Communists: Never Mind About Marco Polo

An outsider in Bucharest last week might have got the idea that Communists were still one big happy family, instead of the dirty, low-down Peking Factionalists and the lousy, no-good Moscow Deviationists they accuse each other of being. For there, on the shore of a moon-bathed lake, dignitaries of 14 Communist states gathered under a festively striped canvas tent, nibbled caviar and quaffed Rumanian champagne and Riesling in mellow tribute to the city’s “liberation” by the Red army in 1944. And there, sharing the head table, were none other than Red China’s Vice Premier Li Hsien-nien and sly old Anastas Mikoyan, President of the Soviet Union.

But look again. Stationed strategically between them was Host Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and his head kept swiveling as if he were following a slow-motion tennis volley. For nearly three hours the Rumanian President alternated his attentions like clockwork—15 minutes to Revisionist Mikoyan, 15 minutes to Factionalist Li—while his two honored guests pointedly ignored each other. Nothing, not even the considerable efforts of the host’s raven haired daughter Lica, who is a Communist movie queen, could make them even look at each other.

Out of Orbit. The fact that they were in Bucharest at all was a lesson in latter-day satellitesmanship. Gheorghiu Dej is edging Rumania out of the Russian orbit and toward its own brand of nationalist Communism, mostly because he wants to continue Rumania’s successful industrialization and trade with the West, free of Moscow’s interference. To that end, Rumania has tried hard to stay neutral in the Russian Chinese cold war. So covetously do Moscow and Peking view Rumania’s new independence that the little (pop. 18.8 million) Balkan state has become the most ardently courted nation in the Communist bloc.

The Rumanians refused to invite the peripatetic Nikita Khrushchev to last week’s party for fear that he might steal the spotlight for himself and use it to blast Peking. Moscow asked permission to send President Mikoyan instead. Peking, hailing its “traditional” ties with a land few Chinese had even heard of, renamed one of its infamous state farms the “Marco Polo Bridge Sino-Rumanian Friendship People’s Commune.”

Never mind about Marco Polo. What both sides were really worried about was next year’s summit conference of the world’s 90-odd Communist parties, called by Moscow and opposed by Peking. Ostensible purpose of the conference is to settle all party differences and to guarantee victory over Peking. Moscow has invited 25 key parties, including the balky Rumanian, to a pre-summit strategy conference in December. Mikoyan’s primary job in Bucharest last week was to persuade Rumania to attend. He failed to do so.

Russia Barred. No more successful was Vice Premier Li, who was trying to line up support for Peking’s own prospective pre-summit conference against Moscow. But China is far from licked. It has already managed to get Russia barred from still another meeting—the Peking-sponsored “Second Bandung” conference of “nonaligned” Asian-African nations to be held next March.

Second Bandung, named for the 1955 conference which urged China to break away from Russia in the interest of world peace, is not to be confused with next October’s “Belgrade Conference” of the neutralist bloc, which neither China nor Russia can attend. And the “Belgrade Conference” in turn is not to be confused with the Yugoslavia meeting to be held this month at Marshal Tito’s hunting lodge. The lodge meeting will be the most exclusive of all. Just Tito and Rumania’s Gheorghiu Dej, whose head may have swiveled last week but was certainly not turned. Their reported subject: how to head off both the Moscow and Peking pre-summits, as well as the summit meeting itself.