Bringing Down Thunderbolts

Russia today is ruled by a collective leadership, and Westerners naturally wonder who is on top or who is fighting whom inside that group. Soviet authorities are extremely sensitive about such speculation, insisting that all is harmony within the Kremlin leadership.

They also do not like foreign correspondents who speak fluent Russian and develop a wide circle of unsanctioned contacts in Moscow. On those counts, the correspondent that has bothered them most of late is the Washington Post's Anatole Shub, 41, who has been in Moscow for the past two years. Last week the Soviets expelled "Tony" Shub from Russia.

The move reflected a growing Soviet campaign to choke off contacts between foreign newsmen and Soviet citizens, most notably the intellectuals who some times slip protest manifestoes to Western journalists. Since last April, Shub and the New York Times' 's Henry Kamm have been barred from traveling beyond a 25-mile radius from Moscow.

Chinese Threat. The Soviet action also showed an intense official annoyance at Shub's reporting, especially a recent article that appeared in the International Herald Tribune under the intriguing if overblown headline: CAN THE SOVIET UNION LAST UNTIL 1980?

"That brought down the thunderbolts," said Shub after he flew out to London. The article focused on the threat of war with China and speculated that the dissident minority groups in the Soviet Union's western borderlands might seize the opportunity to revolt against Soviet rule. In other articles, Shub has delineated the possible power struggles within the Kremlin and described the plight of the Soviet intellectuals, with whom he has close ties.

Since the Soviets knew that Shub was scheduled to leave Moscow in July for a new assignment, his expulsion raised the question of why they had chosen at this late date to make an issue of his reporting. Foreign diplomats and correspondents in Moscow surmised that the Soviets wanted to make an example of him in the hopes of discouraging similar reporting by other newsmen. In retaliation, the U.S. at week's end ordered a Tass correspondent based in Washington to get out of the country within 48 hours.

Twice Forced To Leave. Tony Shub's family background may have made the Soviets especially wary of him. His father, David Shub, 81, is a Russian-born Social Democrat who was expelled from Russia by Czarist officials during the liberal agitation before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Settling in the U.S., the elder Shub wrote Lenin, still one of the authoritative books on the revolutionary's life. When ordered out of Russia by a Foreign Ministry official last week, the younger Shub replied: "My father was also twice forced to leave the country by the Russian authorities of the day, and that didn't help them either in solving their internal or international problems."

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