AGGRESSION AND REPRESSION

The echoes of Soviet tanks clanking into Czechoslovakia were still reverberating throughout Europe and the world last week when the ominous rumblings of a new--and potentially far more dangerous--Soviet aggression sounded. The target this time was Rumania, the Warsaw Pact nation that has long defied Moscow's hegemony in Eastern Europe by insisting on its right to an independent foreign policy and has unwaveringly supported the Czechoslovaks in their triumphs and tragedy. There was every prospect that the Rumanians, unlike the Czechoslovaks, would fight should the Soviets invade. The Rumanian Ambassador to Bonn formally informed the West German Foreign Ministry that the Rumanian army had been issued orders to shoot the first invaders.

Along Rumania's long border with Bulgaria, Hungary and the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact forces were gathering. The Soviet propaganda organs turned the full force of their venom against Rumania and its party leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, and the press in Moscow's allied capitals followed dutifully. So similar was the pattern of visible and intelligence-monitored Soviet activity to what preceded the invasion of Czechoslovakia that an alarmed President Lyndon Johnson spoke out. Though he did not specifically cite Rumania in an otherwise routine speech before a San Antonio milk producers' convention, he made his meaning clear. "There are rumors," he said, "that this action [against Czechoslovakia] might be repeated elsewhere in the days ahead in Eastern Europe. We cannot and we must not return in the year 1968 to a world of unbridled aggression. Let no one unleash the dogs of war."

Galvanized NATO. As the Rumanians prepared to resist (see following story), so did the Yugoslavs, though a direct Soviet attack on the premier rebels of the Communist camp seemed ruled out by geography. Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito and Ceausescu conferred on common defense plans in the event that both nations should be struck simultaneously. Tito then canceled all army leaves and recalled some army reserves. Yugoslav tanks, in a pointed show of force, rumbled through Belgrade and moved into position along the Bulgarian border. Together, the Yugoslav and Rumanian armies total some 395,000 men. Most Yugoslav observers doubted that Tito would employ his forces to aid Rumania alone. But the grim prospect remained that if the Soviets tried to overrun Rumania and a shooting war erupted, the Czechoslovaks might well take up arms against their occupiers, and a Balkan war might catch fire and spread to Yugoslavia.

It was a horrifying prospect for Western European statesmen, already shaken by the unexpected Soviet crushing of Czechoslovakia. Last week it be came increasingly plain that Czechoslovakia was indeed crushed, that any reports of a compromise in Moscow were a sham, and that all the promises of freedom and reform in the country were to be obliterated by the Soviet occupiers for a long time to come. By that grim process, the Kremlin was altering the context of East-West dealings as well. Though the Soviet leaders insist that the intervention in Czechoslovakia is a domestic matter, it inevitably affects, and chills, U.S.-Soviet relations.

European diplomats, who for years have criticized the U.S. for not being more ardent in the pursuit of detente with the Soviet Union, were now urging the U.S. to be cautious. The West Germans were so alarmed that Foreign Minister Willy Brandt asked the U.S., France and Britain to send formal warnings to Russia against invading the Federal Republic, and Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger called for a summit meeting of NATO to "breathe new life back into this humdrum organization, which has become tired and flabby." Actually, the renewed Soviet aggression against Prague had already galvanized NATO. The NATO Council, the organization's highest civil authority, has convened in seven emergency meetings since the invasion of Czechoslovakia. France, in an ironic turnabout, has participated fully each time. As the State Department pointed out: "We are reviewing with our allies what the implications may be for existing arrangements to provide for our common security."

Waiting for Her Dubcek. Still, the severest impact was on the Soviet bloc. The Stalinist crackdown on Dubcek was a clear signal for other bloc bosses to get tough with dissidents in their own countries. Writers and intellectuals could expect new suppression, the press tighter censorship. Travel restrictions and all other contacts with the West were likely to be tightened.

Some East bloc bosses were likely to see their power challenged as a consequence of the invasion. Hungary's Jaanos Kadar, who played the puppet for the Soviets in the suppression of the 1956 uprising, enhanced his slim popularity at home earlier this year by paying lip service to Dubcek's reforms. Now, by allowing Hungarian troops to march with the Soviets into Czechoslovakia, he has lost whatever liberal support he commanded. At the same time, a faction under Central Committee Secretary Bela Biszku accuses him of being too soft. Similarly, Polish Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka opened himself to attack from a nationalist clique headed by General Mieczyslavv Moczar for having sullied Polish prestige by participating in an attack on a neighbor.

In addition to power struggles, East bloc leaders undoubtedly felt qualms about the sympathy that their people managed to express for the Czechoslovaks. "Poland is waiting for her Dubcek," said leaflets in some Polish cities. Petitions in support of the reformist Prague regime circulated in Hungary. In Walter Ulbricht's walled-in Berlin, East Germans brought so many bouquets of sympathy to the Czechoslovak embassy that Czechoslovak diplomats had to use milk bottles as vases. In a clumsy act of intimidation, the East German police padlocked the small pub across from the Czechoslovak embassy and temporarily took into custody the customers inside. The next day, some of the workers who were detained there showed up to sign the visitors' book in the embassy.

Such small acts as these are, of course, what has moved the men in the Kremlin to desperate reaction against Czechoslovakia and perhaps Rumania. Their responses are clearly those of fearful men, and in them is exposed not the Soviet Union's strength but its weakness. It was almost with compassion that a Czechoslovak editorialist in Bratislava Pravda, before the censorship closed down on him, observed that "not Czechoslovakia, but the great power Russia, has arrived at the crossroads of history. It arrived with tanks, troop carriers and hungry and grimy soldiers who failed to understand why they were sent. Let us remember the philosopher who said: 'Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends.' "

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