Shades of Genghis Khan

The new Mongol warriors have bombs in their quivers. But if they attack the alarm bells will ring. And there will be plenty of fighters to defeat them.

--Yevgeni Yevtushenko

Ever since the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance 18 years ago, a specter has haunted the U.S.S.R.: China's military might. While Poet Yevtushenko depicts Chinese soldiers as descendants of Genghis Khan's Mongol horde, which held Russia in thrall for three centuries, the Soviet press, radio and television more commonly compare the People's Liberation Army to Hitler's invading Wehrmacht in World War II. A film frequently screened on Soviet television showed Chinese officers shouting frenzied battle cries, while fanatic soldiers performed such smashing kung-fu stunts as breaking bricks with their fists and foreheads. Pravda and Tass described alleged Nazi-like atrocities committed by Chinese in the war zone. According to Literary Gazette, "Chinese soldiers hang the wounded, cut open women's stomachs, drown children in swamps, tear babies apart."

The constant referrals in the Soviet press to China's "Nazi aggression" and "Peking blitzkrieg" are calculated to stir up traumatic memories of the devastation and suffering caused by the German invasion. Very few Soviet citizens are aware that the Chinese army is not designed, trained or equipped to invade Soviet territory. As perceived by the Soviets, their Chinese neighbor constitutes a potential plague of locusts, voracious and unstoppable. Said one senior Soviet official duck" TIME Moscow Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan last week: "Try to imagine how you would feel if Mexico had a billion people, nuclear weapons and a doctrine of the inevitability of war."

Popular fear and dislike of the Chinese were inflamed all over again by news of China's invasion of Viet Nam. Communist Party activists rounded up several hundred students from Moscow University to demonstrate in front of the Chinese embassy. Though the occasion was less than spontaneous, the demonstrators hurled snowballs, stones and ink pots at the walls and windows with real enthusiasm and relish. At a diplomatic dinner party in Moscow, Soviet maids reportedly even refused to serve the Chinese guests.

Since China's normalization of relations with the U.S., the Soviet propaganda apparatus has been working overtime to indict the Chinese. Peking's rulers have been accused of everything from planning germ warfare to running the world narcotics trade to assassinating President Kennedy. The polemical tone carries over from the popular press into the theoretical world of scholarship. One recent monograph printed by the Institute of the Far East of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (there is a similar institute devoted to American studies) is called Destinies of Culture in the People's Republic of China. It makes the charge that Peking views the arts as "an ideological tool of its rule," as if Moscow did not. Official choice of works on China to be translated into Russian is equally tendentious. One newly distributed book, translated from Japanese, states that China presents a picture of "lawlessness elevated to a way of life, oppression of the masses, contempt for the individual and the absence of the slightest semblance of democracy."

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