Bad Week for Them

For months Russia's headlong Nikita Khrushchev had seemed incapable of putting a foot wrong. His ways might be crude, his methods clumsy, but his words had an engaging candor. He conceded nothing, but incessant Russian appeals for a summit meeting "to relax tensions" had thrown the West on the propaganda defensive. Unilateral Russian "renunciation" of nuclear tests--after the Russians had just completed a series of tests--enabled Khrushchev to pose as the world's leading advocate of disarmament. But just when everything seemed to be going so well for him, Nikita Khrushchev's foreign policy suddenly began to rattle, sputter and stall like an antique Moscow taxi.

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P:All of a sudden, it was the Russians who seemed to be dragging their feet on the road to the summit. The amount of space devoted to the summit in the Russian press has fallen off by 30%, and Russian diplomats no longer display their old volubility on the subject. Gromyko at first insisted on talking separately to the Moscow ambassadors from the U.S.. Britain and France, then refused to hold a joint preparatory conference unless Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia were allowed to sit in too. The air was now being filled with what Russia would be unwilling to discuss--the status of the satellites, the reunification of Germany. P:Foreign Minister Gromyko's formal charge that the U.S. Strategic Air Command constitutes "a threat to peace," because it sends bombers armed with hydrogen weapons flying toward Russia whenever an unexplained "blip" appears on U.S. radar screens, proved a dismal flop before the U.N. Security Council. Since the U.S. was easily able to prove the safeguards in its "Fail Safe" technique--which prevents any U.S. plane from actually proceeding to a Russian target without personal orders from the President--Russia found no supporting votes for its accusation in the eleven-nation Security Council. Arkady Sobolev was compelled to withdraw his resolution, a display of ineptness rare in recent Soviet diplomacy. P:By putting too much overt pressure on Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, Khrushchev last week drove Yugoslavia to a public challenge of Soviet primacy in Eastern Europe (see below). In the process, Khrushchev also ineptly stirred up the ticklish relations between Russia and Poland. Fortnight ago. in deference to the knowledge that the U.S.S.R. could bring Polish industry to a standstill in six weeks by cutting off raw-materials shipments, Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka took steps that were bound to increase his unpopularity at home. In response to pressure from Khrushchev. Gomulka curtailed the power of the democratic Workers' Councils, and severely limited the freedom of the press. Last week, clearly outraged by Khrushchev's crude attempt to dictate to Tito, the Polish government again went a foot or two off the reservation, making cautious but unmistakable display of its sympathies with the Yugoslavs.

So hasty were the Russian actions, so maladroit their handling of a Tito ready to meet them halfway, so inadequate the advance preparation for such unexpected shifts of attitude, that the confusion suggested some dispute inside the Kremlin councils, not necessarily about foreign affairs, but reflected in them. What such a dispute was about, outsiders could only guess, and some did; but perhaps months would pass before whatever went on in Moscow in April's last week became clear. Whatever the cause, it was not a very impressive diplomatic week for Nikita Khrushchev.

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