Bordering on Madness

In public and in private, relations between the Soviet Union and Red China grow chillier and chillier. In attacking the U.N., the Red Chinese now apply to it the worst epithet in their lexicon:

"Under U.S.-Soviet control." The ram paging Red Guards exhibit a fondness for harassing the few Russians remain ing in China, recently even jostled and insulted a Soviet Friendship Delegation visiting Peking. The Guards hurled such "vicious, provocative slogans against the Soviet Union," reported Delegation Leader Viktor Maevsky last week, that the Russians packed up and went home.

While the West sees and appreciates this aspect of the falling-out, there is an other, lesser known and potentially more dangerous side: the rising of ten sion along the long Sino-Soviet border.

Russia and China have been wrestling for years along the vast, sparsely settled 4,100-mile common frontier, from Kha barovsk in the east to Kirghiz in the west. The first recorded battle between Russian and Chinese troops took place in the Amur River valley in the 1680s, and since Sino-Soviet relations began to deteriorate in earnest in 1956, repeated incidents have occurred. Major trouble flared in 1960 and again in 1962, when Pravda reported that 5,000 border "in cidents" had occurred within twelve months. The Russians have since used troops to evict Chinese squatters from islands in the Amur, and Soviet river boats are periodically fired on by the Chinese. The Chinese have cleared a twelve-mile border strip along the Sinkiang border as a security measure, and pumped in Chinese immigrants to farm --and defend -- the territory. Russia is trying to do the same thing in Siberia, hoping to get a long-term economic pact with Japan to develop the Siberian economy.

Russia has long kept an estimated twelve to 15 divisions in Eastern Asia facing China, and recently moved two to four more highly mobile, mechanized divisions there. The reason is that with the excesses of the Red Guards raging across the Chinese mainland, Moscow now finds itself bordering on madness.

The Soviets, says West Berlin Kremlinologist Richard Loewenthal, "regard the extremists-- the Mao-Lin Piao faction--as very actively anti-Soviet, and they have recently lost hope that in the struggle inside China the extremists can be defeated." Ironically, what worries the Russians most is not a major Chinese attack, but gradually expanding Chinese guerrilla infiltration of the porous border area. As the Russians are uncomfortably aware, the Chinese have for years laid claim to thousands of square miles of land that now lie within the Soviet Union, and still record it on their maps as Chinese territory.

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