ROME LETTER
465
been packed with old-line colonial British types, young old and middle
aged Blimps, Empire men exhumed miraculously from mummification in
the days of Disraeli and Gladstone. At least these British have been
dreadfully dashed about the ingratitude of the whole thing.
If
Labor
is going to follow any new line with Italy, it's got a tremendous job on
its hands just to clean out the augean stables of the AC, something that
can't be done in a day, and may be one of those things you never get
around to in time.
What's been happening, and with ever increasing tempo, is that the
manoeuvres of the British-and the Americans have been following them
like sheep-have been driving the Italian masses further into the arms of
the Russians. This seems to be particularly true up north, where I've not"
yet been but of which I've had some very good first hand reports, and
in Rome I've been able to see more or less from the inside the same
thing happening on a smaller scale. It's hard to know how active the
Russians are being through all this, but it looks as if they don't have
to do much but sit and wait while the busy bungling British shake the
ripe fruit into their laps. Unmoved movers. Russia is now the reservoir
into which the general popular discontent is drained off and channeled
as Stalinism, because there's been no other adequate leadership to tap
the popular unrest.
If
nothing else, the Labor victory was at least a
tremendous psychological shot in the arm for the Italian Socialist Party,
which had been giving a wonderful imitation of a man dying on his feet
with nothing much to live for. Now the Socialists have discovered that
life is worth living after all: they can aspire to be like the British Labor
Party! "We can now look to western Europe instead of the East," one
Socialist told me. However the Party is still honeycombed with Stalinists
who have infiltrated under the orders of the Communist Party, and
there is a hard row to hoe before the Socialists get on their feet as an
independent party of the Left.
The Communists may stand to lose some following by the campaign
they are conducting to give Trieste away to Tito. At first sight this looks
like a confusing bit of skulduggery on Moscow's part: why discriminate
between their Jugoslav and Italian followings? That the orders are from
Moscow, no one doubts, because nothing but the influence of a higher
authority would explain the remarkable coordination between Tito's ag–
gressiveness in seeking Trieste and the willingness of the Italian Com–
munists to spread a mat of welcome for him. Stalin's game of chess may
not be so difficult to fathom. Tito hasn't all the popular support he
appears to, he needs Trieste as a bright jewel to offer the Jugoslavs, who
are enjoying right now a· wave of slavic nationalism as intense as that of
the Russians, and would be enchanted at the idea of national expansion.
The Stalin policy always works in piecemeal fashion, one unit after
the other, and the Russian agenda right now lists first the construction
of a solid bloc of the slavic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia,
