The Kremlin Express

The trip had all the mystery of a ride on the old Orient Express. While a raging blizzard shut down the airports of Eastern Europe, the three top men of Russia sped by train from Moscow across the white wastes to the Masu rian Lake district of Poland 600 miles away. There, in a hunting lodge, Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev, Premier Aleksei Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny huddled with Polish Party Chief Wladyslaw Gomulka. Then it was all aboard again for a visit by the Russians to East German Party Boss Walter Ulbricht before heading back home. The bland communiques issued at each stop hardly illuminated what pressing business could have made fellow travelers of the Kremlin troika.

It was fair to suspect that the odyssey was aimed in part at placating Ulbricht, who has been reading some bad news with a Moscow dateline in the papers these days. When the Soviet ambassador handed a note to the Bonn government on the Berlin issue last week, the Kremlin seemed to be serving notice that it now wants to deal directly with Bonn on issues involving the divided city. In the past, it has almost always let Ulbricht present the East Bloc's terms. The note repeats Moscow's apparent willingness to recognize the four-power partition of Berlin as permanent, provided that Bonn's politicians stop speaking of West Berlin as part of the Bundesrepublik and reduce their visits to the city.

The troika has its own worries, however, and no doubt also took to the rails to coordinate strategy for the conference of Communist chiefs scheduled to convene in Budapest next month. With Rumania and Yugoslavia boycotting the conference, and with a new and perhaps more freewheeling regime in Czechoslovakia, Ulbricht and Gomulka are left as the Kremlin's most trusted friends in its flagging campaign to isolate the renegade Chinese Communists. Any flop in the Budapest meeting, which is designed as a prelude to a larger assemblage in Moscow, would be a serious setback for Russian foreign policy.

And the Kremlin express may have had yet another goal in its Polish stop: to head off the ousting of Gomulka that was rumored imminent. His most likely replacement is Edward Giereck, a Politburo member in his mid-50s who was once a miner and is now party boss of the big Katowice industrial region of Poland.

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