The Docile Guests

If the West finds Charles de Gaulle exacerbating, it can take some comfort in the fact that the Communist block is afflicted with 19 million Gaullists --otherwise known as Rumanians.

Rumania has withdrawn in all but name from the Warsaw Pact military alliance: the last Russian troops left the country in 1958. It has cut down both the size of its army and the duty tenure and has reserved the right to decide on its own whether to go to war with the rest of the countries in the pact. Bucharest boycotted the plan of Comecon, the bloc's common market, to make the nation merely a provider of gasoline and grain, instead is busy building a broad industrial base from which to trade West as well as East.

No Bondage. Rumania's abrasive brand of independence was launched by the late Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (TIME, March 26), and both East and West have been closely watching the words of his successor, Rumanian Party Boss Nicolae Ceausescu, to see whether he would try to slip his errant satellite back into more orthodox orbit. Ceausescu (pronounced Chow-shess-coo) delivered a ringing answer last week as delegates from 56 Communist parties around the world gathered in Bucharest for the Ninth Rumanian C.P.

Congress. With Russia's Leonid Brezhnev and Peking's Party Secretary Teng Hsiao-Ping attending, Bucharest had been billed as a head-on Sino-Soviet verbal slugfest. But the Rumanians attached "keep quiet" stickers to each invitation, and the result was a collection of docile guests whose most exciting time at the meeting was a five-hour, 93-page declaration of independence by their host, Ceausescu, that went considerably beyond anything Gheorghiu-Dej ever bruited.

Ceausescu again defended the Rumanian decision to industrialize, and as for Comecon trade, he asserted flatly that "Rumania develops economic relations with all states, irrespective of their social system, on the basis of mutual advantage." Ceausescu went on to make clear that Rumania's economic independence was merely the handmaiden of political autonomy. "Each [national] party has the exclusive right to independently elaborate its political line," he announced. He called for the abolition of all military blocs and, in a reference ostensibly to Viet Nam but which surely raised eyebrows among such members of his audience as East Germany's Walter Ulbricht and the Hungarian delegation, insisted that "foreign military bases and troops stationed on the territory of other states exert a negative influence on international relations."

On the Boulevard. In his four months on the job, Ceausescu has also provided liberation of sorts to Rumanian life. Noting that "diversity of style is peculiar to art and literature," he has gone even farther than Dej in freeing Rumanian artists from strict socialist realism. Abstractionist vernissages are blossoming along Bucharest's fashionable Boulevard Magheru, and even top party people can be seen carting home a nonobjective painting. Kafka is all the rage, and more American movies than Russian are running in Bucharest's cinemas; the Broadway play Rhinoceros was a theater season sellout, and not just because lonesco is a Rumanian. Last week, as if for the edification of his distinguished guests, Ceausescu permitted Western newspapers to go on public sale for the first time--excepting of course Paris' Le Monde, which has been available for some months to the East's Gaullists.

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