VIOLENCE ON THE SINO-SOVIET BORDER

THE Chinese call it Chen Pao, or Treasure. The Russians call it Damansky. Both claim the tiny, uninhabited island, located in the midst of the frozen Ussuri river that forms the common border of Communism's premier countries. Precisely what happened there last week, in the bleak, snow-swept wilderness of eastern Asia, may never be fully known. Only Moscow has offered the world a reasonably detailed--but doubtless in part self-serving--account. Both Moscow and Peking agree, however, that the violence along the Ussuri was for several hours as close to war as the two countries have come in the long succession of border incidents and shoot-outs since their ideological split in 1960. At least the equivalent of a battalion of men were engaged on either side, and armor, artillery, mortars and heavy machine guns were employed before the battle was over. The Russians claim that 31 Soviet border guards were killed and 14 wounded; the Chinese casualties are unknown. Along any other frontier in the world, the scale of the battle would almost certainly have caused large-scale mobilization.

Shot Point-Blanlc. As the Russians tell it, the fighting was a coolly calculated, carefully planned act of aggression on the part of the Chinese. Under cover of wintry night, some 300 Chinese soldiers camouflaged in white uniforms crept across the river's ice to the 6,200-sq.-yd. island. Taking advantage of a low hill and the island's trees and shrubs, they dispersed in ambush formation. A second unit concentrated mortars, grenade throwers and heavy machine guns on the Chinese side of the river and strung field telephone lines between the two units.

When morning dawned, 30 armed Chinese appeared on the river bank and crossed over to the island in full view of the Soviet border guards watching from their side of the frontier. That kind of mild intrusion had happened so frequently that the Soviet response was almost a drill routine. The Russian station commander for the area, Senior Lieutenant Strelnikov, took seven of his men and walked out to meet the Chinese. He intended, says Moscow, to protest their intrusion on Soviet territory and ask them to leave. He never got the chance. As the two groups neared each other, the Chinese opened fire. Strelnikov and his men were killed--"literally shot at point-blank by the Chinese provocateurs," according to the Soviet communique. At the same time, the Chinese gunners across the river opened fire at the Soviet border guards covering Strelnikov.

The Soviets rushed reinforcements to the scene, including armored personnel carriers. At least one armored carrier was destroyed, and the fight raged for four hours before, in Moscow's version, the Chinese invaders were finally driven back to their side of the Ussuri.

It must have been a fairly orderly Chinese withdrawal, however: the Russians admit that they have no idea of the attacker's casualties because the Chinese took their dead and wounded with them when they fell back. Before they withdrew, they held the ground long enough to inflict some "bloodcurdling brutalities," says Moscow. "The Chinese fired point-blank at the wounded and bayoneted them. The faces of some of the slain Soviet soldiers were so mutilated that they were unrecognizable."

Fry Brezhnev! Moscow was first to report the battle to the world. Peking countered that it was a case of "thief crying thief" and that the incident revealed "the fiendish features of social imperialism," a new epithet in the already lengthy and inventive lexicon that China employs against Russia. The Chinese insisted that it was the Soviets who initially opened fire but offered scant details. What they did offer was an orchestrated but nonetheless astonishing display of countrywide protest.

On one day alone, an estimated 1,000,-000 demonstrators jammed the streets around the Soviet embassy in Peking, shouting anti-Soviet slogans and carrying placards that read HANG KOSYGIN! and FRY BREZHNEV! By week's end, at least 150 million Chinese all across the country had joined the frenzied displays of hatred of "the new czars." In editorials published in both Peoples' Daily, the party organ, and the army paper Liberation Army Daily, the Chinese warned that if such "provocations" continue, "we will wipe you out resolutely, thoroughly, wholly and completely." In a formal protest note, China's foreign ministry assailed the "Soviet revisionist renegade clique" for donning "the mantle of czarist Russian imperialism."

In return, Moscow accused Peking of deliberately manufacturing the incident for the sake of arousing "extreme chauvinism." And while Soviet mass demonstrations failed to match the Chinese ones in size, an estimated 50,000 Russians stormed past the Chinese embassy compound in Moscow, hurling rocks and ink pots that shattered 104 windows in the residence buildings and left ugly, multicolored stains on their facades. Next day, still more Russians marched, but violence was curbed. One poster read: BLOOD FOR BLOOD, DEATH FOR DEATH, DOWN WITH MAO!

Considering the scrap of territory at issue, all the bloodshed and passion seemed scarcely worthwhile. Originally, the island in question was a peninsula jutting out from the Chinese side of the Ussuri. In the course of time, the Ussuri's shifting currents changed the peninsula into an island, which both nations then claimed. Their territorial quarrels are by no means confined to that particular spit of land. Sino-Russian border disputes go back more than a century, to the time when Russia's Czar Alexander II took advantage of the faltering Manchu Empire to seize pieces of territory all along the two nations' 4,500-mile joint frontier (see map).

Rebellion in Sinlciang. The degree of Russian control over the borderlands varied through the following decades. During the 1930s, the Soviet Union's in fluence grew steadily in the far-west Chinese province of Sinkiang, at a time when China's Nationalist government was distracted by the invading Japanese in the east. A few years later, while the Russians were concentrating on the war against Germany, the Chinese re-established themselves in Sinkiang, only to be confronted with rebellions that had at least tacit Soviet support. Even after Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, tensions in Sinkiang continued to seethe, though relations between Moscow and Peking were at least superficially cordial. To the east, all was generally calm. The border between Russia's Maritime Kray (Region) and the Chinese province of Heilungkiang was fixed by the Treaties of Aigun (1858) and Peking (1860), and in the 100 peaceful years that followed the Russians built up the huge Far Eastern port of Vladivostok and linked it with western Russia via the Trans-Siberian Railway.

In the early 1960s, however, trouble began to flare in the northeast. "Since June 1962," notes a Soviet Foreign Ministry official, Mikhail S. Kapitsa, "provocations on the borders of the U.S.S.R. have become systematic." For their part, the Chinese claim that in the past two years alone, Soviet border guards intruded onto Chen Pao 16 times. According to Peking, nearby Chiliching and Kapotzu islands have also suffered such intrusions "on many occasions." The Chinese also charge that Soviet aircraft frequently violate their airspace. In the past three years, Moscow has built up its strength along its Asian borders to an estimated 25 divisions. They face about 50 Chinese divisions in Manchuria alone, and another seven divisions in Sinkiang. The London Sunday Express reported that Peking has ordered 5 million more troops to reinforce border divisions. There are reports that the Russians have built a complex of sites for medium-range missiles near the border, thus threatening Manchuria and the nuclear-testing grounds in Sinkiang's Lop Nor.

Shrinking Trade. The border tensions reflect the hostility and fear that characterize current Sino-Soviet relations. Frail diplomatic links still exist, though neither nation now maintains an ambassador in the other's capital. Party relations have been virtually nonexistent since 1963. Some trade still continues, but a recent Soviet survey reports that current two-way trade, estimated in 1967 to be $106 million, is less than 6% of 1961 levels. Given the steady disintegration of the once solid partnership of the two Communist giants, the frontier clashes--and last week's explosion--became inevitable.

Both China and the Soviet Union can probably extract some advantage from the armed clash on the Ussuri. For the Russians, anxious to build European Communist support for the world party conference scheduled for this May, the incident offers proof of Chinese intransigence, and may indeed further Moscow's hopes of expelling the Chinese from the world movement. For Chairman Mao, who plans to convoke the Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party this spring, the incident is being manipulated to prove that China is truly surrounded by foes and that national unity is now a necessity as never before. For the rest of the world, any lingering doubts about the depth of Sino-Soviet antagonism were washed away in the blood that stained the snowy banks of the Ussuri.

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