A Whoop & a Holler

RUSSIA A Whoop & a Holler History's biggest powwow of Communist rulers, the bosses of twelve states and 900 million subjects, who met in Moscow to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, finally wound up. Canceling his long-planned trip to Poland to head straight back to Peking, China's Mao ("Let a hundred flowers bloom") Tse-tung left withered hearts and blighted flowers all over satellite Europe. In a final speech to 3,000 Chinese students at Moscow University he said: "The Socialist camp must have a head, and that head is the Soviet Union. Communist workers must also have a head, and that head is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union." Poland's Wladislaw Gomulka himself proclaimed Russia "first among equals." It seemed as if Khrushchev had disposed of all loose talk about "national" Communism independent of Moscow.

But when Radio Peking broadcast the potentates' long-winded communique whooping it up for Communist unity, it was evident that the Yugoslavs had balked. Yugoslav Ambassador Veljko Micunovic said bluntly: "We obviously did not agree with it." Tito's lumbago had obviously kicked up on diplomatic cue to keep him from Moscow. The reasons came out in what Tito's press suppressed in reprinting the Moscow communique: 1) its attacks on the U.S. as "aggressive"; 2) its assertion that the Soviet Union is ""head of the Socialist camp." In Belgrade, where U.S. Ambassador James Riddleberger returned from Washington to begin a reappraisal of the case for continuing U.S. aid, Yugoslav hopes of a lasting accommodation with Russia wilted.

The Moscow proclamation was a bristling boast that Communism still expects to conquer the world, if possible by reviving "popular fronts" with nationalist neutrals and other unsheared sheep. Without calling for a new Communist International, the communique tried clumsily to paper over the whopping differences between the worker-class Communism that Marx projected and the new, peasant-based Communism that grabbed China. The "law" of historical development, said the communicators in their most relentlessly unifying passage, may prescribe "effecting a proletarian revolution in one form or another, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat in one form or another, [creating] the alliance of workers and peasants in one form or another."

The Moscow potentates' last blast was a propaganda appeal that even the Yugoslavs signed. It was a call for "world peace." It was made public the same day Russia's delegate told the U.N. General Assembly that his government would refuse to pay one dollar toward funds to support the U.N. Emergency Force in keeping peace between the Israelis and Egyptians in the Middle East for another year.

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