World: AGGRESSION AND REPRESSION

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The echoes of Soviet tanks clanking into Czechoslovakia were still reverberating throughout Europe and the world last week when the ominous rumblings of a new—and potentially far more dangerous—Soviet aggression sounded. The target this time was Rumania, the Warsaw Pact nation that has long defied Moscow's hegemony in Eastern Europe by insisting on its right to an independent foreign policy and has unwaveringly supported the Czechoslovaks in their triumphs and tragedy. There was every prospect that the Rumanians, unlike the Czechoslovaks, would fight should the Soviets invade. The Rumanian Ambassador to Bonn formally informed the West German Foreign Ministry that the Rumanian army had been issued orders to shoot the first invaders.

Along Rumania's long border with Bulgaria, Hungary and the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact forces were gathering. The Soviet propaganda organs turned the full force of their venom against Rumania and its party leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, and the press in Moscow's allied capitals followed dutifully. So similar was the pattern of visible and intelligence-monitored Soviet activity to what preceded the invasion of Czechoslovakia that an alarmed President Lyndon Johnson spoke out. Though he did not specifically cite Rumania in an otherwise routine speech before a San Antonio milk producers' convention, he made his meaning clear. "There are rumors," he said, "that this action [against Czechoslovakia] might be repeated elsewhere in the days ahead in Eastern Europe. We cannot and we must not return in the year 1968 to a world of unbridled aggression. Let no one unleash the dogs of war."

Galvanized NATO. As the Rumanians prepared to resist (see following story), so did the Yugoslavs, though a direct Soviet attack on the premier rebels of the Communist camp seemed ruled out by geography. Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito and Ceausescu conferred on common defense plans in the event that both nations should be struck simultaneously. Tito then canceled all army leaves and recalled some army reserves. Yugoslav tanks, in a pointed show of force, rumbled through Belgrade and moved into position along the Bulgarian border. Together, the Yugoslav and Rumanian armies total some 395,000 men. Most Yugoslav observers doubted that Tito would employ his forces to aid Rumania alone. But the grim prospect remained that if the Soviets tried to overrun Rumania and a shooting war erupted, the Czechoslovaks might well take up arms against their occupiers, and a Balkan war might catch fire and spread to Yugoslavia.

It was a horrifying prospect for Western European statesmen, already shaken by the unexpected Soviet crushing of Czechoslovakia. Last week it be came increasingly plain that Czechoslovakia was indeed crushed, that any reports of a compromise in Moscow were a sham, and that all the promises of freedom and reform in the country were to be obliterated by the Soviet occupiers for a long time to come. By that grim process, the Kremlin was altering the context of East-West dealings as well. Though the Soviet leaders insist that the intervention in Czechoslovakia is a domestic matter, it inevitably affects, and chills, U.S.-Soviet relations.