The Cost of Murder

In his campaign to convince the world that Russia is out to ease international tensions, Nikita Khrushchev has displayed the sure timing of an expert con man and the insinuating patter of a carnival barker. Last week, in a single act of savagery, Khrushchev threw away the diplomatic fruits of all this patience and skill.

The executions of ex-Premier Imre Nagy, General Pal Maleter and two other lesser leaders of the Hungarian revolt were in wanton defiance of public pledges (see below) given by the puppet Communist government maintained by Russian tanks in Budapest. The official announcement of the executions by the Hungarian government was made in a manner calculated to achieve maximum international publicity. It conceded that neither Nagy nor Maleter had confessed guilt, deliberately failed to give the date of their execution (which probably occurred only a few hours before issuance of the communique). Asked when the trial had taken place, Chief Prosecutor Geza Szenasi displayed what presumably passes in Communist circles for a nice sense of humor. ''Before the verdict," he grinned.

Back in Bloom. The response was an outburst of fury unparalleled since the Hungarian revolt itself. Italian Foreign Minister Giuseppe Pella withdrew his nation's Minister to Budapest, refused to consent to the appointment of a new Hungarian Minister to Rome. In Montevideo students hurled a gasoline bomb at the Soviet embassy, and Russian missions in New Zealand, Bonn, Istanbul and Copenhagen were all stoned. (As a countermeasure, the Russians permitted a carefully stage-managed crowd to break seven windows in the Danish embassy in Moscow.)

The most passionate outbursts, because they came from those who still wanted to believe in a U.S.S.R. change of heart, occurred among the neutralist powers and Europe's left-wing fringe. Avanti, organ of Pietro Nenni's red-tinged Italian Socialist Party, proclaimed that the executions "bring us back in full bloom" to the era of Stalinism. Burma's Premier U Nu called them "a horrible act." The Indonesian Socialist daily Pedoman drew a local moral: "We cannot fool around with the idea of cooperation with the Reds." In India, where Nehru's equivocation blunted the impact of the revolt itself, there was almost unanimous condemnation of Moscow. Said one influential Indian in unwonted tribute to a man most Indians regard as a stumbling block to peace: "The Nagy execution obviously justifies the firm stand John Foster Dulles takes against Communism."

The Premeditated Slap. These expressions of horror were genuine; yet as a matter of political practice--particularly in the Communist world--leaders of unsuccessful revolutions could expect to end up on the gallows or before the firing squad. Nagy and Maleter might have been quietly executed within a few weeks or months of their seizure, as hundreds of lesser known Hungarian rebels were. But the Russians waited for 18 months and then brutally proclaimed their deed, giving the executions the deliberate quality of a slap in the face to the non-Communist world and of a mighty fist thrust in the faces of the satellites.

Like most slaps in the face, this one promised to create difficulties for the slapper. It calculatedly opened the breach wider between Russia and Yugoslavia than it had been since the Cominform excommunication of Tito in 1948. It all but destroyed prospects for an early summit meeting. (Even De Gaulle, perhaps the most willing of all Western leaders to talk with Russia, declared that he now saw little chance of a summit meeting this year.) All these were consequences that calculating Nikita Khrushchev obviously foresaw when he passed the death sentence on Nagy and Maleter, and chose to proclaim it. He planned it that way.

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