Soviet Reforms Leave Europe’s Communist Parties Adrift

Cast adrift by the Gorbachev revolution, many of Western Europe’s Communist parties are groping for ideological stability, knowing they can no longer count on Moscow for guidance.

The upheaval in the Soviet Union, the shift to democracy in Hungary and Poland and the flight of refugees from East Germany have provoked responses from different parties ranging from congratulations to embarrassment.

With the Bolshevik bogy being replaced in Western minds by the benign image of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, some Communists believe they can win new hearts and minds and reverse their electoral decline.

Conversely, others fear that communism is losing its identity and becoming a mere adjunct to Western-style socialism.

“What we’re witnessing is the breakup of the old Communist culture,” said Martin Jacques, editor of the British journal Marxism Today.

“Every Communist party is in flux as a result,” Jacques said in an interview. “Some will survive, metamorphose.” And those that don’t? “There’s a very good chance that the result will be oblivion.”

Communism in Western Europe has been in schism since the 1950s, marked by periodic watersheds of what the Austrian Communist Ernst Fischer once denounced as Panzerkommunismus , or “tank communism.”

The crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet entry into Afghanistan in December, 1979--each of these events forced Communists to take a clear stand for or against the Soviet line. The result often was a party split.

But with Gorbachev’s openness to pluralism, there simply is no longer a clear Soviet line.

For doctrinaire parties, “The Soviet Union was like their god. So what happens when the pope, as it were, turns on them? Gorbachev has clearly encouraged reforming forces within those parties, and every hard-line party has been thrown into crisis to some degree or other,” Jacques said.

The larger Communist parties have managed, in varying measure, to adapt to the hectic pace set by Gorbachev. Those in Italy, France and Spain can now claim they saw glasnost and perestroika coming and prepared the ground with Eurocommunism, a 1970s attempt to reconcile Communist orthodoxy with life in a Western parliamentary democracy.

For the West, Eurocommunism raised the specter of elected Communists sitting at the cabinet tables of countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But that has happened only in France, from 1981 to 1984 under President Francois Mitterrand, and for three months this year in Greece.

The Italian party, the largest in the West, actually supports Italy’s membership in NATO.

Its vote has declined, from 34.4% in 1976 to 26.6% in 1987, and it is seeking a more youthful image, even toying with the idea of dumping “Communist” from its name. The French and Portuguese parties have also seen their support slump.

In Spain, the Communists have been trying since 1986 to shed their hard-left image, joining forces with other left-wing parties and no longer displaying the hammer-and-sickle flag at public meetings.

The Portuguese party now accepts the Western socialist concept of a mixed economy. But in other areas it hews to doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism.

Last year it expelled reformist Zita Seabra for defending other dissidents’ right to criticize the party leadership.

West Germany’s tiny party is showing signs of strain over its resistance to reforms. In May, 1986, leader Herbert Mies won 95.2% of the vote at the party convention. Last January, he got only 71.8%.

The British party, always marginal, has been further weakened by a split into hard-liners and the free-thinking set whose views are expressed by Jacques’ Marxism Today.

Speaking for the hard-liners, John Haylett agrees that “the monolith is gone forever” and that there are probably many old-guard Communists “wandering around rudderless,” thinking “My God! Everything that I believed in, everything I thought highly of, now turns out to have feet of clay.”