THE BALKANS: They Lost Their Heads

Bulgarian Premier Georgi Dimitrov, Kremlin-anointed promoter of “people’s democracies” in Eastern Europe, had a busy week.

In Dimitrov’s own National Assembly at Sofia, Deputy Kosta Lulchev, spokesman of the isolated little nine-man parliamentary opposition, had dared to criticize the budget as “insincere and unreal.” Dimitrov gave them Red blazes: “Miserable chatterers, talking like a foreign gramophone record . . .! You will remember that in this Assembly I many times warned coalition members of Nikola Petkov’s group but they did not listen. They lost their heads, and their leader lies buried. Reflect on your own actions, lest you suffer the same fate . . .!” Lulchev and associates reflected furiously. Dimitrov’s budget was adopted unanimously.

A few hours later, Dimitrov hustled off to Bucharest on a larger mission. Rumania’s boss woman and fellow Communist, Foreign Minister Ana Pauker, gave him a welcome fit for a Balkan king. At his disposal was a palace just vacated by ex-King Michael’s Aunt Elizabeth, who had decided to avoid Communist Ana’s iron mop by following her nephew to Switzerland. Between champagne toasts and speeches brimming with declarations of love for Soviet Russia, Pauker and Dimitrov signed, in behalf of their countries, a 20-year pact of alliance.

Then, once more aboard his private train, Dimitrov told correspondents of still greater events to come. Treaties of alliance between all the Eastern European states, he said, would be followed by customs unions, and after that—”when the time is ripe our peoples will decide whether it shall be a federation or a confederation of states, and they also shall decide the moment when it will take the shape of a state.” Candidates for inclusion in the new state, as listed by Dimitrov: Bulgaria, Albania, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia “and even Greece.”

At the moment there seemed more than a little.wishfulness in the inclusion of Greece. But coming from Georgi Dimitrov, the forecast seemed to indicate what the Kremlin had in mind.