Youth's Year

The first thing that First Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev did after his sensational speech attacking the "cult of personality" last February was to call a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to have it confirm his denunciation of Stalin policy. Last week, meeting again to review the effect of his policy, the Committee faced an agenda studded with disaster.

Destalinization had sparked a revolt in Poland, a revolution in Hungary, strikes in the Ukraine, widespread unrest in East Germany, Lithuania, and Estonia. Most of these disturbances could be tied to the youth of those countries. Young people, many of them nominally Communists, had taken seriously Khrushchev's thesis that a new day was dawning, and were pressing actively for freedom and reforms. In Russia itself youth was also on the move, and did not seem to care whose sacred feet it trod on. Rising to address a youth rally at Moscow University recently, Khrushchev was greeted with a continuous thunder of applause that prevented him from speaking. Thus the Moscow students expressed their contempt for the present Communist leadership and expressed their solidarity with the youth of Poland and Hungary.

Last week Moscow sources found the Central Committee in two minds about how to deal with the youth problem. On the one hand there were pious calls for the "reindoctrination in Marxism-Leninism," and on the other hand an evident intention to crack down on students and unruly youths. Communist newspapers were demanding that the authorities jail "hooligans" and force schools to fight "enemy appearances." It was the kind of confusion in high places that caused all the trouble in the first place.

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