Change of Line

Out of the mushroom cloud set off in the Supreme Soviet appeared the familiar, forbidding face of Vyacheslav Molotov, the great unsinkable of the Communist Revolution. His duty was plain: to obscure their moment of serious internal weakness, the Soviet leaders had called out the Old Bolshevik to convince everyone that the Soviet Union is really hale, hearty and tough.

Molotov boasted: "Prior to the Second World War the Soviet Union was the only socialist state in a ring of capitalist encirclement . . . Now the correlation of forces . . . has definitely changed to the advantage of socialism."

He viewed with alarm "the aggressive course of the U.S. foreign policy" and its "open propaganda and preparations for a new war." He blustered against the Paris agreements, and warned Germany "they would render it impossible, for a long period, to re-establish Germany's unity." He talked of countermeasures: a new unified command of satellite armies to offset SHAPE. He waved Russia's H-bomb: "U.S. aggressive circles have miscalculated once again . . . The matter has progressed so far that in the production of the hydrogen weapon ... it is not the Soviet Union but the U.S. which is ... the . . . laggard."

But, above all, he warned, in the kind of vituperative language that has not been used since the peace dove got its latest set of wings two years ago:

"The Soviet Union is no weaker than the U.S. Any adventure connected with unleashing a new world war will inevitably end badly for the aggressor. What will perish will not be world civilization . . . but that rotten social system with its imperialist basis soaked in blood."

Gloomy Surprise. As they do whenever an internal emergency requires, the Kremlin's leaders thus callously abandoned a foreign policy line that had scored considerable gains. With Molotov's words, the dovecote sound of Malenkov's "coexistence" and "good life" line gave way to the anvil clank of the old Stalinesque "tough" line. The first outside reaction was gloomy surprise. The London Stock Exchange dipped at the news. Columnist Stewart Alsop concluded that the Kremlin had made up its mind that "war is probable if not inevitable." Former Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, once Ambassador to Moscow, gloomed: "I don't like the look of it . . .I can't take any comfort from all this."

But it soon became apparent that consternation was greatest among Communism's servants and those whom its coexistence line had fooled or seduced. Communist Party headquarters and newspapers around the world were left without intelligible words to explain the sudden abandonment of a line and a "monolithic unity" they had devoted two years to peddling. Socialists in Britain and West Germany were hard put to justify their thesis that Russia's mellow new leadership was ready to become friendly if only those rigid Americans would cease their demands for German rearmament.

Spoiled Campaign. The day after Malenkov fell, Britain's Nye Bevan made an uncharacteristically dispirited defense of his attempt to delay German rearmament and was defeated in a Laborite caucus by a decisive 23 votes. In Wrest Germany, where Konrad Adenauer had been forced to take to the hustings to argue for rearmament, the Chancellor now felt reassured. "The Russians should have waited just one more month," said Adenauer, "then they would not have spoiled the Socialist campaign so completely."

Socialists, being Socialists and stuck with their position, lamely argued that Malenkov had been forced out because the West had rejected his proffered hand; but some of the force had obviously gone out of their cries for a "parley at the summit." Cracked France's Georges Bidault: "Any conference with a man on the verge of disappearance has no urgent character." Caught short with their favorite thesis that the U.S. is rattling H-bombs while the Russians hunger for peace, India's newspapers could summon up only honest, slack-jawed surprise at what the Times of India called Russia's "accents of unbending hostility."

Keeping Up Appearances. The foreign audience that Molotov was probably most interested in satisfying was in Peking. Like any foreign minister, he found it harder to reassure an ally than to fulminate against an antagonist. For the benefit of the high-riding comrades in Peking, Molotov effusively corrected himself after referring to the camp of world Communism "headed by the U.S.S.R.--more correctly said, headed by the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic." He had liberal praise for Red China's friendship and aims, denunciation for the "criminal gang of Chiang Kai-shek that was expelled from China"; he said that the U.S. "must withdraw" all its forces from the Formosa Strait before peace can prevail. But when it came to aligning Russia with Peking's unqualified vow to "liberate" Formosa, Molotov was conspicuously noncommital.

That was not much to offer the men of fired-up ambitions in Peking. Nor did it do much to obscure from Peking the fact that its chief protector and supplier (of MIGs, tanks and other hardware) is openly displaying internal weakness and severe production failures, at a time when Communism is trying to give the appearance of unbeatable strength and inexorable influence across Asia. In Red China's only public reaction to the Kremlin turnover. Premier Chou-En-lai cabled a curiously minimal message of congratulation to Bulganin. "I am confident," said Chou. "that you. under the leadership of the united monolithic Central Committee . . . will surely make great achievements in the cause of the great Soviet peoples' Communist construction and in defense of peace." In the light of the news, the reference to "the united monolithic" Soviet leadership seemed decidedly wishful.

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