COMMUNISTS: The Facts of Life

For weeks. Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders have been screaming at each other in the most unabashedly public row between Communist states since Tito's Yugoslavia broke away in 1948. Last week the dispute was officially closed when the two governments and ten other Communist states signed an agreement in Bucharest upholding Nikita Khrushchev's doctrine of peaceful coexistence. Proclaimed Peking's Madame Sun Yatsen: "It is simply a lie" that Red China—as so many Chinese orators and editors had been saying at the top of their voices—opposed coexistence with ''the imperialists."

Beyond the...