COMMUNISTS: Down the Sink

In Hungary's neo-Gothic Parliament building the crowd cheered as Communist Boss Matyas Rakosi stalked in to open the session. He first walked around the red-plushed row of ministerial chairs to shake hands with each cabinet minister. One of the old familiar faces was missing —that of Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk, wartime underground leader and once Hungary's dreaded Minister of the Interior. Since Rajk's name had headed the single list of candidates in his district, his election had seemed sure. When the rapporteur of the Mandate Credentials Committee omitted Rajk's name from the list of new deputies, an uneasy question began to be asked around Budapest.

Last week, the Interior Ministry announced that Rajk and 19 accomplices had been arrested on charges of "spying for a foreign power." "It was the vigilance of Comrade Rakosi," the Budapest daily Szabad Nep confided, that uncovered "the background of the Rajk legend . . . Trotskyism, Fascism, Zionism and anti-Sovietism, that was the ideological sink" which had spawned the treachery. For Communists who were still safe at home, Nep offered a little fatherly advice: "The important thing (to remember) is that treason against the party, deviation from the Marxist-Leninist line, is a steep slope from which plunging into the imperialist abyss is easy."

In Sofia, another communist ex-hero was sliding down the slope. After bumping down in April from Vice Premier of Bulgaria to head of the National Library, Traicho Kostov has now been expelled from the party and from Parliament.

In Tirana, the tubby little ex-tinker Koci Xoxe met the ultimate end of all unregenerate purgees. Once the general secretary of the Albanian Communist Party, Xoxe was shot by a firing squad of the same secret police he had once organized. Also convicted of being "plotters against popular democracy," three other pro-Tito Albanians got stiff prison terms.

The liquidation of Rajk, Kostov, Xoxe and hundreds of smaller fry were signs of the times: Moscow's men were trying to close the ranks.