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The article discusses the Russian invasion in the Czechoslovakia in 1968, including issues such as Czech public opinion of the invasion, political resistance to Russian foreign policies, and Soviet party leadership. Czech President Ludvík Svoboda and politicians Alexander Dubcek are mentioned, as well as communist public opinion in Europe and liberalism in Czechoslovakia.

The article discusses a July 1963 conference between Chinese and Soviet political leaders, and mentions issues such as China's criticism of Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, economic competition with capitalist countries, and violent demonstrations during the conference. A letter sent to Soviet politicians from the Chinese embassy is mentioned, as well as Belgian politician Paul-Henri Spaak and Soviet Central Committee control of the arts.

This article discusses the policy of the French government on Second World War. France knows that his war, more even than the First World War, is a life-and-death struggle for France and Great Britain. Till the last moment, France hoped that war was not absolutely inevitable, that some attempt might be made to reach a compromise over Danzig. The French attitude towards Soviet Union is in the main hostile and the French government has started its drive against the Communist leaders, some of which are still preaching Stalinist "pacifism." The Hitler-Stalin pact has resulted in the disappearance of the Communist Party as a political party in France.

The article highlights that although the working class is predominantly Communist, five million people in France voted for the Communist Party last June and that it is their own fault if they put themselves beyond the pale. Less than a million of those who voted the party ticket could be considered active Communists, the other four million did so because they were discontented and wretched and only the Communist Party had voiced their protest against their proletarian condition. By this is meant not only their material condition but also that sense of personal humiliation so widespread in the French working class.

The latest discovery made by the French government is that if communism is Enemy Number 1, neutralism is Enemy Number 1-a, in other words, a sort of sub-communism, an accomplice of the agents of Moscow. In the National Assembly there are 180 Communists and near-Communists; but there is no Neutralist Party. This makes it all the worse. For neutralism is a state of mind and its spokesmen are skeptics of various nuances. Neutralists claim to express the most widespread and deep-seated feelings of the French people. Neutralists of all brands are severe critics of the Atlantic Pact.

The article discusses the spread of communism in Czechoslovakia. The city is marked by countless meetings and Marxist-Leninist lectures, the gathering of signatures for Soviet Union Premier Joseph Stalin's birthday and the laying of the cornerstone of a gigantic statue of Stalin on one of the hills overlooking Prague. Moreover, a proletarian intelligentsia is being formed which will replace the old intellectuals and working-class lads have a better chance than sons of the middle class to receive a university education. Instead of the officer corps rank-and-file Communists now lead the Czechoslovak army. Swarms of Communist lawyers and Communist factory workers are also being trained.

The article focuses on the cold war between Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito and Soviet union. The more one sees of this astonishing country, the more one feels that its political ideas are the most important factor in current international relations. The Yugoslav "heresy" is certainly a more dangerous challenge to Soviet communism than all the talk in Western countries about refrigerators in every home and a car for every worker. The refrigerator argument is easy to answer, but when Tito says, "Something in the Soviet Union has degenerated, and has become so distorted that it is almost unbelievable," Moscow must make a serious effort to prove him wrong.

This article focuses on the unification of Western Europe. There is no doubt about it that Western Europe is "unified" only by the Atlantic Pact and anti-communism. If there was no united Western Europe, it was the fault of the British Labor Party, which was the most powerful "Third Force" party in Europe and could have taken the lead. Instead, it did nothing about Europe and was concerned only about two things: the success of its economic experiment within Great Britain and its relations with the U.S. Everything now suggests that, far from supporting the Third Force, the U.S. is supporting the right. Yet at least until recently the Labor Party persisted in believing in some invisible leftward trend in the U.S., and thought that real Social Democracy would materialize much sooner in the U.S. than, say, in Italy.

This article focuses on the ideological crisis faced by Western Europe, and the threatened disappearance of the so-called Third Force. The "Third Force" has been much discussed as an ideological, a political, and a military concept. There was a time-about three or four years ago when one frequently heard it said that Western Europe, under the inspiration of the Labor Party of Great Britain, would develop a social and ideological system of its own which would be different from both American capitalism and Soviet communism. The military, or geographical, Third Force was the brain-child of French political thinkers. But, long before the signing of the Atlantic Pact, which finally turned Western Europe into part of the American military sphere, this concept of the Third Force went up in smoke.

There were two very peculiar things about the annual meeting of the French Socialist Congress in Paris, France, during the weekend of July 16, 1949. The public galleries of the hall were almost completely empty, and on the large bookstall in the lobby there was a large display of the writings of several authors' books describing the horrors of the Communist regime in Russia. The platform was decorated with a globe and three red arrows, which now looked like an historic relic and with the morose-looking pictures of three very old-fashioned bearded persons.

All foreigners in Soviet Union today are undesirabe, though in varying degrees. Even Communists from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, or Poland are not considered 100 per cent proof: for all one knows, they may some day go abroad and change their minds. The new cult, "pride in being a Soviet citizen," is more universally touted than ever before. All contact with bourgeois civilization or with people from bourgeois countries is evil. At a public lecture on Palestine, a Jew in the audience asked whether he could go to Palestine.

The article presents information on leader of Yugoslav Communist Party and Prime Minister of Yugoslavia Marshal Tito. There is much pro-Russian feeling in the country. A blatant switch-over to the West is psychologically impossible for Tito as well as for the Yugoslav people. Russians, clearly, are very unlikely to make peace with Tito now. Russians on the other hand, have their own great problem, as long as Tito is in power, the threat of Titoism spreading throughout Europe. Here, of course, the whole Yugoslav mentality is entirely different from the Russian. The Russian line has been to forget about the Soviet war record and self-glorification.

The acute problem of Russian music has raised many issues of artistic and political practice and philosophy deserving the closest study by anyone interested in Soviet Weltanschauung during the present transition from socialism to communism. The cases of Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, representatives of gunworthy" types of literature were different; one wrote egocentric love lyrics, the others "frivolous" short stories. The implications of the attack on these two writers were no doubt far-reaching but, in themselves, Akhmatova and Zoshthenko were not important.

The most surprising thing about the Twenty-second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party is that it was surprising, perhaps quite as much, in its own way, as the Twentieth Congress of 1956, which ended with that famous secret report on socialist Joseph Stalin. The publication last July of the party's Draft Program, that blueprint for the transition to communism, had led the uninitiated to suppose that this Twenty-second Congress would be a sort of apotheosis of the Soviet Union President Nikita S. Khrushchev regime, a solemn consecration of ideas which had, in fact, been current over the last three or four years in all theoretical party journals.

The article focuses on prevalent political upheaval in France as of December 1961. It's significant, all the same, that Socialist leader Guy Mollet-a man more responsible than any other for the establishment of the Fifth Republic has now declared himself "bitterly disappointed" in this Republic's record, and is advocating the formation of a "broad Republican Front" in which, however, he is still unwilling to include the Communists and the powerful Communist-con- trolled CGT labor federation. The Communists, for their part, are making advances to the "other Republicans" for the creation of "a powerful anti-Fascist front."

There have been some excellent first-hand reports on Vietnam in the American press, but even in many of these one has the impression that, to their authors, Vietnam is still part of the proverbial inscrutable East unless it is a particularly virulent outpost of world communism. Robert Guillain, who knows Vietnam inside out, has just spent several weeks there and has published a series of four long articles in Le Monde under a general title that carries a significant Algerian echo, "Gangrene of Vietnam." One of the recurring themes of his detailed report is the psychological gulf between the Americans in Vietnam and the Asiatics.

This article focuses on new directions decided by the French communist party. Charles Tillon from the political bureau was communicated with a kind of relish to all the bourgeois papers and news agencies of France. Tillon misinterpreted the real role and significance it the peace movement and tried to turn it into a narrow political organization. Having been removed in 1951 from the post of communist representative on the peace movement, he had confessed his errors to the party but nevertheless persisted in them. Charles Tillon was an important figure in the French Resistance and later a minister in the Charles De Gaulle governments of 1945-47.

The article presents information on various political developments related to Tunisia. In the recent debate on Tunisia in the National Assembly every party with the exception of the Communists who as a matter of principle talked of the coming independence of colonial peoples argued for what it considered the most effective way of keeping North Africa. For the Socialists the best and safest way to keep it was to be generous with the Arabs, for the right, the best way was to be exceedingly tough.

The article presents information on the Yugoslav Communist leaders. Yugoslav leaders are in truth, temperamentally as well as physically, very different from the ordinary run of East European Communist bosses. They don't have the standard "poker face" of the Communist boss, his heavy-handed and heavy-footed manner, his lack of humor. The Russians say they are not serious-minded men but a bunch of playboys, unworthy of the name of Communist. Most of the present Yugoslav leaders were professional revolutionaries before the war and soldiers during the war and they never became Moscow-trained functionaries.

Bulgaria with its seven million people, is after Albania the smallest and poorest of the people's democracies. The Sofia congress, meeting in the grotesque raspberry-colored opera house, one of the worst atrocities perpetrated on the country by the Coburg czars, had therefore an international as well as a purely Bulgarian aspect. A large part of Dimitrovs six-hour speech expressed the views not only of the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party and the Prime Minister of Bulgaria, but of one of the most authoritative figures in the world Communist movement.

The article focuses on the deadly onslaught by the Communist Information Bureau on Marshall Tito, Prime Minister of Yugoslavia. A current Yugoslav joke is that the world, is divided into three parts, that is, East, West and Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia, was now on the outer fringe of the Russian bloc, which in itself was important. The relative independence it has shown would have been inconceivable without the help of geography. Compared with Poland, Yugoslavia is much less Soviet Union-conscious, to the ordinary Yugoslav, other than the conscientious and politically trained Communist.

In the view of many observers, a, solemn Anglo-American declaration urging France to adopt and execute a liberal policy toward North Africa is the most useful step that could taken at this critical juncture in France's empire affairs. The French Assembly debate on Algeria, still in progress as this is written, emphasizes Premier's need for backbone. Socialists have proposed a vote of non-confidence which is driving the Premier, who wants to hold on to his job, to seek the support of enemies of the liberal policy he is supposed to represent. Unless the government acquires the courage to get rough with the die-hard imperialists, the situation in neither Algeria nor Morocco is likely to improve.

The "Third Force" era in France seems to have ended. As to what is to take its place, already French President Charles De Gaulle has started popping up all over the place and announcing that France must choose between him and Communists. The debate at the National Assembly, when French politician Georges Bidault first appeared there with his patched-up Cabinet, was most revealing. The promise given by French Socialist statesman Léon Blum entirely on his own, it now appears, that Socialists would continue to support the Bidault government was not kept when it came to the point. Socialists merely abstained, their spokesman saying that this was the only logical course for them to take. He added, however, that he did not wish to be too categorical about Socialists' future attitude.

The article presents author's views on Andrei Zhdanov, a communist who died on August 31, 1948. According to the author, Zhdanov unlike V.M. Moltov, foreign minister, Soviet Union, had a slightly theatrical personality, and more personal vanity and ambition than Molotov. He enjoyed a sense of personal power. According to the author, Zhdanov was extreme in everything. The son of a czarist inspector of schools with the rank of a civil service general, he was determined to be proletarian and plebeian. In early youth he joined the Bolshevik Party and became a fanatical supporter of Joseph Stalin, general secretary of Communist party, after communist leader Vladimir Lenin's death. He rose rapidly in the party hierarchy, thanks to his untiring heresy hunts against the Trotskyites and certain trade-union elements.

To understand more fully Soviet Unions's behavior in Berlin, Germany it may be useful to recall the Soviet propaganda about Berlin during and after the war. Most striking is the contrast between Russia's attitude toward Berlin and its attitude toward Vienna, Austria. Hardly anything is ever said or written about Vienna. Though it was the scene of a great battle and a great victory, the ordinary Russian today is scarcely conscious of its existence. In a country like Germany where everybody tends to follow the crowd the Russians felt that the complete impoverishment of the people would have facilitated the rapid progress of communism if it had not been for the confusing presence of the allies.