Vyacheslav Molotov's future continued to pose the most fascinating puzzle in the Communist world. Not because Old Stone-bottom himself matters much, but because he has become a kind of code word, or swear word, in a veiled but fateful debate.
Two weeks ago, despite Molotov's earlier political disgrace, a Soviet Foreign Office spokesman had announced that he would return to Vienna as delegate to the international atoms-for-peace agency. By week's end he still had not returned. According to one theory, Molotov's enemies in the Kremlin would not let him go; according to another version, he did not want to go, because the minor post in effect means exile. Either explanation fitted with Pravda's latest attack on Stalin's longtime Foreign Minister for his "dogmatic stubbornness" in opposing the "live, creative" Leninist line as preached by Nikita Khrushchev.
The aging (71) Molotov is in the middle of what may be Communism's most significant internal split since the Stalin-Trotsky quarrel in the '20s. On one side are ranged the dominant forces in the Soviet Presidium and most of the world's Communist parties, which support Khrushchev's avowed policies of "peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist nations, his campaign against Stalin's terroristic "cult of personality," and his efforts to raise the living standards of the Russian people. On the opposite side are Red China and its tiny, faraway ally, Albania; they are apparently more willing to risk war against capitalism, they revere Stalin's memory, and scorn Russia's preoccupation with "bourgeois" material gains. "Molotov," in Moscow deliberations, is a shorthand reference to all these heresies.
The basic issue is whether the Soviet Union can tolerate defiance of Moscow policies without seeing the Communist world break up into old-style nation states, all Marxist but pursuing divergent policies. Italian Communist Leader Palmiro Togliatti has already coined the word for this state of affairs: polycentrism.
Brothers United. This fear of local independence inspired a blistering attack last week by Moscow's Problems of Peace and Socialism, an official party journal, which condemned Albania (and by implication, Red China) for pursuing "narrow, nationalistic, egoistic interests." The magazine also denounced the Albanian government as a "regime of terror." The world was thus witnessing the extraordinary spectacle of two Communist states hurling at each other the kind of blasts they ordinarily reserve for the West. Radio Moscow accused Albania of mass arrests and purges in which a pregnant woman Communist leader opposed to Dictator Enver Hoxha was executed. Hoxha, in turn, accused Khrushchev of "hideous activities," including the use of such "poisoned weapons as slander and brutal interference in our internal affairs."
At the same time, the Albanian boss paid homage to his regime's new-found "elder brother, the Chinese people." Last week Big Brother and Little Brother further cemented their new relationship with a trade and technical aid agreement.