KHRUSHCHEV IN DANGER
THE struggle for Eastern Europe becomes more fraught with incident every week. Now that the Yugoslays have confirmed the contents of the Soviet letter to the satellites attacking Titoism, it is clear that Khrushchev's policy has been voted down by his colleagues and that he is desperately trying to restore the situation. But this in its turn means that the Titoists must move fast if they are not to find the old ice age irrevocably re-established. In Poland the arch-Titoist Gomulka has now attended a Politburo meeting. But Poland is far from Yugoslavia, and in the heart of the Soviet empire. And the pro-Soviet element seems inexpugnable by party manoeuvre. On the contrary, it is probably able to use the Titoists as a convenient, but highly temporary, safety valve. Hungary is different. It is on the periphery, next to Yugoslavia. And an anti-Stalinist majority seems to have captured its Central Committee. Nagy, the right-wing leader, has now been readmitted to the Party on his own terms. Farkas, Rakosi's trigger-man, is in jail. And Rakosi himself, deprived of the title 'Comrade,' has been told not to return from, presumably, the USSR. It may yet, if the two Soviet divisions in the country are not used, become a second Titoist State while the Kremlin is still torn between two policies. Meanwhile Khrush- chev has revealed that the showdown—the Plenum of the Soviet Central Committee—will be postponed again : certainly till mid-November, possibly later. And even the Soviet enemies of Tito might be willing to lose Hungary to bring down Khrushchev.
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