International: The Blueshirts

For eight hours last Sunday, down Berlin’s famed Unter den Linden, where Hitler’s brownshirts once goose-stepped, marched 1,000,000 blueshirts, aged six to 26. They were dictator’s zealots of a new age. For sheer size and fanaticism, their “peace parade” was impressive. But there were signs that Communism’s World Youth Festival was not all it was meant to be. Food supplies were badly fouled up. A Red commissary officer was jailed for allowing 380 tons of meat to rot. East Germany’s overburdened transport system broke down, stranded thousands of blueshirts en route to Berlin. And though East German police barred 165 East-West streets, closed 30 westbound subway stations to protect their delegates from “imperialistic contamination,” more than 50,000 young Reds a day swarmed into the Western sector to have a look around; 1,590 asked for asylum. Most of the hooky-playing blueshirts, however, dutifully trooped back to their Communist festival, their one furtive look at freedom apt to become only a memory in the years of Soviet indoctrination that faced them.