Not in the Mood

As a good Communist, Premier Aleksei Kosygin could hardly let China fire the only Red missiles against the U.S. over Viet Nam. So last week he turned a friendship rally for Indian Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi into a launching platform for his most violent attack to date on the U.S. involvement.

Mrs. Gandhi had come to Moscow in hope of lining up Soviet support for a peace conference that would allow both sides to stop shooting without losing prestige. She had been allowed to make her pitch over the Russian television network, where she echoed the U.S. argument that the Vietnamese people "must be left free to decide their own destiny without interference from out side forces or pressures." But Kosygin was not catching it. Without mentioning his Indian visitor by name, he told the 2,000 guests assembled in the Great Kremlin Palace that such arguments for a face-saving peace were "absurd." "It is not for us to be distressed over the decline of United States prestige," he proclaimed heatedly. "We have other problems."

Accusing the U.S. of "vandalism and barbarism on an international scale," Kosygin repeated the old pledge that Russia was prepared to send "volunteers" to fight in Viet Nam if Hanoi called for help. So incensed at the U.S. bombing of North Viet Nam had the Kremlin become, in fact, that it pulled the 123-man Russian team out of an international track meet scheduled for this week in Los Angeles. Such were the atrocities, said a terse Kremlin announcement, that Russia obviously could not "take part in a match with athletes of a country from which this aggression comes."

All in all, the Russians were hardly in a mood to greet British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who flew into town at week's end. As was Mrs. Gandhi's, Wilson's mission was peace in Viet Nam; and for his own political reasons, he was desperately hoping for success. Doubtless, in the back of his mind was the need for a diversion from the economic trouble at home (see WORLD BUSINESS). For all his negotiating skill, Wilson could hardly have expected much as his Comet4 jet touched down in Moscow. The Kremlin had made it amply clear that it was not ready or willing to talk seriously about a negotiated Viet Nam peace.

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