Goodbye to the Cominform

Eighteen of Stalin's top international incendiaries met in Poland in 1947 "to reorganize the general staff of the world revolution." The Cominform they created, even more than the old Comintern that Stalin had diplomatically dissolved in wartime 1943, failed to set the world on fire. Barely a year later, Tito's Yugoslavia split off from Stalin's world, and the furious tyrant turned the energy of the Cominform to attacking and destroying Tito. It failed at that, too.

Apart from the Russians and their six Eastern European satellites, only the French and Italian Communist Parties ever belonged to the Cominform. From a shabby headquarters in Bucharest it waged an increasingly desultory paper war against Tito. When Stalin's successors finally denounced Stalin himself, the Cominform was doomed. Last week in Moscow, largely as a gesture to Tito, First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan announced its end, and professed to find the whole thing unimportant. "They put out a paper," said Mikoyan, "I think." Tito congratulated Russia's new bosses on their "brave and bold" course, but just in case anyone really thought the end of the Cominform meant the beginning of a new era, Pravda pointed out that the Cominform dissolution "in no way means a weakening of links between Communist Parties"--and Pravda should know.

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