TEN

International Communist Politics

The border crisis was an inherently volatile and unstable condi­ tion; that is to say, it was symptomatic of the underlying changes taking place in the wake of Czechoslovakia, and either a new pat­ tern of equilibrium evolved to resolve these acute symptoms or an uncontrollable disaster threatened to erupt. Indeed, that perilous prospect was the gravamen of Moscow's urgent appeal to the inter­ national community conveyed in the weighty Pravda editorial arti­ cle of 28 August. Pravda had appealed to other countries "to realize their responsibility to mankind" in order to avoid the "terrible calamity" threatened by the border confrontation. As it happened, it was within the Communist movement itself that this responsi­ bility was effectively taken up. And, ironically, it was Hanoi, whose reaction to Czechoslovakia had so provoked the Chinese, which provided the setting in which this sense of responsibility was communicated to the parties concerned. The occasion was the death of Ho Chi Minh, an event occurring exactly a year and a day after Chou En-lai had sternly (and forebodingly) lectured the North Vietnamese on the harsh imperatives of Peking's anti-Soviet animus in the wake of Czechoslovakia. Those imperatives were by no means to abate now; rather, they were to take a new direction which would lead to a realignment of global relationships that the North Vietnamese-and here another ironic twist-were to find bit­ terly distasteful. As a catalytic agent in international Communist 194 International Communist Politics politics, Hanoi found itself promoting trends having adverse ef­ fects on its own interests. The death of Ho Chi Minh on 3 September 1969 provided the occasion for the North Vietnamese to draw on the immense pres­ tige of their venerable leader to issue a solemn appeal for unity in the international Communist movement-an appeal, in effect, for a reduction of Sino-Soviet tensions at a time of acute crisis. It was also, in effect, a response to Pravda's 28 August appeal to a broader international jurisdiction for help in containing the border crisis. Ho and his lieutenants had been skillfully walking a tight­ rope of neutrality between Hanoi's two giant patrons ever since the direct U.S. involvement in the Viet'nam combat in the middle of the decade had internationalized that war in a big-power con­ text. Earlier, the Chinese challenge to Moscow's ideological and political leadership of the Communist movement had brought out the affinities among the East Asian Communist states, the North Vietnamese and North Koreans sharing with the Chinese a basic distrust toward Moscow's detente proclivities and a demand for more militant pressure against the U.S. presence in Asia. But the escalation of American combat operations in Vietnam during the second half of the decade necessitated a punctiliously correct neu­ trality on Hanoi's part. For one reason, the North Vietnamese now needed Soviet military assistance, particularly advanced weaponry to counteract the modern arms the United States was committing to the struggle. As it happened, the initiation of the American air campaign against North Vietnam coincided with the visit to Hanoi in February 1965 of Premier Kosygin, acting as an emissary of the new post-Khrushchev Kremlin leadership's line of "united action" in behalf of the Vietnamese comrades directly under fire from "U.S. imperialism." Whatever effect the Soviet overture to Hanoi (and to Pyongyang, which Kosygin also visited) might have had in other circumstances in seeking to reverse Khrushchev's loss of in­ fluence in East Asia, the Kremlin's offer of close relations was given real substance now in the form of arms aid, particularly air defense weaponry during a period in which U.S. air strikes were a central element in Washington's effort to thwart a Communist takeover in South Vietnam.