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A month ago he was anathema: the Yellow Peril, the shameless Pervert of True Marxism-Leninism, the terrible Trotskyite Deviationist and Splitter. Last week, as he stood bundled in a greatcoat and karakul cap atop Lenin's Tomb watching the rockets roll by, Red China's Chou En-lai presumably was still all these things to the fallen Nikita Khrushchev, who was nowhere to be seen, and possibly to many other Russians who have little love for the Chinese. But officially he was the honored guest from the great fraternal Chinese People's Republic, and this just three years after he stormed out of the 22nd Party Congress and thereby ignited China's momentous ideological feud with Russia. Now he was back, as cautious and cool as a man defusing a bomb.
When Red China's Premier accepted Moscow's invitation to the 47th anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, it became obvious that Communism's two big powers are trying to ease their unseemly, downright embarrassing differences, which had become something of a personal obsession to Khrushchev. There is no likelihood that the split will be healed in the foreseeable future, but it will obviously not remain the same. With Chou's arrival in Moscow alongside delegations from every Communist nation in the world except Albania (which is being more Chinese than the Chinese), the post-Khrushchev era of Communism had begun.
Conference Pitch. Night was falling as Chou and his six-man entourage arrived at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. With him was Liu Shao-chi, China's President. In the flare of flashbulbs, Chou's face appeared hard and unyielding. Significantly, he was greeted by only half of Russia's new diarchy, an equally sour-faced Premier Aleksei Kosygin. There were no bear hugs for Chou, though Kosygin did bring a bouquet of flowers. Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev stayed home, possibly to show that Russia was not overeager and to keep the visit a formal matter of governments, not an ideological meeting of parties.
Next day, Brezhnev addressed a jampacked audience in the Kremlin's Palace of Congress with an appeal for Communist unity, and pitched hard for a world conference of Communist parties to deal with the problem. Chou, staring indifferently over Brezhnev's shoulder, was the only man on the stage who failed to applaud. Khrushchev had called just such a meeting for Dec. 15, but with the intention of setting the stage for Peking's excommunication from the Communist movement. Since Brezhnev, Kosygin & Co. still claim to be the legitimate heirs to Khrushchevism, Chou could not readily agree to the meeting, even though Brezhnev's tone was more wheedling than warlike.