Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

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.” 40The 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. 42After 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. 43Though 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. 44The 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. 45In 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.” 47In 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. 49The 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. 51Like 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:

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. 53Behind the scenes, however, the KGB was engaged in active measures aimed—unsuccessfully—at securing Giscard’s defeat. 54