No Dies

Last week the Communist Party gave a remarkable exhibition of hauteur. Like the aristocratic Southern lady who sneered "Newspaper talk" when told that the Titanic had gone down, Party members have steadily sniffed when evidence offered at Washington charged Communists with espionage, treason, counterfeiting, slugging, murder, double-dealing, graft, wrecking, sabotage, forgery, as well as considerable mental and political confusion. Beaming over recent Russian successes in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland, Communists were in no mood to talk about the revelations of Congressman Martin Dies's Committee investigating un-American activities.

What made the Communist nose-in-air the more remarkable was that it had been there so often before. Last April, when former Communist Agent Walter Krivitsky, onetime Chief of Military Intelligence in Western Europe, publicized Stalin's undercover activities in the Saturday Evening Post, accurately forecast the Nazi-Communist Pact, Communists blandly asserted there was no such Krivitsky, featured a creepy New Masses article: "General Krivitsky, you are Shmelka Ginsberg!" At 10:30 one morning last week there appeared before the Committee a slight, thin-faced, intense man of 40 who was introduced by Chairman Dies as his most important witness to date. He was Walter Krivitsky.

Said he, he was born Samuel Ginsberg in the Polish Ukraine, took the name Krivitsky when he became a Communist in 1919. Lighting one cigaret from another, wincing as cameramen exploded flashlight bulbs, he unfolded in five hours of testimony an extraordinary story of the degeneration of a political party that, as he pictured it, had begun as an ardent movement for remaking the world and had turned into the instrument of an imperialist power. He said that Stalin dictated the policies of the U. S. Communist Party and that Russia financed it.

Carefully Witness Krivitsky explained that many Communists are not conscious Russian agents; many are considered too stupid or unreliable by Russians; many a warm-hearted Red battles vigorously for the final triumph of the toiling masses, unaware of cynical Russian manipulations behind the scenes.

Dies. What made Walter Krivitsky a valuable witness for Chairman Dies is that he fitted together for the first time the vast mass of unsavory evidence that the Dies Committee has gropingly assembled, gave it an intelligible pattern. Not the least extraordinary feature of last week's hearings was its evidence of the education of the Dies Committee under the impact of its own findings. Beginning crudely 16 months ago, floundering around futilely at first with professional Red-baiters, crackpots and alarmists, it was nevertheless beginning to loom last week as one of the big U. S. legislative inquiries.

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