Foreign News: Dear Comrade

One breezy afternoon last week, a green-and-cream diesel train rolled into Mos cow's cavernous Kiev station with a man described in the official press, only a few years back, as "traitor, Judas, fascist, saboteur, imperialist agent, renegade," and a hundred other names in the extensive vocabulary of Communist invective. Wearing a powder-blue military blouse loaded with gold braid and ribbons, and red-striped trousers, Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito stepped out of his luxury coach to the sound of Muscovite cheers and triumphal military music.

To greet him were Russia's top leaders, President Voroshilov, Premier Bulganin and First Party Secretary Khrushchev, and Tito's ancient enemy, ex-Foreign Minister Molotov (see above). Grinning broadly, Tito shook them all by the hand. "Dear Comrade President," said President Voroshilov. "Dear Comrades, leaders of the Soviet Union, dear citizens," said Tito. A score of little Russian boys and girls dressed in red kerchiefs and white blouses presented Tito's handsome wife Jovanka with masses of tulips.

Tito made a trainside speech about "our fates being inseparable," despite the fact of "something unheard of and tragic" having taken place in the recent past. He expressed the profound conviction that "nothing of the kind will ever happen again between the two countries marching along the path of Marx, Engels and Lenin." No one mentioned the name of Stalin. Afterwards, to the sound of loud speakers blaring Yugoslav folk songs and the cheers of tens of thousands of Russian onlookers, ex-Traitor Tito drove through Moscow to the Kremlin and then to Spiridonovka Palace, official residence of the new Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov. Observers, practiced in reading the temperature of Moscow's organized welcomes, judged this one to be only a degree or two less than that accorded India's Prime Minister Nehru last year.

Pigs at the Table. But Tito could reflect on how things have changed since his last visit to Moscow ten years ago. What happened then has since been described by Tito's Vice President Edvard Kardelj (who accompanied Tito to Moscow last week). Ten years ago Dictator Stalin threw a Kremlin banquet for Tito, then just recently emerged from Comintern obscurity to the eminence of a partisan hero and boss of Yugoslavia. Tito was clapped on the back by Stalin, who said to him: "What a pity, my dear Walter [Tito's Comintern name]. You are now living and working in Belgrade instead of at my side here in Moscow. I would so much prefer to have a man like you here instead of these pigs here at my table, these weak spineless idiots I have around me all the time."