August 13, 1958
POLAND: Warsaw, August – The newspaper of the Union of Soviet Writers has launched a fresh attack on Polish intellectuals, accusing them of spreading anti-Marxist and pro-Western ideas. The Soviet newspaper attacked the greatest writers and artists specifically by name, even the education minister himself, who is a personal friend of Wladyslaw Gomulka, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. The newspaper expressed its anger at the fact that Polish theaters were presenting «decadent» works by writers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and other great foreign playwrights and called it «a betrayal of Poland’s cultural traditions and the socialist regime.» The newspaper also cited speeches from the conference of Polish writers and artists of 1956, when many intellectuals criticized Socialist realism. Even Poland’s popular magazines came under attack for spreading Western culture. TO THE MOON: Moscow, 2 – According to the findings presented at an international conference here, it appears that the first spacecraft to reach the moon will be equipped with large, manually operated machines.