Seventy

Joseph Stalin would be 70 years old this week, and all over the world his faithful followers prepared to celebrate the august birthday. To Moscow journeyed the satraps to pay homage. Russia's state music publishing house issued 45 separate Stalin songs, bearing titles such as To the Great Stalin--Glory, Our Strength--Stalin, and You Are Our Hero. The Bulgarian city of Varna on the Black Sea reported that it had changed its name to Stalin. The Czechs sent word that they had renamed their highest mountain, Gerlachovka (8,737 ft.), Mt. Stalin.

Presents poured in to Moscow. The

Italian Communists sent a 5,000,000-lire Alfa Romeo sports roadster, the kind that Prince Aly Khan gave to Rita Hayworth. The French Reds sent a chromium-plated racing bicycle. From the Communist Party in Hungary came a red plastic telephone which, instead of sounding a bell, plays the Internationale. And from a well-wisher in North America (Moscow did not name him) came the headdress of an Indian chief, with a salutation hailing Stalin as "the greatest of warriors, honorary chief of all Indian tribes."

Joseph Stalin had much to celebrate; he also had much to remember. When he was born, the son of a drunken Georgian shoemaker and his peasant wife, Queen Victoria was on the throne, Karl Marx was a penniless scribbler, and the world seemed to find it a good deal easier to tell the difference between right & wrong than it does today. Stalin built an empire of a kind that Victoria could not have visualized even in her nightmares; he forged Marx's foggy philosophy into an iron knife with which to carve the earth; and he swamped mankind with an organized lie that, in the minds of millions, made white mean black, war mean peace, and good mean evil. There was not a king or a rich man, a shoemaker or a peasant wife who was not touched by Stalin's power, and who on his birthday did not bear him reverence--or hatred and fear.

For the big chief, it had been quite a lifetime. He had thrived on catastrophe, some of which he had brought about himself, had outlived a dozen comrades, some of whom had died by his order. Despite divisions in his dominions and despite his advancing years, Septuagenarian Joe Stalin was still going strong.

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