SOVIET UNION: The View from Lenin's Tomb

As Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders stood impassively on the marble Lenin mausoleum overlooking Red Square last week, loudspeakers boomed out the Kremlin's May Day greeting to the Soviet people. It was the supreme holiday of international Communism, yet not a word was uttered to congratulate the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong on their overwhelming victory. Among the placards carried by 100,000 Russian workers on their May 1 march, only one referred —obliquely—to the event: "Fraternal greetings to the heroic Vietnamese people," it read. The Communist Party daily...