Savaging a Comrade

If Leonid Brezhnev in Paris grumbled about the U.S., that was nothing compared with the tongue-lashing administered by the Kremlin to fellow Communists in Western Europe. An unsigned 5,000-word article in New Times --a Soviet weekly devoted primarily to foreign affairs--savaged Spanish Communist Party Leader Santiago Carrillo with the kind of language normally reserved for the Chinese. He was charged with advocating "crude anti-Sovietism," making "slanderous allegations" and taking "unsavory positions."

Santiago Carrillo is probably Western Europe's most independent-minded Communist. He has, for example, openly condemned the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Hence Moscow's attack on him did not come as a great surprise, although the force of it was. The target of the New Times article was Carrillo's new book. Eurocommunism and the State, a spirited advocacy of the Eurocommunist movement, which maintains that a Marxian society can be pluralistic and independent of Moscow.

One Communism. In what may be the first official recognition of the term Eurocommunism by Moscow's ideologues. New Times argues that the movement is an invention of "bourgeois theorists ... There is only one Communism--namely that whose foundations were laid by Marx, Engels and Lenin and whose principles are adhered to by the present-day [Soviet-led] Communist movement."

Spain's Communist leaders remained unruffled. For one thing, such attacks from Moscow seem to confirm Carrillo's independence and could thus increase his party's popularity among Spanish voters. For another, as Party Spokesman Angel Mullor explained, the article "has not surprised us in any way. What is lamentable is that it shows the inability of its authors [to discuss] these themes without prejudice and obstinate dogma."

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