World: WHAT THEY ARE FIGHTING ABOUT

AT its simplest, the Russian-Chinese quarrel is over what strategy to follow toward the ultimate victory of Communism—and over who shall be in charge of operations. But beneath this there lies a far deeper split: the split between Communist theory and human reality.

Ever since Karl Marx predicted that the Revolution would break out in industrially advanced Western Europe, while it actually came in backward, agricultural Russia, such contradictions have haunted Communism. Today, according to Marxist theory, capitalism should be in its death throes, the working class in utter misery, and the former colonial peoples well on the road to Communism. Instead, capitalism is thriving, Western workers are going middleclass, and the ex-colonies tend toward Socialism but hardly toward Communism. Nikita Khrushchev favors changing the theory to fit these facts more closely; he is, as Peking accurately charges, a revisionist. Mao Tse-tung favors changing the facts to fit the theory; he is, as Moscow says, a dogmatist.

But both are also realists, motivated by different national interests, different economies, and different histories. Khrushchev, the ruler of a nation that has at last begun to gain some material rewards, argues that people are not interested in war or revolution but in peaceful prosperity, and that rocket-rattling will only drive millions away from Communism. Mao, ruler of a country with a lot less to lose, master of a peasantry whose appetites demand a bowl of rice, not a TV set or a car, replies in effect that he is not running a popularity contest with the West. Power cannot be won by wooing adherents but by fighting for it—otherwise Communism will atrophy.

From the Golden Horde to Yenan

Marxism pretends that it raises people above race and nation, but Moscow and Peking are divided by racial hostility and memories of conflict, which would persist even if ideological differences could be ironed out. Russia has never forgotten the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, which swept west from Mongolia in the 13th century, conscripting Volga boatmen into the Khan’s army and forcing local princes to kowtow. When, after 200 years, the Mongol Empire collapsed, the newly united Russians lost no time in getting even.

“Where is China?” asked Czar Mikhail Romanov. “Is it rich? What can we lay claim to?” Russian claims (Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang) caused friction for centuries, down to the present.

As late as 1949, when the Chinese Reds had virtually conquered the mainland .from the Nationalists, Moscow was still dickering for territorial concessions.

The Chinese still sneer at the Russians as “Big Noses” and consider them as alien as other Westerners. Moreover, the population pressure along the Sino-Soviet border is a constant menace to Moscow; by 1980 there will be 1 billion Chinese. When a British visitor suggested to Khrushchev not long ago that the Chinese masses would eventually explode north into Siberia or south to Australia, Nikita replied grimly: “I’m in favor of Australia.”

From the start, Russian national interests also shaped Moscow’s attitude toward the Chinese Communists. In the 1920s, Stalin ruthlessly sacrificed Mao’s Communist movement to Chiang Kaishek, whom he supported because he considered him a strong Soviet ally who would fight both Western and Japanese threats to Russian power. Decimated by Chiang, the ragged Chinese Communists survived in the caves of Yenan and eventually went on to conquer China, despite Stalin’s warning that they were backward and not ready for revolution. After the war, Stalin sent Mao a Russian handbook of partisan strategy against the Nazis; Mao passed it to an aide who snorted: “If we had this as our textbook we would have been annihilated ten years ago.”

Thus Mao was beholden to no one, least of all Stalin, for his victory. Yet ironically, the first open ideological crack in the Moscow-Peking partnership came over Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin.

From “Secret Speech” to Sputnik

Mao had sent a message to the 20th Party Congress lavishly praising the dead dictator. Without bothering to consult the Chinese, Khrushchev delivered his famed “secret speech” to the Congress, in which he suddenly unmasked Stalin as a megalomaniacal tyrant. Peking was stunned. Mao felt—correctly, as was proved a few months later by the uprisings in Poland and Hungary—that the destalinization drive would touch off a wave of unrest. Even though Stalin had bullied and betrayed the Chinese Communists (as well as helped them, at a price, during the Korean war), Mao believed in Stalin’s principle of centralized rule, preferred a stable Red empire to one in ferment.

The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee hastily called a secret session; a month later, Red China defiantly announced that, despite what the Kremlin had to say, Stalin’s achievements outweighed his errors. On foreign policy Peking agreed—for the moment—to back Khrushchev’s talk of peaceful coexistence with the West, since Mao himself was then energetically pushing the “Bandung spirit” of sweet neighborliness in Asia.

Even this qualified support for the Kremlin disappeared when, in August 1957, the Soviet Union test-fired its first ICBM and two months later launched Sputnik. Russian rocketry, Peking decided, for the first time in history gave the Communist camp military superiority over the West; the Reds must now seize the advantage by fomenting revolutions in underdeveloped nations, even at the risk of war. Instead, Khrushchev pursued a detente with the West. In 1958 he agreed to a moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere (broken in 1961), partly designed to freeze out Peking as an atomic power. When the Chinese wanted Russian atomic cover for a move against the offshore islands and Formosa, Moscow refused.

From Great Leap to Great Brawl

Meanwhile, the Russians did not seem eager to help their Chinese brothers with their growing internal economic difficulties. While Khrushchev wooed neutralist India and Egypt with aid, and even brought his moneybags on a pilgrimage to that renegade Red, Tito, not an additional ruble was allotted to Mao.

The Red Chinese used the only surplus raw material at their command: people.

Millions of peasants were herded into people’s communes and hitched to plows. Peking broke up families, tried to ban money, jerry-built hundreds of “backyard” steel furnaces. The slogan was: “Communism can grow grain and make steel.” Through brawn and “revolutionary romanticism” China was to turn almost overnight into an industrialized land. The Great Leap Forward was hailed as a short cut to Communism —and a slap at Moscow. Khrushchev warned that it could not be done. After a few months the experiment indeed collapsed. Gloating over the failure, Khrushchev told visiting Hubert Humphrey that Mao’s idea had been foolishly “Utopian.”

By the time Nikita showed up in Peking in 1959, fresh from his tour of the U.S. and the meeting with Ike at Camp David, he was barely on speaking terms with his hosts. The airport was decorated with huge posters of Stalin; on the way to town, Khrushchev and Mao began an argument that lasted for the next four days. When the Soviet ruler left, not even the niceties of a formal communique were observed.

By early 1960 Mao had clearly given up hope of persuading Khrushchev to change his flexible cold war policy, and began an all-out Chinese offensive designed to topple Khrushchev from power. It was also the start of an endless argument about whether authority for Moscow’s “peaceful coexistence” or Peking’s “inevitability of war” could be found in the sacred Lenin texts. Actually Lenin, and even Stalin, had argued both ways at various times, depending on conditions—and Moscow pointed out that conditions were certainly different in the nuclear age. When Mao’s men carried the attack into a meeting of world Communist leaders in Bucharest in June, Khrushchev was incensed. “One cannot mechanically repeat what Lenin said decades ago,” he shouted. “We live in a time when neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin is with us. If we act like children who study the alphabet by building words out of letters, we shall not get very far.”

A full-dress summit session of 81 Communist parties in Moscow in November 1960 produced a statement (adopted unanimously, of course) that merely lumped together these diametrically opposed opinions. Then last fall, the Red Chinese invasion of India only served to justify Khrushchev’s view that Mao was a reckless fanatic, and Moscow ostentatiously failed to back Peking. As for Khrushchev’s withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, the maneuver confirmed Mao’s worst fears about vacillating Kremlin leadership, leaning first to “adventurism,” then to “capitulationism.” Thundered Peking: “It is 100% appeasement. A Munich pure and simple. Imperialism is only a paper tiger.” To which Khrushchev replied: “The paper tiger has nuclear teeth. Only a madman would speak of a new world war.”

And that is essentially where the argument still stands.

From Vision to Danger

Time was when Western skeptics wondered whether the Sino-Soviet split was real. Khrushchev, they figured, might be relatively nice to the West only long enough to wangle some concessions on NATO or nuclear arms control; then Mao would step in and together they would demolish the free world. Today it is inconceivable that the quarrel is merely an act. In fact, there is a growing vision—shared by such disparate prophets as Arnold Toynbee and Charles de Gaulle—of Russia and the West some day standing together as allies against China. Stranger things have happened in history. Yet the vision has its dangers.

The West has almost imperceptibly moved into a new era of softness toward Communism. Few any longer talk of defeating Communism; coexistence is more or less accepted in the West.

This may be only realistic in the nuclear age. But all over the West there is a creeping notion that Khrushchev’s kind of Communism can belived with—that only Peking’s is really bad—and this has taken much steam out of the anti-Communist position. Nikita’s “reasonable” approach has helped the Italian Reds gain strength, has revived dreams of a new popular front among once solidly anti-Communist French Socialists, has even prompted Belgian Foreign Minister Paul Henri Spaak to say that the removal of U.S. nuclear stockpiles from Western Europe might not be such a bad idea after all.

These are only modest Red gains. But Khrushchev can point to them to argue plausibly that he is not nearly so bad a Communist strategist as Peking makes him out to be.