To the Barricades!

Bald, pale Mario Scelba, Italy's tough Minister of the Interior, had studied a Cominform directive found by his police on a Red courier en route to France from Bulgaria. Scelba was convinced that French and Italian Communists were under orders to launch a spring offensive. One day last week he warned his fellow ministers: "We are in an emergency." He asked and received extraordinary power to keep public order, including reinforcements for the police and a ban on all public and factory meetings.

"Rearming of the poor people's assassins!" howled the Communist press. "Reenactment of fascist laws!" The Red-dominated Confederation of Labor promptly ordered a mass protest.

500 Soccer Games. In Milan, 3,000 Red activists patrolled the gates of the huge Breda steel plant and other factories, barred workers from entering. Others stopped the city's trams. One group burst into the office of Mayor Antonio Greppi (a right-wing Socialist), demanded that he address a mass meeting in the Piazza del Duomo, as he had done on a similar occasion in 1947. At that moment the phone rang. It was the prefect of Milan, sternly reminding the mayor of the ban on public assemblies. When Greppi told the Red delegation, "No meeting is authorized," he was vilified as a "coward and traitor." As they left, the comrades spat angrily on the city hall stairs. They were equally frustrated when they tried to stir up a street march. Scelba's celere (jeep-riding riot squads) dispersed them.

In Bologna, a Red stronghold, the party could produce no sea of faces or grim proletarian columns. In groups of five to eight, activists toured the city, calling on shops to close and workers to strike. Whenever the celere appeared, the activists, to avoid arrest, would suddenly produce a soccer ball and begin to play. In one day there were at least 500 games going. Major trouble was avoided, but shops remained shut, factories idle.

In Rome, Red truculence was cooled off by an old technique. Scelba's men used high-pressure water hoses to scatter street demonstrators.

Five Ramparts. The skirmish of the week took place at San Severe (pop. 40,000), a poverty-stricken market town amid southern Italy's vineyards. There a Red-led band of 4,000 overpowered the local policemen, stacked up high barricades--gasoline drums, junked autos, mulecarts, one steamroller. When Scelba sent armored cars and regular troops into San Severo, the rebels manned their forts, fired stones, guns and grenades.

Twenty yards behind the first rampart Scelba's men were confronted by another. In seven hours of fighting, they dismantled five successive barricades, surrounded and crashed into Red headquarters, hauled its last-ditch fighters off to jail.

By week's end the Cominform's offensive seemed well slowed down. "Western democracy," commented Milan's Corriere della Sera, "is proving efficient." But Mario Scelba knew that it was probably only the first, probing phase of igso's big Red push.

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