Of Bathers & Borders

It was the silly season in the Sino-Soviet feud.

>> Moscow's Sovietskaya Rossiya huffed indignantly about a large Chinese boat on the Amur River in Siberia that was deliberately swamping smaller Russian craft and splashing Soviet sunbathers on the river banks.

>> Red Star protested that during a recent trip to Peking a Red army basketball team was victimized by "biased and incompetent" Chinese referees. Worse, the Soviet national anthem was not played, even though the Russians managed to win.

>> A Chinese song-and-dance team in Moscow was fine onstage, said Sovietskaya Kultura, but was positively offensive on a visit to the Lenin Museum: they giggled, yawned and spat. >> Red Chinese crowds in the Manchurian port city of Dairen stoned and spat on Soviet sailors, Izvestia angrily reported. City officials even posted signs outside parks and nightspots: "Entrance forbidden to foreigners."

Amid the silliness, Moscow was wailing about Chinese violations of Soviet frontiers, especially in Far Eastern Sinkiang, where the argument goes back about 100 years. Last month Peking accused Moscow of luring tens of thousands of Chinese into Russia for the purpose of sending them back as Soviet saboteurs. Nonsense, replied the Russians; it was just an avalanche of starving refugees. Then the Kremlin launched its own attack, charged that Red Chinese military units and civilians had systematically violated the border 5,000 times during 1962 alone, and had tried to grab Soviet territory. What's more, protested Russia last week, innocent border tribesmen who have roamed back and forth across the Sinkiang frontier for centuries are being moved to the interior of Red China on the suspicion that they harbor pro-Soviet sympathies.

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