Fragmentation May Be Final

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31768, 27 August 1968, Page 17

Fragmentation May Be Final

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) NEW YORK, Aug. 26.

The once monolithic Communist world may have suffered a new, and possibly final, fragmentation this week amid the grim clatter of Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets of Prague, writes Harrison E. Salisbury, of the New York Times News Service, and a former “New York Times” Moscow correspondent. He continues:

Regardless of the immediate outcome in Czechoslovakia, there were a multitude of signs that nothing short of global military order would ever bring back the Communist hegemony imposed by Josef Stalin.

And the damage inflicted on the Communist cause within the Soviet Union might, in the end, prove even more serious.

Russia’s action in Czechoslovakia shattered a Communist world already badly split. Three major Communist states—Jugoslavia, Rumania and China—openly denounced the Moscow action. The two greatest European Communist parties, those of France and Italy, rushed to support beleagued Prague. Standing with Moscow were only East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria. There was a notable coolness in Hungary and even, it seemed, in East Germany. Never had Moscow stood so isolated in the Marxist world. Moreover, within the Soviet Union, the divisive consequences of Russia’s intervention raised questions so explosive that there were those who felt that the most lasting negative consequences would be felt in the Soviet homeland itself.

Just a year ago Moscow was filled with holiday cheer. The whole nation was preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the daring; coup d’etat by which Vladimir Lenin propelled his Bolsheviks into power in Petrograd on November 7, 1917. From the windows behind the high rose-brick Kremlin walls, from which the Politburo gazes out on the world,

the prospects seemed favourable, if not wholly exceptional.

True, there were problems. There was China and the inexplicable deviation of Mao Tse-tung. There was the nagging concern over the American war in Vietnam. And there was worry about the growing mood of restlessness and disaffection among youth and writers, among scientists and poets. But nothing on the horizon seemed to threaten the basic achievements and stability of the Soviet regime. When gypsy fortune-tellers in the Moscow suburbs offered dire predictions that the Soviet Union would not live to celebrate its 50th birthday, some superstitious citizens worried.

But not the Kremlin leadership nor their supporters. To them, fortune-tellers were a relic of the past, a survival of superstitions which had not yet been eradicated by the new and superior science bequeathed by Marx and Lenin.

Distance From Truth

But today, assessing the disarray in the Communist world, there were those who thought that the Moscow crones might have come closer to the truth than anyone suspected. A few months off in the timing, perhaps. Two circumstances supported this view. The first was the self-evident fear and concern which swept the Kremlin last spring with the rise in Prague of a new and liberal Communist regime, a regime which boldly sought to rule without the traditional Communist weapons of censorship, police domination, and a monopoly of political power. The Kremlin rulers quailed before the possibility that the fresh winds from Prague might blow into Moscow, bringing with them burgeoning demands for free speech, for a free press, for freedom of political debate and free competition of political parties.

Never, not even under Lenin, had such freedoms been permitted. To the men in the Kremlin, the possibility that they might have to campaign to win the support of the Soviet publie, and that they might have to stand up in open debate and written argument with free-swinging critics, seemed

to threaten the end of the whole Bolshevik idea. The second concern was a military one, pure and simple. It was a fear that Czechoslovakia might sooner or later slip out of the Warsaw Pact or that its new politics might undermine the shaky East German regime. If Walter Ulbricht went—where would that leave the Soviet reverse “cordon sahitaire”? Would not a powerful reunited Germany swiftly arise, once again a threat to the Soviet Union? These were the dark thoughts which swirled up in Moscow in the wake of Prague’s liberating currents. After months of diplomatic, economic and military pressure, after dozens of confer, ences, barrages of abuse by “Pravda” and grim warnings by Soviet military spokesmen, Soviet troops, with their token contingents from supporting Warsaw Powers, finally intervened. Greater Disunity But the consequences of the intervention did not seem to be those which the Kremlin anticipated. Instead of unity, even unity imposed by the bayonet and the guns of the tanks, there was immediately projected into the Communist world greater disunity than Marxists had ever known.

And, within Russia itself, it seemed likely that the consequences would be even more disastrous. The prevailing currents of liberal thought within the Russian intelligentsia were not likely to be diverted by the spectacle of Russian guns imposing a Russion order on a small Slav Communist State. The attitude of Russian liberals toward Prague had already been clearly set forth in the remarkable manifesto of the Soviet physicist, the father of the Russian H-bomb, Andrei D. Sakharov, made public only three weeks earlier.

“There can be no doubt,” Mr Sakharov wrote, “that we should support their (the Czechs) bold initiative which is so valuable for the future of socialism and all mankind.” Mr Sakharov called for Moscow’s full support for the new Czechoslovakia not only political but economic.

He called on his Government to adopt the same atti-

tudes toward intellectual liberty which Prague had done.

It seemed clear that the brutality of the Muscovite action in Czechoslovakia would reinforce rather than weaken the Russian intelligentsia in their determination to end the debilitating censorship and thought control which, as Mr Sakharov and other liberals noted, was not only damaging Russian development, but a clear violation of the Soviet Constitution.

When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution in Budapest 12 years ago, it seemed that a new era of darkness was about to descend on Eastern Europe. But, within a short period, the Hungarians won greater freedom than they had possessed at any time since the imposition of Communist rule. And within Russia the movement for internal liberalisation was strengthened, not weakened. Internal Effects To many it seemed more than likely that events would follow a parallel course in the wake of the Prague intervention. But the internal Soviet repercussions may be far stronger. It was possible that the Soviet regime would react with a reimposition of Stalinist police controls and terror, a return to the concentration camp system and secret executions. But there was no-one in Moscow who thought that this would work. To try to move in that direction would only bring on the violent explosion which the regime so desperately sought to avoid. The Soviet action in Prague seemed ,to some to echo the last words of the famous authoritarian Russian ruler, Nicholas I, who died in 1855 saying: “After me let them change. But for myself I cannot.”

Nauru On The Air.—President Hammer de Roburt last night officially opened Radio Nauru, the Pacific island’s first radio station. During a five-hour programme by local artists, the President said he hoped the new station would be a source of ideas for better living and help to break down the isolation which remoteness and lack of communications formerly imposed on Nauru, now independent—Nauru, August 26.