Danube Blues

How deep was the rift between Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito and the Kremlin? The Belgrade scene last week measured it to a nicety.

The rift was deep enough to keep the Yugoslav Communist Party congress in session until 2 a.m., denouncing the Cominform, on the night before a ten-nation Danube conference met in Belgrade. Marshal Tito turned his back on the Danube conference, dominated by the Russians, and went off to resume the vacation at Bled which had been interrupted by the Cominform attack on him. Belgrade's greeting to the Danubian delegates was notably cool--no outsize pictures of Soviet leaders, no special triumphal arches in the streets.

But the rift stopped there. At the conference table, Yugoslavia and five other Communist-dominated countries stood squarely behind Russia's Andrei Vishinsky when he took a high-handed line indicating that the Communists intended to keep Western nations off Europe's greatest waterway. This policy would cost the Yugoslavs and the. other Danube countries dearly. From the heights above Belgrade one could scan the Danube in vain for signs of the heavy traffic it had carried before the war.

On the conference's first day it became apparent where Yugoslavia stood on the issue between Communism and the West. U.S. Delegate Cavendish Cannon asked that English be added to Russian and French as official languages of the conference. Vishinsky smilingly retorted that most of the participating states "loved and understood the Russian language." Yugoslavia's Ales Bebler supported him vigorously--in Russian.

Rumania's Amazonian Foreign Minister Ana Pauker, wearing a New Look dress of white-flowered blue silk, with a grey lizard handbag, rose and in stumbling Russian said she had always cherished that language as her mother tongue. She had to be prompted by an assistant when she forgot the Russian word for "love."* At the end she mopped her brow in obvious relief. After these satellite tributes, English was voted down 7-3. (Next day the Bulgarians, Hungarians and Yugoslavs switched from Russian to French for their speeches.)

Vishinsky said that a Danube treaty would be written by the Eastern nations and would go into effect whether the Western powers signed it or not. He snapped: "The door was open for you to come into this conference; the same door is open for you to get out."

Said a glum Western delegate: "By the time we get through here it will probably turn out that a Russian wrote the Blue Danube Waltz."

*Years ago Ana's husband disappeared in Russia; some say Ana herself denounced him to the GPU.

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