Communists: Of Cattle & Comrades

Vyacheslav Molotov’s future continued to pose the most fascinating puzzle in the Communist world. Not because Old Stone-bottom himself matters much, but because he has become a kind of code word, or swear word, in a veiled but fateful debate.

Two weeks ago, despite Molotov’s earlier political disgrace, a Soviet Foreign Office spokesman had announced that he would return to Vienna as delegate to the international atoms-for-peace agency. By week’s end he still had not returned. According to one theory, Molotov’s enemies in the Kremlin would not let him go; according to another version, he did not want to go, because the minor post in effect means exile. Either explanation fitted with Pravda’s latest attack on Stalin’s longtime Foreign Minister for his “dogmatic stubbornness” in opposing the “live, creative” Leninist line as preached by Nikita Khrushchev.

The aging (71) Molotov is in the middle of what may be Communism’s most significant internal split since the Stalin-Trotsky quarrel in the ’20s. On one side are ranged the dominant forces in the Soviet Presidium and most of the world’s Communist parties, which support Khrushchev’s avowed policies of “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist nations, his campaign against Stalin’s terroristic “cult of personality,” and his efforts to raise the living standards of the Russian people. On the opposite side are Red China and its tiny, faraway ally, Albania; they are apparently more willing to risk war against capitalism, they revere Stalin’s memory, and scorn Russia’s preoccupation with “bourgeois” material gains. “Molotov,” in Moscow deliberations, is a shorthand reference to all these heresies.

The basic issue is whether the Soviet Union can tolerate defiance of Moscow policies without seeing the Communist world break up into old-style nation states, all Marxist but pursuing divergent policies. Italian Communist Leader Palmiro Togliatti has already coined the word for this state of affairs: polycentrism.

Brothers United. This fear of local independence inspired a blistering attack last week by Moscow’s Problems of Peace and Socialism, an official party journal, which condemned Albania (and by implication, Red China) for pursuing “narrow, nationalistic, egoistic interests.” The magazine also denounced the Albanian government as a “regime of terror.” The world was thus witnessing the extraordinary spectacle of two Communist states hurling at each other the kind of blasts they ordinarily reserve for the West. Radio Moscow accused Albania of mass arrests and purges in which a pregnant woman Communist leader opposed to Dictator Enver Hoxha was executed. Hoxha, in turn, accused Khrushchev of “hideous activities,” including the use of such “poisoned weapons as slander and brutal interference in our internal affairs.”

At the same time, the Albanian boss paid homage to his regime’s new-found “elder brother, the Chinese people.” Last week Big Brother and Little Brother further cemented their new relationship with a trade and technical aid agreement.

Theoretical God. The Chinese-Stalinist faction has its partisans in Moscow, particularly (so Western experts guess) among the middle echelons of the party secretariat. In Moscow, key Communist Party officials from the Soviet Union’s 15 republics were summoned for a three-day conference on political and administrative problems. Also trying to straighten out the ideological mess was Leonid Ilyichev, Soviet propaganda boss, who demanded a “decisive cleanup of remnants of the personality cult” and reported that some officials will “stick to the viewpoint that Stalin was a theoretical god.”

The open war of words is obviously having a demoralizing effect on the Communist world. But in one respect, it is to Khrushchev’s advantage: it reinforces the idea in the West that he is not a bad fellow compared to the Stalinists, and it even leads such Soviet experts as Britain’s Edward Crankshaw to suggest that Mr. K.’s Russia is slowly moving toward “a species of democracy.”

Khrushchev at any rate was not worried enough by the situation to stay home. Last week, he was off on another of his periodic missions to rural pigsties and haylofts, while his chief international troubleshooter, Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, was on a swing through West Africa. Artful Anastas got a coolly correct reception in Guinea, where he tried to mend some fences; the Soviet ambassador, since expelled, had stirred up demonstrations against President Sekou Toure, a Marxist but apparently not enough of one for Moscow. In Red-leaning Mali and Ghana, Mikoyan was treated like an honorary African, grinned while a provincial street was named after him.

Meanwhile Khrushchev, on a tour of Byelorussia, told hog farmers that he was “not here to read Pushkin’s poems. You will read poems without me. I came to expose shortcomings.” To dairy farmers, the peasant Premier proposed a taste test to decide between his recommendation for high protein cattle feed (sugar beets, peas) or simple hay, which some scientists favor. Khrushchev, who obviously can afford more liberalism toward cattle than toward comrades, suggested that the cows decide. Said he: “Well now, Burenushka [Bossy], what fodder do you vote for?”