■ At year’s end, harsh words and unkind prevailed throughout the once Communist world. China’s Deng Xiaoping told a Party meeting in early December that Mikhail Gorbachev was a socialist, not a Communist. . . . Nonsense, said former Reagan arms negotiator Paul Nitze, seeking to dispel post-Malta euphoria. “I don’t think Mr. Gorbachev has become a democrat; he continues to be a Communist.” . . . In Rumania, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a purist like Deng, had cheery Christmas tidings for his people. They can expect a visit from Fidel Castro in January. . . . Castro is terribly unhappy at reformers behind the late Curtain who are “slandering socialism, destroying its values, discrediting the Party and liquidating its leading role, doing away with social discipline, and sowing chaos and anarchy everywhere.” . . . North Korea’s Kim II Sung is sore at Gorbachev for setting up semi-consulates in South Korea, and sorer still at Hungary and Poland for establishing full diplomatic relations with Seoul. . . . Peking is sore at Belize, Grenada, and Liberia for withdrawing recognition from Red China and establishing relations with Taipei in protest at Tiananmen Square brutalities. . . . Chinese Academy of Sciences has dismissed Fang Lizhi, a leading dissident (who has taken refuge in U.S. Embassy in Peking), from his post at Peking University and stripped him of his title as “young and middle-aged technical and managerial expert” and of all perks that go with the title. . . . In Warsaw, authorities took down a statue of Lenin rather than have it pulled down. It needed repairs, they explained. . . . And in Komarov, Czechoslovakia, the local folk were about to tear down a statue of Josef Stalin until, hearing that someone in Britain collects Stalin memorabilia, they put it up for sale instead. Can’t keep that ol’ debbil capitalism down. . . . In People’s Republic of Benin (pop. 4.5 million), people were informed they need no longer address each other as “comrade.” President Mathieu Kerekou has renounced Marxism-Leninism because “it doesn’t work.”
■ In London, Gordon McLennan, head of the British CP for 14 years, is stepping down next month. Discouraged. The CPGB has gone from 100,000 strong in 1945 to 7,500 today. … In New York, chief Communist Party honcho Gus Hall is displeased with the Soviet press. Most of it, he says, “spreads falsehoods and slanders about socialism,” and paints “a false fairy-tale picture about capitalism.” . . . Gorbachev is not all that pleased with the Soviet press either. Freedom House’s year-end report on press freedom worldwide points out that Soviet publishers Sergei Grigoryants (of Glasnost magazine) and Aleksandr Mazuri (of Ekspres Khronika) have been arrested and subjected to harassment this year, and Sergei Kuznetsov, editor of an unofficial Siberian journal, sentenced to three years in labor camp for “slandering” an official. . . . Aleksei Yeliseyev’s suggestion in Izvestia that prominent Soviet exiles apply to have citizenship restored went over like lead balloon. Said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s wife (and spokes-man): “They kick him out and after that they want him to come and bow and ask permission to enter.” . . . Exiled Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (now conductor of National Symphony in Washington) and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, who got into trouble for sheltering Solzhenitsyn in 1974, and were subsequently exiled and stripped of citizenship, are unlikely to be more receptive. When invited to give a concert in Moscow last summer, Rostropovich replied: “I want an apology [from Soviet government]. I want them to admit that I did nothing wrong and that they had no legal right to expel me in the first place.” He recalled, at the time, the advice conveyed to him by a mutual friend from the late violinist David Oistrakh: “Tell Slava,” said Oistrakh, “not to come back. If he should feel nostalgic, let him plant some birch trees around his house.” . . . L’Express reports Poland and Czechoslovakia are refusing to accept mail for Vietnam. Reason: Soviet rail transport is too unreliable to guarantee its delivery in Hanoi. . . . In China, one million rural factories have shut down in anti-capitalist crackdown of past year. The factories, says Christian Science Monitor, supplied a quarter of China’s industrial product in 1988 and employed 100 million peasants. . . . Peking has announced that 109 officers and men of the People’s Liberation Army have been executed for refusing to fire on students in Tiananmen Square. . . . Saddest statement of the year, from a student in the Square June 4. “Tears streamed down our faces as we ran. We could see a second group of students trying to escape under fire, many of them falling. We all wept, and weeping we ran. . . .”
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