WORLD COMMUNISM AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT 97cope without their assistance.^19 They felt the need for the same gener-
osity towards the Finnish communists, who received $1.35 million.^20
The common border with the USSR made Finland a crucial zone
for the Soviet geopolitical interest. Then, lagging a long way behind,
came Portugal ($800,000), Greece ($700,000) and Chile ($500,000).
The South African Communist Party received a paltry $100,000.^21
The Soviet leadership had no good opinion of Joe Slovo and fellow
communists and instead focused its assistance on the African National
Congress.^22
The Kremlin had a low opinion of Europe’s communist parties.
Though Marchais felt a personal loyalty to Moscow, the growing
public debate about the horrors of the Soviet Gulag made it impossible
to toss a blanket of approval over the USSR. By the late 1970s he had
started to criticize Soviet anti-democratic practices. French commu-
nist publishers produced literature that attacked many features of the
USSR’s external and internal policies. This caused much annoyance in
the Party Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.^23
The challenge to Moscow mounted by West European parties
came to be known as Eurocommunism, and Enrico Berlinguer and
the Italian Communist Party were at its epicentre. Coming to the
leadership in 1972, Berlinguer adopted a strategy of ‘the historical
compromise’, which involved making overtures to the Christian Dem-
ocrats. He criticized the USSR’s human rights record and lamented
the absence of democratic freedom. He denounced the invasions of
Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. He licensed communists in Italy to
question the version of Soviet history given in Moscow’s textbooks.
Soviet leaders resented the support he extended to the Solidarity
movement in Poland.^24 Their dislike of the Eurocommunists was fierce
and sincere. Anatoli Gromyko, son of the Soviet Foreign Affairs
Minister, pronounced that Berlinguer’s ideas derived from his ‘aristo-
cratic’ origins; he also ventured a claim that the prominent Italian
communist Giorgio Napolitano was a CIA agent. This is no sign that
the entire Soviet leadership was equally crude, but the casual way
that Anatoli spoke in front of other officials suggests that he did not
think he was saying anything unusual.^25 Ponomarëv engaged in invol-
untary wit about the Italian communists: ‘I’m not convinced: if war
breaks out, they’ll take a position of neutrality against us.’^26
Nevertheless the Eurocommunists remained of some use to
Moscow, mainly because they continued to campaign for nuclear dis-
armament in Europe, and the Soviet leadership continued to talk to