Red Knight's Tale

For a disgraced Comrade who (by his own admission) spoke only 40 words of Russian, Earl Russell Browder was doing all right.

Serenely ensconced in a luxurious, three-room suite at the super-ritzy Hotel Moscow, he talked amiably to U.S. correspondents. He had had several long talks with Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky, Soviet Information Chief, and had called on Foreign Minister Molotov. Purred Browder: "I have been received like an old and trusted friend of the Soviet Union."

On Friend Browder's desk, reporters noted a traveling chess board. Said he chattily: "I like to wrestle with chess problems." This was in the best Communist tradition (Marx, Lenin and Trotsky had all been rabid chess strategists); but Communism's most perplexing chess problem was still Earl himself.

Ever since the U.S. Communist Party had expelled him, it had looked as though he were just another pawn sacrificed in one of the Kremlin's policy plays. But now, Browder looked less like a pawn, more like a knight on Communism's big board.

In New York, present Communist Boss William Zebulon Foster (no chess fan) was as jumpy as Browder was calm. He issued a statement that the capitalists' "wild orgies of speculation" about a possible Kremlin strategy shift were all nonsense. Foster would continue to battle "Browderism" in order to "pursue a correct Marxist policy."

At his Moscow press conference Browder had declined to say whether he was still a Marxist or not. Better than Comrade Foster, Comrade Browder knew that the day's correct Marxism was a matter of revelation, not for mere pawns or even for knights to divine.

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