The Crimean Summit

It was quite a coincidence. The way Moscow tells it, the Communist Party boss of every nation in the Soviet bloc --with one notable exception--just happened to be vacationing on Russia's Crimean peninsula last week. Since they were all on hand anyway, even Mongolia's Yumshagin Tsedenbal, why not get together for a little fraternal talk?

The missing party chief was Rumania's independent-minded Nicolae Ceausescu, who was sunning himself on his country's own Black Sea coast. Was he deliberately overlooked by the Kremlin, or did he refuse to attend what was in reality a Communist summit conference? The question was asked with some nervousness in Eastern Europe last week; in August 1968 the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia was preceded by two Warsaw Pact summit meetings from which the leaders of Prague's "Springtime of Freedom" had been excluded.

There are other ominous parallels. The 1968 meetings were accompanied by military maneuvers, and last week a new Warsaw Pact exercise dubbed Opal 71 began in Hungary, uncomfortably close to Rumania's western frontier. Early next week full-scale war games are scheduled to begin in Bulgaria, near Rumania's southern border.

Cozy Relations. Moscow is irritated with Ceausescu for a number of reasons. Rumanian combat units have not participated in Warsaw Pact maneuvers for more than three years. Under a law that he concocted shortly after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, foreign troops may not cross Rumanian territory without permission from the National Assembly. As it happens, the Assembly suddenly went into recess a few days ago. That means that Moscow will have to fly three full divisions, totaling as many as 40,000 men, to the impending war games in Bulgaria, or ship them across the Black Sea--unless it wants to risk marching them through Rumania without official permission.

What most unsettles the Kremlin at the moment, however, is Ceausescu's cozy relations with China, particularly now that Peking and Washington are beginning to speak to one another. The Russians believe that the Rumanian leader helped to open Peking's door to Richard Nixon both before and during his own trip to Peking in June. With 600,000 Russian troops stationed along China's borders and no sign of an end to the Sino-Soviet feud, Moscow considers Ceausescu's conduct a grave breach of Socialist solidarity.

Usual Secrecy. Accordingly, ever since Ceausescu returned from China, the Soviets have been seeking an opportunity to get the Warsaw Pact countries together to censure him for his Asian indiscretions. Two weeks ago, the Soviet Ambassador to Bucharest handed Ceausescu a letter from Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. Foreign diplomats in Rumania believe that the letter advised Ceausescu that a Communist summit was going to be held in the Crimea but they disagree over whether Ceausescu refused an invitation or was snubbed. But as one high-ranking Rumanian official put it, "If we had been invited, we would have participated."

The meeting was surrounded by the usual secrecy; non-Communist observers are not even certain whether it was held at Sochi or 40 miles away at Pitsunda. Presumably, the conferees touched on a wide range of foreign policy problems --Berlin, the Soviet setback in the Sudan, China. What most interested Kremlinologists was the final conference communique containing a short but sharp denunciation of "leftwing and right-wing opportunism." Translated, that means China on the left and Yugoslavia and Rumania on the right.

Ceausescu's Law. In view of such criticisms, how has Rumania's leader managed to survive? For one thing, he has remained markedly conservative in domestic affairs. That has made it impossible for the Soviets to accuse him of unorthodoxy. According to what Western observers call Ceausescu's Law, the more daring the foreign policy, the more rigidly conservative the domestic climate. Accordingly, Ceausescu followed up his Peking trip with a tough crackdown on those "invidious Western influences" that the Soviets regularly criticize as bourgeois and decadent.

Rumanians dubbed the new policy, which was announced only two weeks after Ceausescu's return from China, the mini-culturala, after Peking's Cultural Revolution. Among the casualties so far have been acid-rock music on state radio and in youth clubs (too Western), the movie Midnight Cowboy (perverted) and the American TV series

The Untouchables (too violent). Ceausescu evidently believes that the mini-culturala begins at home; his teen-age son Valentin appeared last week with his formerly long locks closely shorn. He explained to friends that his father had ordered the haircut.

Will Nicolae Ceausescu's cultural purity save him from Russia's wrath? In all likelihood, the Russian-Rumanian crisis will prove to be nothing more than a Soviet campaign of intimidation. The situation is significantly different from Czechoslovakia in 1968; the Russians know that the Rumanians, like the Yugoslavs, would fight if they were attacked. Even so, the current war of nerves is an uncomfortable reminder to many East Europeans of that terrible August three years ago.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.