REACTIONS IN AMERICA

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27985, 4 June 1956, Page 11

REACTIONS IN AMERICA

“Last Vestige Of

Stalinism”

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 9 p.m.) WASHINGTON, June 2. Officials predicted last night that the resignation of the Soviet Foreign Minister, Mr V. M. Molotov, would bring no change in Soviet foreign policy.

This prediction was based on the view that—at least since the summit conference at Geneva last July—the Soviet Premier. Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, and the Communist Party leader. Mr Nikita Khrushchev, have been the real makers and directors of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. At the same time, officials viewed Mr Molotov’s resignation as "deStalinisatiqn with a vengeance.’’ They said it was a deliberate decision by the new collective leadership of the Soviet Union to remove the last vestiges of Stalinism from the Soviet Communist regime. They pointed out that Mr Molotov was the sole “old Bolshevik’’ and confidant of Stalin remaining after the dictator’s death as a member of the ruling triumvirate.

The announcement —or at least its timing—was also regarded as a shrewd gesture of appeasement to President Tito of Jugoslavia on the eve of his arrival in Moscow for an official visit. Officials viewed it as a calculated move to seduce Marshal Tito into abandoning his independent Communist stand by returning to the Soviet fold, and to make full amends for the expulsion of Jugoslavia from the Cominform in 1948.

Mr Molotov was as bitterly antiTito as Stalin at the time of the rupture.

Marshal Bulganin and Mr Khrushchev reconciled their differences with President Tito during their pilgrimage to Belgrade last year, but Mr Molotov and Marshal Tito were said to have remained arch enemies in spite of the Soviet Union’s new “smiling” foreign policy since the death of Stalin Apology Recalled

The resignation of Mr Molotov had been expected for several months. Mr Molotov, who once won high praise from the American Secretary of State (Mr Dulles) for his technical skill in diplomacy, had been under suspicion for about a year.

On February 8 last year—the day Mr Georgi Malenkov resigned as Prime Minister —Mr Malenkov said that the foundations of Socialism were being built in Russia. Exactly eight months later, in a letter to the Communist Party journal, “Communist,” he admitted that he was theoretically mistaken and politically harmful. (The official theory says that socialism already exists in Russia.)

Two days later, he smilingly told reporters that there was no question of his retirement, and he went to Geneva the same month for the Big Four Foreign Ministers’ meeting. But speculation that he was on his way out continued, and was increased when the official party newspaper. “Pravda”—edited by his successor, Mr Shepilov—published a four-column article in November condemning his mistake.

Congressional leaders also showed little surprise. Senator Walter George (Democrat. Georgia), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said there had been a feeling “in inner circles here for some time that Mr Molotov was on the way out.”