Busted Bloc

As the shrewd leader of Eastern Europe's nationalist Communists and a man who has increasingly chafed under Soviet attempts to dominate world Communism, Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu cast a jaundiced eye from the very beginning on last week's conference of Communist parties in Budapest. Ceausescu sent a Rumanian delegation only after exacting Moscow's promise that there would be no attacks on any national Communist Party and that there would be "a free exchange of views" on whether to hold a giant summit meeting of Communist parties, Moscow's chief proposal at the meeting. When both promises were broken, Ceausescu angrily ordered his men to walk out of the Budapest meeting and fly home. He thus brought on the most serious break in the Soviet bloc since Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito defected from the Comintern just 20 years ago.

To His Feet. The meeting of delegates from 67 countries had hardly been called to order in the Hotel Gellert's ornate dining room when Mikhail Suslov, head of the Russian delegation and the Kremlin's chief ideologue, broke the first promise by launching a bitter attack on Mao Tse-tung's "slander campaign" against the conference. It also became quickly apparent that Moscow had already decided on the time and the place--November or December in Moscow--for a full-dress Communist summit meeting, and expected only a dutiful seconding from the Budapest assembly. As if all this did not disturb the Rumanians enough, the general secretary of the tiny Syrian Communist Party, who is also a full-time resident of Moscow, bitterly attacked Rumania for retaining diplomatic relations with Israel after the June war--the only Communist nation to do so.

Rumania's chief delegate, Paul Niculescu-Mizil, immediately jumped to his feet, threatening to leave the conference if he did not get an apology. By midnight, the Syrian had agreed to strike his remarks from the official record, enabling weary delegates to retire to their nicely furnished rooms in the belief that things had been patched up. But back in Bucharest, Ceausescu decided not to let matters rest there, demanded that the entire meeting vote an apology to Rumania. When the apology was not forthcoming, Niculescu-Mizil denounced Russia's "Stalinist tactics." Then the Rumanians walked out and within a few hours were bound for Bucharest.

The real extent of Rumania's break with Russia will become evident this week, when the Rumanians have to decide whether or not to attend a meeting of Warsaw Pact countries in Sofia. Even if the Rumanians finally decide to go, Ceausescu's decision to pull out of last week's meeting left the Kremlin in a quandary. Though it now has no serious opposition to its plans for a top-level meeting, it also has less to gain than ever if it occurs. Once intent on isolating Maoism at a summit meeting, Soviet Marxists now stand in increasing danger of isolating only themselves--from a growing number of third parties that are tired of taking orders from Moscow. Since many national Communist parties fear that Moscow would use a summit to re-establish its faltering hegemony over them, a meeting could conceivably end up airing just as many of their gripes against Moscow as Moscow's against Peking.

Russia's embarrassment at the Rumanian walkout was heightened by further signs of discontent from within its own borders. Despite stern warnings to cease their campaign on behalf of four writers imprisoned in January for underground literary activity, a dozen professors, writers and other intellectuals sent a letter to the Budapest meeting protesting the defendants' fate and that of "several thousand political prisoners" confined to prisons and concentration camps under "harsh infringements of legality." "We appeal to the participants in the consultative congress," said the letter, "to fully consider the peril caused by the trampling on the rights of man in our country." All twelve signed their names, even though, as the letter noted, those who have objected so far "have lost their jobs, been called in by the KGB and finally been sent to psychiatric wards."

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