COMMUNISTS: Thunder Out of Russia

Guards with Tommy guns peered down from the roof of Sofia’s grandiose Hôtel Bulgarie, and armored cars toured the streets below. In the hotel’s plush lobbies and corridors, swarthy Albanian colonels conferred importantly with bemedaled Czech generals; Polish officials huddled with thoughtful Hungarians. Vulko Chervenkov, new boss of Bulgaria, walked side by side with Ana Pauker, Stalin’s Amazon satrap for Rumania. Over all watched the steady eyes of the Russians sent for the occasion from Moscow. The Cominform was meeting in full conclave. Chief item on the agenda: what to do about Yugoslavia’s rebellious Tito.

While the Cominform sat, all the Balkans were abuzz with ominous rumor and foreboding fact. U.S. newsmen in Belgrade reported three mechanized Soviet divisions moving westward through Hungary and Rumania. Borba, the official voice of Belgrade, charged that Rumania was inciting Communists in Hungary, Albania and Bulgaria to join in carving up their larger neighbor with Russian help. Three recent train wrecks in Yugoslavia prompted Railways Minister Todor Vujacinovic last week to warn against impending Cominform sabotage. Two days later, fires broke out simultaneously in four parts of Yugoslavia’s huge Romsa oil refinery in Fiume. A Russian warship, covered by Soviet planes, steamed up & down the Danube in Yugoslav waters, defying orders to halt, and acting, said Belgrade, in a “deliberately provocative manner.”

With a defiant “hands off!” meanwhile, the Yugoslav government kept up the furious pace of its propaganda war with the Kremlin. Blared Tito’s Foreign Office last week: “Yugoslavia’s people and its government will not allow anyone whomsoever to interfere in their internal affairs.” As to the 31 Russian nationals who, Moscow said, had been treated “inhumanly” in Yugoslav prisons, they were all “spies, saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries.”

In the single-voiced Soviet press, savage denunciations of the “Tito clique” crowded attacks on the “Anglo-American warmongers” off the front page. A Red army paper said that Tito would suffer the same fate “as Hitler and Mussolini, only this time much quicker.” Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, Soviet Deputy Premier and Stalin’s longtime pal, called upon the Red faithful to rally together for the grand push against Yugoslavia. He also gave them a significant definition of what it means to be a good Communist. “A proletarian internationalist,” said he, “is one who, without any conditions, openly and honestly … is ready to defend the Soviet Union . . .”