EAST GERMANY: Too Much Freedom

At the Big Four conference in Berlin, Russia’s Molotov talked grandly of free elections for Germany. “We would take precautions,” he said, that no genuinely democratic organizations are pushed back and robbed of … active participation … It goes without saying that while conducting . . . elections there must be absolute freedom for all democratic organizations . . .”

Last week the East German Communists provided a nice example of what Molotov was really talking about. Workers of the East German farm and forestry union scheduled an election of officials.

The voters were subjected to a strenuous ideological going-over to persuade them to elect an all-Communist slate.

When the returns began coming in, however, the authorities recoiled in alarm. Count after count showed non-Communists beating out Red candidates, and the Party considered some of the winners positively dangerous to the proper dialectical conduct of the union. Abruptly, the East German trade-union secretariat broke off the balloting. Reasons: “infiltration of class enemies . . . carelessness . . . political mismanagement” of the elections—in brief, too much freedom.