The Pink Pipes of Pan

Every other summer for twelve years the Communists have served up a monster propaganda rally for fellow travelers of the younger set from all over the world, and for any other ingenuous souls who could be enticed along. Until this year, the circuses were always staged behind the Iron Curtain, with plenty of Red police to keep things moving by the numbers, and press censorship to blank out any slipups. But last week, when the pink pipes of Pan sounded for the Seventh Youth Festival in neutral Vienna's vast Prater fairgrounds, there was trouble, trouble everywhere.

With the bulk of the 17,000 delegates coming from the Soviet bloc--many having their first look outside the Iron Curtain--the festival organizers did their best to make them feel that they had never left home. The Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian and Rumanian delegates were quartered in tent cities five miles from Vienna, closely guarded by other "delegates," and whisked back and forth each day in buses, some of them with Moscow license plates.

Trick Count. The U.S. delegation of 630 was a mishmash of the devout (including Paul Robeson Jr.), the trusting, and the curious. There was also a cadre of professionally coached antiCommunists, including a young American scientist, J. A. Ransahoff, who at a party-line seminar on the atom stole the Red thunder with a facts-and-figures presentation of the U.S. program for the peaceful uses of atomic energy.

But when the young non-Communists --a majority of the U.S. delegation--tried to win representation on the festival steering committee, they got a lesson in Communist procedural manipulation. On the transparent pretext that a number of registration cards had been stolen, Festival Chairman (and French Communist) Jean Garcias flatly refused to recognize the majority's officers.

Surprise Signs. A few of the Americans joined with other anti-Communists in Vienna to undercut the festival in a variety of ways. Free bus trips to view the barbed-wire border of Hungary were organized. Light planes circled over Vienna drawing streamers that said "Remember Hungary," "Remember Tibet." The brother of the Dalai Lama was invited to Vienna to talk with Iron Curtain delegates, and U.S. Songstress Ella Fitzgerald was brought in to sing at the other side of town at the same time as Red-banked Baritone Paul Robeson Sr. was Old Man Rivering at a festival rally. All week long, Americans slipped anti-Communist literature under the dinner places and into the beds of Iron Curtain delegates, or handed it out openly in the Prater. For their pains, at least nine--four of them girls--were roughed up by Communist guards, and an acid bomb was thrown into the publishing house printing the anti-Communist tracts.

On Saturday 100,000 Viennese (who had otherwise treated the affair with distaste or indifference) turned out to watch the festival's big parade. They found nothing to cheer about until, near the end of the monotonous succession of national delegations, the ragged-rank bunch of 100 U.S. fellow travelers passed by--followed closely by six non-Communist Americans who, as they entered Heroes Square, broke out signs reading "Remember Hungary," "Remember Tibet" and "We're Against Soviet Colonialism." The crowd gave the half dozen a tremendous ovation before Austrian and Italian Communists swarmed in and knocked them out of line. All in all, it was unlikely that the Communists would soon try to stage another youth festival beyond their own fences.

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