The Winter-Garden Summit

Along the snow-banked road to Moscow's Vnukovo airport, the well-padded commissars of the Kremlin whizzed back and forth last week like commuting suburbanites. Day after day they rode in portly twosomes to welcome the Communist bosses of ten satellites. One afternoon, a round dozen of them wheeled out, led by rotund Nikita Khrushchev, to greet the guest of honor, China's lean, scowling chief of state, Liu Shao-chi, 62. The presence of Liu and other rulers of Communist states barred from the U.N., as well as Communist Party chieftains from all around the world, made Moscow's gathering the biggest assemblage of Communist satraps since 1957, bigger by far than the convocation of satellite bosses that Khrushchev whistled up for the U.N. Assembly meeting in September.

Officially, the Red leaders had arrived in Moscow to help celebrate the 43rd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Actually, they had been marshaled to reaffirm the primacy of Soviet leadership at a "Red summit," and thereby head off a power struggle between Peking and Moscow.

As he stepped from the Soviet jetliner at Vnukovo, Chairman Liu raised his arms in salute to Chairman Khrushchev. But on the eve of Liu's departure, Peking had seized on the pretext of the publication of a fourth volume of Mao Tse-tung's selected works to print an "introduction"' by General Fu Chung, in which the general pointedly quoted old Mao dicta on war and peace and, inferentially, challenged Khrushchev's favorite doctrine of peaceful coexistence. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," quoted Fu. "Politics is war that sheds no blood while war is bloodshedding politics." Against the fearful power of nuclear arms, Fu spoke for the masters of 670 million Chinese: "It is man who is the leading and decisive factor. Though atom bombs have huge and destructive power, they will never be able to occupy territories or settle a fight. The issue of a future war will not be decided by guided missiles or atom bombs. It will be decided by man."

"Peace Is Inevitable." An icy drizzle fell next morning as Chairman Liu stood beside Khrushchev and Soviet War Minister Rodion Malinovsky atop the Lenin-Stalin tomb to review the traditional parade through Red Square. The military parade lasted eight minutes, just long enough to flaunt a thumping train of Russian rockets, including a slim newcomer called the Silver Needle, which the Soviet press claimed was the kind that downed U.S. Pilot Francis Powers' U-2 last spring.

At the reception that followed, Khrushchev proclaimed: "Peace is inevitable. War will not help us reach our goal--it will spoil it. We must rest on the position of coexistence and nonintervention, and eventually Communism will be in force all over the earth." Offering toast after toast, Khrushchev seemed in high spirits. "They say that in the Congo the Soviet Union was beaten," he cried. "We say those who laugh last laugh best."

Leadership Is Indivisible. Then Khrushchev set his glass down and led Liu and 46 other Communist chieftains up the stairs to the Kremlin's green-tiled Winter Garden Room to open his "Red summit'' meeting. He had tried in vain to arrange a compromise at the Bucharest meeting last June. He had gone to lengths that flabbergasted Westerners, Afro-Asians and apparently even his own comrades at the U.N. to show that he could comport himself as militantly as any Peking proponent of revolutionary violence. Now, presumably convinced that anything but peaceful coexistence is suicidal for Soviet Russia, he had dug in his heels, demanded that all Communists acknowledge his truth--and his supremacy--in ideology as in strength in the Communist world.

A paper had been drafted, and it was unlikely that Liu had gone to Moscow except to sign it. Yet whatever the words that papered over the rift between Moscow and Peking, victory had palpably eluded Khrushchev. Mao Tse-tung, China's No. 1 Communist and the senior theorist of the Communist world, had stayed in Peking (where last week he issued the usual dutiful acknowledgment that the Soviet Union "heads the Socialist camp"). By his absence, Mao deprived Khrushchev of acquiescence at the one point where acquiescence counts decisively in the Communist faith--at the summit itself.

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