The Sword and the Shield

^EIGHTEEN EUROCOMMUNISM

A conference of eighty-five Communist parties held in Moscow in 1960 unanimously reaffirmed loyalty to the Soviet Union as an unshakeable article of faith for Communists in both East and West:

By the end of the decade, however, the CPSU leadership was outraged to find its infallibility being called into question by the emergence of what was later termed “Eurocommunism.” The Eurocommunist heresy made its first public appearance after the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, when a number of Western parties ventured some, mostly timid, criticisms of the Soviet invasion. The leadership of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), later the dominant force in Eurocommunism, reaffirmed “the profound, fraternal and genuine ties that unite the Italian Communist Party to the Soviet Union and the CPSU,” but denied the right of the Soviet Union to intervene militarily “in the internal life of another Communist Party or another country.”¹

“The profound, fraternal and genuine ties” which bound the PCI to the Soviet Union even after Soviet tanks had entered Prague had a secret dimension of which very few Italian Communists outside the Direzione were aware. After the Colonels’ coup in Athens in April 1967, the PCI general secretary, Luigi Longo, and other party leaders had become alarmed by the possibility of an Italian military putsch on the Greek model. In the summer of 1967, Giorgio Amendola, on behalf of the PCI Direzione, formally requested Soviet assistance in preparing the Party for survival after a coup as an illegal underground movement. Politburo decision no. P50/P of August 15 authorized the FCD to draw up a program which was intended to give the PCI its own intelligence unit with fully trained staff and a clandestine radio communications system. Details of the program were agreed in talks in Moscow between ANDREA, the head of the PCI’s illegal apparatus, and senior Central Committee officials and KGB officers. Between October 1967 and May 1968 three Italian radio operators completed a four-month KGB training course. Other Party members took courses in producing bogus identity documents, following a syllabus which devoted ninety-six hours to the production of rubber stamps and document seals, six to the art of embossing with synthetic resins, six to changing photographs on identity documents, six to making handwritten entries on documents and twelve to “theoretical discussions.” These and other secret training programs continued at least until the end of the 1970s. The PCI leadership also asked the KGB to check its headquarters for listening devices.²

After the immediate PCI protest at the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, open criticism quickly subsided. Before the PCI Twelfth Congress in February 1969, both Boris Ponomarev, head of the Central Committee’s International Department, and senior KGB officers put heavy pressure on Luigi Longo and other Party leaders to tone down their comments on Cezchoslovakia in speeches to the conference. In reports to the CPSU Central Committee, Ponomarev and the KGB claimed the credit for the fact that, despite the retention of some “ambiguous phrases,” all references to “intervention” and “occupation” by the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact were removed. Nor was there any call by the PCI for the withdrawal of Warsaw Pact forces from Czechoslovakia.³ In a private discussion in 1970 with Nikita Ryzhov, the Soviet ambassador, Longo “particularly emphasized that for the Italian Communists friendship with the CPSU and the Soviet Union was not a formality but a real necessity for their existence.”⁴

Longo also depended heavily on Soviet subsidies. He was at his most importunate when a general election was called one year ahead of schedule in May 1972. The original CPSU Politburo allocation for the election year was 5,200,000 dollars—2 million more than in 1971. After a further appeal from Longo, it provided another 500,000 dollars. Longo then wrote another begging letter, to which Brezhnev sent a personal reply, delivered by the Rome resident, Gennadi Fyodorovich Borzov (alias “Bystrov”), on April 4:

After handing the letter to Longo, Borzov reported to the Centre:

The Centre ordered Borzov to do his best to pacify the Ambassador:

In October 1972, Borzov reported that the “friends” had handed back three 100-dollar notes which had, embarrassingly, turned out to be forgeries.⁷

Until 1976 the transfer of funds to the Communist Party was a far more straightforward business in Rome than in the United States or many other parts of the world. Since leading Italian Communists regularly called at the Soviet embassy, it was thought unnecessary to resort to the clandestine rigmarole of brush contacts and dead-drops. The most dependable Soviet loyalist on the PCI Direzione, who was in regular contact with the KGB, simply selected a series of emissaries who drove to the embassy and collected the money, having first checked that their cars were not being followed. The KGB residency’s KOMETA radio-listening post simultaneously monitored the wavelengths used by Italian police and security forces in order to detect any signs of surveillance. As an additional precaution, the emissary was followed to and from the embassy by a PCI car.⁸ Moscow provided further financial assistance through lucrative contracts with PCI-controlled companies in business ventures ranging from Soviet oil imports to hotel construction in the Soviet Union.⁹

The PCI’s fears of a right-wing military coup were revived by the overthrow of President Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government in Chile by the armed forces in September 1973. In December the PCI took secret delivery from the KGB of three SELENGA radio stations in order to enable Party headquarters to maintain contact with local branches if the PCI was forced underground. Party radio technicians were trained in Russia to operate the new system. In the aftermath of a coup the SELENGA radios would transmit messages to Moscow which would then be retransmitted to local PCI underground groups by powerful Soviet transmitters.¹⁰

The renewed fear of an Italian putsch, however, also drove the PCI in directions which caused concern in Moscow that the West’s largest Communist Party was succumbing to ideological heresy. In a series of articles entitled “Reflections on Italy after the Events in Chile,” Enrico Berlinguer (who had succeeded Longo as general secretary in 1972) proposed, in a phrase which became famous, a compromesso storico (“historic compromise”) with the Socialists and the ruling Christian Democrats.¹¹ Berlinguer was unlike any previous major Communist leader with whom the Kremlin had had to deal. His wife Letizia was a devout Catholic and he had agreed to their children being brought up in the Catholic faith. Longo had done his best to persuade Moscow that, despite his Catholic family, Berlinguer was the best available candidate and that his three main rivals, Giorgio Amendola, Gian Carlo Pajetta and Pietro Ingrao, were unsuitable for the post of general secretary. Amendola, according to Longo, “had a great deal of the bourgeois democrat about him and had too often committed revisionist errors;” Pajetta, “whose authority was dwindling, was too short-tempered and would not promote [Party] unity;” Ingrao was “superficial and given to unrealistic theoretical speculation.” Berlinguer, however, represented the new generation of Party leaders who had emerged since the Second World War.¹² Moscow was far from reassured.

Berlinguer’s original proposal for a “historic compromise” was conceived chiefly as a defense against the prospect of a right-wing coup, justified by Lenin’s dictum that revolutionaries must know when to retreat. Gradually, however, the proposal evolved into a more ambitious—and, in Moscow’s view, heretical—strategy, in which Catholic traditions of solidarity would combine with Communist collective action to produce a new political and social order. During 1975 Berlinguer emerged as the chief spokesman of what became known as Eurocommunism. The PCI joined with the Spanish PCE and French PCF in issuing what was, in effect, a Eurocommunist manifesto, distancing themselves from the Soviet model of socialism and committing themselves to free elections, a free press and a parliamentary road to socialism within a multi-party system.¹³

At a secret meeting with Ryzhov on December 12, 1975, a KGB informant on the Direzione accused Berlinguer and the Party leadership of “a cowardly rejection of Leninism” and growing hostility to the Soviet Union. He appealed to the CPSU to issue a public criticism of the PCI line: “This will almost split the party, but it is the only way to save the situation.” The informant also claimed that the PCI leadership was planning to disrupt the conference of European Communist Parties, due to be held in East Berlin in the summer of 1976, by using it as a platform for its revisionist views.¹⁴

During the preparations for the East Berlin conference the Kremlin issued a series of thinly veiled public warnings to the Eurocommunists not to misbehave. Berlinguer, however, was not to be intimidated. During the Italian election campaign in June, he made what Moscow considered his most outrageous statement yet. Italian membership of NATO, Berlinguer declared, was on balance an advantage: “This guarantees us the kind of socialism that we want—to be precise, socialism in liberty, socialism of a pluralist kind.” The Kremlin responded with a scathing, though secret, letter of protest. Of far more significance so far as most of the PCI Direzione was concerned, however, was the fact that the Party received a record 34.5 percent of the vote (up 7.3 percent since 1972). At the East Berlin conference on June 29-30 the clash between the CPSU and the Eurocommunists was thinly papered over by a bland communiqué calling for “internationalist solidarity.” The speeches of Berlinguer and other leading heretics, which drew attention to flaws in “existing socialism” (in other words, the Soviet model), were published in Pravda only in a censored version.¹⁵

In December 1976 the Bulgarian leader, Todor Zhivkov, always a faithful mouthpiece for the Kremlin, denounced Eurocommunism as one of the bourgeois propagandists’ “main lines of ideological subversion against proletarian internationalism.”¹⁶ The Kremlin’s scope for a direct, frontal assault on Berlinguer, however, was limited by his immense popularity. Instead, Andropov instructed Kryuchkov, the head of the FCD, to prepare active measures to discredit him and other tribunes of Eurocommunism. ¹⁷ A report prepared by the FCD for the Central Committee claimed that Berlinguer owned a plot of land in Sardinia, and had been involved in dubious building contracts worth tens of billions of lira.¹⁸

Remarkably, while hoping to destabilize Berlinguer by leaking evidence of his alleged corruption, Moscow continued to subsidize the PCI. The total subsidy for 1976 was 6.5 million dollars.¹⁹ According to KGB files, however, the “operational situation” for the transfer of money in Rome had become more difficult. The newly appointed resident, Boris Solomatin (previously stationed in New York), concluded in 1976 that handing over money at the embassy was insufficiently clandestine. He agreed with Guido Cappelloni (codenamed ALBERTO), head of the PCI Central Committee administration department, that it would be safest for the money transfers to take place early on Sunday mornings at pre-arranged locations in the Rome suburbs which had been carefully checked beforehand by both the residency and the PCI. The route of the car used by the “friend” who received the money was kept under careful surveillance by PCI members; he then transferred the money to another car which delivered it to a secret Party office.²⁰

Despite its hostility to Berlinguer and Eurocommunism, the Soviet Politburo also continued to authorize KGB training in underground operations of specially selected Italian Communists. In 1979, for example, the PCI sent three Party members to Moscow for instruction by the FCD “Illegals” Directorate S. One was trained to act as radio and cipher instructor, another as a disguise specialist and the third in the fabrication of false documents.²¹

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, rejected 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 and 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:

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

At the beginning of 1976 Marchais privately rebuked the PCF newspaper, L’Humanité, for failing to send a correspondent to meet the exiled Russian dissident, Leonid Plyushch, on his arrival in Paris after being freed from incarceration in a Soviet mental hospital. The Centre interpreted Marchais’s gradual move towards Eurocommunism less in terms of ideological evolution than personal ambition. Even Berlinguer was reported by the KGB as criticizing Marchais for his narrow nationalism and comparing him to the Romanian autocrat Nicola Ceauşescu. The Centre concluded that Marchais would stop at nothing to satisfy his personal vanity.⁵⁵

The KGB reported to the Central Committee that it was not until the Twentysecond Congress of the PCF in February 1976 that Marchais felt sufficiently confident of support for his increasingly heretical views within the Party hierarchy to dare to express them openly, despite the opposition of Plissonnier.⁵⁶ The congress adopted an ambitious Eurocommunist agenda. Marchais took the lead in rejecting the traditional aim of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in criticizing the “limitations on democracy” in the Soviet Bloc and in committing the PCF to “a democratic road to socialism” which would “foster the free expression of many trends of thought.” To scandalized Soviet loyalists within the PCF, the new Eurocommunist platform seemed to “legalize counter-revolution.”⁵⁷ Over the next eighteen months the CPSU Central Committee sent three angry letters to the PCF complaining about its policies. ⁵⁸ Behind the scenes the KGB accompanied such irate correspondence with active measures. Among them was operation YEVROPA, begun in 1977 and based on forged CIA documents which purported to reveal an American plot to destroy the unity of the PCF. The Centre hoped that YEVROPA would set some of the Central Committee against Marchais, presumably by implying that he was playing into the hands of the CIA.⁵⁹

The KGB, however, had misjudged the strength of Marchais’s ideological deviations. The PCF’s Eurocommunist flirtation had been part of the price it had paid for the alliance with the socialists. The flirtation ended in the summer of 1977 after it became clear that, instead of confirming the Communists as the largest party on the French left, it had led to them being overtaken by the socialists. In September 1977 the left-wing alliance collapsed amid mutual recriminations. Thereafter Marchais and the PCF Central Committee gradually returned to an increasingly uncritical Soviet loyalism.⁶⁰ In October 1978 the Centre cancelled an active measure devised by the Paris residency to drive a wedge between the PCF and PCI, probably because it was no longer considered necessary.⁶¹

The KGB report on Marchais submitted to the Central Committee in March 1976 reported that he had hanging over him the exposure of his war record.⁶² Marchais had claimed in 1970 that he had been “requisitioned” in December 1942 to work in a German factory at Lipheim building Messerschmitt fighter aircraft, but had escaped in January 1943 and returned to France.⁶³ The Centre, however, claimed to know “from reliable sources” that the French authorities had documents showing that, far from being forced to work in Germany, he had signed a voluntary contract for a job at Lipheim. The KGB report on Marchais was so hostile that in 1976 it may well have contemplated using his war record to discredit him, just as it hoped to use Berlinguer’s allegedly shady building contracts to destroy his reputation.⁶⁴ It is unclear, however, whether the KGB did anything to bring to light a document, which was published in 1977 by Auguste Lecoeur, a former member of the PCF Politburo, and the right-wing weekly Minute, showing that Marchais had voluntarily accepted work in the Messerschmitt factory. Marchais claimed that the document was forged and brought a libel suit against both Lecoeur and Minute. At the opening of the trial in September 1977 he burst into tears. He lost both that case and another libel suit in the following year. In March 1980 L’Express published a wartime German document which appeared to show not merely that Marchais had gone voluntarily to work in Germany but that he had stayed there until 1944. On this occasion Marchais did not sue but maintained his innocence, declaring that he was the victim of an improbable plot by his rivals in the 1981 presidential elections: “That is why, at the origin of this calumny, there have been successively discovered close collaborators of Giscard d’Estaing, of Chirac, and of François Mitterrand.”⁶⁵

The PCF entered the 1980s in a mood of unswerving loyalty to Moscow. No other leader of a major Western Communist Party matched the zeal with which Marchais defended the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Two years later the PCF sycophantically greeted the outlawing of Solidarity and the declaration of a state of emergency in Poland as a “triumph” for the Polish Communist Party. At the same time, however, the PCF was in steep electoral decline. In the 1981 presidential election Marchais gained only 15 percent of the vote—easily the Party’s worst result since the Second World War. In 1986 the PCF vote fell even more precipitously, to 6.8 percent, in the parliamentary elections.⁶⁶

THE GORBACHEV ERA brought a sea change in the CPSU’s relations with foreign Communist Parties. The PCF and Moscow’s other most faithful Western followers were increasingly outraged to discover that their loyalism was no longer appreciated. Gorbachev himself appeared far more interested in imaginative heresy than in intellectually sclerotic orthodoxy. Eurocommunism seemed to have conquered the Kremlin. As head of the CPSU delegation to Berlinguer’s funeral in June 1984, Gorbachev was deeply impressed by the spontaneous outpouring of grief by a million and a half mourners crowded into Rome’s Piazza San Giovanni.⁶⁷ One of the first signs of his “new thinking” when he became CPSU general secretary in March 1985 was the fact that the only European Communist leader included in his meetings with world statesmen after Chernenko’s funeral was Berlinguer’s successor, Alessandro Natta. Ponomarev was visibly shocked. How could it be, he asked his colleagues in the international department, that despite the presence of so many leaders of “good” Communist Parties in Moscow, Gorbachev had bestowed his favor instead on the general secretary of the “bad” PCI?⁶⁸

Over the next five years Gorbachev repeatedly conferred with PCI leaders, praised their policies and used them as sounding boards for his “new thinking” on social democracy and East-West relations.⁶⁹ In Spain Gorbachev showed far less interest in the tattered remnants of the PCE⁷⁰ than in the ruling Socialist Party. Gorbachev’s press secretary, Andrei Grachev, once asked him which foreign politician he felt closest to. Gorbachev’s reply was unhesitating: Felipe González. According to Grachev, Gorbachev “did not just appreciate ‘Felipe,’ he loved him.”⁷¹

Dependence on secret Soviet subsidies, however, persuaded some of the affronted hardline foreign Communist leaders to swallow their pride. In June 1987, Marchais sent a groveling message to Gorbachev conveying his “deepest gratitude” for meeting him in May and asking for “emergency financial aid” of 10 million francs (1.65 million dollars) to prepare for the 1988 presidential elections.⁷² Noting that the PCF had already received 2 million dollars during 1987, the Politburo none the less agreed to supply another million via the KGB.⁷³

For Gus Hall, the hardline leader of the ever-faithful CPUSA, Gorbachev’s “new thinking” proved too much in the end. Goaded for the first time in his career into open disagreement with Moscow, he launched a public attack on Gorbachev’s reforms in 1989, only for his secret Soviet subsidies to be abruptly cut off. The impact on the CPUSA was devastating. Plunged into an immediate financial crisis, it was forced in 1990 first to cut the publication of the Party newspaper, the People’s Daily World, from five to two days a week, then to turn it into a weekly.⁷⁴ Armando Cossutta spoke for many traditional Moscow loyalists in Western Communist Parties when he declared his disgust after the failure of the August 1991 Moscow coup that “the term ‘Communism’ is now a dirty word even in the land of Lenin.”⁷⁵