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In East Germany another possibly embarrassing meeting was avoided. Just as delegates to the Communist-front World Federation of Trade Unions had unpacked their bags in Leipzig for a skull session on the challenge of the thriving Common Market, they got word from Moscow to start packing again. Khrushchev hates and fears the Common Market and demands that other Communist parties take a tough line too. But Poland, which conducts 20% of its trade with the Six and Great Britain, takes a moderate stand; Italian and Belgian Communists, whose working-class members share in the prosperous capitalist economic community, have already endorsed the partnership despite Soviet opposition. Rather than make the split worse by argument, the Kremlin simply called off the session.
Noisy Interruption. There were even more serious turbulences in Bulgaria. The country's Red boss Todor Zhivkov was back from his trip to Moscow scarcely 24 hours when he told the opening session of a party congress in Sofia that Premier Anton Yugov, ex-Dictator Vulko Chervenkov, and six other bigwigs were being fired as Stalinists. Yugov was slapped under house arrest, accused of ordering the executions of "numerous honest and innocent comrades." Only three years ago, the Bulgarian regime had tried to emulate the Chinese "great leap forward" and also had fallen flat on its face. Now it was Khrushchev's turn to pick up the pieces.
A delegate from Peking's Central Committee was in Sofia, and the purge of the Stalinists was more than he could bear. Heatedly he attacked Bulgarian obedience to Khrushchev's "revisionist" line, defiantly reported Peking's determination to support Fidel Castro in his hour of abandonment by Moscow. The Chinese delegate began his speech to warm applause; he finished to icy silence.
Hoarse Shouts. Back home in Peking, things got even rougher. In some of the strongest abuse it has yet heaped on Khrushchev, Red China labeled Moscow's Cuban retreat "appeasement" and accused the Kremlin of trying to "play the Munich scheme against the Cuban peopie." Day after day, mass rallies of schoolchildren and workers shouted themselves hoarse to back Castro; the regime flooded cities and towns with millions of militant pamphlets.
Nor was Cuba the only issue that inflamed the Sino-Soviet rivalry. Nehru reported that Moscow, after weeks of stalling, finally agreed to sell India MIG jet fighters, which might be used against invading Red Chinese troops. A Pravda editorial on Peking's border war with India carefully refused to take sides: if anything, Pravda leaned slightly toward India. "Bellicosity," tut-tutted the sweet voice of Moscow, is "foreign to the very spirit of a socialist state."