The Sword and the Shield
Page 53
Not all the conflicts between the PCI Direzione and the Communist parties of the Soviet Bloc became public. The most serious secret dispute in the late 1970s concerned the covert assistance given by a number of east European intelligence services to terrorist groups in the West. East Germany became, in the words of its last, non-Communist, minister of the interior, Peter-Michael Diestel, “an Eldorado for terrorists.”22 What most concerned the leaders of the PCI, however, was support by the Czechoslovak StB for the Italian Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades).23 Their anxieties reached a peak on March 16, 1978, when the Red Brigades ambushed a car carrying the president of the Christian Democrats, Aldo Moro, in the center of Rome. Moro’s chauffeur and his police escort were gunned down and Moro himself was bundled into a waiting car. For the next fifty-four days, while Moro was held prisoner in a secret hiding place, the nation agonized over whether or not to negotiate with the Red Brigades to save his life.24
Though the PCI Direzione publicly maintained that there could be no deals with terrorists, it was privately tormented by the fear that news of the support given to the Red Brigades by the StB would leak out. Speaking for the Direzione, Arturo Colombi complained to the Czechoslovak ambassador in Rome, Vladimir Koucky, that a PCI delegation to Prague had been fobbed off when it had tried to raise the issue of help to the Red Brigades, some of whom, it believed, had been invited to Czechoslovakia. On May 4, 1978 Amendola warned Koucky that, if Moro’s kidnappers were caught and put on trial, the assistance given them by the StB “could all come out.” On this occasion, Rhyzov, the Soviet ambassador, sided with the PCI, telling Koucky “he had warned Czechoslovak representatives about contacts with the Red Brigades, but they would not listen to him.” Rhyzov was convinced that the StB residency in Rome was still secretly in touch with the Red Brigades. “You got a pennyworth of benefit [from the Red Brigades],” he told Koucky, “but did a hundred times more damage.”25
The Italian authorities failed to discover Moro’s hiding place in time. On May 9, 1978 he was murdered by his kidnappers and his body left in the boot of a car in the center of Rome, midway between the headquarters of the PCI and those of the Christian Democrats. In the outpouring of grief and soul-searching which followed Moro’s assassination there was—to the relief of the Direzione—no mention of the involvement of the StB with the Red Brigades. During the police hunt for terrorist radio stations over the next few years, however, the PCI leadership became increasingly anxious that their own might be discovered. In June 1981 the PCI leadership informed the Rome residency that, for security reasons, the three radio stations installed by the KGB for clandestine Party use eight years earlier had been destroyed.26
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979 and the imposition of martial law in Poland two years later destroyed any semblance of a reconciliation between Moscow and the PCI. At a meeting of the PCI Central Committee in January 1982, only the KGB’s main contact voted against a motion condemning Soviet interference in Polish affairs. Berlinguer declared that the October Revolution had “exhausted its propulsive force,” implying in effect that the CPSU had lost its revolutionary credentials. The Direzione called on the west European left to work for the “democratic renewal” of the countries of the Soviet Bloc. Pravda denounced the PCI’s declarations as “truly blasphemous.” There followed what the Italians called lo strappo—a brief but highly polemical breach of relations between the PCI and CPSU.
Within the Italian Party leadership, the hardliner Armando Cossutta was a lone voice in taking Moscow’s side in the quarrel.27 A decade later, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, evidence leaked out that Soviet subsidies to the PCI had continued on a reduced scale in the 1980s. But, according to one commentator, “It soon became clear that if Soviet funds had been channelled into Italy, they went through the hands… of Cossutta, either to shore up a failing newspaper with pro-Soviet sympathies (Paese Sera) or to help finance his own activities against the PCI’s leaders.” 28 The final recorded payments—700,000 dollars in 1985, 600,000 dollars in 1986 and 630,000 dollars in 1987—were used solely to provide “material support” to what the CPSU International Department and the KGB (but probably not Gorbachev) considered “the healthy forces in the PCI,” chief among them Cossutta and Paese Sera.29
BERLINGUER APART, THE Eurocommunist of whom Moscow was most suspicious was Santiago Carrillo, leader of the PCE (Partido Comunista de España). Even as a teenage militant, Carrillo had shown precocious leadership qualities. In 1936, at the age of only nineteen, mocked by his opponents as “the chrysalis in spectacles,” he engineered a fusion between the socialist and communist youth movements and became chairman of the combined organization. During the Spanish Civil War, Carrillo became a close friend of the celebrated NKVD illegal, saboteur and assassin Iosif Grigulevich, whom he subsequently chose as his son’s secular “godfather.”30 Taking refuge in Moscow in 1939 after Franco’s victory in Spain, Carrillo proved his Stalinist orthodoxy by denouncing his own father, to whom he wrote with self-righteous fanaticism, “Between a Communist and a traitor there can be no relations of any kind.” He later claimed, implausibly, “If there was any fear of Stalin in the Soviet Union, I did not see it. For many years only a minority knew about the trials and the purges.”31
After becoming general secretary of the exiled PCE in 1959, however, Carrillo gradually evolved towards Eurocommunism. In 1968 the PCE executive committee condemned Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia; its leading Soviet loyalists, Agustín Gómez, Eduardo García and General Enrique Líster, were expelled in 1969-70.32 In July 1975 the PCI and PCE jointly issued a “solemn declaration that their conception of the march towards socialism in peace and freedom expresses not a tactical attitude but a strategic conviction.” After Franco’s death in November, Carrillo began to plan the PCE’s reemergence as a legal party. Late in 1976, without informing Moscow, he returned secretly to Spain from his French headquarters. On December 6 the Centre sent an urgent telegram to the Madrid residency, telling it to investigate rumors that Carrillo was in Spain and, if so, to find out whether he had returned on his own initiative or after a secret agreement with the Christian Democrat prime minister, Adolfo Suárez.33
In fact Carrillo had returned in order to try to force Suárez’s hand. On December 10 he gave a public news conference, thus compelling the Prime Minister to decide whether to risk the wrath of the army and the right by legalizing the PCE or to risk alienating the main democratic parties by refusing to do so. Though Carrillo was arrested on December 22, he was set at liberty a few days later and met secretly with Suárez. The formal legalization of the PCE followed in April 1977.34
Just as in Italy, the KGB’s principal point of contact with the PCI was with a Soviet loyalist, so the Madrid residency’s main source within the PCE was the most pro-Soviet member of its executive committee, Ignacio Gallego, codenamed KOBO. Until March 1976 Soviet subsidies to the PCE had been forwarded via the French Communist Party, the PCF. By Politburo decision no. P-1/84 of March 16, however, the KGB was instructed to make payments directly to Gallego. At least some of these payments were intended for Gallego himself, rather than the PCE executive as a whole, so that he could “work on his contacts.” On December 6, 1976 the Politburo approved a payment to Gallego of 20,000 dollars (decision no. P37/39-OP) for the purchase of a flat in Madrid. Though his public criticism of Carrillo was muted, the Madrid residency reported that in private Gallego was bitterly critical, denouncing him as “a danger to the Spanish Communist Party and the international Communist movement.”35
Early in 1977, through his wife LORA, Gallego passed on to the Madrid residency Carrillo’s draft of a joint declaration to be issued at a summit meeting of the leaders of the PCE, PCI and PCF, as well as the proofs of Carrillo’s forthcoming book, “Eurocomunismo” y Estado (“Eurocommunism” and the State).36 The Centre was scandalized by the criticisms in both documents of the Soviet Union—though, in the event, Berlinguer and Georges Marchais, general secretary of the PCF, r
ejected the most trenchant passages of the draft communiqué.37 Gallego informed the KGB that the left-wing daily Pueblo planned to send a correspondent to Moscow to interview Soviet dissidents. Thus forewarned, the Madrid embassy refused the correspondent a visa.38
With the restoration of parliamentary democracy for the first time since the Spanish Civil War, the PCE was widely expected—not least by Carrillo—to achieve as dominant a position on the left in Spain as the PCI had in Italy. Its socialist rival, the PSOE, had adapted itself less well both to underground opposition to the autocratic Franco regime and to maintaining party organization during almost forty years of exile. In the 35-year-old Felipe González, however, the socialists had a dynamic, telegenic leader whose youthful appeal to voters was far more effective than Carrillo’s. During the campaign for the parliamentary elections of June 1977 the PCE also found it more difficult than the PSOE to free itself of an extremist image. To Moscow’s satisfaction, Carrillo’s Eurocommunist campaign was at least mildly disrupted by the return from the Soviet Union in May of the 83-year-old president of the PCE, Dolores Ibárruri, whom Carrillo had succeeded as general secretary almost twenty years earlier. Known as La Pasionaria (“passion flower”), Ibárruri had been the most charismatic orator of the Civil War, famous around the world for her cries of defiance in the face of fascism: “Better to die on your feet than live on your knees!”; “Better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward!” Franco’s supporters spread rumors that she had once cut a priest’s throat with her own teeth.39 Though Ibárruri’s appearances during the 1977 election campaign were limited by her age and weak heart, she lost no opportunity to praise the achievements of the Soviet Bloc—“countries where socialism is being built.” Carrillo tried to dilute the impact of her speeches by implying that she was out of touch and bound to the Soviet Union by the death of her only son while fighting for the Red Army at Stalingrad.
At the parliamentary elections of June 1977, the first free elections in Spain for forty-one years, the electorate rejected the extremes of both left and right. The PCE won only 9 percent of the vote, as compared with the 34 percent of Suárez’s Union of the Democratic Centre and the 28 percent of the socialists. Among the new Communist deputies was Gallego, who became deputy chairman of the PCE parliamentary group. Believing Carrillo’s position to be much weaker than Berlinguer’s, the Kremlin tried to rally opposition to him in the PCE. Shortly after the election, the Moscow New Times published a vituperative review of Carrillo’s “Eurocommunism” and the State. Carrillo, it declared, might appear to be talking simply about differences in tactics and strategy between different Communist Parties, but his real views were “exactly those of the imperialist adversaries of Communism.”40 The CPSU International Department drafted an attack on Carrillo’s revisionism, then arranged for its publication under the signatures of three members of the PCE. A letter containing a similar attack, signed by 200 Spanish Communists, was circulated as a leaflet.41
During 1978 the public controversy between the PCE and CPSU died down. In private, however, Carrillo was more critical than ever. According to a report from Gallego forwarded by the Madrid residency, he condemned the Soviet Union in one off-the-record outburst as “a semi-feudal state, dominated by a privileged bureaucracy which is cut off from the people,” with a far less democratic way of life than the United States.42 After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979, Carrillo made some of his criticisms public. In January 1980 he wrote to the CPSU Central Committee attacking the invasion as political adventurism and blaming Soviet as well as American policy for the intensification of the Cold War.43 Though some local Party organizations supported Soviet intervention, Carrillo was backed by a majority of the PCE executive. Gallego, meanwhile, continued to receive about 30,000 dollars a year from the KGB.44 The Madrid resident, Viktor Mikhailovich Filippov, reported that though Gallego stuck “as far as possible” to the political line recommended by the residency, there was little he could do to galvanize open opposition without isolating himself on the executive. In Filippov’s view, Carrillo remained in firm control of his party.45 In reality, torn between Eurocommunists and hardliners, and with the Catalan Communists losing faith in Carrillo’s leadership, the PCE had begun to disintegrate.46
There were also divisions within the socialists as Felipe González tried to turn the PSOE into a social democratic party. After a party congress in May 1979 reaffirmed the Marxist nature of the PSOE, González resigned, only to return in triumph four months later when an extraordinary party congress recognized the non-Marxist as well as Marxist “contributions which have helped to make socialism the great alternative for emancipation of our time.” In the 1982 parliamentary elections the PSOE won a sweeping victory. With González as prime minister, the socialists dominated Spanish politics for the next decade. Support for the PCE, meanwhile, was dwindling away. In 1982 it gained only 3.8 percent of the vote—down from 10.5 percent in 1979. Carrillo was forced to resign as general secretary, to be succeeded by Gerardo Iglesias. According to González, “Carrillo managed to accomplish in record time what Franco could not do in forty years of the dictatorship. He has dismembered the Communist Party in Spain.”
Moscow also placed much of the blame for the collapse of PCE support on Carrillo personally, though its analysis differed from that of González. A book by the Tass journalist Anatoli Krasikov claimed that Carrillo’s Eurocommunism and rejection of Marxism—Leninism had led the Party into “sharp internal strife” and electoral disaster: “Large numbers of activists, including very prominent ones who had struggled against Francoism and fought for the democratization of the country, were driven out of the Party.”47 In a secret report preserved in KGB archives, Boris Ponomarev, the head of the international department, declared early in 1983 that there was no prospect of a PCE revival so long as Carrillo or his protégés retained influence in it.48
In January 1984 Moscow supported, and probably financed, the foundation by Gallego of a breakaway Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España. Pravda welcomed Gallego’s denunciation of Eurocommunism and his announcement that the new party would be an “integral part” of the international Communist movement.49 The PCPE, however, never became more than a splinter party. In 1986 the rump of the PCE merged with two smaller left-wing parties to form the Izquierda Unida (United Left).
THE THIRD OF the main Eurocommunist parties in the mid-1970s was the PCF (Parti Communiste Français), led by Georges Marchais, who had previously made a reputation as an uncompromising Stalinist. In 1957 he shouted angrily at a Party militant who dared to express doubts about Stalin’s purges and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising: “Yes, [the Soviets] arrested people, they imprisoned people! Well, I tell you they didn’t arrest enough! They didn’t imprison enough! If they had been tougher and more vigilant they wouldn’t have got into the situation they find themselves in now!” François Mitterrand once complained, “Insult is [Marchais’s] way of saying hello.”50
As Marchais consolidated his power in the PCF as deputy general secretary in 1970 and general secretary two years later, the Centre grew increasingly suspicious of him. Despite his early Soviet loyalism, the KGB reported to the Central Committee in March 1976 that, according to its informants in “circles close to Marchais,” he had been gradually moving away from “the principles of proletarian internationalism” for some time. The KGB’s chief informant on Eurocommunist tendencies inside the PCF was Marchais’s second-in-command, Gaston Plissonier, who had assisted Soviet intelligence operations since at least the early 1950s.51 Like his fellow Soviet loyalists in Italy and in Spain, Plissonnier was also the main conduit for Moscow’s secret subsidies to the PCF.52
In June 1972 the PCF formed an electoral alliance and agreed a “common program of government” with the socialists and left-wing radicals. A few months later, according to the KGB, Marchais told his closest associates (doubtless including Plissonnier) that he condemned both the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 an
d the continuing persecution of dissidents within the Soviet Union. Marchais was also deeply irritated by the Kremlin’s apparent benevolence towards France’s Gaullist governments, which, he claimed, “hampered the French Communist Party’s revolutionary struggle.” Since President de Gaulle had withdrawn France from the integrated NATO command in 1966, Moscow had seen Gaullism as potentially a more disruptive force in western Europe than a left-wing French government, even one which included Communists. Marchais tried to persuade the Kremlin that its assessment was mistaken. In 1972, doubtless intending his warning to be passed on to Moscow, he secretly threatened the East German leader, Erich Honecker:
If the Socialist countries [the Soviet Bloc] do not take account of the French Communist Party’s warning that the French government is shifting towards Atlantic [pro-American] positions, and if they do not give the Party the proper assistance in the struggle to overthrow the regime, they would be faced with a refusal by the French Communist Party to support their policy, as happened at the time of the Czechoslovak events [in 1968].
Publicly, the Kremlin appeared to pay little heed. Before the second round of the 1974 French presidential elections, the Soviet ambassador called on the neo-Gaullist candidate, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, apparently implying that Moscow favored his election rather than that of Mitterrand, who had PCF support.53 Behind the scenes, however, the KGB was engaged in active measures aimed—unsuccessfully—at securing Giscard’s defeat.54