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Sunk in Gloom. The French party, once the most threatening in the West, has become disorganized during the long absence of Maurice Thorez (who was so ill in Moscow last week that he could not appear for Stalin's funeral), and divided over the recent purges of two of its stalwarts, André Marty and Charles Tillon. In Paris, Acting Boss Jacques Duclos put on a black hat and black overcoat when he got the word of Stalin's death, and led France's straggly delegation to Moscow for the funeral. Somehow, as he climbed into a chartered Polish airplane at Le Bourget, he seemed the symbol of what his French party had become—soft and flabby, and sunk in gloom. To the south, Italy's Palmiro Togliatti hastily scraped together a delegation, stuffed long woolen underwear and his Russian fur cap into a suitcase of a type the Italians call Americana, and hurried off to Moscow.
From burrows outside the Iron Curtain and baronies inside, Red plenipotentiaries rushed to the Kremlin by plane and train for the emergency ingathering of the clan. From East Berlin, his neatly barbered, Lenin-type goatee nuzzling a huge brown overcoat collar, flew Walter Ulbricht, who likes to be called "the little Lenin," wears the title of Deputy Premier, but is the real boss of Communist East Germany. From Budapest came the Jew-purging Jew, Matyas Rakosi, who used Stalin's purge-trial technique to install himself in control of postwar Hungary. From Bucharest came Premier Gheorghiu-Dej, the icy-eyed nemesis of Ana Pauker. From Sofia came Premier Vulko Chervenkov, so unimaginatively obedient that even the suspicious men of the Kremlin are said to have no worries about his loyalty. From Prague came President Klement Gottwald, who neatly disposed of Moscow-groomed Rudolf Slansky before Slansky could dispose of him. From Warsaw came Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, the Russian whom all Reds hold out to be a Pole to excuse his running the Polish Defense Ministry and, through that, Poland itself; also from Warsaw came President Boleslaw Bierut, who served as a Red quisling during the Communist-Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. From Albania came a mere vice minister—apparently Dictator Enver Hoxha is so plagued by local resistance and an interior minister with excessive ambitions that he dared not leave Tirana.
Looking for a Tito. Inside the Kremlin, walled off from the biting Moscow winter, they held council of cold war with their superiors. They came not as sovereign heads of state, but as servants, and they returned to their countries to rule in the name of Malenkov as they had previously ruled in the name of Stalin.
They were a physically unimpressive lot. One trait they shared with their new masters, Malenkov, Beria and Molotov: their small height. The ranks of the chief mourners, following the tall, uniformed pallbearers (see NEWS IN PICTURES), are a dumpy group, who could be posed alongside Stalin without dwarfing him.