Swapping Slurs

On the surface, relations between the Soviet Union and Red China seem to have improved markedly in recent months. Last fall, the two Communist superpowers exchanged ambassadors for the first time in more than three years. Next, they signed a trade agreement for an undisclosed amount. Two weeks ago, they signed a new protocol governing navigation on the rivers that run along their Far Eastern border--including the Ussuri, site of bloody clashes in 1969.

Despite these signals of diminished tensions, however, all is far from well between the two. For the past six months, in Chinese-language broadcasts over Radio Moscow and "Radio Peace and Progress," the Soviet propaganda outlet for the Far East, Russia has relentlessly attacked the Maoist regime for everything from its Viet Nam policy to its intellectual rigor mortis. Two weeks before the river protocol was signed, Radio Moscow attacked Peking for "cutting down relations with socialist countries while broadening contacts with imperialist countries." What apparently bothered Moscow most was the fact that China's trade with its former ideological allies has dropped from almost $3 billion in 1959 to less than $800 million. China's trade with Russia alone plunged from $2 billion to a puny $57 million in 1969. Meanwhile, trade with non-Communist countries grew from $1.3 billion to $3.1 billion.

Almost invariably, Radio Moscow saves its choicest epithets for Chairman Mao Tse-tung. One recent broadcast described his thought as "an unprincipled mixture of Utopian and egalitarian ideas of the peasants' uprising, Confucianism, anarchism, Trotskyism, chauvinism, Chinese feudalism, national bourgeois ideas and other ideas contrary to Marxist principles." Mao has been excoriated as an unsteady romantic who has sponsored a gigantic "cult of the individual."

Restored Capitalism. China has remained relatively moderate in its official references to the Soviet Union. After the Polish riots, however, the official party newspaper People's Daily gleefully described the uprising as proof that "the colonial rule of Soviet revisionist social imperialism in East Europe has fallen into a crisis, and that modern revisionism has gone further bankrupt." Poland, the Peking paper added, had become a "dependency of Soviet revisionism." For those comments, the Soviet party newspaper Pravda last week blasted China for "impudent interference" in Poland's internal affairs.

Most often Peking attacks Moscow indirectly. Thus Radio Peking last week broadcast a statement from the Australian Communist Party branding Russia's rulers as "the new czars. They have restored capitalism in Russia. Their armies occupy other countries, their navies roam the world in the direct tradition of imperialism." The statement might have been attributed to someone from Down Under, but Moscow was well aware that it reflected the thoughts of the people next door.

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