ITALY: Butcher Stay Home

Italian headline writers found a welcoming name for 54-year-old Soviet Polit-burocrat Mikhail Suslov: "The Butcher of Budapest." The butcher, accompanied by Russia's ranking woman Communist, Ekaterina Furtseva, was on his way to Rome to lay down the line to the eighth congress of the Italian Communist Party, which until the events in Hungary claimed 2,130,000 members (probable current membership: less than 1,500,000). Suslov is the least known of the top half dozen Kremlin leaders, but what is known of him is not endearing: he is a flinty, ascetic Stalinist, a specialist on the satellites, who arrived in Budapest shortly before...

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