WORLD COMMUNISM AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT 95of all that was progressive, humane and desirable in the twentieth
century.
The man with responsibility for the communist movement around
the world was Boris Ponomarëv. He had headed the Party Interna-
tional Department since 1955. The party leadership had learned over
the decades to trust his instincts and judgement. But Ponomarëv
waited in vain for election to the Politburo, and it was widely sus-
pected that his fellow veteran Gromyko liked it that way in order to
sustain his primacy in decisions about international relations. Never-
theless, Ponomarëv was a party official of importance and the scope of
his duties extended to the communist and other far-left revolutionary
organizations throughout the world. The exception to this global
prescription were the countries with ruling communist parties, which
were handled by Konstantin Rusakov at the Department for Links
with the Communist and Workers’ Parties of the Socialist Countries.^9
Rusakov too wielded much influence even though the importance of
Eastern Europe for the USSR’s interests meant that the Politburo
regularly intervened when emergencies occurred or were brewing.
The Kremlin no longer actively promoted the outbreak of communist
revolutions around the world. It welcoming them when they occurred,
but its own daily preference was to use the parties as a means of
spreading the USSR’s influence.
A traditional way to keep the cooperation of communist parties
was by way of subsidies. Even the Italian Communist Party, which
criticized basic features of the USSR, received money from Moscow.
This was done in complete secrecy. No foreign communist leader
wanted his nation to know that the party depended on the favours of
the USSR. The resultant publicity would have been too damaging.
Gianni Cervetti secretly came to Moscow on behalf of the Italian
Communist Party in October 1979.^10 Having spent some time in
the USSR, he spoke Russian fluently. He subsequently claimed that the
Soviet subsidy had ceased two years earlier.^11
Ponomarëv held the purse strings through the Assistance Fund for
Communist Parties and Movements of the Left. Most of the money
was raised in Moscow, but the USSR did not fail to impose an obliga-
tion on ‘our friends’ in Eastern Europe to supplement this with regular
contributions – apart from easing the problems of the Soviet state
budget, this had the political advantage of binding the countries of the
region to the Kremlin’s global purposes.^12 Ponomarëv submitted his
decisions to the Politburo for its approval.^13 He was not widely loved