Comrade's Farewell

One short year ago the great white marbled Hall of Columns in Moscow's House of Unions blazed with harsh floodlights for the trial of U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers. Now even the cascades of the crystal chandeliers were dimmed, hooded with red and white cheesecloth. At one end a string ensemble played softly. The great and near great of the Kremlin, including Khrushchev, took turns beside the flower-cradled coffin as a guard of honor. Long lines of clerks and students filed slowly by, many of them not quite sure who it was they had been summoned to pay last homage to. In the same hall where Lenin and Stalin had been finally honored lay the mortal remains of American William Zebulon Foster.

Only two other Americans had been so honored in death by Moscow, both more than 30 years ago: Author John Reed and Labor Organizer Big Bill Haywood. From the Communist point of view, William Foster was far and away the most deserving: for years the Soviet Encyclopedia has accorded Foster nearly a full page. Foster scrabbled up from the Irish slums of Taunton, Mass., to become chairman of the U.S. Communist Party from 1932 to 1957. Three times he ran for U.S. President on the Communist Party ticket. Early this year, in failing health, he flew off to Moscow to die. During the long afternoon vigil over his coffin, Nina Khrushchev sat by Foster's widow Esther.

Next morning, after the cremation, Foster's ashes were ceremonially borne to Red Square by a bevy of Communism's best, including Soviet Cosmonaut Titov. The eulogists included "La Pasionaria" of the Spanish Civil War--Dolores Ibarruri, who recalled how Foster had helped recruit the American Abraham Lincoln Brigade for the Republican army. Red China's Ambassador Liu Hsiao called Foster "the leader of the American working class," adding that "he had worked tirelessly to promote friendship between the peoples of China and the U.S.A."

A niche had been prepared for Foster's urn in the Kremlin wall, Communism's Valhalla. But portly Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an old comrade of Foster's who had flown over from the U.S. for the funeral, had other ideas. "From you, dear comrades, we received his ashes," she intoned at funeral's end, "and we shall return them to our country for burial in the industrial center of Chicago where he lived and worked for many years."

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