Press Gang

If there was any doubt in anybody's mind that the great Kremlin apparat has ganged up to brand Tito once again as a dangerous heretic, that doubt vanished last week. The Chinese Communists, last to speak, piled in, throwing the roughest punches aimed at Tito since Stalin's Cominform war of 1948. Yugoslavia's latest program for "separate roads to socialism," said Peking's People's Daily, is "out-and-out revisionism"--a Communist dirty word for any deviation from Moscow's line--and "viciously slanders the socialist camp." Its "evolutionary views," said the Chinese with a hint that the Yugoslavs should get themselves new leaders, "harbor a wild attempt to induce surrender to capitalism [and] fit in exactly with what the imperialists and particularly the American imperialists need." A few days later, after a full Central Committee meeting in Moscow, Pravda warned that if Yugoslavia's rulers think the Soviet Union is taking advantage of its economic relations with their country, they can be "relieved of such 'exploitation.' " Soviet President Kliment Voroshilov canceled his scheduled state visit to Yugoslavia.

The abrupt, frenetic and clumsy switch against Tito suggested that Russia has now concluded that any benefits to be had from Tito's friendship are outweighed by the disorder in the satellites caused by Tito's talk of separate roads to socialism. When in doubt, the Russians hang on to what they have, and never mind opinions in the rest of the world.

The need for a proclaimed unanimity in the satellites works hardest on Poland's Party Chief Wladyslaw Gomulka. Last week he paid his first visit to Budapest since the 1956 popular risings. At the airport he shook hands stiffly with Janos

Kadar and other Hungarian party brass. But at a rally next night the man whose insistence on Poland's separate road to socialism forced Khrushchev one night in October 1956 to call off Soviet armed intervention in Warsaw, for the first time spoke the required, craven words in support of Russian repression in Budapest: "We regard as correct and necessary the decision taken by the Soviet Union to give help to the forces of socialism in your country at the time. It was an international obligation on the part of the U.S.S.R., in the interests of the Hungarian people, peace and all socialist states."

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