The Last Summit: No Past or Future

Under normal circumstances, Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev might have arrived in East Berlin for last week's summit meeting of 29 European Communist leaders by train. But instead of making the leisurely 27-hour railway journey across Poland to Germany, Brezhnev flew to the summit by Ilyushin jet. Out of view but scarcely out of mind was the huge jumble of rails ripped from the tracks near Warsaw late last month by rioting Polish workers. Indeed the mass strikes protesting food price hikes that swept across Poland provided a fitting background for the uneasy, restless mood of the Communist summit. Meeting in the modern, wood-paneled conference room of the Hotel Stadt Berlin, the chiefs of Western Europe's Communist parties rose one after the other to manifest their independence from the Kremlin's 50-year-long hegemony.

Clearly, the "indestructible monolithic unity" of the international Communist movement--once the theme of such meetings--had been eroded to the thinnest, hardly visible varnish. Boldly summing up the sentiments of most of the Western party leaders, Spain's Santiago Carrillo declared that "there can be no doubt that we Communists today have no center of leadership and are not bound by any international discipline."

Common Ideology. Brezhnev sat stone-faced through these declarations of independence. Ironically, he originally intended the summit to serve as the capstone to his career. The Soviet leader, 69, first proposed the conference three years ago; since then he has tirelessly cajoled and pressured foreign party chiefs into agreeing to the meeting. Having enforced Soviet domination of Eastern Europe by the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev hoped that the summit would strengthen the Kremlin's traditional political and ideological authority over the parties in Western Europe.

It was a massive miscalculation.

Months before last week's meeting, it was clear that the Kremlin would fail in its goals. Since the Communists' only hope in Western Europe involves sharing power with democratic parties, many leaders--notably the French, Italians and Spaniards--have scuttled the Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat" in favor of some measure of heretical pluralism. Although Moscow wanted a strong ideological denunciation of Peking in the platform, the Yugoslavs and the Rumanians demanded that China not be mentioned. Then, Soviet-sponsored drafts of the preconference communique were purged of such ritual assertions that Communist parties "share identical objectives and are guided by common ideology." The Italians, Spaniards and Yugoslavs angrily excised the expression "proletarian internationalism," a code phrase signifying the Kremlin's self-arrogated right to put down rebellious parties.

Even the use of the word "democracy" in the draft statement was cause for contention. As one high-level Italian Communist explained to TIME Correspondent Herman Nickel: "How could [Italian Party Chief] Enrico Berlinguer sign a statement on democracy that [Czechoslovak President] Gustav Husak could also sign?" The red-leather-bound final declaration, placed before each delegate at the opening of the two-day conference, affirmed the "complete independence" of each party "in accordance with the socio-economic conditions and specific national features prevailing in the country concerned."

Virtually the only way Brezhnev could assert Moscow's erstwhile primacy in the Communist movement was to speak for 65 minutes--more than twice the time allotted other delegates. Evidently aware of his failure to achieve his original aims, Brezhnev deftly shifted emphasis to a display of Soviet reasonableness. He assured his listeners that the U.S.S.R. had no wish to reinstitute a Communist "organizational center" or Cominform--which would be impossible in any case. This was apparently a conciliatory gesture to Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, 84, who participated in an international Communist conference for the first time since 1948, when the Kremlin-dominated Cominform expelled him.

Mostly, Brezhnev developed the timeworn theme of the struggle between the Soviet "peace forces" and the "aggressive forces of imperialism," thus diverting attention from conflicts among Communists. Still, the mood of the conferees obliged the Soviet leader to ac knowledge the right of all parties to "suit their tactics and strategy to specific situations in their respective countries." The Italians were jubilant. Sergio Segre, the chief of the Italian party's foreign department, said that Brezhnev's remarks meant that "Communism has stopped being a closed system."

Spain's stocky Santiago Carrillo argued that the Communist movement was no longer a "church" with "its own martyrs and prophets," and believers who celebrate the Russian Revolution "like Christmas." Referring obliquely to repressive Soviet and East European regimes, he called for transforming Spain into a democracy without "dictatorial methods, recognizing political and ideological pluralism and with full respect paid to the result of general elections." The publication of Carrillo's speech in the East German party newspaper prompted a local television technician to remark: "That's the best thing I've read in Neues Deutschland in years."

Riding High. Berlinguer, his prestige buoyed by the Communist advance in last month's election (TIME, July 5), also spurned Soviet-style rule for Italy. "The models of socialist society followed in Eastern Europe," he asserted bluntly, "do not correspond to the peculiar conditions and orientations of the broad popular masses in the West." He insisted that Italian Communism was committed to economic development in both the public and private sectors. Such heresies so infuriated a Soviet journalist watching the proceedings on closed-circuit TV that he turned to Nickel and tagged Berlinguer with the ultimate Communist insult. "A social democrat --the capitalists will be happy to have him," he said. "Right now he's riding high, but sooner or later we must make clear that we regard Berlinguer's position as false and dangerous."

One could hardly blame the Russian for his puzzlement and anger; Berlinguer & Co. certainly do not talk like

Communists. As for the West, it can take satisfaction from the further Communist splintering--although the new siren song of independent "Eurocommunism" is harder to combat than the old, dreaded monolith. About the Western parties' independence from Moscow there is now little question left; but how "democratic" they really are, or can remain, is the big question.

Despite Carrillo's and Berlinguer's eloquent espousals of "Eurocommunism," the star and clear winner at the Berlin summit was the wily Tito. His policy of nonalignment, pursued for three decades, seemed finally to have been appreciated by Europe's Communists. In a solemn mood of self-congratulation, he commended other parties for affirming Yugoslavia's "principles of independence, equality, autonomy and noninterference." As the conference ended, many observers and participants agreed that this might well be the last attempt at Communist summitry. Predicted a Yugoslav party stalwart: "The conference had no past--and no future."

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