Suspicions

The Soviet Government has often been grossly attacked in the U.S. press, which is free. But the controlled Russian press has almost never said a harsh word about the U.S. Government. It has behaved with the same correctness toward Britain's Conservative Government. The Soviet press, however, never hesitates to exercise its claws on individual citizens of the big powers. Last winter Pravda kicked Wendell Willkie resoundingly in the pants and called him an "obedient speaking trumpet" (he had mildly ventured to state that there is a Polish question). Pravda also mauled New York Times Military Commentator Hanson Baldwin, called him "admiral of an ink pool" (Baldwin had said that Red Army advances were in part German retreats).

Last week it was William C. Bullitt's turn. His offense: an article entitled The World from Rome (LIFE, Sept. 4). The article, a flesh-creeping look at postwar Europe, purported to be from the Roman point of view, but Mr. Bullitt was obviously obeying the honored adage, "When in Rome. . . . "The question in Roman minds, Bullitt reported, was whether the war would not end in the subjugation of Europe by Moscow instead of Berlin.

Hard Words. Promptly, Pravda lashed out in an editorial signed by K. Demidov, calling the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and Paris "a liar" and "a spy."

Demidov claimed that he had nailed 30 lies in the LIFE article. Three of them:

P:"Lie No. 1--Bullitt writes that the Polish Committee of Liberation is formed of 19 people, nine of whom are Communists, among them Osubka-Morawski [its chairman]. It is well known that there are only three Communists on this committee and that Osubka-Morawski is a member of the Workers' Party of the Polish Socialists."

P: "Lie No. 2--Bullitt writes that 'the Soviet Union will dominate Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.' How can the Soviet Union 'dominate' Soviet Republics?"

P: "Lie No. 3--Bullitt writes that Marshal Tito's Army is 'killing Serbian peasants who are showing anti-Communist feelings with weapons received from America.' By this lie Bullitt gives himself away as a spy who has assimilated the instructions of German Fascist propaganda."

Harder Words. Two days later PM echoed Pravda in a three-page editorial by leftish Max Lerner, who could "not escape the slightly nauseating job of dissecting the rotten cadaver of Bullitt's piece." "Why?" he asked rhetorically. "Because this "is the first time that anyone with a veneer of respectability, in a respectable paper, has uttered a direct call for a war between England and America on one side and Russia on the other."

Ex-Ambassador Bullitt, now a major in the French Army, had uttered no such call. No human being in his senses wants a war between England and America on one side and Russia on the other. No human being in his senses wants war at all. But few sensible men saw much hope of lasting peace anywhere in the world if suspicions could not be aired and beaten out like rugs in the sun--and if communications across boundaries could not be couched in some warmer language than diplomacy, in cooler words than a curse.

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