The Road to Serfdom

In Moscow last week Western diplomats and newsmen were treated to a sight seldom seen in the 40 years since the Bolsheviks stopped making revolutions and started making the rules. The sight: Russian mob demonstrations.

As was only fitting in a nation that prides itself on scientific social organization, the rampage was carefully controlled. Early in the week the Soviet press published meticulous accounts of the damage --mainly broken windows--inflicted on the Soviet embassy in Bonn by German students protesting the execution of Hungarian Revolutionaries Imre Nagy and Pal Maleter. Next day 2,000 Russian students and workers appeared before the West German embassy on Moscow's Bolshoi Gruzinskaya Street and began to hurl stones, chunks of concrete and bottles of purple ink. By the time they dispersed two hours later, the ink-stained fac,ade of the embassy looked like a huge Jackson Pollock canvas, and more than 40 large windows lay in splinters. A similar mob had already bespattered the Danish embassy.*

Two days later, after the Soviet press described the noisy demonstration staged by Hungarian refugees outside the Park Avenue offices of the Soviet U.N. Delegation in Manhattan, U.S. embassy officials sighed and phoned the Soviet Foreign Ministry to demand additional police protection. Sure enough, two hours later, another 2,000 Muscovites turned up before the ten-story U.S. embassy building. This time, however, the "rioters" contented themselves with waving placards and gentle shouts of "fascists" and "dogs." When one youth climbed aboard a passing truck and began to distribute its cargo of bricks among the demonstrators, a policeman intervened, insisted that every brick be returned. The Moscow papers, after all, had made no mention of any broken windows in New York.

"The Dean Regrets . . ." This tit-for-tat performance was Russia's clumsy answer to the continuing chorus of free-world outrage over the Hungarian executions--a chorus that included some voices the Soviets evidently had not expected to hear. In Geneva last week the International Labor Organization expelled Communist Hungary's delegates. In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, the local Communist branch demanded that the national party publicly condemn the executions, and even Prime Minister Nehru felt obliged to chime in with a "most distressing."

Nowhere was the soul-searching more noteworthy than among Britain's dyed-in-the-wool Marxists. Lifelong Communist Arthur Horner, bespectacled boss of the 730,000-man National Union of Mineworkers, phoned up the right-wing Daily Express to announce that he was "shocked and horrified" at this "needless folly." (He remains a Communist, apparently disturbed only by inept tactics.) In Scotland Mrs. Helen Wolff, sister of top British Communist John Gollan, quit the party in disgust. And to the surprise of one and all, the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, "Red Dean" of Canterbury, opened his eyes long enough to announce that "the Dean regrets the executions."

The Giant & the Dwarf. Annoyed and perhaps surprised by the outcry, Khrushchev & Co. had nonetheless calculatedly brought it on themselves, and with an internal purpose in mind: restoring iron discipline within the Soviet empire. Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito last week found himself all but excommunicated by his erstwhile pals in Peking. Tito, snarled Peking's People's Daily, spoke with "the voice of a traitor," and his criticisms of Communist China (TIME, June 30) were those of "a dwarf kneeling in the mud and trying . . . to spit at a giant standing on a lofty mountain."

Behind these attacks on Tito--whom the Soviets had no real hope of bringing to heel--lay Khrushchev's determination to stamp out "revisionism" in the satellites, and particularly in Wladyslaw Gomulka's Poland, the one nation in the Soviet bloc that has managed to achieve some scant room for maneuver within the bonds of Russian domination. With their customary stubbornness, the Poles had at first refused to join in the general satellite rejoicing over the Hungarian executions. Speaking in Poznan, Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki said that Gomulka agreed to visit Budapest two months ago only after Hungarian Puppet Janos Kadar assured him that the final disposition of the Nagy group would be "bloodless." The Secretariat of the Polish Communist Party circulated a letter declaring that Polish Communist leaders "disassociated" themselves from the executions.

This was a gallant performance and one well calculated to enhance Gomulka's prestige with the Polish people. But it was not practical politics. Khrushchev might hesitate to use military force against the Poles (who number 28 million against Hungary's 10 million), but he could well bring Poland to its knees in a matter of weeks by cutting off the raw materials on which the Polish economy depends. Accordingly, at week's end, Gomulka beat a retreat. The Nagy and Maleter executions, he declared, were "Hungary's internal affair," and "the attitude of the Yugoslav Communists ... is wrong and harmful."

For Wladyslaw Gomulka, though he has a long Communist career of knuckling under, this was a humiliating concession, but, if he wanted to survive, Gomulka would almost certainly have to make far greater and more humiliating concessions in the future. The consensus was that Nikita Khrushchev was unlikely to rest content until the stubborn Poles were once again nothing but Soviet serfs.

* During the Suez crisis, a Moscow crowd demonstrated outside the British embassy. A British diplomat worriedly asked a Russian cop, "How long is this going to go on?" The unagitated cop looked at his watch and said, "Oh, about 20 minutes."

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