The Red Tide Ebbs and Flows

For many Americans, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was only the latest in a long, and seemingly unbroken, string of Moscow-sponsored Communist takeovers. Between 1944 and 1948, Albania, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany all fell under Soviet control, either by Soviet army conquest or political subversion. North Korea, which was occupied by Soviet troops, entered Moscow's orbit in 1948, and China the following year, after Mao Tse-tung's armies swept across the country. Five years later, North Viet Nam became Communist, after the peasant armies of Ho Chi Minh humiliated the French at Dien Bien Phu. In 1960, Fidel Castro aligned Cuba with the Kremlin. The 1970s saw the emergence of Marxist, pro-Moscow regimes in Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, South Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia.

The tide has not flowed entirely in Moscow's direction. In 1948, after Tito persisted in pursuing an independent policy, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Corn-inform, the international alliance of Marxist-Leninist states headed by the U.S.S.R. China under Mao grew increasingly upset over Soviet "revisionism" in the early 1960s. All Soviet advisers were expelled, and since then relations with Moscow have varied from cool to hostile. Three other Communist countries are no longer dutiful Soviet satellites. Albania, from 1960 through 1978 a xenophobic bastion of Maoism in the Balkans, now scorns Peking, Washington and Moscow alike. Rumania, although economically and militarily tied to the Warsaw Pact, since 1966 has tried to go its own way in diplomatic matters. North Korea tends to play Moscow and Peking against each other, seeking aid from both.

In the Third World, Moscow's losses have been almost as spectacular as its gains. Soviet influence in Indonesia collapsed with the army's assumption of power in 1966; Sudan crushed its own Communists in 1971, blaming Moscow's Eastern European allies for a coup attempt; and Egypt threw out its Soviet advisers in 1972. Though nominally nonaligned, India tilted toward Moscow after Indira Gandhi signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971. So far, in her second rise to power, Gandhi insists that India will remain genuinely nonaligned. Somalia brusquely expelled the Soviets from its huge missile and naval base at Berbera in 1977 after Moscow backed Ethiopia in the Ogaden War.

Many Third World nations have discovered that the Soviets, for all their support of revolution and liberation movements, can be uncomfortable, even unpleasant, allies. They are generous with arms but stingy with other economic aid, and their advisers are often boorish "ugly Russians." If nothing else, the Soviets are persistent, and they accept setbacks as only temporary. The Kremlin also has a word for regimes that have adopted Communism and the Moscow line: irreversible.

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