Communists: Family Quarrel

Russia and Red China have little in common save Communism, and even on that they disagree. The nature and the size of the split can shape the course of the cold war, and the West’s strategists have studied every scrap of evidence to help map its dimensions. The split was papered over at the meeting of all the world’s 81 Communist parties in Moscow last winter. Last week there was new evidence that the quarrel between the partners is becoming increasingly acrimonious. Writing in the London Sunday Times, Polish-born Kremlinologist Isaac Deutscher revealed an astonishingly bitter, point-by-point indictment of Peking policy “just sent out from Khrushchev’s offices in Moscow to the headquarters o-f several foreign Communist parties.” Among Moscow’s complaints:

¶”The Chinese comrades have conducted a surreptitious agitation against the principles of the Moscow Declaration” of December 1960, particularly the doctrine of “peaceful coexistence.¶I The Chinese have tried to “discredit the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party and have sought to extend their influence to other Communist parties,” particularly in France and Albania. They have made the Chinese embassy in Bern the control center for European subversion against Moscow.

¶The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have hatched, without daring to formulate it categorically, a plan for the division of world Communism into two zones, a so-called Western zone, for which the U.S.S.R. should be responsible, and a so-called Eastern zone under the People’s Republic of China.” This plan has “a flavor of racialism about it contrary to the principles of Communism.”¶ The Chinese have set up special centers in Asia and Africa for “subversive intrigue” against Moscow.* ¶ When Russian “interests more than ever demanded a determined policy of coexistence with the countries hostile to socialism, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party denounced our every initiative in this direction as treason, as appe¶asing the invaders of Formosa, or as a sacrifice of the interests of the people of China to those of the U.S.S.R.” ¶EUR| Ever since 1949, Chinese Boss Mao Tse-tung has preached “preventive war” against the West. Then it was excusable because of the “one-sided military character of the Chinese party,” which had “grown up as an army and not as a civilian organization like any other Communist Party. Now it is more difficult to understand why, twelve years later, the position of the Chinese leaders has remained the same,” and how they can argue that “the Soviet Union should use its present overwhelming superiority in missiles, rockets and nuclear weapons” to dictate terms to the West even if it means war. The trouble is that China, “being obsessed with Formosa,” is bent on “liberating Formosa even at the risk of world war.”

Concludes the Moscow white paper: “World war between Communism and capitalism is not inevitable. It can and should be avoided. We have not been afraid of an open breach with the Yugoslav revisionists; and we shall not be afraid of an open breach with the Chinese dogmatists either.”

Duck’s Egg. Some Western experts found the white paper’s criticisms just too strident to be true. Or, if the paper was authentic, they suspected that it might be a calculated leak by Khrushchev, who is perennially running for office as the West’s favorite Communist. Khrushchev, these experts argue, would like nothing better than to extract concessions from the West in the guise of the reasonable world statesman who needs to show results if he is to stand up to big, bad Mao. Deutscher himself is an ex-Communist and avowed Trotskyite who, though an acknowledged expert on Soviet affairs with intimate contacts among dissident Communists, has long been known for his partiality to Khrushchev. But Deutscher insists the document is genuine and circulating among European Communists. “What if it is a leak? It would seem to me equally significant,” he argues with some logic, “particularly to accuse your principal ally of inciting to war.”

Red China’s Foreign Minister Chen Yi, en route to Moscow from Geneva, where he spent more time making contacts among European Communists than worrying about Laos, was sufficiently impressed by the paper to be annoyed about it. “You will not find a crack in the Sino-Soviet alliance any more than you will find one in a duck’s egg,” he told a French reporter. But he could not resist adding: “The heaviest Soviet satellite weighs four tons. China is too heavy to become a satellite.” A Polish Communist source insisted that the Deutscher paper was “technically false,” but conceded in the next breath that it nevertheless reflected the state of Moscow-Peking relations “with 90% accuracy.”

Atomic Dispute. Whether the paper is valid or not, there is solid and accumulating evidence of the growing divisions between Communism’s Big Two. In full public view, the Red Chinese have effectively pulled Albania into the Peking orbit, so much so that Albania rounded up Russian spies for trial, executed a gaggle of pro-Khrushchev Albanian party officials, closed down Russia’s submarine base at Valona. Western diplomats in Geneva have been astonished to find Soviet delegates confiding that scores of Russian atomic technicians have been withdrawn from China in recent months, after China complained that the Russians were not supplying reactors they needed to make atomic weapons material.

Last week Moscow sent a delegation to Ulan Bator to the 14th Outer Mongolian Communist Party Congress while virtually ignoring the 40th anniversary of the Chinese party in Peking. Pravda, which uses layout and column inch with Politburo precision, reported the Ulan Bator festivities in a big Page One spread, relegated the Peking fete to a small item on page 6. Polish Party Leader Wladyslaw Gomulka and Premier Josef Cyrankiewicz set off to pay an official visit to Ulan Bator, but have been told by Khrushchev to stop there, not to go on to neighboring China. Russia publicly embarrassed the Chinese by unilaterally announcing last week that China was $300 million in debt to Moscow, as if to emphasize that Peking had better set its own house in order before aspiring to a bigger role in world Communist affairs.

Communists All. Even as Mao challenged Khrushchev in the European parties, Khrushchev has carried the rivalry into Asia, assiduously wooing China’s nearest neighbors in an effort to nip Peking’s “two-zones” gambit in the bud. Khrushchev lavishly welcomed first North Viet Nam Premier Pham Van Dong, then Premier Kim II Sung of North Korea. Then Khrushchev announced he and Kim had signed a ten-year defense and economic aid pact. Though Khrushchev justified the pact as necessary in the face of South Korea’s new “military-fascist dictatorship,” most Kremlin experts scored it chiefly as a coup against Peking, which has long fancied itself North Korea’s chief patron.

For all the evident jockeying, the West has no way of knowing the full extent of the disharmony. When the voluble Chen Yi reached Moscow he and Khrushchev toasted Sino-Soviet friendship in a demonstration obviously designed for public consumption. And however deep and real the split, both nations are Communist, dedicated to the same determined end—winning the world to Marxism. They differ chiefly about the current means—which does not necessarily mean that Khrushchev, spouting peaceful coexistence, is a “good guy,” and Mao, threatening war, is a villain. But Khrushchev has it firmly fixed in his thick peasant’s skull that a nuclear war would mean the end of Russia and its industrial might. Mao is said to look on such a war with more aplomb; his country, still heavily rural and plagued with perpetual food shortages, could well spare a hundred million or so inhabitants, and would probably not be the first target anyway. Their difference is a question of nerve, not intent.

*The French estimate that China now has more than 3,000 “embassy officials” stationed in the former French colonies of Africa alone.