Communists: One-Third of the Earth

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Shreds of morning mist drifted across Moscow as the first groups of delegates arrived in Red Square for the opening of the 22nd Communist Party. Congress. On one side, sunlight touched the golden onion-domes of the Kremlin's 15th and 16th century churches. On the other, it flashed from the glass-walled, modernistic Palace of the Congresses, where fluttered the red flags of the 15 "republics" of the Soviet Union.

The huge auditorium was filled to capacity. The delegates were impressed by their surroundings, and what impressed them most was that everything worked perfectly, from the almost silent escalators to the air conditioning, from the earphones to the hot and cold running water in the marble lavatories. Snack bars and soft drinks were available in the seventh-floor restaurant, which Western newsmen were calling the ''Top of the Marx." No one bothered to tell the impressed delegates that the tiled floors and kitchen refrigerators had been installed by two British firms, or that the air conditioning and electric wiring came from West Germany.

Such last week was the setting for Communism's most serious public rift since Tito's defection from Moscow. Instead of turgid rhetoric, there were revelations about Communism's recent past that rivaled the purge trials of the 1930's. Instead of parrotlike unity, there was the thrust of conflict between Red China and the Soviet Union. With typical Communist indirection, Moscow and Peking used tiny, insignificant Albania as the symbol of the quarrel and as their ideological whipping boy.

In the new hall's vast rows of upholstered red seats—which were comfortable but lacking in leg room—were crowded 4,394 voting delegates and 405 nonvoting delegates from the Soviet Union and 80 other countries. They ranged from giants like Red China to pygmies like Martinique and San Marino. There were such old war-hens of the party as the U.S.'s grandmotherly Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 71, and overblown Dolores Ibarruri, the famed La Pasionaria of the Spanish Civil War. And there were men whose hands are bloodied by countless executions, like Hungary's sad-eyed Janos Kadar and Argentina's fat Victorio Codovilla, who once was Stalin's top agent in Spain, and such party hacks as France's Maurice Thorez and Italy's Palmiro Togliatti, both symbols of failure from countries that, scarcely a decade ago, seemed on the brink of Communism.

Broken Windows. After the visiting Communist VIPs filed onstage beneath a giant silvery head of Lenin embossed on purple plastic, the 13 members of the Soviet Party Presidium came on from stage left, headed by a fit-looking, somewhat thinner Nikita Khrushchev. "I propose we begin to work," said Party Secretary Khrushchev briskly. "The 22nd Congress is now in session."

Khrushchev was in top form. For six hours on opening day he ranted and rambled his way through foreign affairs. Next day he held forth for another six hours in an increasingly hoarse voice on the subject of Soviet domestic triumphs. Groggy but game, the delegates stayed with him.