The Policy Declaration and the appeal to the peoples of the world adopted last December by the Moscow conference of eighty-one Communist parties mark the end of one phase in the dispute between the leaderships of the ruling parties of China and the Soviet Union—the phase in which the followers of Mao for the first time openly challenged the standing of the Soviet Communists as the fountainhead of ideological orthodoxy for the world movement. But the “ideological dispute” which began in April 1960 was neither a sudden nor self-contained development: it grew out of acute differences between the two Communist great powers over concrete diplomatic issues, and it took its course in constant interaction with the changes in Soviet diplomatic tactics. Hence the total impact of this phase on Soviet foreign policy on one side, and on the ideology, organization, and strategy of international Communism on the other, cannot be evaluated from an interpretation of the Moscow documents alone, but only from a study of the process as a whole, as it developed during the past year on both planes.
To say that the 1960 Chinese challenge to Soviet ideological authority grew out of pragmatic disagreements over foreign policy is not to take the view that the varieties of Communist ideology are a mere cloak for conflicts of national interest. The profound differences in the history of the Soviet and Chinese Communists parties, both in the strategy by which they conquered power and in the methods they used afterward for transforming society, have clearly produced a different ideological climate, different forms of inner-party life, and a different “style of work”; and the fact that Mao Tse-tung could only win control of the Chinese party and lead it to victory by repeatedly defying Stalin’s advice has contributed to the formation of a Chinese Communist leadership which is highly conscious of those differences.
This is not the place either to discuss the origin and nature of the distinctive ideological climate of Chinese Communism in detail, or to trace its various manifestations from Mao’s first “rectification” movement of 1941 to the methods adopted after his victory for the “re-education” of hostile classes, or from the reaction to Soviet “de-Stalinization” and the subsequent crisis in the Soviet bloc to the “Hundred Flowers” campaign and to the creation of the communes. Suffice it to say that while some of these manifestations of Chinese originality took an apparently “liberal” and others an apparently “extremist” form, their common characteristic is a historically conditioned tendency to believe that almost anything is possible to a revolutionary party armed with the right consciousness—an exaltation of faith and will over all “objective conditions” of the productive forces and all given class structures which exceeds that shown by the Bolshevik model, and is even more remote from the original Marxian doctrine than the latter.
A party leadership conditioned by this ideological climate will obviously perceive both the internal problems and the national interests of the state it governs in a peculiar way; to that extent, the ideological difference constitutes a kind of permanent potential for rivalry between the two Communist great powers. Yet it does not by itself explain the timing and content of any particular dispute between them. For given the manifestly overriding importance of their common interests, the potential rivalry can only become actual when concrete policy disagreements arise which cannot be settled by the ordinary means of intra-bloc diplomacy, and which the weaker and dependent ally regards as sufficiently vital to take recourse to the public use of the ideological weapon. This was done by China in muted hints during the 1958 disagreements, and much more openly in 1960.
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The Policy Dispute
In both cases, Chinese misgivings seem to have been based on a sense of insufficient Soviet diplomatic and military support in their long-standing conflict with the United States, and to have been acutely aggravated by Mr. Khrushchev’s efforts to achieve a Soviet-American détente—by his repeated bids for a summit conference without Communist China, and by his visit to the U.S. in September 1959. The Chinese leaders apparently feared, probably not without reason, that such a détente would further diminish Soviet interest in taking serious risks on their behalf, and increase Soviet interest in preventing them from taking any such risks themselves.1 Above all, Soviet willingness to make disarmament one of the main items on any summit agenda, combined with the agreed temporary ban on nuclear test explosions and the continued negotiations for a permanent ban, must have given rise to Chinese anxiety lest the Russians might be willing on certain conditions to enter a commitment to close the “nuclear club.” The mere fact of negotiation on that subject apparently precluded them from receiving Soviet aid in developing nuclear weapons of their own, and thus helped to delay their becoming a world power of the first rank; an actual Soviet commitment would have faced them with the choice of either accepting permanent inferiority in this field, or—if they went ahead successfully in developing and testing the weapon themselves—of defying in isolation an agreement of the world’s leading powers.
Whatever the Chinese may have said in their private representations to Moscow, they did not think it advisable to spell out these fears in public. But during the winter of 1959-60—roughly from Khrushchev’s visit to Peking, on his return from his talks with Eisenhower, at the beginning of October to the Moscow conference of the Warsaw Pact states in early February—they openly attacked the assumptions on which the effort to achieve a Soviet-American détente was officially based. The core of their argument was that the policy of American “imperialism” and of Eisenhower, its “chieftain,” could not change in substance even if it was temporarily disguised by peace-loving phrases; hence nothing could be gained by seeking an understanding with the U.S. in an atmosphere of détente, only by isolating this “main enemy” and putting pressure on him. A period of quite visible, concrete disagreement on policy toward the Eisenhower administration thus preceded the Chinese Communists’ generalized, ideological attack on Soviet authority.
The most striking characteristic of that period is the apparent unconcern with which the Soviet leaders pursued their preparations for a summit conference, despite the increasingly outspoken Chinese protests. The impression that Mao Tse-tung had refused to approve the concept of a detente based on “mutual concessions” as advanced by Khrushchev was confirmed when the latter, addressing the Supreme Soviet on his return to Moscow, coupled his advocacy of that concept with blunt warnings against the “Trotskyite adventurism” of a policy of “neither peace nor war,” and when the theoretical organ of the Chinese Communists developed an analysis of American foreign policy directly opposed to Khrushchev’s optimism in the following months. Nevertheless, Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet in January 1960 a substantial reduction of Soviet conventional forces and military expenditures as his advance contribution to the ten-power disarmament negotiations, and also indicated willingness to help overcome the deadlock in the negotiations on an inspection system for a permanent ban on nuclear test explosions—a most sensitive issue from the Chinese point of view.
Within a week, the standing committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress, in a resolution formally approving the Soviet disarmament proposals, solemnly announced to the world that China would not be bound by any agreements to which she was not a party; but when this stand, together with warnings against illusions about a change in the character of American policy, was repeated at the conference of Warsaw Treaty ministers in early February by the—possibly uninvited—Chinese observer, his speech was not published in any European member state of the Soviet bloc, and the declaration adopted by the conference showed virtually no concessions to his point of view. To cap it all, Khrushchev spent most of the remainder of February, including the tenth anniversary of the Sino-Soviet alliance, in India and Indonesia, two countries with which China was involved in acute conflicts of national interest, and showed throughout the journey an almost ostentatious detachment from Chinese claims and actions.
All during the winter, the Chinese thus experienced the inherent weakness in the position of a dependent ally who urges the stronger partner to pay more heed to his interests, but is unable to switch sides if the latter turns a deaf ear: none of their objections, raised first in secret and then with increasing publicity, were able to deflect Khrushchev from his course. There remained to them one weapon—to interfere directly not with the Soviet policy of détente, but with the détente itself—by urging on Communist and revolutionary nationalist movements in the non-Communist world a bolder forward policy than was compatible with the plans of Soviet diplomacy. But this meant that the Chinese Communists must set themselves up as rivals to their Russian comrades in advising these movements—in other words, that they must generalize the dispute and raise the question of ideological authority.
During the later part of the winter 1959—60, a number of cases became known where Chinese representatives had opposed Soviet delegates in closed sessions of the directing organs of such international front organizations as the World Peace Council, the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, the World Federation of Trade Unions, etc. The central issue in these clashes was whether the “peace campaign” was the priority task to which all other forms of revolutionary struggle must be subordinated, as the Russians maintained, or whether it was only one among many forms of the struggle against imperialism, which must in no circumstances be isolated and “set in opposition” to more militant forms of revolutionary action, as the Chinese argued. It was as a platform for these discussions in the international movement that the Chinese Communists published in April their ideological statements on the teachings of Lenin—documents which, despite all later elaborations and modifications, have remained basic for that phase of the dispute.
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Ideological Interpretation
It has been implied in subsequent Soviet polemics against “dogmatists and sectarians” and innumerable times spelled out in Western comment, that the central thesis of these Chinese statements was the continued validity of Lenin’s belief in the inevitability of world war. That is not so. Every one of the Chinese documents in question quoted with approval the sentence in the 1957 Moscow declaration (based in turn on the resolution of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) that, owing to the growth of the forces of peace, “it is now realistically possible to prevent war.”2 What none of them approved, however, is the formula of the 21st Congress on the emerging possibility “even before the full victory of Socialism in the world, while capitalism continues to exist in part of the world, to banish world war from the life of human society.” The difference is that in the Chinese view the latter phrase implies the disappearance of any serious danger of world war while capitalism still exists; the Chinese Communists felt that this presupposed a change in the nature of imperialism—and that they had to deny such a possibility in order to contest the Khrushchevian hope of converting the ruling circles of the U.S. to a genuine acceptance of “peaceful coexistence” from realistic motives.
The picture drawn by the Chinese was that of an unchanged, though weakened, imperialism which would resort to war whenever it could to defend its sphere of exploitation, but might be prevented from doing so in any particular case by the “forces of peace.” In practice they agreed with the Soviets in regarding an all-out attack on the Soviet bloc as unlikely, but argued that inter-imperialist war was still possible, and insisted that colonial wars against national liberation movements were virtually inevitable : the latter could only be “stopped” by vigorous support for the revolutionary movements. But the Communists would fail to give support if they were “afraid” of another world war, if they “begged the imperialists for peace,” or if they tolerated or even spread illusions about the warlike nature of imperialism, instead of mobilizing the masses everywhere for an all-out struggle against it.
This analysis implied three charges of “muddle-headed concessions to revisionism” against Khrushchev’s policy: exaggeration of the dangers of nuclear war, which might paralyze the will to resist imperialism or at any rate lead to excessive caution; illusions about the growth of a “realistic” tendency toward peaceful coexistence among such “chieftains of imperialism” as Eisenhower, which might lead to a relaxation of vigilance among the Communist governments and movements; and as a result, excessive reliance on diplomatic negotiation as a means to avert war, causing a desire to restrain revolutionary movements and “just wars” of liberation, instead of welcoming them as the best means to weaken the imperialists and stop their wars. Accordingly. the Chinese ideologists argued that it was all right for a Communist to seek a meeting with Eisenhower, but wrong to say that he believed in the latter’s peaceful intentions; all right to propose “general and complete disarmament,” but wrong to tell his own followers that there was a real chance of obtaining it; all right to propagate peaceful coexistence, but wrong to advise the Algerian nationalists to try and negotiate a cease-fire with President de Gaulle. They accepted peace propaganda as a means of revolutionary struggle against imperialism, but not peace diplomacy of a kind which might even temporarily mitigate the forms of that struggle.
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The Russians, in turn, aware that there could be no serious negotiation without an atmosphere of détente and at least the pretense of believing in the peaceful intentions of the other side, recognized that this was an attack on the whole coexistence diplomacy; but they had to answer it on the ideological plane. Through the mouth of Otto Kuusinen, a member of the secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU who had begun work in the Comintern in Lenin’s time, they insisted that Lenin had differentiated between militarist diehards and possible partners for peaceful coexistence in the imperialist camp, and had foreseen that changes in military technique might one day make war impossible. They argued that the growing strength of the “Socialist camp” and the destructive potential of nuclear weapons and long-range rockets had in fact provided a realistic basis for a diplomacy based on similar differentiation at the present time, and claimed as telling proof of their thesis the success of Khrushchev’s personal diplomacy in general, and of his “historic visit” to the U.S. in particular, in largely dispersing the climate of the cold war and restoring businesslike relations between the two different social systems. Yet only a few weeks later Khrushchev himself, even while maintaining this position in theory, reversed himself in practice to the extent of wrecking the summit conference on the ground that negotiation with Eisenhower had become impossible after his assumption of responsibility for the U-2 incident.
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Summitry & the Chinese Response
Western discussion of the causes of this volte-face necessarily remains inconclusive in the absence of direct evidence of the motives of the Russian rulers and the course of their deliberations in the critical period. But a coherent analysis of the Sino-Soviet dispute is impossible without at least venturing a hypothesis. I have elsewhere stated my reasons for rejecting the theory that a decisive weakening of Khrushchev’s position by some combination of “neo-Stalinist” or “pro-Chinese” elements in the Soviet leadership took place at the time3; indeed, I know of no convincing evidence for the assumption that such a grouping exists at all. On the other hand, Khrushchev’s Baku speech of April 25 showed his anxieties, following a number of authorized American policy statements, lest the summit meeting might fail to yield the Western concessions on Berlin which he expected, and his desire to increase the pressure in that direction; and his initial reaction to the U-2 incident is consistent with the assumption that he regarded it not as a reason for evading the summit conference, but as an occasion for making the pressure more effective by driving a wedge between Eisenhower and his “diehard militarist” advisers.
By marking the complete failure of this crude attempt at differentiation, the President’s assumption of personal responsibility for the spy-flights, whatever its other merits or demerits, must have been a double blow to Khrushchev: it deprived him of the last hope of obtaining substantial concessions at the summit, and it put him clearly in the wrong on one important part of his public argument with his Chinese allies. A failure to reach his summit objectives thus became certain at the very moment at which, from the viewpoint of his prestige in the “Socialist camp” and the Communist world movement, he could least afford such a failure: hence it seems natural that, with the full support of his colleagues, he decided instead to wreck the conference in advance unless he could still force a last-minute differentiation by obtaining a public apology from Eisenhower.
Within a few days, Khrushchev demonstrated by his refusal to go ahead with an East German peace treaty pending a possible summit conference with Eisenhower’s successor that he had not abandoned the “general line” of his diplomacy but only intended to change the time schedule. But the Chinese Communists not only were not content with this, but felt that now that they had been proved right by events they were in a strong position to force a broad change of policy by pressing home their ideological attack.
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The attempt was made officially and in fact publicly at the beginning of June at the Peking session of the General Council of the WFTU by the Chinese Vice-President of that body, Liu Chang-sheng, and there is reason to suppose that even more comprehensive and outspoken criticisms of Soviet policy were communicated non-publicly at the same time, at least to selected leaders of the Communist world movement. Liu’s speech went beyond the April documents in demanding a “clarification” of the Communist attitude toward war, denouncing “indiscriminate” opposition to war, and calling for active support for “just wars” of liberation; in sharply opposing the formulation of the Soviet 21st Congress about “eliminating war forever while imperialism still exists” as “entirely wrong” and leading to “evil consequences of a serious nature which, in fact, we already see at present,” though he too admitted the possibility of preventing a new world war; and in condemning any belief that proposals for general and complete disarmament could be accepted, and that the funds formerly earmarked for war purpose could be used for the welfare of the masses and for assisting underdeveloped countries while imperialism still existed, as “downright whitewashing and embellishing imperialism” and thus “helping imperialism headed by the U.S. to dupe the people.”
Yet the Chinese had misjudged their chances of forcing a change of the Soviet line. At the World Federation of Trade Unions session they found themselves vigorously counterattacked by both the Russian and the major European movements, and finally isolated with only the Indonesian trade unions on their side. Moreover, this seems to have been the point at which the Soviet leaders decided to give battle in defense of their ideological authority, and first of all to whip into line those European satellite parties which had in the past shown signs of sympathy for Chinese intransigence. They took the initiative in calling a conference of all ruling Communist parties to meet on the occasion of the Rumanian party congress later that month; and in the meantime the Soviet press began to publish warnings against the dangers of “dogmatism” and “sectarianism” in the international movement, while the Italian delegates returning from Peking published the fact that the Chinese had been isolated and defeated in a major international discussion on the problems of the struggle for peace and disarmament.
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The Bucharest Stalemate
Now that the issue of authority was in the open, the field of the dispute kept broadening. Already in April, the speaker at the Peking celebration of Lenin’s birthday, Lu Ting-Yi, had claimed for Mao’s creation of the communes the succession to Lenin’s concept of “uninterrupted revolution,” and had attacked people who in Socialist construction “rely only on technique and not on the masses” and deny the need for further revolutionary struggle in the transition to the higher stage of Communism. Now Pravda quoted Engels and Lenin for their criticism of the Blanquist wish to “skip all the intermediate stages on the road to Communism” in the illusion that “if power were in their hands, Communism could be introduced the day after tomorrow.” Yet the original Sino-Soviet disagreement about the communes had been ended in the winter of 1958-59 with the withdrawal of the Chinese claim that this institution constituted a short cut to the Communist stage, and an understanding that the Chinese would go on developing and the Soviets and their European satellites rejecting that institution without further debate. The revival of the issue now only made sense as part of the attempt by each side to throw doubt on the other’s ideological orthodoxy.
On the eve of the Bucharest conference, in June, a Pravda editorial stated bluntly that “among Socialist countries, there cannot be two opinions on the question of peace or war. Socialists believe that in present conditions there is no necessity for war, that disarmament is not only needed but possible, and that peaceful coexistence between nations is a vital necessity.” Coupled with a quote from Khrushchev’s December speech to the Hungarian party congress about the need for all Communist governments to “synchronize their watches,” and his warning that “if the leaders of any one of the Socialist countries would set themselves up to be above the rest, that can only play into the hands of our enemies,” this indicated the Soviet leaders’ intention to force a clear decision that would be binding on all ruling parties.
But at Bucharest, this intention was at least partly foiled by the Chinese. Khrushchev’s public attack on people who quote the words of Lenin without looking at the realities of the present world, and whom Lenin would set right in no uncertain manner if he came back today, was plain enough for all the satellite leaders to understand that the time for maneuvering between the two colossi was over, and for all but the Albanians to rally round. His account of how Soviet strength and Soviet skill had again and again foiled the war plans of the “imperialists,” from Suez in 1956 to the Turkish-Syrian crisis of 1957 and the U.S. landing in the Lebanon after the Iraqi revolution of 1958, if historically dubious, was propagandistically effective as a demonstration of the meaning of his “peace policy” for a Communist audience. But the Chinese delegate P’eng Chen was clearly instructed neither to submit nor to carry the ideological debate to a conclusion at this point: he evaded a decision by a skillful withdrawal to prepared positions.
In public, P’eng Chen appeared as the advocate of Communist unity at almost any price, to be achieved on the basis of the 1957 Moscow declaration to which all but the Yugoslavs had agreed. This committed the Chinese once more to recognition of the possibility of preventing or “checking” imperialist wars—a possibility that, P’eng claimed, could only be fulfilled by the united strength of the “Socialist camp” and the determined mobilization of mass action against the imperialists. But it was also intended to commit the Russians once again to the 1957 thesis that the aggressive circles of the U.S. were the main enemy of peace and all popular aspirations, and that “revisionism” was the main danger within the ranks of the Communist movement. Having said that much, the Chinese representative spoke no word about détente, disarmament, or the “elimination of war from the life of mankind” before the disappearance of capitalism.
Behind the scenes, he seems to have argued that the 1957 conference of ruling Communist parties had been called chiefly to settle problems of Communist power and “Socialist construction”; the questions now in dispute, being concerned with world-wide revolutionary strategy, could only be decided by a conference representing the whole Communist movement. Khrushchev might well complain about Chinese “factional” methods of carrying the quarrel into the ranks of other parties; in the end he had to agree to put up the dispute officially for world-wide inner-party discussion in preparation for a November conference in Moscow, and to content himself with a brief interim communiqué which, while stressing the primary importance of the “peace campaign,” did not go beyond the 1957 declaration on any controversial point.
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This fell far short of what the Soviet leaders had expected. The decisive showdown was not only postponed for several months, but it would take place before an audience of revolutionary parties many of whose members were less closely tied to Soviet control than the East European satellites and might well regard the Chinese slogans of unconditional revolutionary solidarity as more attractive than the Soviet readiness to subordinate their struggle to the needs of coexistence diplomacy whenever that seemed expedient. Thus an Algerian Communist might prefer Chinese offers of aid for the FLN to the repeated Russian advice favoring negotiation with de Gaulle; an Iraqi Communist might recall that neither Soviet support for Kassem’s regime nor his own party’s Soviet-ordered retreat from its earlier offensive policy had obtained for it a legal, let alone a dominating, position under that regime; an Indonesian Communist might resent the manner in which Khrushchev had ignored his party during his official visit, and the general Soviet wooing of the “bourgeois nationalist” regime of Sukarno that limited the democratic rights of the Communists as well as of other parties and favored a neutralist bloc with the “renegade” Tito. And would not the Communists of Latin America be sensitive to the Chinese argument that as Yankee imperialism was the main enemy, any attempts to relax Soviet-American tension were bound to weaken Soviet support for them as well as for China?
Yet without the cooperation of these movements, Khrushchev’s coexistence diplomacy could not be carried through: he needed their discipline, and the Chinese had launched their ideological attack on his authority precisely in order to undermine that. Now they had created a situation in which the objects of the struggle, the Communist movements in partibus infidelium, were to act to some extent as its arbiters. True, the Russians had still the advantage of the prestige and resources of a world power as well as of older organizational ties: all the foreign Communists knew that the Soviets could help them more—financially, diplomatically, and ultimately militarily—than the Chinese, yet they were less certain that the Soviets would always help them to the limits of their ability. Hence Khrushchev seems to have felt that in preparation for the November meeting, not only the circulation of new Soviet documents and the dispatch of new emissaries to the wavering parties were needed, but above all new proofs of the spirit of revolutionary internationalism animating his foreign policy.
The fact that he had already decided to postpone his new summit approach until after the U.S. presidential elections made it easier for him to furnish that proof: for he could now afford to increase rather than relax tension for a time without serious damage to his future diplomatic chances, and perhaps even hope to improve them by creating a dark backdrop for the next display of his sunny smile—provided only that he did not allow matters to get really out of hand. The weeks after Bucharest thus offered the strange spectacle of the Soviet leaders conducting themselves on the world stage in the very style which Peking’s ideological theses had seemed to demand, while at the same time launching a vigorous campaign against those throughout the Communist world movement!
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Diplomacy; Ideological Maneuvers
The Bucharest communiqué had not yet been published when Russia demonstratively walked out of the ten-power disarmament talks at Geneva, just before the Western counter-proposals for which she had been calling so insistently were officially submitted. There followed within a few days the shooting down of an American plane over the Arctic, the first Soviet note on the Congo accusing all the Western powers of backing Belgian military intervention as part of a plot to restore colonial rule, and, as a climax, Khrushchev’s personal threat to use intercontinental rockets against the U.S. if the latter should attack Cuba. Yet during the same period, Khrushchev used his visit to Austria to insist again and again on the horrors of nuclear world war and on the need to avoid even local wars because of the risk that they might spread; and even in his most reckless gestures he took care not to do anything irrevocable. The Geneva test negotiations were not broken off; the Cuban rocket threat was soon “explained” as symbolic, while in the Congo the Russians refrained from backing their policy with force; and a proposal for taking the disarmament negotiations out of the UN and for calling instead for a disarmament conference of “all governments” including China, which the Chinese managed to get adopted by a Stockholm session of the World Peace Council in July, was promptly dropped down the memory hole by Moscow in favor of Khrushchev’s suggestion that all heads of government of the member states should personally attend the next UN assembly session in order to discuss the Soviet plan for general and complete disarmament.
The same contradiction between the desire to keep the lines of negotiation open and the need to pose constantly as an uninhibited revolutionary agitator also dominated Khrushchev’s subsequent behavior at the UN assembly itself. He did not back the neutrals’ initiative for a new summit meeting but left the onus of killing it to the West. He depreciated the importance of his own proposals for “general and complete disarmament,” for the sake of which so many heads of government had come, by devoting far more energy to his attack on “colonialism” in general and on the UN secretariat in particular, and by choosing a language and style of behavior more apt to inspire revolutionary movements outside than to influence delegates inside the assembly hall. He followed his attack on the secretariat by proposals for a reform of the latter and of the Security Council which appealed to the natural desire of the new African and Asian member states for stronger representation in the leading organs of the UN, but then suggested that any such changes in the charter should be postponed until the delegates of the Chinese People’s Republic had been seated. These inconsistencies are incomprehensible unless the fact is borne in mind that during all this time Khrushchev was engaged in an effort to prove his revolutionary zeal and international solidarity in preparation for the Moscow conference.
Meanwhile the line for the ideological campaign itself had been laid down by a meeting of the central committee of the CPSU in mid-July, which had approved the conduct of its delegation at Bucharest led by Khrushchev, oddly enough after a report by secretariat member F. R. Kozlov who had not been there. As developed during late July and August in the Soviet press and the statements of pro-Soviet leaders of foreign Communist parties, the campaign showed some significant changes of emphasis. It was more uncompromising than ever on the need to avoid the horrors of nuclear war and the rejection of all attempts to belittle them or to regard any kind of international war as desirable. It insisted that good Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries were entitled and indeed obliged to adopt conclusions different from Lenin on this matter, both because of the new techniques of destruction and because of the change in the relation of world forces to the disadvantage of imperialism. It vigorously defended the possibility not only of stopping each particular war, but of altogether “eliminating war from the life of society” with the further growth of the strength of the “Socialist camp,” even while capitalism still existed on part of the globe, as the 21st Congress had laid down; and it claimed that the Soviet program of general and complete disarmament was a realistic policy goal that could be achieved, even though this might require time, “mutual concessions,” and compromises. Any opposition to this general line of peaceful coexistence was to be eliminated from the Communist movement as “Trotskyite adventurism.”
But the new campaign no longer laid stress on Khrushchev’s differentiation between “realistic statesmen” and “diehard militarists” in the enemy camp, and no longer mentioned “relaxation of international tension” as a condition of coexistence diplomacy. Instead, the goals of peace and disarmament were now put forward, in language first used by the Chinese critics, as having to be “imposed” on the imperialists by the strength of the “Socialist camp” and the relentless struggle of the masses. Peaceful coexistence was now described as “the highest form of the class struggle,” and justified as leading not to an even temporary weakening, but to an intensification of revolutionary movements everywhere, including civil wars and colonial revolts whenever the imperialists attempted to hold back the rising tide by force. It was only international wars, wars between states, that should be avoided by the policy of peaceful coexistence; and it was explicitly admitted that imperialist intervention against revolutionary movements might lead to “just wars of liberation,” and that in that case the duty of the Socialist camp was to support the latter—though not necessarily with troops—and to seek to end the intervention. In short, it was now claimed that there was no contradiction at all between the diplomacy of coexistence and the policy of unconditional revolutionary solidarity: both had become compatible in an age where, owing to the growing strength of the “Socialist camp,” the “dictatorship of the proletariat had become an international force” as once predicted by Lenin.
This interpretation of Soviet policy evidently placed its authors in a very strong position to meet the Chinese ideological challenge; yet as the Chinese had intended, and as Khrushchev’s simultaneous actions illustrated, it was bound greatly to reduce the credibility and effectiveness of the coexistence campaign in non-Communist eyes. The Soviets could hope to succeed in restoring their international ideological authority to the exact extent to which they were prepared temporarily to weaken the political impact of their diplomacy. It was an expression of that dilemma that when the chief ideological spokesman of Yugoslav Communism, Vice-President Edvard Kardelj, published a pamphlet in defense of coexistence and against the Chinese cult of revolutionary war, Pravda immediately turned against him and accused him of all the revisionist sins of which the Chinese had accused the Soviets—not only because he had been so tactless as to name the Chinese as his target, which the Soviets had never done, but because he had taken a consistent position with which they could not afford to identify themselves. For Kardelj had argued that real peaceful coexistence between states with different social systems required that these systems should not become the basis of permanent “ideological blocs” in foreign policy; and this concept was, of course, as incompatible with Soviet practice as with the new definition of coexistence as “the highest form of the class struggle.”
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During the same period, the Chinese Communists were also shifting their ground. They stopped belittling the horrors of nuclear war and claiming that only cowards could fear them, and repeatedly protested their willingness to fight for peaceful coexistence and the prevention or stopping of wars. But they kept rubbing in the formula of the Moscow declaration of 1957 about the role of the aggressive U.S. circles as the center of world reaction and the need for vigilance against its war plans camouflaged by peace talk, which they felt had been borne out by Khrushchev’s experience with Eisenhower; and they pictured peaceful coexistence and disarmament as goals which could be “imposed” on the enemy only “to some extent” and for limited periods, without the slightest assurance of permanence or completion before the final, world-wide victory of the Communist cause. In other words, they remained adamant in their rejection of the thesis of the 21st Congress about “eliminating war from the life of mankind” before that final victory.
Parallel with that, the Chinese concentrated on extolling the importance of revolutionary violence, including revolutionary war. While the Russians now admitted that peaceful coexistence did not exclude colonial uprisings and civil wars, and that imperialist intervention in these cases might lead to “just wars of liberation,” the Chinese stressed revolutionary violence as the normal and classical road for the advance of the Communist cause, and support for just wars as the criterion of true internationalism. In fact, they abandoned the safe ground of the 1957 Moscow declaration (on which they were otherwise relying in that phase) to the extent of attacking its thesis, taken over from the 20th Congress of the CPSU, that the Communist seizure of power might take place in some countries without violent upheaval and civil war, as a peaceful revolution carried out with the help of the legal parliamentary institutions. Ignoring the examples given by the Russians at the time—such as the annexation of Estonia and the Czechoslovak coup of February 1948—the Chinese now insisted that the bourgeoisie would never and nowhere abandon power without resorting to violence, and that it was “muddle-headed” at best to confuse the peaceful construction of Socialism after the seizure of power with the necessarily violent conquest of power itself. To this, the Soviets replied with renewed charges of “Blanquism.”
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Ideology & Demagoguery
Of all the differences raised in the 1960 dispute, this argument on the violent and non-violent roads to power was probably the least serious and most purely demagogic one. The Soviets had started talking about the “parliamentary road” in order to ease the tactical position of the Communist parties in the West, and it was the latter who made propagandist use of the formula; at any rate, it contains nothing to which the Chinese could object from the point of view of their interests. But in the weeks before the crucial Moscow meeting, the Chinese effort was chiefly directed at those Communist parties in underdeveloped countries for which the Chinese experience had long been regarded as a natural model—parties which had developed alternately in cooperation or violent conflict with nationalist dictators, but which had certainly no prospect of gaining power by “parliamentary” means. By dragging in the slogan of the “peaceful road” which nobody had thought of applying to those parties, the Chinese were trying to suggest to them that the real motive for the Soviet counsels of restraint occasionally tendered them (and which were in fact due to the diplomatic expediency of “keeping in” with the nationalist dictators concerned) was a general renunciation of revolution for the sake of “peace”—that the Soviets were passing from the Leninist policy of coexistence between states to the “revisionist” position of peace between classes!
The Soviets replied to this twist by a similar piece of demagogy—accusing the Chinese of a sectarian refusal to work with broad nationalist movements against imperialism unless these movements subscribed in advance to Communist principles and leadership. As a general charge, this was as untrue as the Chinese attack on the alleged “revisionism” of Moscow’s “peaceful road”; the close contacts maintained by Peking with the Algerian and many African nationalists proved that daily. But Peking’s conflicts with the Indian and Indonesian governments, due in fact not to doctrinaire prejudice but to Chinese chauvinism, and its support for leftish malcontents in several Asian Communist parties against Moscow’s wooing of nationalist dictators, gave to the charge a semblance of substance.
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Soviet-Chinese relations seem to have reached their low point in August and early September. It was during that period that an unusually large number of Soviet technicians left China, while many Chinese students returned from Russia; that the organ of the Soviet-Chinese Friendship Society disappeared from the streets of Moscow; and that the expected Chinese scholars failed to turn up at the Orientalists’ Congress there. It was then, too, that a number of Soviet provincial papers printed an article explaining that in contemporary conditions, not even a huge country like China could build Socialism in isolation and without the aid and backing of the Soviet Union, while Peking’s theoretical voice published a statement of the need for China to rely chiefly on her own resources for the fulfilment of her plans. We do not know the inside story behind those visible symptoms—whether Moscow really tried to apply economic pressure and failed, or whether Peking made a gratuitous demonstration of her capacity for “going it alone.”4 Chinese criticism, at any rate, had not been silenced by October 1,5 when the Russians used the eleventh birthday of the CPR to make another show of friendship; on the contrary, some of Peking’s most polemical utterances came in the last weeks before the Moscow conference, whereas the Soviet ideological campaign had rather abated since the middle of September. But by then the Soviets could afford to stop arguing in public, for the Chinese had been largely, though not completely, isolated in the international movement: early in September, even the North Vietnamese party fell in line with the Soviet position.
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The Moscow Conference
The mere duration of the Moscow conference—almost three weeks of argument behind closed doors—showed that agreement on a new common statement of principles was anything but easy. This time, the Chinese had sent the strongest possible team short of exposing Mao himself to the risk of defeat—a delegation led by Liu Shaoch’i and the party secretary Teng Hsiaop’ing; and reports that they fought for every clause and comma, and finally yielded to the majority view on some crucial points only under the threat of an open ideological breach, do not seem implausible. Halfway through the debates, the anniversary of the 1957 declaration was commented on by editorials in Moscow and Peking which still showed a marked difference of emphasis: on the primacy of revolutionary struggle in the People’s Daily, on the “general line” of peaceful coexistence in Pravda; while at the same time a Chinese delegate to a session of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee threw off all restraint and claimed publicly that there could be no peaceful coexistence in those countries before the liquidation of colonialism, as the oppressed peoples would never accept “coexistence between the rider and the horse.” But it seems established that as the Moscow conclave wore on, the Chinese were only able to retain the support of a few Asian parties that were traditionally dependent on them or largely recruited from the Chinese minorities, of some rather weak Latin American parties, and of the Albanians long tied to them by common enmity against the Yugoslav “revisionists.”
The long document on the strategy of international Communism that was agreed on in the end thus marks a clear Soviet victory on almost all the points that were still in dispute in the preceding three months. But the Soviet position as defended since the July session of the central committee of the CPSU already contained substantial concessions to the original Chinese criticism of Soviet policy.
The 1960 Moscow declaration starts from the Soviet analysis that Lenin’s views are partly outdated because the present epoch is no longer primarily that of imperialism, but of the growing preponderance of the “Socialist world system” over the forces of imperialism. On this basis, it accepts not only the possibility of ending war forever with the world-wide victory of Socialism, but of “freeing mankind from the nightmare of another world war even now”—of “banishing world war from the life of society even while capitalism still exists in part of the world.” The thesis of the 21st Congress of the CPSU which the Chinese had fought to the last has thus been reluctantly accepted by them, and so has the full description of the horrors of nuclear war. The declaration also proclaims the possibility not of preventing all local wars, but of “effectively fighting the local wars unleashed by the imperialists” and extinguishing them, and stresses the unanimity of all Communists in their support of “peaceful coexistence” and negotiation as the only alternative to destructive war. Finally, it recognizes the “historic” importance which a fulfillment of the Soviet program for general and complete disarmament would have, and states that its achievement, though difficult, may be accomplished in stages if the masses and the governments of the “Socialist camp” resolutely fight for it.
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At the same time, “peaceful coexistence” is described as “a form of the class struggle” (not, as in some Soviet documents, as “the highest form,” because in the Chinese party doctrine that rank remains reserved for revolutionary war). The hope of preserving peace is squarely based on the strength of the “Socialist camp,” the revolutionary movements and their sympathizers; it is admitted that the latter may be found also in “certain strata of the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries” who realize the new relation of forces and the catastrophic consequences of a world war, but this appears as a marginal factor. Gone are Khrushchev’s “realistic statesmen” and his successful goodwill visits; the emphasis is on the fact that the aggressive, warlike nature of imperialism has not changed and that “American imperialism” as such—not only, as stated in 1957, “the aggressive imperialist circles of the United States”—has become the “main center of world reaction, the international gendarme, the enemy of the peoples of the whole world.” While condemning “the American doctrine of the cold war,” the document thus defines coexistence in rigid cold war terms.
The declaration allots to the “peace campaign” pride of place as likely to unite the broadest possible fronts under Communist leadership and rejects the “slander” that the Communists need war for extending their sway or believe in “exporting revolution.” But it also calls for the most determined international support, both by the mass movement and by “the power of the Socialist world system,” of revolutionary movements anywhere against “the imperialist export of counter revolution.” The statement that “the Socialist states . . . have become an international force exerting a powerful influence on world developments. Hence real possibilities have appeared to settle the major problems of our age in a new manner, in the interest of peace, democracy and Socialism . . .” assumes a special meaning in this context: for the first time since Stalin’s victory over Trotsky, active support for international revolution is proclaimed as an obligation of the Soviet government and all other Communist governments. But the crucial question of whether that obligation includes the risk of war, of whether “peaceful coexistence” or “revolutionary solidarity” is to receive priority in case of conflict, is not settled explicitly—for the possibility of conflict between the two principles is not admitted.
On the question of violent or peaceful roads to power, the view of the Russians and of the 1957 declaration that both may be used according to circumstances is clearly upheld. Equally “broadminded” are the declaration’s new directives for the policy of the Communists in underdeveloped countries toward their “national bourgeoisie”—i.e., toward the nationalist, neutralist, and non-Communist, though in fact hardly ever toward bourgeois regimes that have emerged from the struggle for national independence. The Communists are advised to aim at “national democratic” regimes, defined by their willingness to support the Soviet bloc against the “imperialists,” to create the preconditions of progressive internal development by land reform, and to grant full freedom for the activity of the Communist party and of Communist-controlled “mass organizations.” They are told that those sections of the “national bourgeoisie” which oppose land reform and suppress the Communists, having taken a reactionary turn at home, will sooner or later also side with imperialism abroad. But again, the crucial question of a nationalist dictatorship that is willing to take Soviet aid and to vote anti-Western in the UN but jails its own Communists, is shirked6; nor is there any clear indication of who is to interpret the ambiguous directives in case of conflict.
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The Question of Authority
Thus matters come back to the ultimate issue of ideological authority—of the right to interpret ambiguous principles in a changing situation. Here, the Soviets score a clear but very limited victory: they emerge as the most successful, but not as the only orthodox interpreters of the true doctrine. The Soviet Union is hailed as the only country that, having completed “Socialist construction,” is engaged in building the “higher stage” of Communism; the Chinese communes are not even mentioned, and the Soviet argument that Communist abundance is not possible short of the highest level of technical productivity, including automation, is hammered home. The CPSU is unanimously declared to be “the universally recognized vanguard of the world Communist movement,” and its superior experience in conquering power and transforming society is stated to have fundamental lessons for all parties; the decisions of its 20th Congress in particular are said to have opened a new era for the whole international movement. But that new era now turns out to be an era of polycentric autonomy—just as the bolder spirits thought at the time.
For under the new declaration, the spiritual authority of the CPSU is not incarnated in the shape which all doctrinaire authority, and certainly all authority in the Bolshevik tradition, requires by its nature—the shape of hierarchal discipline. It is not only that the declaration repeats the ancient pious formula about the independence and equality of all Communist parties; it is that it fails to establish a visible, single center for their dependence. It provides for irregular conferences, whether world-wide or regional, for mutual coordination, and for bipartite consultations between any two parties in case of differences. This may be intended to rule out the circulation of Chinese attacks on CPSU policy to third parties before they have raised the matter in Moscow directly; but it does not, on the face of it, prevent them from broadening the discussion again the next time they fail to get satisfaction in their direct contact with the “vanguard of the world movement.”7 Clearly, the primacy of that vanguard is no longer that of an infallible Pope: the rule of Moscow locuta, causa finita is valid no more. For the first time in its forty years of history, international Communism is entering a “conciliar” period.
One phase of open ideological controversy between Moscow and Peking has thus ended. The Chinese have withdrawn their open challenge to the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the Soviet Communists, but not before they had extracted from it as much advantage for their foreign policy as they could hope to gain without risking an open breach. The underlying differences of interest and viewpoint remain, though their public expression will now be muted for some time. But the phase that has now closed has not only had a considerable immediate impact on Soviet foreign policy; it is bound to produce lasting changes in the constellation of factors shaping that policy, in Soviet-Chinese relations, and in relations within the Communist world movement.
A measure of the immediate effect is the uncertainty of direction shown by Soviet diplomacy from the wrecking of the summit conference in May to the end of 1960. Having set out to induce the U.S., by a mixture of pressure and courtship, to abandon some exposed positions and allies for the sake of a temporary understanding with their chief antagonist, the Kremlin did not indeed abandon that objective, but wavered visibly between it and the Chinese objective of isolating the U.S. as the one irreconcilable enemy. The oscillations were too fast, the conciliatory gestures too half-hearted, and the brinkmanship too risky to be explained merely as the conscious use of zigzag tactics to “soften up” the opponent; even if the Soviets intended all the time to reserve the next serious offer of relaxation for the next American president, a cool calculation of diplomatic expediency would hardly have led them to commit themselves in the meantime to the point to which they have gone over, say, in Laos or Cuba. By depriving them of the power automatically to subordinate all revolutionary movements everywhere to Soviet diplomatic needs, the Chinese forced Stalin’s successors to compete for authority over those movements by playing up to them to some extent; and this meant that, while failing to impose on the Kremlin a policy made in Peking, the Chinese forced it to deviate from its own concepts to a significant extent.
Nor have they lost this power of interference as a result of the Moscow conference. True, they have failed to establish a power of veto over Soviet diplomacy in general and Soviet-American contacts in particular, as would have been the case if the Chinese theses of an unconditional priority of revolution over peace and of the hopelessness of any serious disarmament agreement with the “imperialists” had been adopted. There is nothing in the Moscow declaration that would make it impossible for the Soviets still to agree with the Western powers on a permanent ban on nuclear test explosions with proper guarantees of inspection, hence on an attempt to close the “atomic club.” But there is much in it that will enable the Chinese to make it more difficult, and generally to raise suspicion against any direct Russo-American talks, and nothing that specifically endorses Khrushchev’s methods of personal diplomacy, from his pursuit of summit meetings to his proposals for “reforming” the United Nations. In fact, if the text of the declaration is viewed in the context of the events leading up to it, it suggests that the Soviet Communist party was only able to win on the controversial questions of principle by silently disavowing some of the more spectacular actions of its leader, and that the latter has emerged from the fight with his personal prestige noticeably impaired.
The declaration’s approval of the “general line” of peaceful coexistence and of the aim to eliminate world war in our time permits the Soviets to go on pursuing their strategy of using both negotiation and violence short of world war as means to gain their ends; but it is not enough to assure them of tactical freedom to decide, in the light of their own interests alone, when and how far to use one or the other. To regain that freedom of maneuver, the Soviets would have either needed a plain and brutal statement that local revolutions may in certain circumstances have to be subordinated to the interest of preserving world peace and thus protecting the achievements of “Socialist construction” against a nuclear holocaust; or they would have required an equally plain recognition of their right to act as the only legitimate interpreters of revolutionary doctrine for the world movement, and to enforce the strategic and tactical consequences of their interpretation by means of centralized discipline. But either way of insuring Soviet primacy, so natural in the Stalinist age when the Soviet Union alone was “the fatherland of all toilers,” proved impossible in the post-Stalinist age of “the Socialist world system” proclaimed by Khrushchev himself.
On one side the doctrine that “the dictatorship of the proletariat has become an international factor,” first announced in Russia by M. A. Suslov and now substantially incorporated in the declaration, amounts to a partial repeal of Stalin’s “Socialism in a single country”: it does not, of course, deny what was achieved under the latter slogan, but it restores, in the new world situation, the idea of a duty of the Communist powers to aid the progress of world revolution for which Trotsky fought. Even if this principle of solidarity is not formulated as an absolute and unlimited obligation, it is enough to expose Soviet diplomacy to constant pressure to take bolder risks—pressure of the kind which the Chinese mobilized effectively during the past year, andare free to use again.
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The Polycentric Bloc
On the other hand, the declaration’s recognition of the Soviet Communist party as the “vanguard” of the world movement falls far short of establishing a permanent and unchallengeable doctrinaire authority, let alone a single center endowed with disciplinary powers. It even falls far short of the position conceded to the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist party at the time of the 1957 Moscow declaration—on Mao Tse-tung’s initiative. Then, the Soviet Union was consistently described as being “at the peak of the Socialist camp,” and Mao publicly went out of his way to speak of the need for a single leader among Communist states and parties, and to insist that only the Russians could fill both roles.
Now, the Chinese talk quite openly and naturally about the special responsibilties of “the two great Socialist powers,” the Soviet Union and China; and in the declaration itself, the vanguard role of the Soviet party is balanced in part by the recognition of the “enormous influence” exerted by the Chinese revolution on the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America by its encouraging example to all movements of national liberation. In 1957, the failure to found a new formal international organization only increased the influence of the large international liaison machinery developed within the secretariat of the central committee of the CPSU, compared with which all bilateral and regional contacts were bound to be of subordinate importance. Now, the failure formally to establish a single center legitimates the de facto existence of two centers in Moscow and Peking, both with world-wide links and without any agreed division of labor, which will continue to cooperate on the basis of the declaration but also continue to give different advice on the questions still left open and to compete for influence. And if Moscow is still the stronger power and the older authority, Peking is closer in its type of revolutionary experience and the emotional roots of its anti-colonialist ardor to those parts of the world where the chances of Communist revolution are most promising.
In a long range view, the relative victory of the Soviets in the 1960 phase of the dispute thus appears less important than the fact that this phase has marked a new stage in their abdication of their former position of exclusive leadership. The reports that the Soviets themselves expressed during the Moscow conference a wish that they should no longer be described as being “at the head of the Socialist camp” may well be true: finding themselves unable any longer to exert effective control over the whole world movement, they may have preferred not to be held responsible for all its actions by their enemies. In a bloc containing two great powers, in an international movement based on two great revolutions, such a development was indeed to be expected as soon as important differences appeared between them. But while the two protagonists remain as determined to continue to cooperate as they are unable to settle their disagreements, the result is not a two-headed movement with neatly separated geographic spheres of control, but a truly polycentric one: many Communist parties outside the Soviet bloc may in future be able to gain increased tactical independence, based on their freedom of taking aid and advice from both Moscow and Peking, simultaneously or alternately—with all the risks that implies for the future unity of its doctrine and strategy.
The victory of Communism in China, and the subsequent growth of Communist China into a great power, thus appears in retrospect as the beginning of the end of the single-centered Communist movement that Lenin created, and the single-centered Soviet bloc that Stalin built. The process took a decisive step forward in 1956, when the 20th Congress of the CPSU recognized the existence of a “Socialist world system” and of different roads to power, and when the destruction of the Stalin cult inflicted an irreparable blow on the type of Soviet authority that had depended on the infallibility of the “father of nations.” Mao’s victory had killed the uniqueness of the Soviet Union; Khrushchev’s speech buried the myth built around that uniqueness.
It was at that moment that the specter of “polycentric Communism” first appeared. But when de-Stalinization was quickly followed by the crisis of Russia’s East European empire, the façade of single-centered unity was restored in the following year with the help of China’s prestige and Mao’s authority. Now that China herself has brought back the specter she helped to exorcise three years ago, the process is no longer reversible. This time, polycentric Communism has come to stay.
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Postscript
The above was written before the publication of Khrushchev’s report on the Moscow conference, given on January 6 to the party organizations of the Higher Party school, the Academy of Social Sciences, and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Compared to the text of the declaration, the report is distinguished by two diplomatic omissions and two theoretical elaborations.
Khrushchev has made no mention of the role of U.S. imperialism as “the gendarme of world reactions,” etc., which would have embarrassed him in resuming diplomatic approaches to the new American administration; reactions to President Kennedy’s first statements in Moscow and Peking have already confirmed that the original foreign policy difference between the two great Communist powers remains intact after the formal burial of the ideological dispute that arose from it.
The report also fails to define the new concept of “national democracy,” created to designate the desirable type of regime for the underdeveloped, ex-colonial countries, by the criteria of land reform and freedom of Communist organization given in the declaration. In view of the diplomatic importance of Soviet relations not only with Nasser’s UAR, but with the traditionalist autocracy of Morocco, this is understandable.
But Khrushchev is more precise than the declaration in his comment on “wars of national liberation.” He goes further than any previous Soviet participant in the debate in agreeing with the Chinese that such just wars are “inevitable” so long as imperialism and colonialism exist, and he is emphatic about the need for all Communists to give them their fullest support. But he solves the apparent contradiction with his preceding condemnation of “local war”—which might lead to the disaster of nuclear world war—by arguing that these wars of liberation are in their origin not “wars between states” but popular insurrections, and that the support which the Communist powers must give them should consist not in taking the initiative in internationalizing the conflict, but in preventing the intervention of the major imperialist powers by the threat of their own counter-intervention—as in Vietnam and in the Cuban revolution—and thus assuring the victory of the people. This is the most explicit formulation yet of the Soviet practice of “all aid by threats and indirect support short of war” for revolutionary movements.
Finally, Khrushchev confirms publicly that it was the Soviet delegation that asked for the omission of the flattering formula placing the Soviet Union “at the head of the Socialist camp” and the CPSU “at the head of the Communist world movement,” which Mao had bestowed on them at the 1957 conference; and he bluntly states his reason: that this would have been a source of difficulties rather than advantages, as the Soviets are in fact no longer in a position to act as a single center giving directives. The polycentrism implicit in the declaration is thus made explicit for the first time through the mouth of the highest authority of Soviet Communism.
In the circumstances, Khrushchev’s assurances that the Communist parties will in future be able to “synchronize their watches” without the help of a statute regulating their relations, merely by the light of their common ideology, amounts to little more than the hope that Russia and China will continue to be able to compromise their differences in the light of their common interests. Even assuming that this will still be true for a long time, nothing so far indicates that the achievement of compromise will in future be easier, or the effects on the world Communist movement less critical, than in the recent past.
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1 Since this was written, a report based on unpublished Communist documents in the possession of Western governments has stated that a scheme for a joint Russo-Chinese Pacific naval command broke down owing to Soviet fears of being drawn by the Chinese into a war over Formosa. See Edward Crankshaw in the London Observer, February 12, 1961.
2 This applies to all Chinese texts available for scrutiny. Crankshaw's summing up of the secret Communist report referred to above repeats the Soviet charge that the Chinese regard nuclear war as inevitable (see particularly his second article in the Observer, February 19). But he quotes no Chinese statements and indicates that the report in question was given by the leader of a satellite Communist party favoring the Soviet view, and may have come into Western possession by a deliberate Soviet leak.
3 “The Nature of Khrushchev's Power,” Problems of Communism, July/August 1960.
4 Since the above was written, it has been reasonably well established that the Soviets took the initiative in withdrawing large numbers of technicians, giving as their reason Chinese attempts to influence them ideologically against official Soviet policy. Both the pro-Soviet secret report summarized by Crankshaw and a pro-Chinese account by the West Bengal Communist leader H. K. Konar, published in the Indian weekly the Link and quoted by Boris Nikolaevsky in the New Leader of January 16, 1961, agree on this.
5 According to the report summarized by Crankshaw, the Chinese Communist party circularized their systematic counterattack to the Soviet charges, going back to their disapproval of Khrushchev's 1956 “de-Stalinization” speech and to complaints of “unprincipled” Soviet behavior in Poland and Hungary later that year, only on September 1960. Once again, the reported Chinese position is confirmed by the pro-Chinese account of Konar (referred to above) and based on statements made to the author by Chinese representatives at the North Vietnamese congress at about the same time.
6 In practice, President Nasser's regime in the UAR continues to enjoy Soviet diplomatic backing while being vigorously attacked in Soviet-controlled organs of the Communist world movement.
7 According to the report summarized by Crankshaw, the Chinese explicitly affirmed their right to form factions in the international movement during the Moscow discussions, and finally accepted the declaration only on condition that another world conference should be called within two years.
