Communists: The Battle over the Tomb

COMMUNISTS

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Iconoclasts always end up needing more icons than anyone else. Thus the familiar, revered image is seen everywhere in Russia—framed in classrooms and pasted on peeling walls, idealized on canvas and frozen in marble. It is almost as ubiquitous in China, where it is often carried in processions, shaped of paper or flowers, surrounded by mock dragons and popping firecrackers.

The face with its high-domed forehead and arched eyebrows seems slightly Asiatic to Western eyes; in Asia it looks Western. Both the Russians and the Chinese passionately claim it as their own. On either side of the great split that now divides the Communist world, the disputants exalt Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as their patron and prophet. Lenin looks on as, in his name, Nikita Khrushchev denounces the Chinese as dogmatists, fools, adventurers and warmongers. And Lenin looks on as, in his name, Mao Tse-tung denounces the Russians as revisionists, traitors, bourgeois cowards and capitulationists.

Monthly Outing. He has been dead for 40 years, lying inside a glass coffin in the squat redgranite mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square, where thousands of Soviet citizens queue up to march soberly past his waxy form, guarded by rigid Russian soldiers as immobile as the corpse. Not long ago, when Khrushchev was asked how Lenin’s remains were kept looking so lifelike, he replied: “That’s easy. We just take him out once a month and re-embalm him.” So it is with Lenin’s ideological remains. Constantly re-embalmed, retouched, re-clothed, he remains at the center of a savage historical fight, the most important split in the history of Communism.

If he could return from that other world whose existence, as a good Marxist atheist, he of course denied, Lenin would be dismayed by the quarrel but hardly surprised. Contrary to its reputation, Communism has never been a “monolith.” Communists live in a violent hate-love relationship, and have always reacted to one another’s heresies far more viciously than to any “class enemy.”

In a sense, it is absurd to find Communists today fighting each other—and the rest of the world—over a tomb, with a mass of dated polemics used both as sacred writ and a manual of strategy. But unlike monarchists, Reds cannot find legitimacy in a family tree or by divine right. Unlike democrats, they do not draw their mandate from the people they rule. Communist legitimacy, such as it is, derives from the writings of Karl Marx and from the words and deeds of Lenin, the first man to apply Marxism to a living nation.

First-Class Lion. As Nikita Khrushchev celebrated his 70th birthday last week, the image of Lenin appeared in yet another prominent place: Nikita’s chest. The Order of Lenin was pinned on him by President Leonid Brezhnev. There were other decorations. Outer Mongolia awarded Khrushchev its Order of Suhe-Bator, Czechoslovakia weighed in with the Order of the White Lion, first class, with gold chain, and top orders came from East Germany and Rumania. The congratulations almost recalled the “personality cult” that once surrounded Stalin; they salute Nikita as a “militant leader, a fiery tribune, giving his burning energy in the service of the cause of Communism.”

But that cause is in deep trouble. When Khrushchev took over Russia, he could boast that Communism ruled one-third of the earth’s people and controlled one-fourth of the earth’s land surface. Beyond the Iron and Bamboo Curtains were 6,000,000 Communists, more or less loyal to Soviet Russia. How badly that image has been shattered was illustrated by the very birthday greeters who came—or failed to come —to Moscow. Khrushchev apparently wanted to prepare a full-dress Communist summit meeting to condemn China. Instead of simply calling such a meeting and dictating the resolutions, Khrushchev had to plead and argue with foreign parties, including those from his own satellites. The Italians, among others, did not even send a delegation to Moscow. The rest plainly urged restraint, not because they like Mao any better than Khrushchev does, but because they are afraid of the consequences of widening the split even further. For one thing, the satellites—cherishing their new, limited but heady independence—do not particularly want to give Moscow a chance once again to play the supreme arbiter of the Communist world. They relish a situation in which their support is solicited and paid for—a situation in which even Cuba can afford to play both Communist camps against each other.

For the moment at least, it seemed that Khrushchev was not pushing for the ultimate break; he remarked that Moscow would “always leave an opportunity for rapprochement and understanding.” From Peking came birthday greetings signed by Mao and other Chinese leaders, expressing the hope that the split was “only temporary.” Yet almost in the same breath, the Peking press called Khrushchev a traitor, “a dragon who changes his colors,” and “even more stupid than the Americans and Chiang Kai-shek.”

Whether or not Moscow ever formally tries to read Peking out of the Communist movement—or breaks diplomatic relations with China—the quarrel is so deep and bitter that Communism can never be the same again.

Despairing Squeal. As only he can do it, Khrushchev last week once again defined the quarrel. For the first time in an attack on the Chinese, he mentioned Mao Tse-tung by name, and for the first time he publicly used the word “split,” which, he said, “could no longer be hushed up.” Gleefully, he imitated the high-pitched Chinese speech when he talked about their “seemingly revolutionary squeals, which are really squeals of despair.” He called them Trotskyites, and hinting at the fate that lies ahead for Mao, Khrushchev shouted: “Where is Trotsky now? Rotting!”

Khrushchev hit hard at what he presents as the two main issues of the quarrel: 1) peaceful coexistence v. war, and 2) peaceful evolution toward Communism v. violent revolution. Returning to the defense of what the West has already taken to calling “goulash Communism,” he said, in effect, that it is easier to fight a revolution on a full belly than on an empty one. The Chinese, he sneered, want him to tell the Russian people: “The economy has been sufficiently developed. Let us produce less so as not to become fat and thereby grow like the bourgeoisie.”

China, he said, wants to tell the workers in the West: “Why the hell are you earning so much? Do you know what danger you are in? You have degenerated.” To his audience, Khrushchev shouted: “Comrades, nothing but ridicule would come of this. Should we switch our industry to the production of belts, so that we may draw them in tighter? Will this inspire the people to march ahead? To where? Into the grave? What do their own people want—war or rice? I think they want rice.”

The Chinese, Khrushchev hinted, are merely envious of Russian prosperity—but this prosperity is necessary to the revolutionary cause, he added virtuously, for it inspires workers everywhere. Moreover, if the Chinese have economic problems, then they have only their own “reckless experiments” to blame. Obviously still smarting at not being consulted, Khrushchev recalled how Mao Tse-tung in 1958 informed him of his disastrous plans to set up agricultural communes. “He was not asking me,” said Khrushchev, “he was telling me. So I said, ‘It is your business. You try it. But we tried it long ago and failed.’ ”

General Havoc. As usual, Khrushchev’s speech was studded with supporting quotations from Lenin, and, as usual, so were the replies from Mao. The baffled Western spectator could only wonder which one was the real Leninist and just what the prophet had really said.

The trouble is that Lenin, in scores of books, pamphlets and collected speeches, said enough to prove almost any side of any case. Moreover, he naturally had different views as a frustrated exile, as a revolutionary organizing street fights in Russia, and as the head of a government. Thus the battle of Lenin quotations could go on until won ton turns to borsch, but in essence it shapes up something like this:

∙ PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE. Closely following Marx, Lenin was convinced that competition for markets among capitalist countries would inevitably lead to war, and moreover that “the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist states is unthinkable. One or the other must triumph in the end. And before that end arrives, a series of frightful collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states will be inevitable.” Lenin was sure that the general havoc caused by war was necessary for the spread of Communism. He vaguely referred to the idea of peaceful coexistence only a few times, and for special reasons—once while trying to get Russia out of World War I.

∙ REVOLUTION. Like Marx, Lenin thought that violent revolution was both inevitable and necessary. “Those who are opposed to armed uprising,” he wrote, “must be ruthlessly kicked out as enemies, traitors and cowards.” He dismissed the notion of peaceful victory over capitalism as heresy, akin to the hated belief in mere social reform. This, as Lenin and Marx saw it, provides a palliative for the workers that, by lessening their misery a little, only delays revolution. On the other hand, Khrushchev can quote Lenin as saying that the time must always be right for revolution before it is tried, and also that “revolution cannot be exported,” meaning that each country must reach it on its own.

∙ NATIONALISM. At least to begin with, Lenin put the cause of worldwide revolution ahead of any one nation’s self-interest. “I don’t care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it,” he said after the October Revolution of 1917. “All this is only the road to a World Revolution.” On the other hand, when White Armies were storming toward Moscow and Petersburg, Lenin swiftly turned nationalist, calling on Russians to defend “the Socialist fatherland!”

In sum, Mao has the better of the argument—at least on paper points. But Khrushchev argues effectively that Marxism is not a fixed dogma, but a method that must be applied to different conditions of each era—for instance, to the nuclear age, which drastically changes the nature of war. It is not enough simply to “get out the book and look up what Vladimir Ilyich said. We must do our own thinking, study life diligently and analyze the contemporary setting.”

In a way, Lenin did just that. He adapted Marx to totally different conditions than those known to the scholarly, misanthropic exile in 19th century London. Marx predicted that the revolution would happen in an advanced industrial society and shaped his theories to this prophecy; Lenin applied them to a backward peasant country. Marx was inclined to sit back and let the revolution come; Lenin taught that it had to be helped along with the aid of a corps of professional revolutionaries.

Lenin owes nearly as much to Machiavelli and Von Clausewitz as to Marx. He passionately believed in Marxism—but he also believed in using any means to help it win. Thus what he did is at least as important as what he said. In the last analysis, Leninism is Lenin’s life. He remains pertinent not only because his successors keep invoking him, but because he epitomizes in his career so much of later Communist history and so much of what is unchanging in Communism’s nature.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born 94 years ago in a comfortable frame house in the small, sleepy city of Simbirsk, deep in the Russian heartland. His mother, a Lutheran, was a Volga German; his father Ilya, of Russian-Mongolian ancestry, was a teacher who rose to the post of director of elementary schools for his province and received a minor patent of nobility from the Czar. The Ulyanovs were seemingly untouched by the vast, ancient and epically inefficient tyranny that ruled Russia, or by the equally inefficient stirring against it. Vladimir and his older brother Alexander had an idyllic childhood. They swam in the Volga, hunted mushrooms in the birch woods, went ice skating and sleighing during the long winters. In the evenings, they bent over chessboards, sang around the piano, or played games invented by Vladimir with rules that he changed according to his whim. It was a habit he never lost.

Unknown even to Vladimir, Alexander joined a revolutionary movement called the People’s Will, and at 20 was hanged for taking part in a plot that failed to assassinate the Czar. Young Vladimir vowed: “I’ll make them pay for this! I swear I will!” Payment was to be long deferred.

Alexander had drawn his inspiration from the Populists, who abhorred all dictatorship; he and his companions used terror because they saw it as the only answer to the violence of the czarist state. But 19th century Europe offered a great many other forms of revolution to shop among. There were Saint-Simon, Fourier, and the other Utopian socialists, intellectual descendants of a small wing of the French Revolutionary Jacobins. There were the secret societies organized by the followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui, an erratic Frenchman who was the first to advocate dictatorship of the proletariat; the British Chartists, who demanded universal suffrage and representation of workers in Parliament; the syndicalists and anarchists, who wanted to abolish capitalism and the state immediately, and have men live in blessed freedom.

Young Vladimir was deeply influenced by the Russian revolutionary tradition stemming from the anarchists, by the peasant-dreamer Tkachev, and by the demonic intriguer Nechaev. Vladimir accepted without qualification Nechaev’s famous dictum: “Everything that promotes the success of the revolution is moral; everything that hinders it is immoral.”

Then, in 1888, he discovered Marx, who had died only five years before.

Provincial Grocer. Vladimir Ulyanov sat on the stove in a spare kitchen in his grandfather’s house and read Das Kapital, convinced that here at last was the weapon to bring down the state and lift oppression from the backs of the people. Among his first disciples were his younger brother and his sisters. While he worked for a law degree and wherever he went, Vladimir founded or joined Marxist study groups, and he traveled abroad to meet the exiled leaders of the outlawed Marxist party, then still known as the Social Democrats.

During the St. Petersburg textile strikes of 1895, Vladimir was arrested, spent a year in jail, followed by three years’ banishment to Siberia. “It is in prison,” he said later, “that one becomes a real revolutionary.”

When he reached Shushenskoe, a small Siberian village near the Mongolian border, he was 25, already bald, and looked more like a provincial grocer than a leader of men. He acted as law yer without fee for his peasant neighbors and showed a local merchant how to keep accounts, while at the same time explaining that the merchant was a parasite of capitalism.

While in Shushenskoe, Lenin married a fellow exile, Nadezhda Krupskaya, a thin, hot-eyed girl with carroty hair and many of the strong-minded qualities of the young women in the pages of Chekhov and Turgenev. The honeymooners spent their time translating The Theory and Practice of Trade Unionism, by the British Socialist sages Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Of necessity, every revolutionary needed a pen name, and Vladimir chose his: Lenin, presumably from the Lena River, the longest and one of the coldest in Siberia.

Brussels Fleabag. After banishment came foreign exile. Traveling on forged passports, using such names as Meyer, Petrov and Jordanoff, Lenin lived as a cafe conspirator in the West, spending long hours in the great libraries of Europe. Occasionally, he slipped back into Russia and out again. From the beginning, the Marxists were rent by savage quarrels. As soon as three or more gathered together, they divided into left, center and right. The “European” wing, under the German Karl Kautsky, who was savagely denounced for seeking to “reform” Marx, eventually evolved into today’s democratic socialists. The Russian wing, under George Plekhanov, a nobleman and former army officer who was the antithesis of Lenin, underwent a momentous split, mostly on the issue of just how tough, disciplined and dictatorial the movement should be.

It happened at the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Party in 1903, which began in a flea-ridden hall in Brussels, and after several police arrests moved on to quarters in a London slum, where boys hooted and threw stones at the gesticulating foreigners. At this congress, Lenin’s hard-line program won, and his followers became known as the Bolsheviks, or majority; the other faction was called Mensheviks—minority. Led by gentle Julius Martov, the Mensheviks had a Jeffersonian faith in the masses and a passion for democracy. Lenin despised them, and though Martov had been a close personal friend, he denounced him as a liar, coward and traitor.

This set a pattern for his life, and indeed for Communism; though Lenin reversed himself countless times, anyone who disagreed with him was denounced —not, as he admitted, for the sake of persuasion, “but to wipe him off the face of the earth.” Lenin was always ready to use any instrument at hand. Once when a comrade protested that a Bolshevik named Victor was an obvious scoundrel, Lenin warmly agreed. He added: “Tell me, frankly, would you live off the wife of a wealthy businessman? No! I wouldn’t do it either. I couldn’t overcome my disgust. But Victor accomplishes this and helps party finances. He is irreplaceable.”

Parisian Redhead. Some of the later Bolsheviks worked with Lenin on the staff of Iskra (Spark), a newspaper printed in London or on the Continent and smuggled into Russia. While living in Paris in 1910, Lenin fell in love, and again with a redhead. Her name was Inessa Armand, a young woman of French-Scottish extraction who had been converted to Bolshevism by Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and had deserted her wealthy husband. Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, was apparently not disturbed by the affair and seemed to be genuinely fond of Inessa and her five children (not Lenin’s). Krupskaya was Lenin’s nurse, companion and confidante, who saw to it that he ate regularly and had his hair cut; Inessa was gay, impudent and not afraid to oppose Lenin’s views with her own. The ménage à trois, with interruptions, lasted for ten years, until Inessa died of typhus.

The conspiratorial life had its horrors. The exiles lived in constant fear of betrayal, and were naggingly suspicious even of close comrades. At one time, Lenin’s top agent in Russia and his top man in Western Europe were both on the payroll of the czarist police. Prison and Siberia also left their mark. Lenin suffered blinding headaches and recurrent insomnia. Nostalgia for the vast spaces of Russia plunged some comrades into deep melancholy, drove others to suicide.

What kept them going was a missionary fervor, a quasi-religious intoxication, not with God but with man—and with man not as they knew him, but as he would be after they had forcibly recreated him. Lenin said: “I always think with pride, ‘What marvelous things human beings can do!’ ” He loved music, but hated listening to it because “it makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. But you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head—you’ll get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without mercy.”

Twilight Zone. By the time of World War I, he had quarreled with most of his followers, was isolated and depressed about the prospects of the revolution. When it finally came, it was not Lenin who made it; but it was Lenin who stole it.

The disasters of war and its own in vincible stupidity finally brought down the czarist regime, to be replaced by a provisional government under the liberal-minded Prince Lvov, and then by Socialist Revolutionary Alexander Kerensky. Feverishly Lenin, then living in Zurich, worked to get back to Russia. The government did not want him. Lenin, who had already received $10 million from the German government to further the revolution, again turned to Berlin. Since the Germans knew that he wanted Russia to conclude peace at all costs, they sent him to Russia in the celebrated special train.

As he sped across Germany, Lenin telegraphed orders to his lieutenants. In Stockholm, there was a hasty meeting with Red agents, and time to buy an overcoat and a pair of shoes. Next evening, at twilight, the train pulled into St. Petersburg’s dingy Finland Station, and Lenin stepped to the platform, unsure whether he was to be welcomed or arrested.

Several of his followers had reached Petersburg before him. They got together a large crowd of soldiers, sailors and workers, whose fluttering red banners were lit up by searchlights. To full-throated cheers Lenin delivered a speech at the station, another in the street outside, a third from the balcony of Ksheshinskaya Palace, former home of the Czar’s mistress and now Bolshevik headquarters.

His speeches gave Maxim Gorky the impression of the “cold glitter of steel shavings,” from which arose “with amazing simplicity the perfectly fashioned figure of truth.” Even when they knew that he was lying, many men implicitly believed Lenin. He stunned his followers when he denounced the Kerensky government as the bourgeois enemy and vowed to bring it down. Then Lenin proceeded to demonstrate “the fine art of insurrection.”

Resigned Ministers. When his first coup against the Kerensky government failed, Lenin told Trotsky: “Now they will shoot us. This is the best time for it.” But the government dithered, and by the time it issued an order for his arrest he was hiding in a haystack. Three months later, a second coup succeeded when the Bolsheviks stormed the Czar’s Winter Palace, then the seat of the provisional government, and forced Kerensky’s ministers to resign at gunpoint.

Meanwhile elections had been held for the Constituent Assembly—the only democratic vote in Russian history—which clearly rejected the Bolsheviks in favor of the liberals. Lenin simply sent troops to disperse the assembly. Thereafter the “Little Robespierre,” as Trotsky called him, launched his own Terror. The Czar and his family were executed, and Lenin systematically began the liquidation of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Comrade Zinoviev cried triumphantly: “The capitalists killed separate individuals. But we kill whole classes.” The Cheka (secret police) was organized. Sometimes, mistakes were made, but from Lenin’s point of view they were just as good as deliberate acts. At one party meeting, Lenin passed a note to his Cheka chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, asking how many reactionaries were held in Moscow’s jails. Dzerzhinsky scribbled the number 1,500, and Lenin marked the note with a cross. At once Dzerzhinsky left the hall and had the 1,500 shot dead. He learned only later that Lenin marked communications with a cross merely to indicate he had understood them. Later Lenin said: “We are all Chekists.”

In Every Happy Day. Not even Communist historians are sure how Lenin’s regime managed to survive the invasion by allied armies from all sides, the civil war, the total economic chaos resulting from Lenin’s belief that “any cook can run a state.” He had made literally no plans for governing. He told his Bolshevik high command, “Try to nationalize the banks, and then see what to do next. We’ll learn from experience.”

In 1921, the sailors of Kronstadt, who had helped to bring about the revolution and to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, rose against the Lenin regime, crying: “Enough shooting of our brothers!” Lenin crushed the revolt. By conservative estimate, 5,000,000 died in the first few years of his rule. But Lenin realized that the time had come for changes. Politically, the regime stayed as dictatorial as before, but he instituted the New Economic Policy, a right turn toward partial capitalism that gave groaning Russia a brief respite. It was to be among Lenin’s last official acts, for in 1922 he was incapacitated by a series of strokes that left him paralyzed and partly speechless until he died in 1924.

Such the career, such the accomplishments, of the leader whom both Moscow and Peking fervently claim as their own, and of whom Russian schoolchildren sing:

Lenin is always alive,

Lenin is always with you.

In sorrow, hope and joy

Lenin is with you in your spring.

In every happy day

Lenin is within you and within me.

Cleared Smoke. The triangular division that Marxism is so prone to became evident even before Lenin’s death in 1924. The right wing of the Central Committee was led by Bukharin, who wanted an even wider application of the NEP; the center was dourly controlled by Stalin; and the left followed Trotsky and the flamboyant Zinoviev. When the smoke cleared, Trotsky was again in exile, Zinoviev and Bukharin were dead, and Stalin was in power.

Before he died, Lenin carefully considered the man who was to succeed him. Joseph Stalin had risen to the post of first party secretary from his beginnings as a terrorist and holdup man for party funds. In his political testament, Lenin warned in vain against making Stalin his successor, because he considered him too rude and too ambitious.

And yet Stalin had as much right as Khrushchev to claim Lenin’s heritage, perhaps more. Although he added his personal despotic flourishes, Stalin had learned about terror, about dictatorship, about the total disregard of human life or ordinary human decency, from his master Lenin. In one important respect, Stalin did greatly enlarge upon a force present in Lenin’s life only embryonically—Russian nationalism.

In purging Trotsky, Stalin sounded much like Khrushchev attacking Mao. Trotsky, like Mao, talked about an immediate drive for world revolution; Stalin countered with repetition of Lenin’s concept of “socialism in one country” and the idea that Mother Russia must be developed first as a guide and model for the world revolution. For the sake of Soviet foreign policy, he calmly sacrificed the interests of foreign Communist parties—notably including the Chinese party itself. In all this, Khrushchev closely resembles Stalin, even though he took the momentous step of denouncing Stalin’s oppressive form of dictatorship.

Empire’s Course. Communism was the first force since the rise of the nation states to call for a real world order, but it failed even to begin to create one, or really to come to terms with nationalism. Even though in many areas Communism uses nationalism as a vehicle, the two remain essentially inimical. The supranational loyalty to Moscow, which Stalin enforced through sheer power and terror, was artificial. Moscow is not the Third Rome. What started under Stalin, continued with Tito’s defection, and goes on ever more intensely under Khrushchev, is the reascendancy of nationalism over Communism, of self-interest over ideology.

Much of the ideological invective between Moscow and Peking camouflages rivalry between two great if unequal powers. Mao’s pride in his ideological subtlety and his own Chinese Communist revolution—which he accomplished largely unaided by Russia—obviously mingles with his pride in an ancient culture and his contempt for Khrushchev as a belly-slapping vulgarian.

Much of Russia’s anger at China’s pretensions to lead Asia and Africa mingles with immemorial fears of the invading “Golden Horde” and “the Yellow Peril.” Russia’s course eastward to the Pacific has collided with China’s course northward to the empty spaces of Siberia. Khrushchev and all Russians must be deeply worried by the thought that in 1970, they may be living next door to hundreds of millions of hostile Chinese who by then will probably have nuclear weapons.

Among Russia’s European satellites, nationalism has also reasserted itself as it has in the West—and it gets stronger as fear of Khrushchev’s Russia diminishes. That is why alliances on both sides are in a state of flux, and therein also lies one of the dangers to the West.

Risky Distinctions. To the West, the ultimate question raised by the Sino-Soviet split is whether it bodes good or ill. All Communist splits, big or small, are essentially the result of failures—failure to meet a goal, failure to measure up to reality. One failure behind the present Sino-Soviet quarrel is Russia’s recent inability to make headway in the cold war; another is the glaring fact that more than four decades after the revolution, communism is nowhere able to match the capitalist standard of living. In this respect, the West can obviously take heart from the split.

A more fundamental question is whether the Khrushchev line denotes only a temporary, tactical change in Communism or a more profound one. All Communists, no matter of what stripe, still share the aim of defeating capitalism; but this statement, while as true as ever, is no longer a sufficient analysis of the situation. Some of the metamorphoses that Communism has undergone may have begun as tactical moves which in effect make Communism more attractive, but may end up meaning more—for example, Yugoslavia’s compromises with free enterprise, the Italian Communist Party’s championship of the small businessman.

The results of Khrushchev’s destalinization drive, which began in 1956, are still shaking the Communist world; “re-stalinization,” a return to despotic control by Moscow, is not impossible, but could be accomplished only through violent upheaval. Thus the notion that the U.S. now deals with a totally new form of Communism is widely accepted. Among others, Senator Fulbright distinguishes between a country’s internal Communism, with which the U.S. supposedly has no quarrel, and expansionist Communism. From that, it may be a short step to thinking of “good” Communists (Moscow) and “bad” Communists (Peking).

And yet such distinctions are risky. The West, which for many years underestimated the importance of the split, should not now overestimate it. At any rate, it should not be taken at face value in the terms Moscow and Peking themselves use to describe it. China is not quite so warlike as Moscow pretends, nor Russia quite so peaceable. The Chinese attack Moscow for cowardice in signing the test ban treaty with the imperialists, and they have spoken cynically about the possibility of surviving a nuclear war, but after all, Russia, not China, has the Bomb. Russia, not China, risked nuclear war in Cuba and came close to risking it in Berlin.

A Bill Some Day. The story of the split is riddled with similar paradoxes; only a few years ago, spartan Peking was championing precisely the kind of economic liberalism Khrushchev now promotes, and at the time of the Polish revolt against Moscow in 1956, it was the hard-line Chinese who urged caution on Khrushchev, who was all set to crack down as he had on rebellious Hungary.

For a Communist, Khrushchev has given every evidence of sanity and of really believing in peaceful coexistence. And yet it is well to remember that Stalin, too, practiced a form of peaceful coexistence when he entered the popular fronts with the hated Socialists abroad during the ’30s and fought alongside the hated capitalists in World War II. The West paid a price for this at Teheran and Yalta. It is not impossible that Khrushchev will present his own bill some day.

Obviously the West for the present has nothing to fear from the split, and perhaps something to gain. But just about the only sure thing is that the split, as such, will never solve the West’s own problems, or preserve peace, or assure freedom. After all, no matter how Moscow and Peking interpret their Lenin, no matter what they read in that polished marble of his tomb, he is still the man who said: “We are all Chekists.”