World Youth Festivals May Be Abandoned, Sigmund Predicts

The Helsinki World Youth Festival may have been the last one that the Communists will sponsor, Paul E. Sigmund, Jr., Allston Burr Senior Tutor of Quincy House, told a Catholic Club meeting last night.

Sigmund, who attended the Helsinki Festival as well as the Seventh World Youth Festival in Vienna in 1959, said the hostility of the Finns, the activities of anti-Communists and the multi-million dollar cost of the Festivals, may cause the Communists to switch to smaller youth meetings.

He noted that Jean Garcias, French Communist head of the Festival's permanent organizing committee, mentioned the possibility of holding only smaller meetings at the Festival's concluding press conference.

Earlier, Sigmund traced the history of World Youth Festivals and sharply contrasted the enthusiasm of the 35,000 delegates at the Moscow Festival in 1957 with the apathy and criticism that marked Helsinki.

He said he was particularly encouraged by the "growing sophistication" of neutral students from the underdeveloped countries and the neutralist peace activists from Western Europe.

African and Asian delegates were extremely sensitive to attempts at using them for Communist propaganda purposes, Sigmund observed. The walk-out of the non-Communists from Ceylon, he remarked, was the first major public demonstration of dissatisfaction by non-Western delegates to any Festival.

Peace activists, provoked by a 30-megaton Soviet test the day before, protested Soviet nuclear tests as well as American blasts in the Festival's closing demonstrations, Sigmund said. However, Festival leaders used the police to stop them from marching in the final parade. When an Icelandic delegate attempted to parade a sign reading "No test--East or West," he was forcibly pulled out of the parade.