Exit in Budapest
SHANOR, DONALD R.
WHY RUMANIA LEFT THE COMMUNIST PARTY CONFERENCE Exit in Budapest By Donald R. Shanor Budapest Shortly before midnight on February 29, the fourth day of the recently concluded world Communist...
...Hyvonen the following day...
...The sharpness of the criticism was in inverse ratio to the particular Party's position: The Hungarians, Czechs and Finns went lightly...
...Vladimir Koucky, the chief Czechoslovak delegate, on Saturday...
...Sounding like something straight out of an old Pravda, the speeches brought the flavor of the '50s to the conference...
...It was not a consultative conference, as we were promised when we agreed to come here...
...67 attended the Budapest meeting...
...Their judicious leaks had filled in the large gaps left by the official communiques...
...The last to speak was Paul Ni-culescu-Mizil, head of the Rumanian delegation...
...The immeDonald R. Shanor, a previous contributor, reports on East European affairs for the Chicago Daily News...
...An editor of the Party daily, Nepszabadsag, briefed journalists...
...The date, place, and agenda for that were set up before we came...
...Among the exiles, the miniparties, and the Eastern European parties, who have little room for maneuver, the Soviets will always be able to muster a majority for whatever unity project they are pushing...
...One by one, the Communist leaders took the microphone...
...No conference should "discuss in any form the internal or international activity or policy of other Communist or workers' parties...
...The power relationships were equally clear...
...Honecker, like Suslov before him, denied that any plans were afoot to re-establish a Communist center "in the sense of an organizational leadership organ...
...After Bakdash broke this agreement, they sought only to have the conference reaffirm it, not apologize...
...The Rumanians' story, of course, is quite different: At the very outset, they contend, the parley agreed to abide by the Rumanian principle of not condemning the views of other parties and not interfering in their affairs...
...the Rumanians insisted that the entire meeting disavow the Bakdash attack and reaffirm the hands-off agreement...
...The conference was silent...
...For the 200 correspondents who used the Club as a press center, the Rumanians—who were delegation members and journalists—had been the main unofficial source of news about the closed sessions going on two miles away at the Hotel Gellert...
...It did not discuss the summit...
...An orator in the Middle Eastern tradition, Bakdash had denounced the Rumanians in especially strong terms, although reports that he had called them "a tool of the Zionists" were apparendy untrue...
...According to a later Rumanian statement, consultations were in progress between the delegation and party boss Nico-lae Ceausescu in Bucharest...
...diate reason, they said, was a speech delivered the day before by Syrian Communist leader Khaled Bakdash, attacking Rumania for its support of Israel and its iconoclastic attitude toward the Communist summit planned at the end of this year...
...In the next few minutes, the long-prepared, highly-publicized meeting of the 67 Communist parties collapsed, bringing down with it the peculiar kind of unity the Soviet Union had tried to enforce...
...He criticized "practices aimed at imposing the will of certain parties on other parties...
...WHY RUMANIA LEFT THE COMMUNIST PARTY CONFERENCE Exit in Budapest By Donald R. Shanor Budapest Shortly before midnight on February 29, the fourth day of the recently concluded world Communist parley here, a small group of tired, unshaven Rumanians walked into the old Victorian villa that houses the Budapest Journalists' Club...
...That Thursday night, however, the story they told over cups of gritty Hungarian coffee or glasses of Steer Blood wine was no ordinary leak: The Rumanian delegation, out-maneuvered, outvoted, and the victim of Soviet "orchestration" at the meeting, had walked out and was going back to Bucharest...
...It took them until 3:00 a.m...
...But that does not mean that there is no binding measure of our international conduct...
...It is above all due to the Soviet Union that imperialism has not been able to plunge the world into the inferno of nuclear war...
...But in reality each side was dealt a defeat...
...The lines were clearly drawn, with Rumania favoring the loosest possible ties among Communist parties...
...Whoever is against close cooperation with the Communist party of the Soviet Union weakens his own position and thus the position of our entire movement...
...Every delegation was asked to state its views on the two resolutions, their short comments serving in place of a formal vote...
...All gave variations on the same theme: While the Rumanians may have had a grievance, they should never have left the conference...
...But as Budapest showed, the harder they push for unity, Soviet style, the more they will risk losing the support of the parties that count—those in Italy or France, which must compete for votes in free elections, or those in Czechoslovakia or Hungary, which are late and hesitant travelers on the path taken by Yugoslavia and Rumania...
...Meanwhile, the Rumanians were talking to the correspondents, huddling with them in little groups in lounges and the restaurant of the press center...
...If the Rumanians ever wanted their persistent declarations of independence and non-interference to be taken seriously, they had no choice but to walk out...
...It also must face the possibility of economic retaliation from its chief supplier, Moscow...
...Hyvonen, an attractive brunette in her mid-40s, the Rumanians emerged with one draft resolution and she with another...
...We couldn't accept it...
...The Canadians, with no worries about trying to liberalize a country in the shadow of the Soviet Union, were harshest, calling the Rumanian behavior a provocation...
...Each side claimed victory after the walkout...
...By the next morning, though, Suslov's position seemed mild indeed compared to the Honecker text, being circulated before the session in full instead of in the usual bland summary...
...None supported Rumania...
...Then he scooped up his papers and calmly led his delegation out of the conference hall...
...The criteria of internationalism are loyalty to Marxism-Lenism and proletarian internationalism, which are incorporated in the international consultations and conclusions of the world Communist movement...
...Rumania failed to gain the backing of any of the liberal Western parties like the Italian, or the liberalizing Eastern parties like the Czechoslovak or Hungarian...
...At the same time, the Central Committee was contacting Rumanian Party leaders in Moscow and the other capitals of the bloc...
...The Rumanians immediately demanded a retraction...
...He did not mention the Rumanians directly, preferring to devote most of his attack to the more dangerous nationalists, the Mao Tse-tung group...
...One Rumanian's comments were typical: "The meeting was orchestrated from the start...
...Mizil's short speech was full of the phrases the Rumanians have been stressing over the last two years at every Communist meeting—non-interference, independence, free and democratic exchange of opinion...
...Where Rumania urged that no decision be made on the time or place of a summit, Suslov gave delegates a choice of November or December 1968...
...Of these 66, at least a dozen are miniparties, no more influential than the Greenback party in the United States...
...And the walkout left them split evenly: China, Albania, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam and Yugoslavia comprise the "outs" with Rumania...
...general?tasks...
...The other delegations—now down to 66—went back to their tasks, chief of which was to prepare a press statement trying to put the best face on the affair...
...Some commentators here think the Soviets want it this way—a smaller movement, stripped of all potential dissenters, but monolithic and pure...
...The most crucial numbers, therefore, involve the 14 Communist parties in power...
...Our Party . . . sees as its duty learning from the experience of the fraternal parties, and acting in accordance with the general line of the Communist movement...
...Canada's delegation met the press the next morning...
...A breakdown of the 90 Communist parties in the world, however, suggests that Russia may have suffered the more serious defeat...
...But then, at the last minute, they took from their pocket a proposal from Bucharest...
...If Honecker's speech brought back memories of Cominform or Comintern meetings to older delegates, one can imagine how it affected the Rumanians—particularly when one contrasts it to Niculescu-Mizil's speech closing the Tuesday session...
...the East Germans and, more delicately, the Soviets, the tightest...
...The Finnish draft said in effect that Bak-dash's withdrawal was enough...
...The Soviet Union bears and has borne the main burden of the fight against imperialism...
...Anna Liisa Hyvonen, head of the Finnish delegation, provided one description of the scene that day: "In the morning, without any reason, we think, the Rumanians came up and said they had been in contact with the Central Committee and could only continue in Budapest if the whole meeting apologized for the Syrian statement...
...His own Party's attitude was clear: "On the basis of its achievements, which have changed the world since the Great October, as well as on the basis of its pioneer role in the building of Communism, it marches in the forefront of the international workers' movement and all of mankind...
...Poland, Bulgaria, East Germany, Outer Mongolia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary constitute the "ins" with Russia...
...When the Hungarian hosts saw what was happening, they quickly mounted a counterattack...
...Eighty-one parties showed up in Moscow eight years ago...
...Another key criterion, he added, at least in the view of the East Germans, is a party's attitude to the Soviet Union and its Communist party...
...The Soviet stage-managing of international meetings must stop...
...Another 12 to 15 are exile parties, camped in Moscow or some other friendly capital...
...Rumania had learned of the decision to call the Budapest meeting from "Moscow correspondents of the bourgeois newspapers and press agencies...
...This would "attribute to them the character of sessions of an organized body, and introduce into the relations between the Communist parties the elements of an organizational structure...
...Rumania had preserved its purity, Moscow its unity...
...We recognize the possibility and necessity of a general line, because the international workers' movement has common—that is to say...
...Yet where Niculescu-Mizil called for retracting the 1960 Moscow conference censure of Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia, Suslov said the USSR would "remain true to the general line of the Communist movement formulated in this document...
...We thought we had done so...
...only from the standpoint of my participation in the preparation, the propagation, and the hastening of the proletarian world revolution," Continuing in his own words, Ho-necker said: "Without the active support and solidarity of the fraternal parties, no Communist party can solve its problems successfully in the long run...
...While the minor delegations continued their ritual speeches on the floor, a final attempt at compromise was made...
...and they had exaggerated the incident out of all proportion to suit their own devious purposes...
...In any case, after a three-hour meeting with Mrs...
...It failed, and the two resolutions were presented...
...It seems more likely that their aim was a large monolith, with all dissenters either silent or paying lip service to Moscow's leading role...
...Bakdash reluctantly agreed to have his remarks stricken from the record, even though he did not formally withdraw them...
...The incident seemed to be closed...
...A member of the East German Politburo and Walter Ulbricht's heir apparent, Honecker challenged Rumania with a quotation from Lenin: "I cannot judge from the standpoint of "my' country...
...The stage was being set for the walkout on Thursday...
...and probably fewer than 66 will be on hand for the summit...
...But the lights were on late Wednesday night in the Rumanian Embassy, another Victorian villa near the Varosliget park...
...They said if we didn't accept it, their plane was waiting and they would leave...
...But, as later conversations with the Rumanians revealed, all the talk about Bakdash, compromise resolutions, and votes only obscured the real cause of Bucharest's disaffection: the tough speeches made on Tuesday and Wednesday, the second and third days of the meeting, by the Soviet Union's Mikhail Suslov and East Germany's Erich Honecker...
...The imperialists, Suslov warned, "attempt to take advantage of the ideology of nationalism to split our ranks...
...The chief Rumanian delegate listed several far-reaching demands: ?All future international meetings, including the planned summit conference, should be rotated among the capitals, not confined to Moscow, to "exclude the possibility of unwished for interpretations—namely of the existence of a leading center...
...The fact that their country alone among the Soviet bloc nations supported Israel is a private affair, the delegation maintained, as is the Rumanian view that the summit conference almost certain to take place in Moscow next fall should be delayed to allow additional time for preparation...
...Mrs...
...There should be no line of succession from the Moscow meeting of 1957 and 1960 to the one now being planned...
...Such practices, he said, accelerate the danger of deepening the split in the Communist movement...
...We tried to reach a compromise with them...
...Moscow had 66 votes, Rumania one...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 6
