THE TABLET, June 25th, 1955. VOL. 205. No. 6005

Published as a Newspaper

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Recjina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

* JUNE 251h, I955

NINEPENCE

The U n ited Nations: The Past Ten Years and the Next Ten Bombs in Buenos Aires: I : Armed Revolt and Catholic Indignation

II : The Excommunication and the Explanation III : Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

Profit-Sharing and Peace: The Prime Minister’s Recommendation. By Paul Crane, S.J. Communist Regression in Italy : Losing Ground among the Industrial Workers Campion’s College : An Oxford Quatercentenary. By Roger Sharrock “Conditio Humana” : In Port Royal and in China. By Eugen Giirster

B o o k s R e v i e w e d : America at Mid-Century, by André Siegfried ; Mandarin Red, by James

Cameron ; The Cretan Runner, by George Psychoundakis ; Journey into a Fog, by Margareta BergerHammerschlag ; The Master Builder, translated by Eva Le Gallienne ; The Unsuitable Englishman, by Desmond Stewart ; A Day Among Many, by Lorna Pegram ; The Holy Wells o f Wales, by Francis Jones ; Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Geoffrey Grigson ; and the Nonesuch Hopkins. Reviewed by Ursula Branston, B. C. L. Keelaji, V. R. Desborough, M. D. Majendie, Evelyn Ramsden,

Isabel Quigly, T. Charles Edwards and George Scott-Moncrieff.

NEHRU IN MOSCOW

T HE travels of Western statesmen—Dr. Adenauer, M. Molotov, Mr. Harold Macmillan, Mr. Foster Dulles, M. Pinay—have so far monopolized attention that Mr. Nehru’s visit to Moscow has had less notice than it deserved. He has made a prolonged tour of the Soviet Union, and in the course of it has invited Marshal Bulganin to pay a return visit to India. He has become one of the few non-Communists—perhaps the only one—to address a mass meeting in the Dynamo Stadium at Moscow, where he found a singular degree of common ground between himself and his hosts. He dated the final phase in India’s struggle for independence from the time of the October Revolution ; that might have been a mere courtesy, but he went on to say that “even though, under Mahatma Gandhi, we followed another path, we admired and were inspired by Lenin.”

Marshal Bulganin’s journey to Belgrade—just before Mr. Nehru arrived there—may well be partly explained by the increasing concentration of the Soviet Government on Asia. Mr. Nehru and M. Chou En-Iai were no doubt both glad of demonstrations that it is enough to be “inspired by Lenin” ; that one can opt for the East and not the West and count, if the minimal assurances are given, on the Soviet Union aspiring to be no more than a primus inter pares. Mr. Nehru, asked in Moscow what he thought should be discussed next month at Geneva, put the problems of the Far East first ; and if the agenda is in fact enlarged to include those problems, in a series of meetings that will last less than a week, the prospect of fruitful results will become even smaller.

The Soviet Government has scorned the idea that the nations of Eastern Europe should be discussed at Geneva. “There is no East European problem,” the Tass agency declares, “because these nations have overthrown the regime of the exploiters, set up the power of a people’s democracy and will tolerate no intervention in their internal affairs from any quarter whatever.” This statement, issued on the second anniversary of the East German workers’ rebellion, is fully in accordance with the Communist doctrine on national rights. They are, Lenin taught, to be considered and utilized as temporary phenomena, but “cannot and must not serve as an obstacle to the working class in exercising its right to dictatorship.” Any particular national movement may be sacrificed on the principle that “the interests of the democracy of one country must be subordinated to the interests of the democracy of several and all countries.” That has been in fact the experience of the nations in Eastern Europe, as of the national minorities in the Soviet Union and in China. Nationalist movements in all these areas have been used by the Communists in so far as they could be directed against States which the Communists wished to destroy first. But at the same time Communists were required to capture these movements and finally to destroy them in the interests of the leaders in Moscow and Peking. When the Manchester Guardian suggests that “greater recognition for diversity in national methods among Communists” might be exchanged for Western concessions involving Germany’s twelve divisions and a limited withdrawal of NATO’s military forces, it is forgetting this role assigned to nationalist movements in Communist doctrine. Mr. Nehru seems to have forgotten it too.

The original East German shock over Dr. Adenauer’s unexpected invitation to Moscow has been quickly composed because it has apparently been realized that no complete