Sino-Soviet Sizzle

Seldom since the blusterous days of Nikita Khrushchev had there been such an epithetic attack on China by a Soviet leader. Launching the Soviet Union's 50th anniversary celebrations in Moscow last week, normally restrained Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev lashed out at Peking for "malicious slander of the Soviet political system and foreign policy," for "absurd claims to Soviet territory," for "sabotage of efforts for disarmament," for "continuous attempts to split the socialist camp," for trying to "foment discord" among "national liberation" movements, and for attempts "to range the developing countries against the Soviet Union."

Brezhnev stopped just short of reading the Chinese Communist party out of the Communist movement. But the widening gulf between Communism's two giants was never more evident than in Brezhnev's pointed reference to a nonaggression pact offered Peking by Moscow in 1971. The offer, said Brezhnev, was designed "to assume clear, firm and permanent commitments ruling out a conventional, nuclear or missile attack by one country on the other." The Chinese ignored the proposal, in effect rejecting it. Yet, Brezhnev charged, Peking was willing to enter "the most unprincipled alignments with even the most reactionary forces," so long as they were "anti-Soviet."

For Soviet citizens, his biggest news was that a new constitution will be unveiled at the next party congress, scheduled for 1976. A new charter was necessary, Brezhnev said, to take account of "fundamental changes in Soviet society and the world" since the existing constitution was formulated under Stalin in 1936. Brezhnev added that the new constitution would be submitted to a national referendum. In Soviet political lexicon, that does not mean a mass, single-issue vote but usually a few months of grass-roots discussion, which can be interpreted any way the party desires.

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