Crackdown

To Moscow's wary, cautious eye, Bulgaria's ambitious Premier and ex-Comintern Boss Georgi Dimitrov and Yugoslavia's restless, bellicose Marshal Tito were pedaling too far and too fast.

Both, with the silent assent of Rumania's hard-driving Communist Matriarch Ana Pauker, had been talking up a federation composed of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Poland (TIME, Jan. 26). Quilted into a single state, it would comprise 447,000 square miles with 81 million people. It had growing armies, resources of coal, oil, and some highly developed industry. In the absence of a strong Germany, it would be Europe's most formidable power outside Russia. And it was perched on Russia's doorstep.

Last week, Moscow's Pravda, the Communist Party's voice of authority, decided that the time had come to scotch the dream. It thundered: "Pravda believes these countries do not need a problematical and artificial federation, confederation or customs union." In Sofia, disciplined Communist Dimitrov heard and heeded. In effect, he cried: I was misquoted.

Why did the Kremlin, through Pravda, squelch the plan to create another great Communist-dominated state? Partly because the Kremlin's bosses, as inheritors of Czarist foreign policy, did not want a revived and enlarged Austro-Hungarian empire; partly (and more important), from fear that their puppets might get out of hand. Party discipline inside the U.S.S.R. has been maintained for so long by police power that Moscow looks askance at Communists like Dimitrov and Tito who control police states of their own.

A great Eastern European federation might be able to protect its bosses from the Kremlin's reach. Therefore Moscow wanted to coordinate the policies of Eastern European countries through Communist Party machinery, which it can control, rather than through Eastern European governments. As Pravda explained: "What [these states] do need is consolidation and protection of their independence and sovereignty through mobilization and organization of their domestic democratic forces, as has been correctly stated in the known declaration of the nine Communist Parties."

The Moscow-run Cominform* was all the federation Moscow wanted now.

*This week, the Cominform revealed that it had met in mid-January at its Belgrade headquarters, chosen Moscow's dialectical expert Pavel Yudin to edit its journal, and branded Protocol M (TIME, Jan. 26) a forgery.

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