Divorce, Italian-Style

Arrivederci, comrades

Not since Mao Tse-tung's China broke with Moscow in 1960 had the Communist world been rocked by such a bitter and open feud. To Soviet accusations of "slander" and "sacrilege," the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.) last week responded with charges that the Kremlin was "authoritarian," "erratic" and bent on the "mortification of national sentiments and sovereignty." By week's end many observers believed that a complete break between the two parties might ensue.

The divorce has long been in the making. The independent-minded Italians have been at odds with the Kremlin ever since they criticized the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The quarrel escalated into open conflict last Dec. 30, when the P.C.I., headed by Enrico Berlinguer, published a resolution denouncing the imposition of martial law in Poland and declaring Soviet-style Communism to be an "exhausted" force. Last week, after the P.C.I.'s Central Committee overwhelmingly approved that resolution, the Soviet party daily Pravda unleashed an attack of almost unprecedented ferocity.

Pravda charged that "the leaders of the P.C.I. speak of aspirations to struggle for peace, but at the same time they slander the principal, fundamental force in this struggle: the U.S.S.R. and its socialist allies." The PC.I.'s "position against world socialism," said the article, was "an aid to imperialism, to anti-Communism and to all forces hostile to social progress."

Berlinguer's party promptly struck back. Bristling at the "insults and bad faith" of the Soviet attack, P.C.I. Foreign Affairs Specialist Giancarlo Pajetta observed tellingly that "there is no Communist Vatican, and nobody can excommunicate us." Observed the Italian party daily L'Unit`a: "It seems to us strange and worrisome that the [Soviet party] has learned nothing from the numerous grave facts and ruptures of the past, which have strongly damaged, and continue to weigh upon, not only the cause of socialism, of peace, of liberty, but also on the Soviet Union itself."

Many Italian Communists believe the schism is irreversible. Giorgio Napolitano, leader of the Communist bloc in Parliament, said last week that the Pravda attack "represented such a violent, drastic condemnation that one cannot see how it could be reversed." Others still see some possibility of a future rapprochement. Said Camilla Ravera, 93, one of the last surviving founders of the Italian party: "This will be an episode, but in my life I have seen many of this type."

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