Not Being Too Beastly to Moscow

A meeting of international Communist leaders in Spain? Nothing like it had happened in 40 years, and it was almost enough to bring that old anti-Communist crusader, Francisco Franco, dead scarcely a year, right back from his tomb in the Valley of the Fallen.

Said Santiago Carrillo, secretary-general of the Spanish Communist Party: "I feel very much moved. Until today it was I who had to be received by them, in Rome or in Paris, and now it is I who can receive them in Madrid." With those words and a couple of warm abrazos, Carrillo welcomed Party Chieftains Enrico Berlinguer of Italy and Georges Marchais of France for a day and a half of Euro-Communist summitry in Madrid.

The meeting was all the more remarkable because the Communist Party is still officially illegal in Spain, although the government of Premier Adolfo Suarez, in its efforts to broaden political participation, now generally looks the other way when it comes to the Communists' political activities. The government even permitted the party chiefs to hold a two-hour press conference. It also provided heavy security for the visitors. Carrillo himself, undoubtedly mindful of the right-wing assassination of five Communist labor lawyers six weeks ago, escorted his guests from the airport to their hotel in a bulletproof 1948 Cadillac, a gift from Rumanian President Nicolae Ceausescu.

The summit was both a ringing endorsement of the Spanish party's struggle for legalization and a significant event in the development of Western Europe's own brand of Communism. For years, Berlinguer and like-minded comrades have claimed that they are: 1) independent from Moscow and 2) devoted to the democratic process. The Madrid get-together was eagerly watched for signs of just how far the three leaders would dare to go toward those stated goals. As it turned out, not all that far.

Beyond a reiteration of their commitment to "a democratic way," the godfathers of Euro-Communism disagreed sharply on just how deeply they should cut the Kremlin's apron strings. They reached no agreement at all on the sensitive issue of dissidence in the Soviet bloc, other than a mild approval of the Helsinki accord.

Dissident Issue. Neither Berlinguer nor Marchais has any desire to provoke a rupture with Moscow over the dissident issue. Not now at least. The Italians defend free expression but draw the line at anti-Soviet hostility. The party still has a large constituency of working-class oldtimers who not only look to Moscow as their ideological mecca but who have grown restive about Berlinguer's tacit support for Premier Giulio Andreotti's Christian Democratic minority government. When Carrillo recently declared that repression of dissidents showed that the "Soviet Union is not really a popular democracy but a dictatorship of a small layer of the country over the rest of the society," Berlinguer scolded him on Italian television, saying: "That is a summary judgment that I do not share."

The French party, too, still has among its top leadership men who were once staunch Stalinists. Marchais himself is a new (and in some quarters suspect) convert to the more liberal tenets of Euro-Communism. The French Communists were stung by an article in the Soviet Party organ Pravda blasting their participation in a Paris rally called to support political prisoners in the Soviet Union. In Madrid, Marchais was not about to raise Russian hackles again. Said he rather lamely: "We think that the three parties do not have the right to make a collective condemnation of some parties." That left Carrillo almost out in the cold

The plucky Spaniard could hardly care less what Moscow thinks, since the Kremlin has already tried to kick him out as party chief. Both for political and personal reasons, Carrillo wanted a strong joint declaration condemning the treatment of dissidents in the Soviet bloc. A plea to legalize the Communist Party is now before the Spanish Supreme Court, and the decision hinges on the court's finding of whether or not the party "submits to an international discipline" and "proposes to establish a totalitarian system." The joint declaration called for by Carrillo would have reinforced the party's claim to independence from Moscow and its commitment to democratic principles.

In a mild attempt to defend his comrades' failure to take a clear stand on human rights, Carrillo drew an analogy with his own 37 years in exile when "not one-millionth of the voices that are now raised to defend the dissidents of the East raised themselves [to defend] not only my rights but the rights of this country." Nonetheless, he added emotionally, "We do not hesitate in condemning with all our energy violations [of liberty and democracy] wherever they may occur, even when those responsible belong to parties that affirm socialist ideals. In the systems of socialist countries, what is missing is democracy."

As if to point up the ideological distance between the two ends of Europe, a more traditional Communist gathering of Soviet-bloc nations was taking place in Sofia, Bulgaria, even as Carrillo spoke. There, the prime topics were containing dissidence and seeking coexistence with the Euro-Communists.

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