Eurocommunism: Moscow's Problem Too

Distrusted by Washington, hated by Moscow: that seems to be the unenviable fate of Eurocommunism.

A number of Western statesmen and intellectuals--notably former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--have warned against accepting at face value the Eurocommunists' assurances that they are truly independent from Moscow and committed to working within existing parliamentary and democratic systems. But the surprising electoral successes of the Italian and French Communist parties have been equally alarming to Moscow, although for very different reasons.

The immediate target of Soviet wrath is Spanish Communist Leader Santiago Carrillo. In tones reminiscent of Moscow's strident broadsides against Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito in the late 1940s and '50s, and China's Mao Tse-tung since the '60s, the Soviet weekly New Times blasted Carrillo, his new book Eurocommunism and the State, and the whole notion that Marxist societies can be established in Western Europe that would be independent of the Soviet Union.

The Russians did not publish the article until after the Spanish election, in which the Communists won only just over 9% of the vote, presumably because they feared their attack might have helped Carrillo and his colleagues at the polls had it come earlier. Last week the volume of Communism's new intramural scrap increased a notch when Carrillo replied to the Soviet assault. Said he jauntily at a Madrid press conference: "I didn't expect an excommunication decree from the Holy Office." Soon, he cracked, he would publish the New Times article in Spain, along with "clarifying notes." That, he added in a pointed jab at the Soviets' closed society, is "a method we recommend to our Soviet comrades so that their public opinion will be correctly informed."

Carrillo speculated that the Soviets might be trying to split the Spanish Communists and set up a rival party. If that was indeed Moscow's strategy, it would be risky. After 1968, when Carrillo blasted the Soviets for invading Czechoslovakia, Moscow tried to oust him by giving financial aid to a onetime general in the Spanish Civil War, Enrique Lister, who now lives in exile in France. The move flopped, and the Spanish party was subsequently purged of its Soviet sympathizers.

Last week the party's 135-member Central Committee voted almost unanimously to reject the Soviet charges against Carrillo and to reaffirm their commitment to Eurocommunism. They maintained that Spain's Communists are answerable only to their supporters in Spain.

Past Transgressions. While the Soviets were angry with Carrillo for his book, as well as his past transgressions, the New Times diatribe was clearly a signal both to other Communist parties in Western Europe and to Moscow's captive regimes in the East. Spanish party leaders who have traveled in Eastern Europe lately have met chilly and even hostile official receptions just about everywhere they have gone outside Tito's Yugoslavia and Nicolae Ceausescu's Rumania. Says one such traveler: "I got the feeling that the governments didn't know how to react and were waiting for a sign from Moscow."

Now the message is clear: the aging Kremlin leadership is not prepared to relinquish its influence over the Communist parties in the West, however successful the tactics of those avowedly independent Marxists may be (see following story). But Moscow's deepest concern is probably the possible reverberations that Eurocommunism, if allowed to develop unchecked, might have among the captive regimes of Eastern Europe. If seductive ideas about an independent Communism were allowed to take root there, they would not only threaten Moscow's determination to maintain itself as the Rome of international Communism. They would also threaten the East-West balance of power, the informal system of spheres of influence in Europe that the Soviets have sought to maintain and legitimize since World War II.

The growing tension between Moscow and the increasingly feisty Western parties is bound to complicate Western policymakers' problem of how to view or deal with the Eurocommunist phenomenon. Conceivably, the Soviet denunciation could encourage a relaxed view of Eurocommunism, on the principle that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

But what is bad for Moscow is by no means automatically good for Washington. Like the other Eurocommunists, Santiago Carrillo, maverick though he may be, is ultimately as opposed to Western systems as he is to the Soviet dictatorship.

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