THE BALKANS: Southern Relatives

Only well-known European language which even remotely resembles the difficult Magyar tongue is Finnish. Mainly for this reason, sentimental Hungarians consider the Finns "our northern cousins." Last week Hungarians were dismayed to hear of the Soviet invasion of Finland. At the same time fear of the Russians came nearer home with disturbing occurrences on their own Russian (recently Polish) frontier. Red Army soldiers, it was reported, fired on Hungarian sentries. More important, Hungarian military authorities seized large batches of Communist propaganda pamphlets shipped into eastern Carpatho-Ukraine, the mountainous district which Hungary grabbed from dying Czecho-Slovakia last March and which the Nazis once thought of using for a jump-off into the Russian Ukraine. All this indicated that when Comrade Stalin finished with the "northern cousins" he may very well turn toward the Finns' southern relatives and put in a small claim.

Meanwhile, not all Hungary's troubles were with the Communists. In an important by-election the demonstrative Andrew Mecser, known as "Hitler's personal representative in Budapest," was decisively defeated for the Lower Chamber. Next day Führer Adolf Hitler showed his displeasure at the defeat by conferring on Herr Mecser the German Order of the Eagle.

Elsewhere, Red rumblings and the Allied-German tug-of-war over trade and prestige reverberated throughout the Balkans:

>In Rumania, generally picked as the next victim for Stalin's expansionist program, Foreign Minister Grigore Gafencu soft-soaped the Soviet Union: "We are convinced of the similarity existing between the Soviet's affirmed policy of peace and the Rumanian policy of independence." Earlier, George Tatarescu, the new pro-Ally Premier, made a bid for democratic sympathy when he promised to lift the hitherto strict Rumanian press censorship by allowing newspapers to give vent to "impartial criticism and the voicing of grievances against the Government."

> Characteristic part of Balkan political life is the student demonstration, often a bought-&-paid-for affair. At Belgrade, university students broke up a meeting of the Yugoslav Friends of France. Yugoslav authorities suspected Russian agents were responsible, arrested 50 students, put the autonomous Belgrade University under direct governmental control.

In the Allied-German duel for Yugoslav trade the Nazis appeared the winners of round one. The Germans forced Yugoslavia to recognize (in principle) pre-World War I debts incurred by Serbia and by the old Austrian province of Bosnia, now in Yugoslavia. Remarkable feature of this agreement was that neither debt has been serviced since 1914, and that both were virtually considered as having lapsed. To pay off the "debts," Yugoslavia will presumably offer goods.

>In Sofia His Majesty King Boris received Italian Minister Giuseppe Atenolfi, Marquis of Castelnuovo in a two-hour audience at his palace. That day rumor spread about the Balkans that Italy was now very much interested in forming an anti-Soviet Balkan peace bloc and that the Italians had just about persuaded Bulgaria, which has territorial claims on every one of her neighbors, to let bygones be bygones temporarily and join up.