The Russian Equation

It may have been pure coincidence. First, reports filtered out of Moscow that the leaders of North Viet Nam and the Soviet Union had met secretly on the Black sea. Then the President of the U.S. rose in remote Arco, Idaho, and, in his first speech on U.S.-Soviet relations in many months, urged an end to the cold war and a new spirit of "common endeavor" between Moscow and Washington. Whether or not the two events were linked, it was suddenly obvious that there is the possibility of a dramatic shift in the direction of the Viet Nam war.

President Johnson is approaching a November election and, like any U.S. President, would welcome an honorable end to the war. At the same time, it must be slowly dawning on the North Vietnamese that the cost of the war will inexorably rise and that they no longer have a chance of military victory. The Russians, while enjoying the American discomfiture, certainly do not want the war to escalate to the point where they will be drawn into it any further. And the Chinese are involved in such a fanatical internal purge that they have sent shivers throughout Asia and further widened the Sino-Soviet rift.

No Threat. Against this setting, President Johnson last week openly invited the Soviets to agree finally to end decades of mutual distrust. "Both of us possess unimaginable power," said the President. "Our responsibility to the world is heavier than that ever borne by two nations at the same time. Our common task is now this: to search for every possible area of agreement that might enlarge, no matter how slightly or how slowly, the prospects for cooperation." Solemnly he declared: "The dogmas and vocabularies of the cold war were enough for one generation. The world must not now founder in the backwaters of old and stagnant passions." Then the President of the U.S. pointedly noted that the war in Viet Nam posed no threat to "the vital interests of the Soviet Union" and "does not have to stop us from finding new ways of dealing with one another." The President spoke barely a week after North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong and Defense Minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, according to diplomats, flew to the Black Sea, after a two-day layover in Peking, to meet vacationing Communist Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Aleksei Kosygin. The presence of the Hanoi leaders was never formally acknowledged by the Russians, and just what happened behind the guarded gates of the vacation villa is, of course, a matter for speculation.

Hardly Happy. Western observers noted that, despite their hard-lining public stand on Viet Nam, the Russians have never been particularly happy about the war there. But to retain credibility in their struggle with Red China for paramountcy in the Communist world and to avoid any sign of weakness, they have flatly rejected appeals from Westerners--especially from Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson last July--to help in launching negotiations that would end the war. "If you want to talk peace," they have said, in effect, "go to Hanoi." For their part, Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, while scathingly denouncing Hanoi, Peking and Communists in general on the question of Viet Nam, have consistently treated Russia with circumspection, taking care to burn no bridges to Moscow.

U.S. diplomats are convinced that the minute Hanoi begins really hurting and asks Moscow for a rescue, the Russians will make every effort to arrange negotiations. Moscow, after all, has its own gnawing domestic problems, and its leaders can hardly be happy about sending costly military aid to Hanoi while they are regularly forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Western wheat. And the North Vietnamese may now be hurting. Since the U.S. began bombing the Hanoi-Haiphong oil depots on June 29, no tankers have discharged petroleum at Haiphong.

Worried & Obdurate. It is entirely conceivable, of course, that Hanoi's emissaries were in Russia not to explore the possibility of peace talks but to demand more military aid. Though they are being damaged, the North Vietnamese have shown no inclination to talk peace on their own; in fact, they seem to have grown in obduracy. Aside from their concern over losing prestige in Asia, they are worried that the Viet Cong guerrillas will lose heart and defect once peace talks start--or else rebel against Hanoi's leadership.

Still another possible reason for the visit is Hanoi's alarm at events north of its border. Red China today is a country gone berserk, seized with a frenzy compounded of xenophobia and frantic dogmatism (see THE WORLD). The Soviet press has carried lengthy, sarcastic accounts of the rampages of the arrogant young Red Guards, and one disturbed Russian last week told a New York Times correspondent: "This sounds almost like Nazi Germany in the 1930s." Hanoi's purpose could have been to secure a guarantee of Russian help in the event of some unpredictable Chinese move.

If it was a new interest in peace that sent Hanoi's men hurrying to the Black Sea, the vehicles for talks are readily available. For one, there is the Geneva Conference that carved up French Indo-China in 1954. For another, there is the all-Asian peace parley suggested separately by Thailand's Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman and Republican Senatorial Candidate Charles Percy of Illinois, among others. Both the Johnson Administration and the G.O.P. have endorsed that idea. Hanoi, so far, has thumbed it down.

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