After the Sino-Soviet dispute had considerably weakened Moscow’s supremacy in world communism, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was keen on restoring control and unity. But he soon discovered that his meaning of unity did not exactly coincide with what others had in mind. West European communists were striving to accommodate social principles to domestic conditions so, as to be able to accede to government. They advocated for each party’s right to make their own decisions independently and also for an enlargement of world communism beyond its initial sectarianism. Their cause was vulnerable though as internationalism was still an important part of their political identity, apart from the fact that Moscow did subsidize most of them. In the second half of the 1960s though, a new voice joined those asking for reform in world communism: Nicolae Ceauşescu, a leader of the Romanian Communist Party. Interested to promote his country’s autonomy in the Soviet bloc, Ceauşescu had no reason to support Moscow’s efforts to regain control. Instead, Ceauşescu developed close relations with West European Communist parties and assumed some of their ideological tenets, trying to fend off Soviet domination. This way, although he never was a Eurocommunist, Ceauşescu did play an important part in the ideological debates that were later to produce Eurocommunism, defendingWest European arguments in front of Moscow.

No abstract

No abstract

One of Leonid Brezhnev's primary goals when he acceded to party leadership in the Soviet Union was to restore Moscow's control over the world communist movement, severely undermined by the Sino-Soviet dispute. Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania was determined to prevent this, in order to consolidate his country's autonomy in the Communist bloc. The Sino-Soviet dispute offered the political and ideological framework for autonomy, as the Romanian Communists claimed their neutrality in the dispute. This article describes Ceauşescu's efforts to sabotage Brezhnev's attempts to have China condemned by an international meeting of Communist parties between 1967 and 1969. His basic ideological argument was that unity of world communism should have a polycentric meaning.

No abstract