THE COMMUNISTS: 20,000-Word Creed

In A.D. 325 the Emperor Constantine. disturbed because the Arian heresy had started a squabble among his bishops that threatened the internal and external security of the Roman world, summoned the Council of Nicaea, banged episcopal heads together until the bishops agreed on the Nicene Creed, a concise statement of belief that runs in the Latin version to only 162 words, yet managed to postpone religious schism for 700 years.

Five weeks ago Nikita Khrushchev convened in Moscow an ecumenical council of the Communist hierarchs of 81 nations to deal with the threat of schism raised by efforts of the brash Peking Communist school to put itself forward as the true exemplar of Communist faith and practice. Last week the resulting creed finally was published in Moscow and in Communist papers around the world.

Failed Papering. As the most concise reconciliation presently possible of conflicting Communist points of view, the summary communique runs to 20,000 words, or three times as long as the last similar pronouncement of a Communist council, the 1957 declaration that formally approved the Communists’ plans for peaceful coexistence.

All the words fail to paper over the growing evidence of deep ideological disagreement. In place of the flat 1957 assertion that the Russian Communist Party plays the “leading role in the Socialist movement,” the new document merely observes that historically the Russian party is “universally recognized as the.vanguard of the world Communist movement.” As if to underline Red China’s view that Moscow has a primacy only in time, the Peking party daily Jen Min Jih Pao editorialized that henceforth all Communist parties are “completely equal and independent.” Instead of talking of the “monolithic unity of the Socialist camp,” the communique spoke of the “comity” of Communist states.

Chinese Tones. The Chinese Communists seemed ready to give a little, but not much, on specific issues of dispute with Moscow. They conceded that in underdeveloped countries Communist powers temporarily may cooperate with “bourgeois nationalists” who are actively trying to throw off imperialism. But such elements, said the document, are inherently “unstable,” hence not to be trusted for long. Speaking in Chinese tones, the communique assailed Egypt and Iraq, where Russia has been attempting to buy the favor of the governments in power with gifts and loans, complaining bitterly that local Communist leaders still “languish in torture chambers” in both countries just as in Spain and West Germany.

To celebrate the paper victory, China’s Chairman Liu Shao Chi took off on a stately processional round the Soviet Union in company with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. At a “friendship” rally in Moscow, Brezhnev promised that “the day is not far off when the stinking corpse of Chiang Kai-shek will no longer poison the atmosphere” of the U.N.

On the issue that originally started the Peking-Moscow dispute—whether war is inevitable or Communism can prevail without it—the communique took the jargon way out. War is not bound to happen, but “the peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems does not mean reconciliation between the socialist and bourgeois ideologies. On the contrary, it implies an intensification of the struggle of the working class and all Communist parties for the triumph of socialist ideas.”

Concluded one U.S. expert of the new balance of power within the Red system: “The Russians have always been more equal than the others. Now they are less more equal than they used to be.”