History in the unmaking
Peter Nichols
East Berlin There was a lot of talk of history in the making last week in Berlin at the conference of European communist parties. The prod of history in fact was the reason Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the Italian Communist Party, gave to explain how the conference took place at all. He was asked why the Russians preferred to come and make concessions rather than postpone the affair indefinitely : 'Even if you are not a Marxist,' was his reply, you must accept the logic of history, and that was what brought Mr Brezhnev to Berlin.'
Fortunately there was a corrective. The Komische Oper was due on the final night of the conference to stage a revival of Felsenstein's production of Carmen but had to make a quick change because of the illness of a singer and replaced Bizet's straightforward, relentless, history-obeying story with Kodaly's Adventures of Hary Janos which, as all East European operagoers know, are adventures that cannot be true, but also are not untrue. Nary Janos did not really ride the wild stallion, or capture Napoleon or turn down the hand of the Emperor's daughter and an archduchy, but, the way he describes his feats, as part imagination, part poetry, part reality, it would be wrong to dismiss him as a liar.
Mr Brezhnev made a big effort to keep the conference on the lines which he feels essential. But he faced the fact that insistence from a minority of the twenty-nine parties present for a different outlook had to be met. And so he gave a splendid picture of Soviet achievements: 'We have created a society free from domination by a monopoly oligarchy, free from fear of crises and unemployment, and free from social upheavals. We have created a society of people with equal rights in the broadest sense of the word, without estate, property, racial or any other privileges, a society that not only proclaims the rights of man, but also assures the opportunity to use them. We have created a stable, dynamic and close-knit society'. He produced a long list of efforts by the Soviet Union to reduce armaments and the lack of cooperation from the West. He insisted so hard on the point, as did President Tito (who was making his first appearance at an international communist meeting since his expulsion from the movement in 1948) that there was more than a suspicion that economic difficulties may have been as weighty as the burden of history in bringing the conference about.
Some of his comments were surprisingly conciliatory towards the communist parties challenging the Soviet Union's primacy in the movement. 'Each communist party is born of the working class movement in the country where it operates. And it is accountable for its actions above all to the working people of its own country, whose interests it expresses and promotes.' He reiterated the validity of proletarian internationalism, a dogma which is not mentioned in the Conference's final document, but dismissed as 'strange apprehensions' the idea that internationalism implies an organisational centre, adding that the concept includes 'voluntary cooperation among fraternal parties with strict observance of the equality and independence of each'.
He was not against innovation : 'Life continuously adds something new to the objective socio-political and economic processes in the individual countries and on the world scale, to the struggle for our common aims'. He quoted Lenin's view that revolutionary theory grew out of 'the sum total of the revolutionary experience and the revolutionary thinking of all countries in the world'. He set limits to the individual lines followed by communist parties in Western Europe, insisting that communists who joined hands 'with broad democratic move ments, including social democrats and Christians', should remain true revolutionaries, convinced proponents of replacing the capitalist with the socialist system.
Mr Brezhnev was doing his best to answer and contain the new doctrines developing among the Western European communist parties which are known collectively as Eurocommunism. The only delegate to use the term was Berlinguer: 'Obviously,' he said, 'we were not the ones to coin this term, but the very fact that it has gained such a wide circulation indicates the depth and extent of an aspiration to see solutions of a new type in the transformation of society in the socialist direction, take root and advance in the countries of Western Europe'. He went a long way in criticising the Russians with his clear bid for acknowledgment of the leading tble of the Italians in shaping these more flexible theories devised for a socially more advanced part of the continent and for parties in opposition. It is very much a minority movement. The ideas are not new : the British delegation hastened to recall that the British way to socialism was accepted communist policy in Britain two decadesago.
Did history put in an appearance at all in Berlin ? Everybody was pleased with the conference, but not monolithically so, in the traditional communist manner, but for diffferent reasons, like any international conference of no marked ideology. This impression was enhanced by the fact that the party leaders were facing problems—and finding them difficult like everyone else— which are common to Europe as a whole and not just to communist Europe. The Russians were happy to have managed to bring all the European parties together, with the exception of Albania, after a year and a half of difficult discussions. The innovators were pleased to have been able to say what they felt with unusual frankness. And they found a totally surprising ally in Cunhal, the Portuguese leader, who came down firmly for local autonomy. The Yugoslays went away in the belief that an era had begun of open dialogue within the communist world. Berlinguer meant much the same with his remark that the conference was more important for its methods than its merits. The method of arriving at the text of the final document was consensus. That is also what has kept Hary Janos's adventures in circulation.
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