Communist Schisms

Report Outline
Clash Between Russian and Chinese Reds
Intra-Communist Conflicts Since 1917
Impact of De-Stalinization on Satellites

Clash Between Russian and Chinese Reds

Red Chinese Challenge of Soviet Leadership

Soviet Russia and Red China are locked in a bitter ideological quarrel that threatens to split the Communist world as the Reformation split Christianity. Since the Bolshevik revolution in the autumn of 1917, Moscow has been the Rome of communism. Now Peking is asserting its claim to be the capital of the Communist sphere, maintaining that the Kremlin has strayed dangerously far from the teachings of Marx and Lenin. Polemics fill the party press and the air waves.

For almost a decade, the Sino-Soviet conflict was carefully hidden from public view, presumably to maintain the pretense of Communist solidarity. Red China would assail Yugoslavia instead of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union would castigate Albania instead of Red China. Since last January, however, the two countries have attacked each other publicly and by name. Their frequent exchanges of insults show that the dispute involves not only ideology but also, to an increasing extent, national interests and racial antagonism.

Adam Ulam of Harvard's Russian Research Center wrote last spring in The New Face of Soviet Totalitarianism that “Peking and Moscow must be approaching the realization that the old pattern of relations between the U.S.S.R. and world communism is gone forever.” As long as the Soviet Union was the only Communist country, “there was a clear and unambiguous identity between the interests of world communism and the Soviet national interest.” The final Communist victory in China in 1949—an event that apparently caught even Moscow by surprise—changed all that. Russia and China had fought over territory in the Far East for three centuries, and common allegiance to communism only partly dispelled their traditional enmity.