THE AMERICAS: The Friendly Russians

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Ingratiatingly, alluringly, the Russians last week used the tools of trade and culture to turn Latin American eyes and aspirations away from the U.S., toward the U.S.S.R. The response from both Brazil and Chile gave the Communists cause to take heart.

In Brazil a small, hitherto unknown company named Torgbraz came to the fore as the Soviet Union's trading arm. Run by a retired Brazilian colonel and a "refugee" from Russia, Torgbraz (Trade-Brazil) offered to supply Petrobras, the state oil monopoly, with crude oil, drilling and refinery equipment on either "short-or long-term payment." (At present Petrobras gets equipment from U.S. companies on strictly businesslike terms.)

Only a month earlier, No. 1 Communist Nikita Khrushchev, in an interview with a Brazilian Communist newspaperman, had plugged for a booming trade that would exchange Brazil's coffee, cocoa, hides, sugar and cotton for such manufactured goods as "oil-well-drilling equipment and automobiles." The trade offers, suspiciously similar, were aimed at a big target: a country with 100,000 Communist Party members and enough party-liners to swing a tight election. They were shrewdly directed at sensitive areas such as Petrobras, of which the public is fiercely proud. Publicly, Petrobras was cool to the Torgbraz offers, but privately it awaited a top governmental decision. Congressional and army opinion was building up for a resumption of both trade and diplomatic relations with Russia.

Chile played host to a large contingent of eager Russians, including Playwright-Author (Days and Nights) Konstantin Simonov, a power in the Soviet Writers' Union; the Cultural Ministry's Latin American chief, Konstantin Chugonov; Neurologist Leonidas Koreisha; and the 18-man Dynamo soccer team. Dynamo lost its Chilean match 1-0, but the Simonov team scored by making agreements to exchange teachers with Chile, to send copies of all books printed by Moscow University in return for copies of a single Chilean literary magazine, to send the Moscow Dramatic Theater for a visit in 1959. "Gentlemen, make your petitions," said Culture Chief Chugonov jovially. "We will try to satisfy them." Meanwhile, in Paris, the ambassadors of the two countries got together and agreed, subject to President Carlos Ibañez approval, to sell 20,000 tons of Chilean copper wire to Russia.