Lunge to the South

The raw anger erupting last week in British speeches and editorials (see JUDGMENTS & PROPHECIES), all directed against the Russian leaders, was the kind that Britons used to reprove Americans for showing. Even old Winston Churchill came out of his comfortable hibernation to make his first political pronouncement since his retirement: "You have all been following the exhibition--I use no other word--which the heads of the Russian state have been making of their tour through India and Burma. It has certainly been a surprising spectacle and one which Her Majesty's government will no doubt study carefully before they allow it, with suitable variants, to be repeated here."

Almost as one, Britons cried "foul" at the insults and distortions Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin have been strewing around Burma and India. They winced at being depicted as the deposed usurers and enslavers of Asia, but what angered them more was Khrushchev's distorted and reiterated cry that Britain, France and the U.S. had instigated World War II and sent the Nazis marching toward Russia. Britons remember too well when they stood alone against Hitler, and when Hitler felt safe to move against them because he had protected his rear by an infamous pact with Communist Russia.

The question was: Should Anthony Eden's invitation to the two Bolsheviks to visit Britain next spring now be canceled? In a poll by the Daily Sketch, 69.6% said yes. But Labor's ex-Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison argued, "Let them come. It would be spiteful and childish and not improve relations to get bad-tempered." In the end, the Eden government decided to go on with the plans, but to moderate the welcome.

Not only Britain reacted violently to the new Russian behavior. "The cold war has been declared anew by Party Secretary Khrushchev," proclaimed a West Berlin commentator. Added a French Foreign Ministry official: "There's very little left of the Geneva spirit after this tour of South Asia." Or as U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles put it in his Chicago speech: "A huge, materialistic state, thwarted in its efforts to aggrandize itself by force [is trying] coldly and cruelly ... to exploit for its selfish ends the aspirations of the peoples of less-developed lands."

Steely Sounds. The Western reaction reflected a common conclusion about what Russia is up to. The Kremlin is deliberately bringing to an end the temporary warm-front toward the West and lunging at the vast, uncommitted softnesses of Asia and the Middle East. Molotov's steely noes at Geneva last month were the sounds of a door closing; the Kremlin was settling for the status quo in Europe.

Russia's hard about-face in Europe slowed down a growing dissatisfaction in Germany with Konrad Adenauer's foreign policy; it halted the drift toward the formation of a Communist popular front in France; and Russia's new anti-Western bellicosity might well reawaken those drowsy Europeans whose tensions had got relaxed. Against these losses had to be set what Russia hoped to gain in the uncommitted Arab-Asian lands.

To this uncommitted, neutralist bloc, Khrushchev and Bulganin offered a new message: You don't have to apply for membership in our club; we have already enrolled you and ask no dues. Want fac tories? We will help build them. Have you opponents? We will hate them too.

The mere presence of such powerful potentates was flattering to proud young nations. But however sound the strategy, the tactics were surprisingly clumsy. As they traveled through India and Burma, Khrushchev and Bulganin may sometimes have forgotten that though these nations were born yesterday, they have been around as peoples for a long time.

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