Pulling Strings

Soviet aid. bragged Nikita Khrushchev during Nasser's visit to Moscow last month, is "peace-loving, selfless sharing" --and unlike U.S. aid, always offered "without strings.'' But last week the tugging of Russian strings was visible for all to see in every uncommitted capital of the world.

Because Yugoslavia's Communist Tito was getting out of hand with his insistence on "separate roads to Socialism" (TIME, May 5), Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko last week called in Tito's Moscow ambassador and coldly told him that Russia had decided to "postpone" for five years its entire $285 million program of economic aid (aluminum and hydroelectric plants, fertilizer factories) to Yugoslavia.

At first European blush, Gromyko's action seemed to be a match for Secretary Dulles' famed 1956 abrupt withdrawal of U.S. aid to finance Nasser's Aswan Dam. Actually, the Soviet switch was an entirely different matter. Where the U.S. had only withdrawn an offer (which had gone seven months without being accepted, while Nasser tried to wangle better terms), the Russians were reneging on an agreement signed and sealed.

The Yugoslav government denounced the Russian action as an "entirely unilateral cancellation of valid economic agreements, in glaring contradiction with established standards of international relations," and hinted that it might be "compelled" to demand damages for breach of contract. But its only real recourse was to let the world see what a "selfless sharing" benefactor Moscow was.

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