CONFERENCES: Slav Congress

The long arm of revolutionary pan-Slavism reached into the U.S. last week and beckoned 2,000 American Slav delegates to a congress in Manhattan. In the stuffy ballroom of dingy Manhattan Center, they cheered their heroes (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Claude Pepper) and hissed their villains (President Truman, James F. Byrnes, “U.S. imperialism”). Later, in Madison Square Garden, they gave a standing ovation to personal messages ‘from Generalissimo Stalin, Marshal Tito, and Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitroff. They roared approval of Russia, UNRRA aid, Yugoslav claims to Trieste.

The U.S. paid little heed to the congress. The Soviet Government and satellites (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia) thought it so important that representatives from abroad included (among others): Alexander Korneichuk,** Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukraine; General Vassily Kozlov, World War II guerrilla hero; Lieut. General Alexander Gundorov, head of the All-Slav Congress in Moscow; General Karol Swierczewski, Poland’s Vice Minister of National Defense; Tzola Dragoïtcheva, Secretary of Bulgaria’s Fatherland Front and No. 1 hatchet woman of Bulgarian Communism. The Yugoslav delegates, who attempted to attend the congress as private citizens, were barred as Communists by U.S. immigration authorities. All other foreign delegates came as diplomatic representatives of their governments.

High point of the congress: when U.S. Negro singer (and leftist) Paul Robeson finished singing Song of the Fatherland, Soviet General Kozlov was so moved that he rushed to the rostrum and planted a kiss on Robeson’s cheek.

* His wife, the Soviet Army’s Colonel Wanda Wasilewska, was to have accompanied her husband, but remained in Kiev fighting a cold.