Private Party

Attended by 200 secretaries, 400 Communist Party delegates from 50 countries arrived importantly in Moscow last week for the first Congress of the Comintern in seven long years. Its constitution defines the Comintern as "a union of Communist parties of all countries into one proletarian party, which fights for the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, for the creation of a World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for the complete destruction of classes and the achievement of Socialism--that first stage of the Communist society." Since many of the 400 delegates are furtive persons, wanted by the police of their home countries, the Soviet State concealed their names from foreign correspondents who could find out nothing last week except that the best rooms in Moscow's best hotels, for which tourists are charged $15 per day, were being occupied free by nondescript persons of both sexes, of every race and all colors. The last Chairman of the Comintern was the famed "Bomb Boy of Bolshevism," shaggy Comrade Grigory Zinoviev. In 1926 thrifty Joseph Stalin decided to squander less Soviet gold on Communists abroad and Chairman Zinoviev, huffing and puffing, resigned from the Comintern. To day, since Stalin has broken not only with Zinoviev but also with Trotsky, who should be groomed in Moscow last week for election by the Congress this week as Chairman of the Comintern but George Dimitroff.

Two years ago the question "Who is George Dimitroff?" could have been answered with enthusiasm only by his old mother. Then German police arrested Bulgarian Dimitroff in their frantic efforts to arrest almost anyone except the Nazis who everyone believes set fire to the Reichstag (TIME. March 6, 1933. et seq.). It was assumed that innocent Communists could be browbeaten before the German Supreme Court into confessing that they had set the fire, or at least that their mouths could be stopped by execution. In stead the Supreme Court acquitted all except the half-witted Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe. During the trial, fiery Bulgarian Dimitroff not only studied German judicial procedure and earned the right to defend himself but hurled it with such withering invective at No. 2 Nazi Hermann Wilhelm Goering, Premier of Prussia and President of the Reichstag, that the beefy Brownshirt completely lost control of himself, screamed at the stocky Bulgar in court like a madman.

Today every Russian considers that Germany is the spearhead of such anti-Communist world forces as exist. Though Comrade Dimitroff has had no experience in directing a revolution, he has fearlessly fought Nazis and he does have spunk. This last week caused some Moscow wiseacres to guess that Dictator Stalin, famed for weeding out spunky subordinates, might intervene to prevent Dimitroff's election.

Only foreign Communist in Moscow who dared to come out into the open was ailing William Z. Foster, onetime Communist candidate for President of the U. S. Though bedded in a Moscow hospital, Comrade Foster contributed a piece to the newsorgan of the Comintern. He urged all U. S. well-wishers of the World Revolution of the World Proletariat to enter a new misleadingly named "Workers' Party" and try to mislead as many workers as possible into thinking it is not identical with the Communist Party.

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