Nation: A SAVAGE CHALLENGE TO DETENTE

A FEW hours after it happened, the Czechoslovaks staged a haunting protest. They froze. Wherever they were, at work or in the streets, they stood still for a minute, in a silent outcry against the invaders. When news spread of what the Russians had done, the world, too, froze for an instant.

It was an instant of fear and incredulity. The event, though discussed and weighed as a possibility, had seemed unlikely. After all, it was 15 years after Stalin's death, twelve years after Hungary. The West had come to accept the "new maturity" of Russia's leaders. The relative liberalization of Soviet society and the increasing autonomy of Moscow's erstwhile satellites in Eastern Europe had also been taken for granted as an irreversible reaction to the harsh rigidities of the Stalinist past. The softening of Communism ("They are getting more like us, and we are getting more like them") had become one of the dubiously hopeful cliches of the day. In one brutal night's work, Moscow undercut, if it did not erase, all such assumptions. For all the changes, the Soviet Union still could not bear the contagion of freedom from Czechoslovakia spreading into other Eastern European countries and into Russia itself (see THE WORLD).

From the international point of view, perhaps the chief fact about the invasion is that, far from strengthening Soviet-style Communism, Moscow has further crippled it. Acting on the flimsiest and most cynical of pretexts, Warsaw Pact troops throttled the infant independence of a state that had reiterated its fidelity to Moscow and Communism. To retain its grip on Eastern Europe—perhaps only for a few years more—the Soviet Union had sacrificed much of its influence among Communist parties elsewhere. Not since the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 had the Kremlin acted so palpably from fear and weakness. Under present-day conditions, Moscow's treatment of Prague makes for a very poor prognosis for the future of Communism. The thrust that made the Dubcek regime possible will not die with that government.

Predawn Assault. For the U.S., the chief immediate question was: Have the Russians renewed the cold war? A pri-ma-facie case can be made to the ef fect that they have; that Moscow has once again substituted force for reason, and that a seemingly businesslike regime is in fact dangerously unstable.

The answer will not be clear until it is known whether the invasion was caused by or will be followed by a power shift inside the Kremlin. But the chances are that Moscow's blow was aimed entirely at restoring order inside Russia's Eastern European domain—as the Soviets were careful to point out—and is not necessarily a sign of all-round aggressiveness against the rest of the world. On the contrary, it is possible that the move has so weakened Russia's prestige and so strained its relations with other Communist parties that adventures elsewhere are the last thing that Moscow can now afford.

That is the assumption on which the U.S. has operated. Washington's reaction had about it an almost dreamlike unreality in its restraint. The U.S. knows, of course, that in a nuclear age it has no way whatsoever of aiding Czechoslovakia. But the relative lack of polemics was remarkable.