Out of Line

Umberto Terracini, president of Italy's Assembly, is affectionately known to his fellow Italian Communists as "The Brain." Last week The Brain ached.

U.S. Newsman Kingsbury Smith of International News Service had quoted Terracini as saying: "The United States [should] cease interfering in the internal affairs of European states. . . . This rule also applies to Russia as well."

Next day, top Communist Palmiro Togliatti gave Communist Terracini a public dressing-down. The Italian Communist Party announced officially that Terracini's interview "expresses the false and dangerous tendency of putting on the same plane imperialist aggressors, who are fomenting war and intervening in the internal life of peoples . . . and states which, like the Soviet Union, necessarily follow a policy of defense of peace and never dream of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. . . . Opinions of the kind expressed by Comrade Terracini can only serve to disorient the working masses in a battle which they must wage in defense of peace against the provokers of imperialist wars."

Umberto Terracini has the reputation of a brave man. He spent 18 years in Mussolini's prisons. From his presiding rostrum in the Assembly he had once rebuked his own party boss: "Honorable Togliatti, you don't have the floor. I beg you to be silent." Terracini had been known to believe, in the past, that the Kremlin might err. He had raised such a fuss over the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 that he had been banished from the party's inner councils for a while. But last week even Umberto Terracini judged that he was on dangerous ground. Day after his party flogging, The Brain recanted, pleaded that the "nuances" in his statement to Newsman Smith had been distorted.

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