Communists: The Split Is Real

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Radio Peking grew so angry with the Russians over their withdrawal from Cuba that it used a new technique for its philippics : each sentence was followed by a burst of martial music. With or without brass accompaniment, the discord between Moscow and Peking reached a crescendo last week, and no one any longer pretended harmony. In Budapest, addressing a congress of the Hungarian Communist Party, Moscow Delegate Otto Kuusinen. 81, oldest member of Khrushchev's Presidium, denounced a Red Chinese visitor two seats away: "Bigmouthed extreme leftist critics are bravely brandishing their verbal weapons before world imperialism." But when the chips were down in Cuba, Kuusinen added, those who "beat their breasts were incapable of giving the slightest practical help to revolutionary Cuba."

The man from Peking, who two weeks ago in Sofia had witnessed a purge of Red Chinese sympathizers and Stalinists in the Bulgarian Communist Party, would not be shouted down. The revisionists, he shot back, as usual using Tito as a synonym for Khrushchev, were "despicable traitors of the working class."

Since Russia pulled back in Cuba and the Red Chinese marched into India, the Sino-Soviet split had widened into a chasm. It will probably remain unbridgeable for a long time to come. In Belgrade, U.S. Ambassador George F. Kennan predicted that the rift "is on the verge of coming into the open, in the same way that Moscow's fight with Belgrade did in 1948."

It was easier to see the split than to know how to exploit it. British Foreign Secretary Lord Home was heard last week to predict that "some time, sooner rather than later, it will be revealed to the leaders of Russia that her ties are with the West." But this kind of choosing favorites between two countries that are insistently Communist may have the unintended effect of compelling Moscow to get tougher again in order to counteract some of its Peking critics and to prove it has not sold out.

Nevertheless, fierce competition for dominance in the Communist world is a fact. There is no doubt that the Chinese would like to topple Khrushchev if they could. So far they have had precious few successes, though they are doing their best in world propaganda to show how resolute they are in India, how weak Khrushchev has been in Cuba. The belligerent and Spartan Peking line, perhaps required by Red China's own economic misery, may have some impact on the most doctrinaire of Communists around the world, but it is a backward and dated dogma that probably has less appeal than Khrushchev's optimistic promises of a better life and peaceful victory over capitalism. Still. should both the better life and cold war victories continue to elude Russia, the Peking line might find more adherents.