Dare

It was a little like Tom Sawyer drawing a line in the dust with his bare toe and "dassing" his foe to step over it.

Marshal Tito, firming up his truculent stand against Moscow, spoke bluntly last week to army officers guarding Yugoslavia's border region of Macedonia, where Cominform agents are making plenty of trouble for Tito's regime. His words were really directed across the frontier at Bulgaria, and at Russia beyond.

"On several occasions our men . . . had to confront the enemy face to face. Blood has already been shed . . . Rumors are still being heard. At first these rumors were spread by Western persons . . . But we knew that the Red army cannot attack a Socialist country because that would mean the end of Socialism in the world . . . But today those in the East are also trying to intimidate us, disseminating rumors ... of this many and that many Soviet divisions in one place or another . . . We are afraid only of elemental upheavals, droughts and hail . . . [We are] prepared to defend our country against any enemy, no matter who he might be."

Earlier in the week Tito had incited the peoples of Bulgaria and Albania against their Cominform rulers. "I think the time will come when we will help them to remove all obstacles which individuals have placed in the way of our fraternal relations." Thirteen months after Tito had been denounced by Moscow's Cominform as a Trotskyite traitor, he was still going strong. Western observers were beginning to believe that Stalin could not afford much longer to ignore Tito's dare.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.