World: RUSSIA'S DILEMMA

• Share

Whatever course the Soviet Union ultimately takes in handling the Czechoslovak crisis — from inaction to armed intervention—it will have to pay dearly. If Moscow chooses muscle, it will not only antagonize most of the non-Communist world but will also alienate many Communist countries and national parties. If it permits Dubček to proceed, his sweeping reforms are bound to spread elsewhere and further weaken Russia's hold over its Communist neighbors. The Kremlin is caught in an enormous dilemma and. no matter what it does, the shape and strength of what used to be called the Communist bloc are bound to change drastically.

That shape has been changing, of course, for 20 years. The Soviets, in effect, abandoned the Marxist dream of total, supranational Communism with the dissolution of the Third International in 1943. Five years later, on a gamble that Stalin would not risk U.S. atomic firepower by intervening, Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito took the first successful walk from Moscow. The Kremlin successfully stamped out Hungary's uprising in 1956, but Tito has been followed in this decade by the puritanical Chinese and their sympathizers in Albania, then by Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu, who wanted to pursue a freer foreign policy. Thus Russia now finds itself caught in the middle, between the Stalinist reaction of China on one side and the liberal yearnings of Czechoslovakia on the other.

Still, for all the talk of "polycentrism" in Communist leadership, Moscow has never really abandoned Nikolai Bukharin's notion that "centripetal tendencies" would one day unite world Communism under the Kremlin banner. Now the Czechoslovaks not only threaten to speed the breakup of Eastern Europe but propose a top-to-bottom spiritual reordering of the Communist way of life as well. Says British Kremlinologist Tibor Szamuely: "Russia is perfectly correct in interpreting the Czechoslovak experiment as something that will lead that country into a non-Communist democracy. The Soviet empire in Eastern Europe is at stake."

Moscow has watched the other Communist governments of Eastern Europe split badly on the Czechoslovak issue. Communist parties throughout Western Europe, moreover, reared back in almost unanimous disapproval of Russian pressure on Prague. In campaigns to win support from respectable liberals, their leaders had advertised Dubček's "renewal," as Italian Party Boss Luigi Longo called it, to be the party's exciting new image. Now Moscow has damaged and perhaps destroyed that image. The resulting bitterness in the Communist camp has raised serious doubt that the Kremlin will really be able to hold the summit meeting scheduled for November, at which it desperately wants to consolidate support against the Chinese.