Communists: Dragging Heels

When Joseph Stalin was running things, the Kremlin had only to bark a command and heels clicked throughout the Communist world. Now the heels are more likely to drag. Nowhere was the fraying discipline of once-monolithic world Communism more clearly illustrated last week than in a Pravda editorial that all Communists had been awaiting for months.

After nearly a year of intensive interparty bickering, Nikita Khrushchev finally ordered into motion the machinery that he hopes will rally assistance to his side in Moscow's ideological quarrel with Red China. He invited 25 Red delegations to Moscow on Dec. 15 to lay the groundwork for a full-scale summit meeting of the world's 90-odd Communist parties sometime in 1965. Nikita had hoped to convene his sub-summit this fall, but the recalcitrance of his Eastern European satellites—notably Poland and Rumania—forced him to delay. Both Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka and Rumania's Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej feared that an open split with China would free Khrushchev's hand to impose tighter discipline on them, and both leaders had learned to like their new (but still quite relative) freedom.

In his invitation, Khrushchev was careful to allay fears; indeed, the tone of the Pravda editorial was almost wheedling. It solemnly endorsed the "unity through diversity" that Gheorghiu-Dej has demanded, and swore that the purpose of the meeting was not to "excommunicate" anybody. Where earlier this year, Moscow had boasted that "nearly all" parties were in favor of a showdown summit, Pravda meekly moderated its claim last week to a mere "absolute majority." But the phrase that best revealed Khrushchev's uncertainty of control over his onetime charges was a promise "to collaborate conscientiously in those areas where positions and interests coincide, and to refrain in future from any actions harmful to the Communist movement which aggravate difficulties and bring happiness to our class enemies." With that, Nikita sat back anxiously to count his R.S.V.P.s.