Strictly Temporary

When Nikita Khrushchev was ousted and the Kosygin-Brezhnev team took over in Moscow, the new leaders doubtless hoped they would be able to put an end to Russia's bitter quarrel with Red China. At first, they seemed to be succeeding; for months, scarcely an anti-Moscow curse or sneer was heard from Peking. Red China's Premier Chou En-lai was received politely in Moscow, and Russia's Premier Kosygin got cool but correct treatment from the Chinese when he toured Asia last month.

But the truce was strictly temporary, as became all too clear last week. Into the Foreign Ministry in Moscow raged Red Chinese Ambassador Pan Tzu-li, crying foul over Russian handling of the Chinese-led riots at the U.S. embassy in Moscow (TIME, March 12). "Police brutality!" declared Pan, demanding "severe punishment" for the Moscow cops and an official apology from Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. With the disdain he once reserved for Western diplomats, Gromyko turned Pan away icily and instantly, then published an angry blast at Peking charging that China "permits itself intolerable acts against the Soviet Union."

Deep in the Mud. What's more, growled Moscow, Peking "even tries to teach us how to fight imperialism. We do not intend to accept anyone's instructions on this score. The Soviet Union has consistently waged, and continues to wage, this struggle not in words but in deeds." These were bitter words, but they had been provoked by as ugly an allegation as one Communist can make about another. The Soviet Union was "bent on colluding with the U.S. imperialists," Peking had charged--specifically in North Viet Nam, where Moscow was giving Ho Chi Minh's regime nothing more than verbal support.

Sitting in retirement in his Moscow apartment, Khrushchev must have chuckled at this exchange, for it was similar to the pattern of attack he had known when Red China first turned its guns on him. The time for Peking to get personal had not quite come. As before, this was being left to Albania, Peking's European mouthpiece. "The Moscow student demonstration has torn the mask from the Khrushchevite revisionist troika--Brezhnev, Kosygin and Mikoyan," blared Radio Tirana. "It showed how deeply they have plunged into the mud of revisionism and capitulation when faced with the pressure and blackmail of American imperialism."

"The Question of the Question." Resumption of the open feuding coincided with another reminder of Moscow's fading mastery of the world Communist movement. It was the communique explaining the results of the long-awaited, short-lived March meeting of 19 pro-Soviet parties. The 1,000-word document was a weaseling admission of defeat, the sotto voce anticlimax to what was obviously the most unsuccessful gathering of international Communists ever staged by the Soviets. Khrushchev had originally planned the meeting as a first step toward a full-dress Communist summit, aimed at reading Red China out of the movement and thereby reestablishing Soviet hegemony among the world's 90-odd Communist parties. But even before it began, Nikita's uneasy successors had watered the meeting down to a mere "consultation"--a preparation for a preparatory meeting leading up to the big showdown. In the event, it was not even that.

"On the question of deciding the question of calling such a preparatory meeting," said the communique, "consultations with all parties are necessary." That means months, maybe years, of bilateral talks among dissident Red leaders. Russia's chance of hammering out ideological unanimity appeared to be virtually nil.

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