New Push in Eastern Europe
Once again a slight Communist retreat in front of the Iron Curtain is being accompanied by a ruthless strengthening of the prepared positions behind it. In Hungary the purge of all elements to the Right of those utterly subservient to the Russians, has reached the stage when it can remove the acknowledged heads of the Hungarian Communist Party on the ground that they are Hungarians as well as Communists. In Czechoslovakia the Roman Catholic Church must now be forced to lend its support to the purely political policies of the Government. In Eastern Germany the Communist failure at the recent elections is now to be followed by an open attack on all suspected of contributing to it. M. Rajk, once the powerful Minister of the Interior in Hungary, until recently the Foreign Minister, and now a prisoner, condemned in advance of his trial, is the subject of a carefully arranged outcry the object of which is to hang him. Archbishop Beran, who has dared to condemn the Action Committee, whose object is to force the Church into political subservience, and has been firmly supported by his bishops and by the Vatican, has found it necessary, like Cardinal Mindszenty before him, to disclaim in advance any recantation which may later be tortured from him. Herr Wilhelm Druck, a Christian Democrat member of the Landtag in Saxony, has been summoned by the Russian military authorities to Karlshorst and has not been heard of since. The whole sickening apparatus of denunciation, imprison- ment and death is in motion once more. All the usual accompani- ments, including " spontaneous " messages from " workers and peasants" asking the authorities to show no mercy, are working up to their usual climax. The list of charges against M. Rajk reads like the Communist equivalent of a string of oaths—spying, Trotskyism, chauvinism, nationalism, under-rating the U.S.S.R., keeping silent about the virtues of the Russians, courting personal popularity. But this miserable abuse is not the point. The point is that a handful of men have dared to show some slight sign of independence. For that they must be struck down. That is simply what the official Communist pronouncements say. It is not an hallucination. It is what is happening in Eastern Europe at this moment.
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