May Day

The bells of the Kremlin tolled the May Day hour (10 a.m.) as Joseph Stalin, in fawn uniform and chipper mood, stood on Lenin's marble tomb to take the adulation of a million marchers. His son, Lieut. General Vasily Stalin, flew above Red Square in the van of the mightiest Soviet air show; there were 64 four-engined bombers where last November there had been 22. "Comrades," orated Chief of Staff General S. M. Shtemenko, on the rostrum beside Stalin, "a crisis is approaching in capitalist countries . . ."

The sense of crisis was most acute in Berlin, where two worlds faced each other balefully. Half a million German comrades paraded in the Soviet zone, held high the images of their master Stalin. Three-quarters of a million gathered in the Western zone to cheer anti-Communist speakers. Between opposing camps ranged a thin line of police and occupation troops. At Potsdamer Platz, demonstrators surged from the Allied toward the Soviet sector, hurling stones at its police, shouting "Black SS!" and "Communist pigs!" They were promptly dispersed by West German police.

Warsaw watched 600,000 march. Prague staged its celebration in historic Wenceslaus Square, where citizens had wept when the Nazis swept in. Paris had a divided holiday--a traditional left-wing parade and a rival Gaullist music festival. Rome listened to speeches in the jampacked Piazza del Popolo. Peking's 200,000 celebrants chanted "Long live Sino-Soviet alliance!"

A third world held jubilee in Belgrade. There the Yugoslav comrades, led by Marshal Tito, cheered for the people's revolution and independent Communism, promenaded under the portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Nowhere was there any picture of Stalin.

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