Word: carrillo
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...immediate target of Soviet wrath is Spanish Communist Leader Santiago Carrillo. In tones reminiscent of Moscow's strident broadsides against Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito in the late 1940s and '50s, and China's Mao Tse-tung since the '60s, the Soviet weekly New Times blasted Carrillo, his new book Eurocommunism and the State, and the whole notion that Marxist societies can be established in Western Europe that would be independent of the Soviet Union...
...Russians did not publish the article until after the Spanish election, in which the Communists won only just over 9% of the vote, presumably because they feared their attack might have helped Carrillo and his colleagues at the polls had it come earlier. Last week the volume of Communism's new intramural scrap increased a notch when Carrillo replied to the Soviet assault. Said he jauntily at a Madrid press conference: "I didn't expect an excommunication decree from the Holy Office." Soon, he cracked, he would publish the New Times article in Spain, along with "clarifying notes...
...Carrillo speculated that the Soviets might be trying to split the Spanish Communists and set up a rival party. If that was indeed Moscow's strategy, it would be risky. After 1968, when Carrillo blasted the Soviets for invading Czechoslovakia, Moscow tried to oust him by giving financial aid to a onetime general in the Spanish Civil War, Enrique Lister, who now lives in exile in France. The move flopped, and the Spanish party was subsequently purged of its Soviet sympathizers...
Last week the party's 135-member Central Committee voted almost unanimously to reject the Soviet charges against Carrillo and to reaffirm their commitment to Eurocommunism. They maintained that Spain's Communists are answerable only to their supporters in Spain...
Spain's Communist leaders remained unruffled. For one thing, such attacks from Moscow seem to confirm Carrillo's independence and could thus increase his party's popularity among Spanish voters. For another, as Party Spokesman Angel Mullor explained, the article "has not surprised us in any way. What is lamentable is that it shows the inability of its authors [to discuss] these themes without prejudice and obstinate dogma...