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The conference had hardly got un der way when the ground rules were shattered and the fumes of controversy began to leak to the outside world. The opening speaker on the second day was a delegate from Paraguay, who launched an attack on the Chinese. The first nasty epithet was scarcely out of his mouth before Rumania's Ceausescu was scribbling a reply on the notepad in front of him and demanding the floor. The Rumanians had made clear that they would attend the summit only on the understanding that the internal affairs of any Communist Party, present or absent, would not be discussed.
When the Paraguayan finished, Ceausescu broke in to issue a blunt, 500-word warning that the discussion was taking an unwelcome and unwise turn. "To our regret, in today's speech by the representative of the Communist Party of Paraguay, attacks and condemnations were included against one party that is not attending the conference. We consider that if other par ties follow this procedure, this will lead to a course fraught with danger for the success of our conference," he said. Undeterred, Polish First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka resumed the Soviet-orchestrated attack on the Chinese: "The principles of internationalism have been betrayed by the present leaders of the Communist Party of China, who have, from positions of anti-Soviet nationalism and great-power chauvinism, violated the solidarity of the international Communist movement."
The next day Brezhnev added the Soviet voice to the anti-Chinese chorus. In a bitter speech the Soviet party boss warned that the Chinese were preparing to start a war and charged that "the damage caused by the breakaway activities of Peking to the common cause of Communists cannot be underestimated." Said he: "The practical activities of Peking in the international arena more and more convince us of the fact that China has actually broken with proletarian internationalism and lost its class Socialist content." It sounded as if the Soviets had decided after all to press on with their original plans to excommunicate the Chinese from the movement. But such a move was certain to lead in the conference to heated debates and perhaps even walkouts and further divisions within world Communism.
As a myth and a generalized faith, Marxism has proved remarkably durable, partly because it has been interpreted and stretched so broadly that widely different political movements can and do invoke it (see TIME ESSAY, page 35). In its specific applications, the faith is hopelessly split. Within little more than a decade, Communism has undergone a great schism (Moscow v. Peking), experienced an abortive reformation (Dubcek's Czechoslovakia), and developed a plethora of protestant sects (Yugoslavia and Rumania, among others). The once vaunted and feared unity of Communism has shattered into a bewildering, quarrelsome, logic-and dogma-defying set of parties.