The Split Between Russia and China

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV first attacked Mao Tse-tung personally at the Bucharest Conference in June, 1960, but it was not until the autumn of that year that the great dispute between China and the Soviet Union was publicized within the Communist movement as a whole. At the Moscow Conference of eighty-one Communist parties from all over the world, held that November, Khrushchev denounced Mao as another Stalin; the senior Chinese Party secretary told Khrushchev to his face that his ideas were all wrong and that he was a revisionist; Enver Hoxha of Albania stood up in the Kremlin council chamber and called Khrushchev a trickster and a betrayer of Lenin. The quarrel then revealed was so bitter that even some of those who fully accepted the existence of a Sino-Soviet rift could hardly believe their eyes.

Since then more material has reached the West, largely through French and Italian Party sources, which throws light not simply on the Sino-Soviet quarrel, but more particularly on the strategy of Moscow Communism, on the preoccupations of the various fraternal parties, and on their relations with each other, with Moscow, and with Peiping. The whole future of the world Communist movement is bound up with these matters.

There were 108 speakers at the Moscow Conference, and some of them spoke twice. The obvious line of division was between the parties belonging to the Soviet bloc and those outside it. Within each category, another division made itself apparent — a division between those parties with a relatively strong and independent leadership and those which had no idea of independence. Thus, within the bloc the outstanding leaders were Gomulka of Poland and Kadar of Hungary. Both showed themselves completely in accord with Khrushchev in the matter of the Sino-Soviet dispute, but also capable of adding to the Moscow line and giving it their own gloss. Their speeches contrasted strongly in vitality and tone with those of the Romanian Georgiu Dej and the Bulgarian Zhivkov, who simply echoed energetically the Khrushchev line; above all, with the abject performance of Ulbricht of East Germany, who repeated Khrushchev’s actual phrases. Outside the bloc the differences were far more complicated.

The men who blurted out a large part of the truth, which everyone else was carefully ignoring, were the delegates for the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Both of them said that the bad relations between the Chinese and Soviet parties were the result of bad state relations between the U.S.S.R. and the Chinese People’s Republic; the Chinese could prove their good faith by settling their state differences with the U.S.S.R. Nobody else touched on the heart of the matter — namely, great-power rivalry between the Soviet Union and China. All the rest, except those few who sided with China or adopted an attitude of neutrality in the dispute, played the game according to the rules.

The rules were laid down in advance by the Russians. Many of the delegations from parties outside the bloc were resentful of Soviet pressuring and lobbying and entered St. George’s Hall in the Kremlin in a slightly mutinous mood. If the Chinese — to say nothing of the Albanians — had been more subtle, tactful, and devious, they could have won for themselves far more support. As it was, by conceding nothing; by attacking the Soviet comrades with almost brutal violence; by refusing to admit the least justification for the least criticism of their conduct; by their terrifying contempt for the consequences of nuclear war; most of all, by their glorying in the charges of “fractionalism” (the worst crime in the Communist calendar) flung at them by Khrushchev and others, they alienated all sympathy and turned some of the delegations who were most angry with the Russians into fervent supporters of Khrushchev’s cause.

I DO not propose to recapitulate the account of the Chinese, Albanian, and Soviet speeches which provided the immediate spectacular element of the conference. Since then their substance, if not the more personal items of abuse, has been repeated many times: by the Russians in their attacks on the Albanians; by the Chinese in their attacks first on the Yugoslavs, then on the Italians. But it would be well to summarize the main points of the doctrinal quarrel, as outlined in a special commentary by Suslov, of the Party Presidium, which was given to all the delegates. Suslov’s argument did not go into personalities or into the power aspects of the differences already revealed to many of the faithful at the Bucharest Conference in the summer of 1960, but it did set out with some clarity the general lines of the ideological quarrel:

The Chinese have wholly failed to appreciate the changes which have taken place since Lenin’s day, particularly in the relationship between political and economic forces. They are thus incorrectly interpreting the basic principles of Lenin.

They oppose the Soviet thesis that the forces of socialism can prevent war. Only a short time ago they were saying that, given fifteen years of peace, war could be banished forever from the face of the earth. Now they have reversed themselves; it is impossible, they say, to prevent the imperialists from making war.

This exposes a contradiction. While the Chinese nominally support the thesis of peaceful coexistence, in the same breath they insist that war is inevitable. They cannot have it both ways. Either we have war or we have peace; there is no third way. “The Soviet Union cannot allow the capitalists to destroy humanity.”

The Chinese also say that the Soviet Union is helping the bourgeois nationalists to seize power in many countries. But without making war, there is no other way. The fact that the present course of the struggle for Communism involves a certain maneuvering does not at all mean that the Soviet Union has lost sight of its ultimate objective.

The Chinese talk about the desirability of local wars; but local wars can lead only to world war.

The Chinese attitude is leading to the isolation of China and the Communist countries. Above all, the Soviet Union deplores their refusal to sit down at the same table with bourgeois delegates at one congress after another. This only weakens the campaign to win more adherents in the struggle for peace.

Finally, the Chinese have spoken with reservations on the fight against the cult of personality. They have done this in spite of the fact that other Communist countries regard this matter as settled.

So much for Suslov. It was left to Khrushchev, Gomulka, and others to inject into their speeches the more dramatic and picturesque charges with which we are now familiar.

The obvious grouping of the extra-bloc parties was by geographical area, and indeed there were marked differences in the attitudes of the Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and Latin-American parties. (The failure of Communism in Africa was brought home by the fact that in all that great continent the only parties represented were those of the Union of South Africa, Sudan, and, in the north, Algeria, Morocco, and the United Arab Republic.)

On the whole it is fair to say that Asia, apart from India and Nepal, showed itself either on the Chinese side (Burma, North Korea, Malaya) or neutral (North Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan). Interestingly, both the Australian and New Zealand Communist parties were also pro-Chinese. The few Arab parties (especially those of Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq) were the most violently antiChinese, but at the same time indicated a certain concealed resentment at Moscow’s championship of Nasser. Algeria was rather a special case, markedly pro-Russian but not viciously antiChinese. The European parties outside the bloc were to a man anti-Chinese. The most interesting situation of all revealed itself in the Latin-American group: here all the official delegates were solidly anti-Chinese, but so deeply concerned with their own internal problems that they were not prepared as a body to endorse uncritically everything said or done by Moscow.

Yet, within this general pattern there were variations, and the local and national preoccupations and problems concealed by the bleak, bland front of the international Communist movement came out with startling clarity and force.

LATIN AMERICA

The Latin Americans ranged in type and character from the Brazilian Prestes, with his elderstatesman calm, to Mora of Costa Rica, who opened his speech by saying that he felt rather intimidated by this vast array of experienced Party leaders, and a little dazed, “rather like a peasant up from the country to visit a big city for the first time.” Prestes, at the other end of the scale, spoke easily and discursively about the particular problems of Latin America as a whole, not only for Brazil. He had a real contribution to make to the understanding both of Moscow and Peiping, and he knew it. He spoke like a man quietly disillusioned but confident and determined still, and with all time before him. He did not seek to flatter the Russians, though he acknowledged their experience. There were problems, he seemed to imply, which he and many other lesser Communists had to live with every day, problems undreamed of in the palaces of the Kremlin: never mind, they were quite capable of looking after themselves. He did not abuse the Chinese. He said they were making mistakes, and he would like to point out to them, very gently, that they were not being very clever in Latin America; too often, no doubt out of ignorance, the comrades they chose to back were the ones most likely to bring the cause into disrepute and slow down the advance of Communism.

What he was talking about was revealed more clearly in speeches from the delegates for Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Mexico, Venezuela, Paraguay, Colombia, and, again, Costa Rica. The last four said they hoped to profit much by the conference, because they were suffering within their own parties precisely the sort of dissension that now existed between the Soviet Union and China. The delegate from Paraguay said his party had been split from top to bottom, and it was all the fault of China. The others were less recriminatory, but their general tone was very much against China’s advocacy of revolutionary violence. The Costa Rican delegate said that his own party had been shattered by the Costa Rican civil war; the delegate from Colombia complained that his party was being embarrassed by adventurist pressure on Colombian youth to engage in violence and partisan warfare; the delegate from Venezuela spoke in much the same vein. Both Mexico and Uruguay came out sharply against the Chinese line. It was the delegate for Uruguay who first imported the word “Trotskyite” into the discussion. “Only Trotsky ites,” he said, “opposed the struggle for peace.” The delegate for Mexico denounced the Chinese for impeding the progress of Communism and all humanity.

The general Latin-American feeling was best summed up by Escalante of Cuba. Cuba, he said, had indeed succeeded, where others had failed, by violence. But Cuba was a very special case. There would certainly be need for violence in some countries, but for others to copy blindly the Cuban method might be a very grave mistake. Only the delegate for Guatemala boasted with wistful pride that his party still had a nucleus of armed warriors.

A rather different tone began to manifest itself deeper in the Caribbean. The delegates for Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic came out firmly for Khrushchev but were not quite sure about violence. Guadeloupe in particular thought violence might very often be necessary to overturn existing regimes. Martinique and Guadeloupe wanted to go on record as being profoundly grateful to the French party for training, help, and advice. Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as already mentioned, distinguished themselves by insisting that the trouble between the Russians and the Chinese was due to bad state relations — that is, great-power rivalry.

The South Americans as a whole were particularly indignant with the Chinese for their violent criticism of Khrushchev’s flirtation with Eisenhower and his visit to the United States. The delegate for Colombia, speaking of China’s fury at Khrushchev’s calling Eisenhower a man of peace, said, “The Chinese must not confuse diplomatic gestures by a head of state, as in the case of Khrushchev’s remarks about Eisenhower, with considered statements of the Communist Party.” Mora of Costa Rica said that without Khrushchev’s visit to America the Costa Rican party would still have been outlawed. But none of the Latin Americans were as fulsome about Khrushchev as the Europeans. The Latin Americans supported him, but with a cool eye, a mood best expressed by Jesús Faria of Venezuela, who said the Russians as well as the Chinese must do more to maintain unity and prevent further schisms while safeguarding the principles of Leninism. He was not altogether pleased, either, with uncritical genuflections to Moscow. Moscow in the past had made plenty of mistakes, and he thought too much praise was being given to the Soviet party.

THE MIDDLE EAST

The mood changed very sharply indeed in the Mediterranean countries. In the Arab countries the cause of Communism appeared to be hopelessly mixed up with nationalism in general and a burning hatred of Nasser in particular. Since Nasser has been demonstratively helped and patronized by the Russians; since the Chinese have come out so strongly against the idea of Communists’ giving help to “bourgeois nationalist” governments of any kind (above all, those of Nehru, Sukarno, and Nasser); since the whole position of the Soviet Union vis-a-vis the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular is equivocal to a degree and clearly concerned with Weltpolitik rather than with ideological struggle, it might have been expected that the Arab Communists would turn to China. Probably the main reason for their loyalty to Russia lies in the fact that they see the Soviet Union as a shield against Israel.

Syria and Lebanon were the most violent in their condemnation of China. The Lebanese delegate attacked China for “brutal violation” of the resolutions of the 1957 Moscow Conference. The Syrian delegate went so far as to ask whether the Chinese party should not be cast out from the bosom of the Communist world. But for them, and for the Jordanian delegate, the big issue was the existence of Nasser. Lebanon accused him of murdering prisoners; the Syrian delegate, while charging China with being more nationalist than Communist, of treating all criticism as a declaration of war, of imposing a gigantic burden of toil, beyond human strength, on the Chinese people, spoiled the effect of his rhetoric by adding, “Just like Nasser!” In a word, the performance of the Arab parties was not such as to inspire much confidence in Moscow, which may explain a good deal.

The comrades from the North African littoral were a good deal more stimulating. The Algerian delegate spoke very much to the point on the matter of peace and nonviolence. Nobody, he said, could accuse Algeria of shirking violence, but what Algeria wanted in November, 1960, was peace. The Russians understood why and helped the Algerians in sensible ways. But the Chinese could think of nothing better to do than condemn them for trying to negotiate with De Gaulle. The delegate from Morocco was also very clearly on the Russian side — socialism would not come through war. A number of countries, he went on, had liberated themselves without war, and others would follow. The Moroccan party had supported the Moroccan bourgeoisie in its anti-imperialist struggle and would continue to do so. It had been deeply hurt by the Chinese attitude.

THE FAR EAST

Even in the Far East there were not many wholly pro-Chinese; but there was a more general leaning toward the violent solutions favored by Peiping. There was also, as among the Arab countries, a fairly complete absence of comprehension (apart from the Indian delegate) of the larger issues. This applied especially to an understanding of the Khrushchev line of supporting any anti-imperialist government so long as it assisted in undermining Western influence.

North Korea, interestingly, formally thanked the Soviet Union for all the help it had given, together with the Chinese, in “the war of liberation”; but the North Korean delegate offered much implicit criticism of the soft Khrushchev line and the Russian attempt to railroad the conference into condemning China. Burma, definitely proChinese, was at pains to elaborate the Chinese case that it was nonsense to accuse Peiping of being warlike. The Indonesian delegate, who had, like the North Vietnamese, set himself up as a mediator between the two parties, agreed with the Russians that the Chinese had erred in seeking to use mass organizations such as the Trade Union and Student Conferences to agitate against the Russians; but he was far more Chinese than Russian in demanding immediate assistance to all those engaged in “wars of liberation,” and he considered that, although the peaceful winning of power by Communists was conceivable in some countries, it could happen only in exceptional cases. He maintained, furthermore, that alliances between Communists and bourgeois nationalist parties were dangerous and double-edged expedients. Malaya, as might be expected, was all for violence and very strongly pro-Chinese.

Rather surprisingly, North Vietnam, in the person of Ho Chi Minh, did not come out wholly on China’s side. It offered a classical exposition of the problems facing Communist movements in the struggle against colonial and excolonial powers, and the emphasis of this exposition was decidedly pro-Chinese. But Ho Chi Minh ended up by expressing neutrality. Perhaps this was because he, more than some, was vividly aware of the point made by Khrushchev that China, for all its lofty talk about the iniquity of Moscow in propping up bourgeois nationalist governments, was not above the same sort of activity when it suited it, as in Laos and Cambodia. Perhaps he remembered that for all its talk of violent solutions, China patiently put up with the British in Hong Kong and the Portuguese in Macao.

Great bitterness toward China was displayed by the Indian delegate, Ghosh. In him, nationalism and Khrushchevism walked hand in hand. The Indian party, he said, was supporting Nehru in his fight for peace and would continue to do so. The Chinese were making things impossibly difficult for all Indian comrades. The Indian party had been snubbed by Peiping time and time again, and Chinese action on the Indian frontier had caused deep injury to the Communist cause.

EUROPE

The European delegates lifted the whole debate to a far more sophisticated level, a level only touched otherwise by one or two of the Latin Americans. Within the bloc, Gomulka of Poland and Kadar of Hungary showed conviction, subtlety, and understanding. Outside it, the Italian delegate, Longo, was incomparably the most effective speaker, and also the most radical thinker, though Hagberg of Sweden and Vincent of Switzerland indicated clearly that they too had independent minds. All of them, and Thorez of France, expressed sharp impatience with the ossification of Communist thought and jargon. Hagberg even wanted to drop the phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” He said bluntly, “This is an unattractive phrase in Sweden. ... It is wrong to try to analyze the events of the day by recourse to the theories of yesterday. . . . There is no sense in going on repeating what Lenin once said without taking note of the changes since his day.”

The Europeans were far more preoccupied with the imperative necessity of avoiding nuclear war, of avoiding any action, including the fighting of a local war, which might conceivably lead to a major war. The American delegate, Jackson, in the understatement of the year announced that he could not possibly go back to New York and try to capture the American workers by telling them that the way to Communism must lie through nuclear war.

All this was understandable and at the same time reassuring. So was the emphasis placed by the extra-bloc Europeans on achieving power by peaceful means, by capturing mass movements of a progressive kind, by infiltrating trade unions. La Passionara, the Spanish heroine, was particularly contemptuous about the Chinese talk of violent solutions. The Spanish comrades, she said, had been boycotted by the workers for a decade when they practiced, or tried to practice, guerrilla tactics, but now that they were concentrating on infiltrating the unions and helping the workers in their struggle for better living conditions, they were getting on like a house afire. The sense of what she said was supported in a sad speech by the delegate from Greece, who hoped that fraternal parties would profit from the example of the Greek party, which had been ruined and made ineffective for years to come because it had once engaged in a losing civil war.

Gollan, the British delegate, said that each party must follow its own path; the British way would be different from the Russian way. He gave the Chinese a short lesson on what it is like to be English. They failed entirely to understand, he said, the long traditions of the English working class and the strength of the social democratic labor movement. He, with others, underlined the real meaning of the campaign for general disarmament, which was the greatest weapon in the hands of Communists for “paralyzing imperialism.” He boasted — a little prematurely, as it turned out — that the British Communists had helped the left wing of the Labor Party to defeat its right wing.

It remained for Hagberg of Sweden and Longo of Italy to state boldly and shatteringly where all this was leading. The Social Democrats, said Hagberg, had been in power in Sweden for many years. The Swedish Social Democrats, moreover, were a typical working-class party. Communists would get nowhere by abusing them. What was more, in the long-term view, the Swedish Communists had no desire to annihilate the Social Democrats; rather, they worked for the day when the two parties would be fused into one.

This epoch-making remark, which a few years ago would have been received as black heresy, was not challenged. It was made on the first day of the conference and it was picked up and elaborated on the third day by Signor Longo.

Longo’s speech, or the greater part of it, has been published not only in Italy but also in the Polish press. It was the forerunner of Togliatti’s speech to the Italian Party Congress two years later, the speech in which the Italian Communist leader (the Italian party is numerically the strongest in the world outside the bloc, save for the special case of Indonesia) said in effect that the Italian Communists were not interested in theories and dogma but only in achieving a better life for the masses; they did not care how this was achieved, or whom they had to work with; they looked forward, moreover, not to the victory of Communism as such but to the creation, with the help of all men of goodwill, of a new international order, no matter what it is called.

Togliatti’s speech attracted the special wrath of the Chinese and caused them to put out the special article in People’s Daily on December 31, 1962, entitled “The Differences between Signor Togliatti and Us.” It was that article, widely publicized by the Chinese themselves, which stimulated the Soviet response in the Pravda article of January 7, 1963. And between them those two articles cover in greater detail than anything else publicly stated before the fundamental ideological differences of the two sides. But the whole of Togliatti’s Rome speech had been implicit in Longo’s speech to the Moscow Conference.

Already, in 1960, the Italian delegate was speaking like an equal of Khrushchev or Mao, as befitted a leader of the party which invented the concept of “polycentrism.” He attacked the Chinese as an equal, too.

The Chinese onslaught, he said, meant an attempt to undo all the good work done by the 20th and 21st Congresses of the Soviet party. He put in better language than anybody else what so many of the Europeans were thinking about the Chinese doctrine that the Communists must still reckon with the possibility of war. “Any idea of this kind,” he said, “would sap all impulse and vigor of action from the masses. The masses cannot be made to struggle for objectives which we ourselves declare to be unrealizable. On the other hand, it should be remembered that without precise and energetic action on our part to mobilize the people against imperialist war, the way would be left open to imperialist propaganda, which seeks to blunt and distract the vigilance of the masses and spreads the slander that Communists do not oppose war and that they believe in the slogan ‘the worse the better,’ because they wish to achieve socialism by means of war. If we do not refute calumnies of this kind with clear pronouncements on the possibility of avoiding imperialist war and do not work continuously to organize the masses for the defense of peace, we risk losing the sympathy of the broad masses, whose highest aspiration is the achievement of peace.”

Longo then explained why the Italian party devoted so much time and energy not to propagating Communist doctrine but to fighting for what he called “structural reforms” — that is to say, all reforms calculated to give the workers more power and better living conditions.

This, coupled with the speech of Hagberg, the Swedish delegate, was a revolutionary contribution. It meant that the Communist parties of Italy and Sweden had embraced, with Khrushchev’s approval and in face of the wrathful scorn of the Chinese, the great anti-Bolshevik heresy, reformism. Reformism means working directly and immediately for the amelioration of the poor, the downtrodden, the underprivileged, even if this involves cooperating intimately and indefinitely with the bourgeois. It means putting social reform first and doctrine a bad second. It means turning one’s back on the class struggle and working for class cooperation, leading to class fusion. Bolshevism, Leninism, Stalinism mean the reverse of this; they mean working to exacerbate the relations between capital and labor, to reach the better through the worse, so that one day the workers, in desperation, will rise up and overthrow their masters by violent means.

The Chinese thus are better Bolsheviks than the Italians and the Khrushchevite Russians. For Khrushchev, too, is moving tentatively along the Italian path; at home he is more interested, for a variety of reasons, in prosperity than in doctrine, and he is more interested in achieving what he calls Communism (which is not what Stalin meant by Communism, though it is more nearly what Communism should mean) throughout the globe by economic rather than violent means.

Thus, within the great drama of the SinoSoviet struggle, the Moscow Conference of 1960 in its secret proceedings offers us a glimpse of the beginnings of a far greater drama — the transformation of Communism into something quite different, with the Chinese bitterly standing guard over the Ark of the Covenant.

Signor Longo’s speech was not an individual heresy. In December, 1962, Signor Togliatti endorsed it all and added to it. And the latest proof that the Italian Communists are really working on the lines indicated by Longo is their formal attachment to the idea of the Common Market, at first comprehensively denounced by all good Communists, from Khrushchev down, as an imperialist conspiracy against the former colonial countries and the Soviet bloc itself. Moscow has still not sorted out its attitude toward the Common Market. But the Italians have not been denounced for supporting it. And their reason for supporting it, that it is raising the standard of living of the Italian workers (which good Bolsheviks would seek to reduce, in order to force violence), has been accepted quite mildly by Khrushchev. Khrushchev himself has since proved by the new accommodation he has reached with the Yugoslav League of Communists that he, too, is in a thoroughly heretical and experimental state of mind.