The Bear's Way

Men of good will and men with schemes to push pondered last week the riddle of the bear that walks like a man. From the wintry fastness of the Russian plain, the bear had reached out to gash a friend. Moscow's Pravda, highest official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, detonated a seven-day wonder by accusing British "personalities" (or "officials": translations varied) of talking peace with Hitler's Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

First Blood. Whatever Pravda meant with its "rumor from Cairo," the consequences of publication and later broadcast were swift and frightening. The British Government presented its stern denial directly to the Soviet Government. The British press fired harsh words at Russia for the first time since Hitler turned east: lie, insult, slander. Nazi propaganda set to work to prove a fatal rift in the fabric of agreement supposedly woven at Teheran, raise again the specter of a Red Europe. Ordinary Russians, taught to believe their press implicitly, now wondered whether Britain was about to betray them. In the U.S. many a plain citizen had his faith in Russia as an ally and as a responsible partner in peace severely shaken.

After a week of turmoil no one was prepared to say straight out why the semi-Asiatic, often inscrutable bear had lifted a warning lip at the lion. Guesses were a dime a dozen, but few fitted the known facts. Practically no one believed that Moscow had merely played another card in the complex game of Poland's postwar frontiers. Pravda's bad-mannered belch clearly had some deep but hidden bearing on inter-Allied relations for war & peace.

Any sound reasoning had to start with the axiom that Russian papers never publish explosive stories without a purpose. Two plausible--and contradictory--purposes were suggested for this one: 1) Moscow wished to prepare Russians and the world outside for a peace move at Britain's expense--by asserting, in advance, that Britons were scoundrels, concocting a scheme to double-cross Russia; 2) Moscow actually thought that as the Red Army's sustained lunge carried it closer & closer to Central Europe, the ghosts of Munich might regain their onetime influence, persuade the English-speaking Allies to compromise.

First Light. When Moscow published the British denial, the Russian press took pains to couple the item with an otherwise innocuous Ankara dispatch to the London Sunday Times (no relation to the Times of London). This report said that Ambassador Franz von Papen asked the Turks, two months ago, to relay a German proposal that the Wehrmacht voluntarily retreat to prewar boundaries in the west, in return get a "limited free hand in the east." The Sunday Times said that the Turks refused to act, and that nothing came of Ribbentrop's advances. But Russians, reading about it, were clearly meant to understand that peace talk was going on, even if no Briton had seen Ribbentrop. The result was that they paid little attention to the British denial, felt that their first suspicions were confirmed.

Side by side with this manufactured fear of a British double cross ran a fresh Russian uneasiness over the opening of the western European front. Russians read (in last week's issue of War & The Working Class) that "defeatist and peace-creating elements in the countries allied with us have now taken up vigorous anti-invasion propaganda." In Russian eyes, a continuing faith in destruction of the enemy by bombs and a lingering hope that frontal assault might yet prove unnecessary would call for a stiff reminder of promises given. In Russian eyes, an apparently unrelated accusation such as the Pravda rumor would serve to jog a lagging associate.

From London, after the first outraged cry, came strong indications of an intent not to quarrel. Winston Churchill, just recovered from pneumonia and home from North Africa, quietly talked with Poland's Premier in Exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, and let it be understood that the British Government was working to heal that particular rift. British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr got orders to cut short his leave, return to Moscow. Said Anthony Eden in the House of Commons, referring specifically to the Polish border dispute, generally to relations with Russia: "We are not without hope that a favorable solution may be attained. . . . We are in closest touch with our Allies. . . ."

First Proof. Suddenly Moscow smiled again. Purred the Red Army's official paper, Red Star: "The anti-Hitler coalition of freedom-loving powers, created and strengthened in the fire of war, has never been more firm and inviolate than now. . . ." In Stalin's presence, on the 20th anniversary of Lenin's death (see p. 38), rising young Communist Party executive Alexander Shcherbakov said: "Confidence and unity among the nations of the anti-Hitler coalition have increased. . . . Hitler's plans . . . have failed."

Plainly the bear was satisfied with whatever he had done, and now wanted the world to understand that the vicious swipe was not meant to wound. The world did not know what assurances the bear had gained nor how they had been conveyed. But it did know, definitely, that it would have more faith in the pledges of Teheran if the bear could learn to keep his claws off his friends.

The shut-in millions of Russia, whose government is their only window to the outside world, remained an unknown quantity--as mute, foreign and far-off as the millions of plain Americans and Britons were to them.

*In 1941, listening to official broadcasts of the Anglo-Soviet agreement.

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