East & West

Round the head of young King Michael swirled a political blizzard. Angry worlds, which freely bandied his royal name, flew back & forth. The disputants were the Big Three.

Moscow started the name-calling. Moscow was good & mad at Michael. In asking the Big Three to help set up a representative Rumanian Government in place of Premier Peter Groza's Communist-controlled Cabinet, Michael had stepped on a tender Kremlin corn.

Izvestia, in an editorial splashed across its front page, denounced the royal action as "not spontaneous." Charged Izvestia: the King acted under U.S. and British pressure, later admitted to the Soviet representatives that he had no complaint against the Groza Government. "Really," said Izvestia, "it was a straight case of the Allied representatives going to the King and telling him their governments would not recognize Rumania nor conclude a peace treaty unless the Groza Government was let out. . . ." London talked back just as toughly.

Said a bristling British spokesman: "We certainly did not apply any pressure on the King. . . . Our views about the Groza Government have been well known to the Russians since they removed the Radescu Government early this year and installed the present regime." Next, United Press, in a Bucharest dispatch filed abroad to avoid Rumanian censorship, reported that strong-arm Andrei Vishinsky, ace Russian trouble shooter, had given King Michael just two hours to dismiss Radescu, install Groza.

"Cordial, Friendly." Russia followed its slap at Michael with a pat for Groza. In Moscow the Rumanian Premier and his Government received an elaborate endorsement. Welcomed to the capital on a scale customarily reserved for top diplomatic personages, the pleased, impressed Premier intoned: "I am happy that for the first time I tread the Moscow earth. Light comes from the east."

Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov was at the airport to meet Groza and his entourage of Ministers. Later Generalissimo Stalin entertained him at a "cordial, friendly" dinner at the Kremlin.

The official junket set an imposing Soviet seal on the Groza Government, just before the Council of Foreign Ministers was due to weigh its records in London (see INTERNATIONAL). But Rumania, like Bulgaria (see below), needed the imprimatur of the U.S. and Britain before it could get the peace treaty it sought. Not one but all of the Big Three were now acting tough. If Premier Groza had found light in the east, King Michael might also find it in the west.

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