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While thousands of party workers (aided by a Khrushchev directive that took 2½ hours to read) were out explaining why the doors should remain shut, millions of simple Russians worried about what to tell children brought up to believe in Stalin as a demigod. The party's most effective argument (e.g., in resentful Georgia) was proving to be Khrushchev's flat assertion that Stalin had murdered 5,000 Red army officers. Almost everybody remembered the costly military debacle of 1941. Khrushchev had acted for the swift downgrading of Stalin without much thought for foreign Communist Parties. At a Communist meeting in Rome, Italian Communist Leader Palmiro Togliatti admitted that he and French Communist Leader Duclos had been overruled by Moscow when they protested that too sudden destruction of the Stalin myth was "inadvisable and dangerous." Togliatti had based the popular appeal of his party on frank adulation of Strongman Stalin, and activists had scrawled his nickname Il Baffone (the Mustache) or Ha da veni il Baffone (The Mustache is coming) on walls all over Italy. At Stalin's death, a weeping Togliatti had mourned: "My soul is overwhelmed with grief at the passing of a man more venerated and loved than anyone else, at the loss of a master, the comrade, the friend."
Shrieking Apes. Now as Rome's press jeered, Togliatti lost his temper, called his tormentors "a mob of streetwalker journalists who know only how to shout, shriek, fabricate, vomit lies, calumnies, coarseness ... a mob of shrieking apes." Asked why the Russian leaders had not previously made their feelings about Stalin known, he said lamely: "Any opposition would have damaged the prestige of the party. Besides, Stalin's enormous popularity would have made any objection to his decisions seem like an act of rebellion." Togliatti's discomfiture was increased by Socialist Pietro Nenni's air of having known about Stalin all along, and his deploring of Togliatti's anti-Stalin campaign.
Other Communist leaders were even more confused. In East Germany Communist Walter Ulbricht was telling German Communists that "it has become known that Stalin did not sufficiently prepare his country for war," while in Britain Communist Harry Pollitt was taking the opposite line: "Despite his mistakes about collective leadership and the agricultural situation, Stalin's contribution to the building of socialism and the defeat of Hitler will remain." In Red China, where for six years Chinese Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung has billed himself as "Stalin's younger brother," there was a complete blackout of news about the Russian attack on Stalin.