Premier Guy Mollet has survived last week’s confidence test in the Chamber of Deputies by a seemingly safe (271-56) margin. Two hundred and one deputies, among them 144 Communists who could have brought the score to 271-257, abstained from voting. Angry as they are at Mollet’s tough Algerian policy, the Communists cannot be counted on to abstain next time. Three months ago, in another Assembly test on Algeria, Mollet received 455 votes.
In a gesture of Old World courtesy to an honored guest, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, who had been prominently associated with the former anti-Tito operation, resigned as Soviet Foreign Minister the day before Marshal Tito made his glittering arrival in Moscow. His replacement, presumably selected with Marshal Tito’s sensibilities in mind, is Pravda’s editor, Dmitri Shepilov, whom Stewart Alsop recalls from an interview a few months back as “a hard-driving, ruthless, fiercely ambitious man” who “really and deeply believes that the Soviet system and the American system are inherently and totally hostile, and that the only possible outcome must be and will be the utter destruction of the American system.”
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