Comradely Dissension

Communist Dictator Tito, who cannot always be assured these days of being addressed as Comrade in Moscow, last week motored to Vinca, south of Belgrade, to open the Communist world's first atomic reactor outside Russia. The donor: the Soviet Union. Tito was doing his best to show that, allowed to travel his separate road, his goal is still the same as Moscow's.

But Moscow, in its newly toughened attitude towards ideological dissension in the satellites, was dropping hints with the subtlety of a trip hammer that it might cancel a promised $175 million Soviet credit for construction of an aluminum plant in Tito's Montenegro on the ground that Tito was also taking money from the U.S. This led Belgrade's party newspaper Borba to suggest that the Soviet Union "believes that it alone has the right to do business with the U.S.," and that it is now Moscow, not Washington, that puts strings on economic aid.

Looking on from afar, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, who was slow to express indignation about Soviet tanks in Hungary, read in the Yugoslav-Russian quarrel a lesson of Communist "interference in other countries' domestic affairs."

"In the last year or two much has happened in the Communist world," said Nehru. "Sometimes it is called liberalization, sometimes democratization, sometimes 'Let a hundred flowers bloom.' [Now] the flowers have become weeds to be pulled out ..."

Increasingly concerned with Communist gains in his own country, Nehru is readier than he once was to discuss the defects of Communism. On another occasion last week he pointed out that Marxism had got its historical prophecy wrong, failing to foretell the prosperity of America. Sometimes it seems as if Neutralist Nehru, who likes to balance off two great world forces, has lately concluded that the U.S. has now become the underdog that needs a little defending.

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