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Despite their exclusion from the agenda, it was plain that China and Czechoslovakia were the real issues at the conference. On both, the Russians had tried to cover their positions in ad vance. Moscow propagandists a month ago performed their own unilateral ex communication of China by pronouncing that Mao's party now had "nothing in common with international Communism" and was merely the apparatus of a "military clique" ruling China and masquerading as Communists. Since the shooting on the Ussuri River last March, the Russians have been trying to enlist the sympathy of foreign parties and the world by saying that Russia is not only defending its Far Eastern borders but also holding back the Maoist yellow peril that threatens humanity. For the Russians, who have so long regarded themselves as the providers of aid and arms to other Communist countries, the response has been deeply dis appointing. Requests for token military units or even observers to come to Siberia to join the Red Army in its vigil on the long, lonely border have reportedly been refused. No other Communists want to be caught in the thrashings of the two giants.
Besides a condemnation of China, Russia has something else that it would dearly love to extract from the delegates. That is an endorsement of the principle of limited sovereignty as expressed in the Brezhnev Doctrine. As a justification for the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet party boss last November expounded a new policy asserting that members of the Socialist Commonwealth have the right to intervene in the affairs of another member whenever the purity and primacy of socialism are endangered in that country. Foreign Communists who feel most threatened by the policy, notably the Rumanians and Yugoslavs, fear that the So viets will use the doctrine not only to keep any socialist country from defecting to the Western camp, but also to enforce their own brand of political orthodoxy. As Lumea, the Rumanian foreign-news weekly, declared: "Limited sovereignty makes no more sense than limited honesty."
Aware of the opposition, the Soviets enlisted support for the doctrine from its first victims. Shortly before leaving for Moscow, Czechoslovak Party First Secretary Gustav Husak, who in April replaced Alexander Dubcek, declared that "anti-Communist and anti-Soviet insti gations" had justified the intervention of Czechoslovakia's Warsaw Pact neigh bors. In Moscow, Husak, accompanied by new hard-line officials who only the week before had accomplished a purge of most of the prominent liberals on the Czechoslovak Central Committee, pleaded with the Italians and other foreign Communists not to discuss the Czechoslovakia issue in the conference.
His request was likely to go unhonored, if for no other reason than that the Italian Communists, who have great hopes for doing well in the next gen eral elections, fear the influence that the Brezhnev Doctrine would have on Italian voters. They can foresee their opponents' campaign slogan: "Put the Communists in power and the Red army will keep them there!"
First Controversy