(2 of 3)
President Truman was known to be worried about relations with Russia. Harry Hopkins in Moscow, said London sources, had found out that Stalin was worried, too. Stalin had gone all out for cooperation with capitalist countries; the build-up of Yalta and Dumbarton Oaks in Russia would make a shift embarrassing. The Russian people certainly did not want to contemplate the prospect of World War III. Maxim Litvinov, who represents those Communists who believe in cooperation with capitalist democracy, was pointedly brought from his obscurity to attend a Moscow dinner for Hopkins.
What Is Truth? But the official Russians were the weakest witnesses. Molotov in 1939 had said: "The present war . . . lays the foundation for a new bloody struggle which will involve the whole world. . . . The leaders of capitalism . . . betray the masses of their people by asserting that the aim of the war is the protection of democracy." Now he preached collaboration. The Ukrainian chairman in San Francisco, Dmitry Z. Manuilsky, had said in 1939: "Not a stone will remain of the cursed capitalist structure." Now he echoed Joseph Grew's statement that there were no basic conflicts between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
The Red Army's General Karatkov was asked in Copenhagen when Soviet troops were going to leave Denmark's Bornholm Island. He made the most conciliatory answer possible: their occupation would be "exactly as long as Marshal Stalin, President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill decide."
On the left, the opposition between those who believed in the "irrepressible conflict" and those who did not was creating rifts. In New York, the Nation's Louis Fischer resigned because he thought the magazine's policy too pro-Russian (see PRESS).
The Communist parties outside of Russia were in a dither which dampened collaborationist hopes. Jacques Duclos, secretary of the French Communist party, belabored Earl Browder for plumping for collaboration with capitalist democracy. This week the U.S. Communists' National Board abjectly confessed its "opportunist errors," abandoned the "illusion" that wartime collaboration could be continued.
Testimony from the Front. Somewhere in Europe, TIME Correspondent William Walton read U.S. news accounts which, to him, indicated a belief at home that "central Europe is tense with Russian-American animosity." These accounts prompted him to cable last week:
"In the past three weeks I have traveled over considerable portions of Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria watching our troops and the people they are governing. In Asch, Czechoslovakia, I saw truckloads of displaced Russian civilians starting out for repatriation, guided by G.I.s of the ist Division who vied for the job because they had so much fun behind the Russian lines with the hard-drinking Red Army soldiers.
"In Pilsen, smartly polished troops of our 2nd Infantry staged a review in the ancient city square for visiting Red dignitaries and soldiers who received American combat medals. Afterwards Reds and doughs with arms about one another's shoulders careened in jeeps through the Pilsen streets.