MOLOTOV'S public appearance on the penitent's stool marks another stage
in a decline which has been obvious for some time. His omission from the delegation which settled things in Peking last year, and from the Belgrade outing, were omens. A stronger one still was Pravda's reprinting of a Tito speech in a censored version which yet left in some strong stuff about Molotov. He has now announced that he was wrong in saying that the USSR was only 'basically' Socialist. Konununist, in which he has been compelled to eat crow, is a well-known whetstone for ideological knives. And it has rubbed in Molotov's own ambiguous apology with an aggressive editorial attacking his deviation in conjunction with those of the Malenkovite economists, and touched up the parallel, such as it is, by printing beside it another article attacking Malenkov's Minister of Culture, Aleksandrov, who fell with him last February. Stalin's usual method of bringing Molotov to heel was to arrest his wife Zhemchuzhina on charges of contact with her brother in New York, releasing her after a salutary week or so. His successors seem to want to go further. And the timing of the attack (which was given extra publicity over Radio Moscow) suggests that he may be replaced, perhaps even before Geneva, by someone who can manage the formula put forward by Khrushchev the other day, of smiling while remaining an insatiable Marxist-Leninist at least. Perhaps Mikoyan or Shepilov (or even Khrushchev himself ?) will provide the smile, into which Molotov, never a great merry- maker, has found it increasingly difficult to contort his features. Others will manage a laugh at the notion that he is in trouble not for big stuff like the Tito quarrel but for one of Communism's ideological iotas.
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