Political Perversity

A Soviet insider's view of the coming war with China

The scenario is chilling. China's ethnic minorities, which occupy some 60% of the nation's territory, want to break away from Peking. The inhabitants of Inner Mongolia yearn to unite with the Mongolian People's Republic and the Turkic peoples of Sinkiang with their cousins in Soviet Central Asia. "An exchange of blows," as the author puts it, "may start at any moment." When that happens, hundreds of thousands of "volunteers" on the Soviet side of the Chinese frontier will "come to the aid of [their] brothers in blood and in faith," and the Soviet authorities will be unable to stop them. As the fighting spreads, the Chinese may attack Russia itself. The Soviets consider escalating to nuclear weapons. "It is difficult," the author warns, "to overestimate the scale of the retaliation. . ."

If The Coming Decline of the Chinese Empire were the creation of some hack novelist, it might be dismissed as turgidly written and historically inaccurate--for it is both of those--but it is in fact the work of Victor Louis, 50, Moscow correspondent for the London Evening News, world traveler, bon vivant and a man widely reputed to have close connections with the Soviet KGB. The book thus can be interpreted as a Soviet government fantasy of China's eventual political and geographical disintegration--and a rationale for direct Soviet military intervention.

One expert who so interprets it is Harrison Salisbury, who was asked by Times Books, a subsidiary of the New York Times and the publishers of Louis' effort, to write an introduction. A onetime Moscow correspondent for the Times and author of a book entitled War Between Russia and China, he responded with a blistering attack. "Louis is a longstanding and experienced KGB agent," Salisbury charges in a 14-page "dissenting introduction," and his creation "is a book of spurious content, dubious logic, flagrant untruth . . . What confronts us is political perversity seldom seen." But because of Louis' position, Salisbury adds, his tract "commands our attention."

Louis claims to have worked on The Coming Decline for ten years, roughly the length of time since he became the first Soviet citizen in two decades to visit Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan, secretly, in late 1968. His book, however, is virtually devoid of contemporary sinological research, not to mention eyewitness reporting. Louis draws on czarist-era studies to proclaim that nationalism is flourishing even in Manchuria, though the Manchus have virtually vanished as an identifiable ethnic group, largely because of overwhelming Han Chinese immigration for a century. At one point Louis admits this; at another point he claims, preposterously, that the issue of Manchu nationhood is being debated "heatedly" by scholars. He even concocts a bizarre drama in which the Tibetan Dalai Lama takes up residence in the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator and rallies Tibetans and Mongols--who share the same kind of Buddhism--to separatism.

Louis' fantastic speculations provide strange insights into Soviet thinking about China and the Chinese. To provide evidence for his reasoning, Louis quotes strongly chauvinistic Russian ethnographers and explorers of the 19th century and laces his narrative with chapter headings like "Yellow Colonialism," "They Want to Secede" and "The Aggressor Rebuffed." He argues that China "can hardly be said to have any common cultural makeup" and virtually denies the existence of an official national dialect, Mandarin. He also asserts that the Chinese are not patriotic but only respond to individual leadership.

Understandably enough, Louis makes no mention of Moscow's difficulties with its own ethnic minorities, which constitute 53% of the Soviet Union's population, as compared with a total 6% minority population in China. Yet it was a revolt of the Soviets' restive minorities that provided a central drama a decade ago in the prophecy by Soviet Dissident Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? After serving a term of exile in Siberia, Amalrik was allowed to emigrate to the West in 1976.

In terms of the Sino-Soviet propaganda war, Louis' book is so inflammatory that it could hardly have been published unless he had obtained approval for it at a very high level. The work's timing is surely not coincidental. The Chinese invasion of Viet Nam last February plunged Sino-Soviet relations to a new low, and the U.S. normalization of ties with China revived Moscow's anxiety about a possible Peking-Washington rapprochement, one of the events predicted in Amalrik's Will the Soviet Union Survive?

Louis is no stranger to controversy. He once was arrested by Stalin's police, and Salisbury repeats the report that Louis operated a store inside a concentration camp. He emerged during the Khrushchev era as not only a journalist but a very well connected middleman. His entrepreneurial activities have included attempting to stage a pirated Soviet production of the musical My Fair Lady in 1959, trying to sell Western publishers an unauthorized version of the memoirs of Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, and possibly helping to spirit out of Russia the tapes and manuscripts for Khrushchev Remembers. Louis' luxurious dacha, complete with sauna, clay tennis court and thermostatic wine cellar, suggests a more generous source of income than journalism. Yet Louis heatedly denies any KGB connection and last week professed dismay at the Salisbury introduction. He had agreed to having Salisbury write one, then was upset on reading the result. He tried to have it removed from the book but was reminded that his contract gave him no such right. "At the very least, it is impolite," he complained to TIME'S Bruce Nelan. "They would not do this to an American author, so why do it to a Russian?"

Said Louis: "I was trying to present a Russian way of thinking. In a book like this you have to take sides. I couldn't be an impartial observer." Certainly no one ever accused Louis of that.

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