At the opening of a cotton festival in Aleppo last week, Syria's Agriculture Minister Hamid Khuja announced to a cheering throng that the Soviet Union had pledged itself to buy all surplus Syrian farm produce--as part of an estimated $240 million deal for Soviet-bloc tanks, guns and jet fighters. Other Syrian leaders were proclaiming that a Soviet economic mission was in Damascus to arrange Soviet aid of $500 million for building irrigation works, roads and other development projects.

Before being wafted to paradise by visions of Soviet "aid without strings," the Syrians might profitably examine Egypt's two-year experience of doing business with the Communists. Gamal Abdel Nasser mortgaged Egypt's one big cash crop --cotton--to pay for Soviet-bloc arms. But in midseason the Soviet bloc suddenly stopped buying, leaving the Egyptians with more than one-third of last year's crop unsold. The desperate Egyptians had to unload the rest at cut-rate prices. When the Egyptians found themselves strapped for hard currencies, their Russian friends let them have some Western currencies last summer--at a 20% premium. Now, with a new cotton crop heading for market, Cairo is at the mercy of its new customers. At one time recently, only two Cabinet officers were left in Cairo; the rest were out scurrying from The Hague to Peking in hopes of peddling cotton for whatever barter terms the Communists or anyone else might give.

The Soviet bloc has sent Nasser oil, wheat, and old military hardware. But the Communists have been unwilling or unable to supply many of the items his Western-oriented economy needs, notably spare parts and lubricating oils. What they have sent has often proved inferior, e.g., low-quality newsprint that tears in Cairo's high-speed Western presses. Cracked a Cairo editor: "Pravda must go to press at 6 o'clock at night." The domestic economy twitches along in austerity and torpor, with tea and sugar scarcely obtainable except at black-market prices, and the regime invoking military law in an effort to force butchers to sell meat at new, government-set prices. The price of kerosene, essential for cooking and lighting in the fellah's household, is up 10% since last November, and foreign observers estimate that one out of every three Egyptians is now unemployed or underemployed.

Nasser has already started talks with the British and French to settle Suez claims and restore ties with Egypt's old trading partners. Says a high U.S. official in Cairo flatly: "Egypt's Russian experiment has failed."

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