Europe: The Revolution That Failed

ON the rainy afternoon of January 21, 1921, a small faction of disgruntled Socialists met in a darkened Leghorn movie theater to found the Italian Communist Party. Last week some 16,000 party faithful traveled from all over Italy by car and chartered bus to Rome's suburban Sport Palace for a four-hour rally to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that event. Party Secretary Luigi Longo, grizzled and ailing at 70, was presented with a framed replica of his 1921 membership card along with a 1971 model. He declared proudly: "The forecast was that our life would be short. Today no one can ignore our presence and our strength."

Few could argue with Longo's boast, as far as it goes. Italy's robust Communist Party has not just survived, it has thrived. But it has fallen far short of another forecast. At the time of the 1921 Leghorn meeting, it was the view of Lenin and the Comintern that Italy had all the "required conditions to guarantee the victory of the great proletarian revolution." Lenin, in fact, saw not only Italy but much of Western Europe as ripe ground for Communism, thanks to its broad base of industrial workers. Today there are Communist or Marxist regimes in all of Eastern Europe, in Asia, in Africa, and even in the Caribbean and South America--but not one where Lenin dreamed that his ideology would triumph first. Only in three Western European countries, in fact, does Communism constitute a major force (see chart). The big three:

ITALY. The only Western European Communists given any chance of achieving a significant share of national power in the foreseeable future are Longo & Co. With 1,507,000 members, their party is the largest outside the East bloc and China, and it drew 27% of the nationwide vote in the last election.

All told, Italy's Communists run or help run 1,400 local administrations; in their effort to win respectability, they have generally proved honest and efficient. Still, the party cannot hope to win 51% of the national vote unless some catastrophe strikes Italy, and the Communists claim they do not want that to happen. They have abandoned their old slogan, "Tanto peggio, tanto meglio" (The worse it is, the better it is for us), and often cooperate to help pass important bills (or at least refrain from sabotaging them). Deputy-Secretary Enrico Berlinguer, 48, Longo's designated successor, hopes to make the Communist Party the nucleus of a "new majority" of the left that would include left-wing Christian Democrats and Socialists.

FRANCE. Soon after the French Communist Party marked its 50th anniversary at the end of 1970, it was embarrassed by two events in the East bloc: the Polish riots and the Leningrad trials. In each instance the party was highly critical. Traditionally conservative and doctrinaire, the French party was once so slavishly obedient to Moscow that its official newspaper, L'Humanite, described the Soviet repression of Hungary in 1956 under the incredible headline BUDAPEST SMILES AMONG THE RUINS. Under Georges Marchais, 50, who has taken over active direction of the party from ailing Party Secretary Waldeck Rochet, 65, the French Communists are seeking to recast their image. Other party stalwarts are helping out. In December, the Communists' 1969 presidential candidate, Jacques Duclos, joined other well-known Frenchmen on television to describe how he interpreted Christmas. Looking like Santa Claus in mufti, the beaming, rolypoly former pastry chef said it meant peace and good will to him.

The object is to establish the Communists as the only credible opposition to the Gaullists, or as leaders of a popular front movement. But former Party Member Annie Kriegel, a political scientist at Paris University's turbulent Nanterre campus, doubts that they can become either. "The Communist Party," she says, "constitutes the opposition without being the alternative." Even so, 61% of the Frenchmen questioned in a national poll said that they would consider it normal for Communist ministers to participate in a future left-wing coalition.

FINLAND. Like most of their countrymen, Finnish Communists have learned to keep a wary eye on their giant neighbor to the east. The party has long taken Tito-type stands critical of Moscow's policies and was one of the most vocal protesters against the Czechoslovakian invasion.

Under the pragmatic foreign policy of President Urho Kekkonen, which is based on maintaining smooth relations with the Soviets, Communists have served in coalition governments since 1966. One branch of the party advocates a moderate "peaceful road" to Communist rule, but a hard-line faction insists on waging a "class-conscious fight against big capital." The rest of the nation, which remembers all too well that the Communists were caught plotting a coup in 1948, still takes the hardliners' threats more than half seriously. Last week, in a demonstration of their increased militancy, the tough faction incited workers in key labor unions to go on wildcat strikes against several Finnish industries.

Turning Point. Elsewhere, the Communist Party is even less of a factor. In Sweden, four decades of prosperous Social Democratic rule have left the Communists with almost nothing to ask for. In one recent election, their platform sounded positively bourgeois: two homes for every family--a country stuga and an apartment in town. Similarly, Britain's Labor Party and West Germany's Social Democrats have preempted the working-class vote and the welfare issue. The Communists do not have a single member in Parliament, the Bundestag or the Bundesrat. In Switzerland, Denmark and the Benelux countries, they control a total of 20 seats.

Whatever strength the party possesses in Western Europe comes largely from what Italian Author Luigi Barzini describes as "the voters, millions of them, who know practically nothing of Marxism but are vaguely attracted by what they know as the poor people's natural party." What makes things difficult for the Communists is that while they are seeking to satisfy this constituency, they are also reaching for middle-class votes by cultivating an aura of bourgeois respectability. This opens them to sniping from young--and old--radicals on their left. In the meantime, despite continuing opposition from conservatives, most European governments are attempting to meet the needs of the poor.

Also important is the fact that for millions of voters, Communism as it is practiced east of the Elbe exerts not a vague attraction but a specific revulsion, periodically reinforced by events like Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Leningrad trials. Moscow, preoccupied with China and a stuttering economy, grudgingly gives the Western European parties greater autonomy than ever. But the Kremlin's influence is still so pervasive that for countless voters, as French Socialist Guy Mollet once remarked, "The Communists are not of the left but of the East." As long as that is true, Western Europe will continue to make a mockery of Lenin's expectations.

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