"If We Act Like Children"

In the Communist system, the top dog must also be top dogmatist. In seven years as the Soviet Union's highly practical boss, Nikita Khrushchev has worked out a doctrine of coexistence between Communism and the West to suit the realities of a highly developed Soviet industrial society. The doctrine has come under increasing attack from the militant revolutionaries of Communist China (TIME, June 27). Last week, calling Eastern European Communist leaders to his side, Khrushchev went before the Rumanian Party Congress in Bucharest to give his first direct answer to Mao Tse-tung's challenge to his ideological primacy among world Communists.

"In our day," said Khrushchev, "only madmen and maniacs launch a call for a new war." Why, in these "totally changed historical conditions," should Communists keep "mechanically repeating" Lenin's 1918 dictum that war between capitalist and Communist states is "inevitable"?

Said Khrushchev, "We live in a time when we have neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin with us. If we act like children who, studying the alphabet, compile words from letters, we shall not get to go very far."

Has the man who downgraded Stalin now, in effect, downgraded Lenin too? Bulgarian Party Boss Todor Zhivkov, rising in his turn to hail the supreme chief, pronounced Khrushchev's speech "historic." The other satellite chieftains chimed in. But Communist China's Delegate Peng Chen was not impressed. Peking newspapers heaped scorn on "modern revisionists" who, "frightened out of their wits by the imperialists' blackmail of nuclear war, exaggerated the consequences of the destructiveness of nuclear war and begged imperialism for peace at any cost." The same newspapers noted only in a sentence that Khrushchev had also made some remarks and received "warm applause." The rift was public, and it was growing.

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