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- <text>
- <title>
- (1980) The Red Tide Ebbs And Flows
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1980 Highlights
- </history>
- <link 06351>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- ESSAY
- The Red Tide Ebbs and Flows
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> For many Americans, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was
- only the latest in a long, and seemingly unbroken, string of
- Moscow-sponsored Communist takeovers. Between 1944 and 1948,
- Albania, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and
- East Germany all fell under Soviet control, either by Soviet
- army conquest or political subversion. North Korea, which was
- occupied by Soviet troops, entered Moscow's orbit in 1948, and
- China the following year, after Mao Tse-tung's armies swept
- across the country. Five years later, North Viet Nam became
- Communist, after the peasant armies of Ho Chi Minh humiliated
- the French at Dien Bien Phu. In 1960, Fidel Castro aligned Cuba
- with the Kremlin. The 1970s saw the emergence of Marxist,
- pro-Moscow regimes in Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, South Viet
- Nam, Laos and Cambodia.
- </p>
- <p> The tide has not flowed entirely in Moscow's direction. In
- 1948, after Tito persisted in pursuing an independent policy,
- Yugoslavia was expelled from the Com-inform, the international
- alliance of Marxist-Leninist states headed by the U.S.S.R.
- China under Mao grew increasingly upset over Soviet
- "revisionism" in the early 1960s. All Soviet advisers were
- expelled, and since then relations with Moscow have varied from
- cool to hostile. Three other Communist countries are no longer
- dutiful Soviet satellites. Albania, from 1960 through 1978 a
- xenophobic bastion of Maoism in the Balkans, now scorns Peking,
- Washington and Moscow alike. Rumania, although economically and
- militarily tied to the Warsaw Pact, since 1966 has tried to go
- its own way in diplomatic matters. North Korea tends to play
- Moscow and Peking against each other, seeking aid from both.
- </p>
- <p> In the Third World, Moscow's losses have been almost as
- spectacular as its gains. Soviet influence in Indonesia
- collapsed with the army's assumption of power in 1966; Sudan
- crushed its own Communists in 1971, blaming Moscow's Eastern
- European allies for a coup attempt; and Egypt threw out its
- Soviet advisers in 1972. Though nominally nonaligned, India
- tilted toward Moscow after Indira Gandhi signed a friendship
- treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971. So far, in her second
- rise to power, Gandhi insists that India will remain genuinely
- nonaligned. Somalia brusquely expelled the Soviets from its
- huge missile and naval base at Berbera in 1977 after Moscow
- backed Ethiopia in the Ogaden War.
- </p>
- <p> Many Third World nations have discovered that the Soviets, for
- all their support of revolution and liberation movements, can
- be uncomfortable, even unpleasant, allies. They are generous
- with arms but stingy with other economic aid, and their advisers
- are often boorish "ugly Russians." If nothing else, the Soviets
- are persistent, and they accept setbacks as only temporary. The
- Kremlin also has a word for regimes that have adopted Communism
- and the Moscow line: irreversible.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-