World: Rumblings in the Realm

There were moments last week when the Kremlin seemed to have less trouble coexisting with the U.S. than with the Communist bloc (or blocs). While the world was positively smothered in peace talk from Moscow about how Nikita Khrushchev’s wisdom had prevented a war between the U.S. and Russia, there were audible rumblings of dissension in the Communist realm.

At a reception in the Palace of Congresses banquet hall, celebrating the 45th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Nikita Khrushchev presented the picture of a man bouncing back in great style from his own Cuban fiasco. In one of his most dazzling displays of personal diplomacy, he seemed relaxed, relieved and philosophical. “Who won and who lost?” he asked reporters. “Reason won. Mankind won because if there hadn’t been reason, then there might not have been this reception, and there might not have been any elections in the U.S.” Khrushchev even seemed to concede a U.S. missile lead. “We put 40 rockets in Cuba,” he said. “What are 40 rockets? Even 140 would not have been enough.”

Then, toasting the U.S. with a glass of sweet Georgian wine, he turned to U.S. Ambassador Foy Kohler, standing 15 feet away. “If we don’t love each other,” he said affably, “then that’s a question of taste. If we don’t embrace, we can at least shake hands, because if we should clash, the others will not go unscathed.”

“This is not a threat,” he added quickly. “A hard policy is not always best. Flexibility is necessary.”

Rude Silence. Also giving the soft line a hard sell was one of Khrushchev’s oldest cronies. First Deputy Premier Aleksei Kosygin, who hailed “concessions made by both sides to peace and sanity” in Moscow’s missile misadventure in the Caribbean. Regarding Berlin, Kosygin omitted the usual Communist demand that Western troops quit the city and did not refer, even vaguely, to a deadline for a separate Soviet peace treaty with East Germany. Next day, Defense Chief Rodion Malinovsky reduced his professional rocket-rattling to below last year’s noise level, reviewed an eight-minute march-past of military hardware that included only one new item: a 50-ft.-long, probably solid-fuel missile that was billed by the Russians as capable of being fired from a submerged submarine, like the U.S. Polaris missile.

Usually the Bolshevik anniversary is the occasion for an informal Red summit. But as of last week, Khrushchev seemed eager to avoid such mass meetings. He sent no invitations at all to Red China, North Korea and North Viet Nam, and called in his East European allies to Moscow one by one for quick briefings on Cuba. Last to arrive and last to leave was Hungary’s Janos Kadar.

In East Germany another possibly embarrassing meeting was avoided. Just as delegates to the Communist-front World Federation of Trade Unions had unpacked their bags in Leipzig for a skull session on the challenge of the thriving Common Market, they got word from Moscow to start packing again. Khrushchev hates and fears the Common Market and demands that other Communist parties take a tough line too. But Poland, which conducts 20% of its trade with the Six and Great Britain, takes a moderate stand; Italian and Belgian Communists, whose working-class members share in the prosperous capitalist economic community, have already endorsed the partnership despite Soviet opposition. Rather than make the split worse by argument, the Kremlin simply called off the session.

Noisy Interruption. There were even more serious turbulences in Bulgaria. The country’s Red boss Todor Zhivkov was back from his trip to Moscow scarcely 24 hours when he told the opening session of a party congress in Sofia that Premier Anton Yugov, ex-Dictator Vulko Chervenkov, and six other bigwigs were being fired as Stalinists. Yugov was slapped under house arrest, accused of ordering the executions of “numerous honest and innocent comrades.” Only three years ago, the Bulgarian regime had tried to emulate the Chinese “great leap forward” and also had fallen flat on its face. Now it was Khrushchev’s turn to pick up the pieces.

A delegate from Peking’s Central Committee was in Sofia, and the purge of the Stalinists was more than he could bear. Heatedly he attacked Bulgarian obedience to Khrushchev’s “revisionist” line, defiantly reported Peking’s determination to support Fidel Castro in his hour of abandonment by Moscow. The Chinese delegate began his speech to warm applause; he finished to icy silence.

Hoarse Shouts. Back home in Peking, things got even rougher. In some of the strongest abuse it has yet heaped on Khrushchev, Red China labeled Moscow’s Cuban retreat “appeasement” and accused the Kremlin of trying to “play the Munich scheme against the Cuban peopie.” Day after day, mass rallies of schoolchildren and workers shouted themselves hoarse to back Castro; the regime flooded cities and towns with millions of militant pamphlets.

Nor was Cuba the only issue that inflamed the Sino-Soviet rivalry. Nehru reported that Moscow, after weeks of stalling, finally agreed to sell India MIG jet fighters, which might be used against invading Red Chinese troops. A Pravda editorial on Peking’s border war with India carefully refused to take sides: if anything, Pravda leaned slightly toward India. “Bellicosity,” tut-tutted the sweet voice of Moscow, is “foreign to the very spirit of a socialist state.”