Ratifying the Right to Dissent

"We are in serious doubt about the scientific character of some aspects of the analysis contained in the document. In style, the document is more frequently couched in invocatory-propagandistic rather than analytical terms, and this makes it impossible to catch the whole novelty, wealth and complexity of the world-revolutionary movement." The words were those of Enrico Berlinguer, the deputy leader of the Italian Communist Party, and he was addressing the other 74 delegations at the world Communist summit meeting in Moscow. Berlinguer was criticizing the 47-page communique that the Soviets hoped all the parties would sign as a symbol of Communist solidarity.

Though a team of writers and editors worked round the clock considering some 300 amendments and incorporating 30 of them into the text, the document was still not tailored to Italian taste by the time the conference wound up last week. Berlinguer signed only the section of the four-part document that dealt with the need for combatting imperialism. Three other delegations, including the Australian one, also signed only the anti-imperialism passage. The delegates from the tiny militant party in the Dominican Republic had the temerity not to sign at all. Eight other parties initialed only after expressing reservations of one sort or another.

Soviet Compromises. Because of the divisions in the Communist world, it was not really remarkable that there were abstentions and objections. Surprising, however, was the extent to which the Soviets bent and shuffled in order to get as many signatures as possible on the dotted line. Moscow had once aimed to use the conference to read the Chinese out of the Communist movement. No such luck: all direct mention of the Chinese was knocked out of the final version. The Kremlin had also wanted to gain the parties' approval for the doctrine of limited sovereignty, by which the Soviet regime justifies the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Russia settled for a watered-down defense of "proletarian internationalism," qualified by strong declarations of independence for all parties.

Most of all, the Soviets had hoped to revive miraculously their former role as the leaders of world Communism. Instead, they were forced to publicly renounce any claim to hegemony. "All parties have equal rights," declared the final paper, adding: "There is no longer a center of the Communist movement."

Real Newspaper. As an instrument to refurbish the image of Communist unity, the conference was a bust. That very fact, oddly enough, may serve to make Communism seem less sinister to the rest of the world. For what the delegates in effect ratified in Moscow was a decision to tolerate dissent within Communism, thus bringing to the movement a semblance of democracy. It was the first summit in history in which Communists were allowed to disagree with the majority view and could hold to their divergent beliefs without threat of being thrown out of the movement. At the farewell reception in the Kremlin, Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev assured his guests that the "free and frank" discussions had made, in his words, "a new, weighty contribution to the development of our revolutionary theory."

Moscow '69 has already produced at least one interesting development. In reporting the proceedings, Pravda, for the first time in 41 years, printed criticism of a ruling Soviet regime. The strong Australian condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, for example, appeared on Pravda's front page. While the summit was in session, Soviet citizens enjoyed a glimmer of what it is like to read a real newspaper. There in print were foreign comrades defying the Kremlin--and getting away with it.

Some Western European Communists went home with the feeling that the display of foreign dissent might fan the embers of Russia's native discontents. One Yugoslav observer, doubtless overly optimistic, even hazarded the premature observation that "the conference marked the beginning of a legitimate opposition in the Soviet Union." The leaders of the Soviet Union show no signs of extending to their own people the toleration they temporarily granted their foreign comrades. There were reports last week in Moscow that Soviet security forces were harassing the 54 dissenters who had tried to send a petition to the United Nations. Their complaint: basic civil rights are being suppressed in the Soviet Union.

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