Communists: Not Too Fraternal

The leaders of the world’s Communist nations kept busy last week disagreeing, rebuking one another, attacking former colleagues and hurling invective with nonfraternal intensity.

> In Moscow, the Communist Party charged that Mao Tse-tung is not a true Communist and that his policies threaten the party with extinction in China. The party ideological journal Kommunist declared that Mao’s policies are “not only a matter of purely Chinese concern” and that they are “doing great harm to the cause of socialism and revolution throughout the world.” Kommunist accused Mao of demanding “blind obedience and barrack-room discipline, which turns a human being into a small screw in a bureaucratic machine.”

> In Bucharest, a party commission attacked Rumania’s late strongman Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who died in 1965, as a Stalinist who used terror to keep in power in the 1950s. The commission charged his regime with handing down sentences without trials, of murders, abusive arrests, “rude fakes and transgression of the most elementary rules of law.” Thus, Dej’s successor as party boss, Nicolae Ceausescu, paved the way for a purge of the late Dej’s Stalinist cronies. The first to go was a onetime Ceausescu rival, ex-Police Chief Alexandru Draghici, who was purged from the party Presidium and from his post as Deputy Premier.

> In Prague, new Czechoslovak Party Boss Alexander Dubček scolded the So viet Ambassador for continuing to visit and consult with the man who was recently deposed from power, Antonin Novotný. Calling Stepan Chervonenko into his office, Dubček expressed “surprise and indignation” at this breach of party etiquette.

>In Hanoi, the party virtually announced that it no longer wants interference from either Moscow or Peking. The party newspaper Nhan Dan announced that “a Communist party responsible for the revolutionary movement in its own country must firmly preserve its independence.” Thus, said Nhan Dan, Hanoi from now on will solve “all of the problems of the Viet Nam revolution” itself.

> In Budapest, a conference of national Communist parties, convening behind closed doors, did little to cement the cracks of disunity. Only 52 of the 88 invited parties bothered to come to the session, which was sponsored by the Russians. At week’s end, those who did come were reported close to an agreement on an agenda and a date for a Communist summit conference in Moscow that the Kremlin has been promoting for years. The leaders had trouble, however, disguising the fact that most of the bloc will welcome such an event with a lack of enthusiasm bordering on dismay.