The Confrontation

A troupe of Patagonian jugglers would have received a warmer welcome from the Kremlin. Not a single Soviet reporter or photographer was on hand when the men from Peking appeared at Moscow airport; Pravda did not even mention their arrival. After months of invective, accusations and counteraccusations, the great confrontation between Soviet and Chinese Party delegations was finally at hand. East and West watched the showdown--or what could be seen of it--with equal fascination.

Although Nikita Khrushchev suddenly discovered urgent business in Kiev, the Kremlin was stiffly correct about it all, sent out its chief dialectician, lanky, austere Mikhail Suslov, to meet the visitors. Head of Peking's seven-man mission: Teng Hsiao-ping, secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party. As Teng stepped out of a Soviet TU-104 jet, a crowd of Chinese residents in Moscow, watched closely by a Chinese army colonel, sent up a cheer.

Suslov smiled, stepped forward and shook Teng's hand. But the Russian omitted the usual brief welcoming address, instead politely suggested that Teng might like a two-hour rest before getting down to business. When a Chinese delegate remarked on the chilly 57DEG temperature, a Muscovite Red replied: "We hope it will get warmer." Fresh Insults. In one sense, things undoubtedly got warmer when both sides met behind the massive walls of a rarely used mansion in the Lenin Hills section of Moscow. Suslov and Teng exchanged toasts, but that was just routine. For under the pose of politeness, the Sino-Soviet quarrel was becoming ruder than ever. Without explanation, Peking suddenly withdrew its two entries from an international film festival about to open in Moscow. And just before the party leaders met, Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung exchanged a fresh round of insults over Red China's 25-point denunciation of Soviet policy. Although the Soviets themselves refused to publish it, Moscow complained last week that Chinese agents handed out the document in cities from Odessa to Leningrad and even in the atomic research center of Dubna, near Moscow. Chinese crews on the Peking-Moscow express scattered bundles of the manifesto through coach windows, used the train's public-address system to read the Chinese charges to the captive Soviet audience.

After Moscow expelled three Chinese diplomats for having a hand in this extraordinary circulation campaign, Peking leaders ostentatiously welcomed them home with bouquets of flowers. At the same time, the Chinese condemned the Soviet move as a violation of its right, as a government, to circulate statements abroad. Nonsense, replied the Soviets. What gave the Chinese the idea that they could "behave as though they were in one of the provinces of China"? Such tactics, fumed the Kremlin, violated Soviet sovereignty: "It is obvious that instead of searching for ways to a rapprochement, the Chinese leadership aims at aggravating differences." Equally Matched. If that was Peking's purpose, it could find no better man than Teng. Short, stocky, in his 60s, Teng was believed badly crippled in the Chinese civil war, still has a limp and a nervous tic when he speaks--which does not keep him from speaking often and abrasively. No stranger to the Russians, he attended two previous Moscow meetings on the split--in 1957 and in 1960. A veteran of Mao's Long March to Yenan in the 1930s, Teng came to prominence as a political commissar in the army, since 1952 has risen to a place among the top four or five men in Red China's hierarchy.

In prestige and personality he is a match for Suslov, 60, who for years was Stalin's ideological mouthpiece, and now supplies Khrushchev with the theoretical justifications for political strategy.

Inevitably, Western diplomats speculated whether the Red Chinese and the Soviets would sever party connections or diplomatic relations, carry the feud to a summit session of world Communist leaders, or merely agree to continue to be disagreeable. Whatever happened, the gravest schism in the history of Communism was at hand.

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