Must All Those Troops Stay?

There was a curtained irony to the whole affair. For months, Moscow had watched with glee as Charles de Gaulle hacked away intransigently at the NATO alliance. Now, on the other side of the eroding Iron Curtain, the Russians were getting a taste of the same galling medicine. Out of many Eastern European capitals last week came reports of a Rumanian round-robin message to the nations of the Warsaw Pact.*

It charged that Soviet troops were no longer needed in Eastern Europe, since the threat of U.S. aggression had faded. It proposed that any nation desiring Russian troops on its soil should conclude bilateral treaties with Moscow to keep them. The message also suggested that Moscow should gain the unanimous approval of all Warsaw Pact nations before it ever uses its tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. And, asked the Rumanians, why should not the command of the Warsaw Pact military alliance be rotated among member nationalities, rather than remaining solely in Russian hands?

Though a Rumanian Foreign Ministry spokesman blandly denied that such a letter had been circulated, there was little doubt of its existence. Its corrosive contents fit perfectly with the nationalistic attitudes of Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu, whose stinging anti-Soviet speech only a week earlier had triggered a flying visit from Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev.

Tremors & Torpedoes. Just what immediate benefit Ceausescu hoped to gain by the letter remained obscure. After all, Soviet troops left Rumania in 1958, at the insistence of "Ceausescu's predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. There are still 22 Russian divisions in East Germany; certainly some could be called back, but to withdraw all of them suddenly would probably cause the regime of Walter Ulbricht to collapse. Poland still has three Soviet divisions, but the Russians remain unobtrusive, and Polish Party Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka paranoically fears that a Russian pullback would encourage German encroachment on the Oder-Neisse line. Only Hungary's Janos Kadar could profit from the removal of the four or five Russian divisions still in his country: they serve as a constant reminder of Moscow's brutal role in repressing the 1956 Hungarian revolt. Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, like Rumania, house no Russian troops.

Still, Ceausescu has something to gain merely by causing tremors in the Iron Curtain. At the Soviet 23rd Party Congress last March, Brezhnev called for a "strengthening" of the Communist alliance, and later hinted at a Warsaw Pact meeting to be held, of all places, in Bucharest. Such a meeting would dangerously strengthen Russian restraint on Rumania's independence of action. By circulating the anti-alliance note, Ceausescu might well have torpedoed the meeting, and at the same time won greater maneuvering room for his own nation.

* Members: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Rumania and Russia. Albania is still a nominal member, though since 1960 it has sided with Red China and no longer attends Warsaw Pact meetings.

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