Word: stalingraders
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Economically Screwy. The Russians, said MacRae, "did us really proud" in setting up interviews on economic problems, but they growled nyet to requests for a tour of Moscow's auto factory, a visit to Kazakhstan's troubled "virgin lands" program, a trip to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad). "At Gosplan," said MacRae, "they were deliberately stonewalling us on some questions. We could see some of the younger Russians growing restive when they had to sit and listen silently to the older men give us evasive answers...
Cold Retreat. Military reverses in Russia strained relations even further. The Duce had sent some Italian troops along to Russia to be in on the victory. When victory turned into disaster at Stalingrad in early 1943, the Germans blamed the Italians for capitulating too quickly. They took revenge by grabbing the Italian transport for their own retreat, leaving many Italians to freeze to death in the Russian winter. They also gleefully filmed Italians fleeing from battle. Mussolini received a letter from a soldier at the front: "Among the officers of both higher and lower rank a general feeling of rancor...
...Canceled the showing of a TV documentary to mark the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad. Prepared by the state-owned TV network, the film included a tirade by Nikita Khrushchev that, in the government's words, was "violently hostile to West Germany and to the policy of Franco-German rapprochement.''' Same week, another documentary movie. Death in Madrid, consisting mostly of stock shots taken during the 1936 Spanish Civil War, was denied a license for exhibition in France or abroad-presumably for fear of offending Franco...
Some of the government's repressions are explicable as international backscratching. De Gaulle's increasing amiability toward Spain has been rewarded by Franco's jailing of six top anti-Gaullist terrorists who were hiding out in Spain. Banning the Stalingrad show may just possibly have been repaid last week when German police failed to prevent mysterious French agents in Munich from kidnaping a top S.A.O. leader, Antoine Argoud (see below). But it seemed unlikely that Khrushchev would care greatly if Nureyev danced in Paris, or that Adenauer would object to being damned by Nikita...
Reporting blandly to the party's Central Committee, Red Chief Palmiro Togliatti backed Khrushchev, denounced Stalin's tyranny as "a terrible tragedy," but confessed himself puzzled that the name of Stalingrad had been changed, "because millions of people associate that name with the famous battle that was the turning point of World War II." Moscow, Togliatti added plaintively, "should take into account popular sentiment in capitalist countries and should not insist on what is not absolutely necessary...