On the Anniversary

After Stalin's 70th birthday in 1949, it took Pravda 22 months to print all the names of his well-wishers. Last week, on the tenth anniversary of the tyrant's death, there was not a single mention by press or radio of the man Nikita Khrushchev once fulsomely praised as "our great leader, our friend and father, the greatest man of our epoch." In all of Moscow's millions, only a single anonymous soul dared to pay respects--with three rubles worth of yellow mimosa on Stalin's black marble slab near the Kremlin wall.

But tiny Albania, seizing any excuse to defy the Soviets, was gushing Stalin's praise. All over the country, monuments to the dead dictator were hung with garlands of flowers; Tirana newspapers published his picture and babbled their "love and profound respect for his teachings," Red China might also have been expected, to use the occasion to glorify Stalin's memory, but remembering the dictator's open distrust of his Asian comrades, Peking chose not to be hypocritical.

Instead, Mao Tse-tung took the occasion to launch his toughest, most strident blast at Moscow since the Sino-Soviet squabble began. A 60,000-word broadside in Peking's theoretical journal Red Flag declared: "Certain people, though calling themselves Marxist-Leninists, are in fact muddleheaded; they talk drivel . . . They either make endless concessions to the enemy and thus commit the error of capitulationism, or act recklessly and thus commit the error of adventurism." Peking added contemptuously that Communists like Russia's Khrushchev, Italy's Togliatti and France's Thorez, who advocated "peaceful" revolution in the West, were guilty of "parliamentary cretinism."

Red China's new tone made the squabble for supremacy in the Communist world sound all but irreconcilable. "If it is a case of masters wielding clubs over the heads of servants, calling for unity, then what is actually meant is a split," declared Red Flag. Switching to another metaphor, Peking intoned ominously that "now there are two watches" by which Communists can tell the time. "Which is to be the master watch?"

Moscow did not shout back last week; but it could not long remain silent, lest Khrushchev appear to be the "coward" that Mao now called him. Now that the Chinese Reds have nailed their theses tothe Kremlin wall, some men in Moscow would be thinking of excommunication. Stalin's posthumous excommunication took only three years to accomplish; and already the Sino-Soviet quarrel has raged for longer than that.

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