The High Price of Horse Meat

Narrow is the road for enemies.

--Old Chinese Proverb

At every turn last week, the narrow road of enmity that Russia and Red China have been following resounded to the clang of colliding ideologies. From Moscow to Peking, from Rumania to Viet Nam, each collision was more bruising than the last.

The intense continuing rivalry for control of the Communist camp was most evident in Russia's and China's at tempts to outdo each other in promises of aid to the Communist Viet Cong. After only a hint from Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev that Moscow might send men to North Viet Nam, Peking came screaming from its corner with promises of its own "volunteers." Brezhnev's Red Square speech, however, was far from an outright pledge of troops, and Peking's promise was just as carefully hedged.

Aloof & Impassive. Were the two Red giants threatening to move into Viet Nam together? In an interview with a French journalist, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai suggested that if worse comes to worst in Southeast Asia, "the Chinese and Russian peoples will close ranks." But there was no sign whatsoever of incipient togetherness last week when Chou met a delegation of Russians in Bucharest, where Communists of all stripes had gathered for the state funeral of Rumanian Party Leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.

Walking along only a few paces from Chou, Soviet President Anastas Mikoyan remained aloof and impassive as the mourners trooped with the funeral procession across Bucharest toward what is resoundingly known as the Monument to the Heroes in the Struggle to Liberate People and Homeland for Socialism. There Dej was entombed.

Shams & Realities. Mikoyan's aloofness was understandable; his ears must still have been burning from the violent 7,000-word blast that China had directed at Russia, attacking last month's Moscow meeting of 19 pro-Soviet Communist parties. Lavishly embroidered with typical pseudo-philosophic chinoiserie, the Peking assault accused the Kremlin of engaging in "three shams and three realities: sham antiimperialism but real capitulation [to the U.S.], sham revolution but real betrayal, sham unity but real splitism." As the price for an end to polemics, Peking demanded unconditional surrender from Russia--nothing less than complete renunciation of "Khrushchevian revisionism" would do.

The leaders of Russia, sneered the Chinese, were "selling horse meat as beefsteak, displaying a lamb's head while actually selling fillet of dog." In Mao Tse-tung's somewhat mixed-up butcher-shop imagery, that meant that the Red meat of true Marxist-Leninism was still being supplanted by goulash a la Khrushchev.

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