for the release of Hungarian prisoners of war. At once Stalin answered: “We will begin to return the prisoners of war even before signing the peace.”

Could the P.W.s meanwhile write letters to their relatives back home? “It shall be,” Stalin ordered. What about Russia’s $15 million bill for restoring railroad lines? Stalin cut off the questioner: “Do not pay it!”

Finally, Hungary’s claim against Rumania for areas of Transylvania? Stalin had Molotov read to him the Transylvania section of the armistice agreement. “Yes,” said Stalin, “this section gives you an opportunity to introduce the question of Transylvanian territory.”

The pleased delegation returned to Budapest. A few days later, they got a delayed kick in the teeth; Molotov, at the Foreign Ministers’ conference in Paris, had yielded “all” of Transylvania to Rumania.

Barricaded Bedbugs. Soon after this, Nagy and his colleagues made a trip to the U.S. They were flabbergasted by its opulence—all of them but Matyas Rakosi, veteran Moscow-trained Communist (who last week was mentioned as Zhdanov’s successor to head the Cominform). The Hungarians were treated handsomely by Truman, Byrnes and others, and they responded in kind—all but Rakosi. They toured the TVA with David Lilienthal, ate bountiful plates of good food at a dam workers’ cafeteria. (The helpings were too big; the only guest who cleaned his plate was Rakosi, saying, “This is the land of plenty. Why should we spare the Americans by leaving any?”) At one of the TVA farms they saw a dairy worker in dungarees slightly torn at the knee. Nagy reports: “This was the first piece of torn clothing we had seen in America. Rakosi, who did not miss a thing, immediately crowed, ‘Look at those rags! All is not cream in America, either.’ ”

Nagy continues: “Rakosi’s criticism knew no limits … In Tennessee he outdid himself . . . We were shown some prefabricated houses, beautifully equipped. This was a very hard one for him. I could see him peering about critically. At last he came forth with the comment, ‘Once the bedbugs get into these houses, they’ll never get them out again.’ And his face relaxed in complacent self-satisfaction.”

Lenin’s Divide-Rule. But Nagy’s book is not all wryly illuminating anecdotes. Nagy, like Mikolajczyk, traces in detail the formula of the Communist takeover: the endless series of intrigues, harassments, “workers’ demonstrations,” phony conspiracy charges—all with the aim of splitting and confusing and whittling down the democratic parties that have the people’s support and replacing them with Communist parties that haven’t. Like Mikolajczyk, he had to flee, leaving the government in the hands of Rakosi & Co.

What happened to Nagy and Mikolajczyk and dozens of others who thought they could cooperate with Communists is best nutshelled in the words of Lasglo Rajk, Hungary’s anti-Semitic Communist Minister of the Interior. Nagy quotes him from the transcript of a secret meeting of Hungarian Communist leaders. Said Rajk:

“Learn from Lenin; if you have five enemies, you should ally yourselves with them; arrange to incite four of them against the fifth, then three against the fourth, and so on until you have only one enemy left in the alliance; you can then liquidate him yourselves and kick him out of the alliance … It was these Leninist tactics that the Soviet Union followed when it made an alliance with the reactionary capitalistic great powers.”