DURING the last decade Cold War rhetoric has taken an unexpected turn. The quantity and intensity of angry exchanges between capitalism and Communism have subsided almost everywhere, while the two major practitioners of Communism have been having it out. Moscow and Peking have blasted each other with charges more scurrilous and personal than the wildest anti-Communist might have ventured in the fifties. In May, 1970, the New York Times, reflecting on the fact that Mao had included in his celebration of Lenin's centennial a comparison of Brezhnev and Hitler, and Moscow had reciprocated with a charge that Mao was a philanderer who had murdered his own son, observed that "even at the height of the Cold War, it is doubtful that any official American pronouncement matched, much less exceeded, the bitterness" of such exchanges.

Lost in the shadoAvs of the more newsworthy arguments about borders, nuclear war, and leadership of world Communism, is another aspect of the unprecedented Sino-Soviet ideological quarrel—a no-holds-barred and below-the-belt brawl on the nature and function of culture in a Communist society. Each of the Communist giants contends that the other is a traitor to Marxism and has done irreparable harm to the cause of proletarian culture.

This enormous, orchestrated propaganda campaign is carried on not only in the press, but especially by round-the-clock broadcasts over the back fence from Radio Moscow and Radio Peking. The Soviet Party journal Kommunist