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Communists in collision
The Border Issue" China and the Soviet Union March-October 1969 INTRODUCTION Leonard Schapiro BACKGROUND
Peter Berton
DOCUMENTS
Border Incidents • Internal Repercussions International Repercussions
LEONARD SCHAPIRO
Communists in Collision The collection of recent documents relating to the clash between the Soviet Union and China, to which a large part of this issue is devoted, illustrates, in one respect, most graphically the essence of the dispute. For the documents fall broadly into two categories: those which contain reciprocal accusations on the subject of recent frontier skirmishes; and those in which each side in turn indulges in rich vituperation on the errors of the other's ways. This juxtaposition of themes serves to remind us that the dispute is not an "ideological" one, as is so often asserted; nor yet a clash of rival interests between two great powers (if China, by virtue of size and age, should be so described); but a fusion of both. It is not, and never has been "ideological," in the sense that some of the religious disputes of the past have been "ideological": a true collision of minds in which each side is primarily motivated not by self-interest, nor yet by desire to advance some cause (unless avoiding hell-fire is self-interest), but by commitment to abstract truth. But communists do not believe in hell-fire, and they have never been conspicuous for their veneration for abstract, or any
I22
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM
other, truth. They believe in causes, and in theories as something which helps to advance them: where the cause demands, the theories can change. Every one of the heresies now charged by China against the Soviet Union has at some period of its history been embraced by China when it suited her purpose. But it is also a mistake to interpret the dispute as merely a conflict over territorial expansion, a collision between two rival expanding empires. This may well be an underlying element of the dispute, since the Soviet Union could with reason fear, for demographic reasons if for no other, that a billion Chinese will one day in the future prove uncomfortable neighbors to two hundred and fifty or three hundred million Russians. But it is scarcely a realistic fear today. Indeed, if it were not for the fact that human lives are being sacrificed, one would be inclined to dismiss the skirmishes on the Ussuri River, at all events, as a comic parody of a territorial claim of the minimum possible importance or reality. Whatever the recent skirmishes are about, it is certainly not the question of Lebensraum. Clearly the recent armed clashes play some different part in communist tactics--whoever may have started them. (The Sinkiang situation is perhaps different, and it is dealt with below.) There is, no doubt, good reason for supposing that the long term rivalry between China and Russia will prove to be the rivalry of neighbors for territory. But to overlook the fact that this rivalry takes place within the framework of communism, with all the levers of control and influence which this provides over many forces in the world, is to overlook half of its significance. As the documents show, the dispute is neither ideological nor territorial it is nearer the truth to say that it is a fusion of both. The penultimate document in this issue raises some interesting speculations on the future course of the Sino-Soviet dash. This is an official lead article on policy in Pravda of August 28, 1969, entitled "Peking's Adventurist Course". In form it is a warning to China not to play with fire, because the Soviet Union is strong enough to defend itself. Since China is presumably aware of this, it is unlikely that this is the main purpose of the article. The article is conspicuous for the frankness with which it exposes the real, underlying cause of the dispute between the two powers since its inception in 1958: rivalry over the leadership of
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123
the world revolutionary movement. Pravda is particularly bitter about Peking's accusations of revolutionary ineptitude against Moscow based on its alleged failure to support revolutionary and national liberation movements. "The Maoists calculate that such propaganda must assist the establishment of the hegemony of Peking in the contemporary revolutionary movement and to increase China's influence in the 'third world'. 'u It is for this reason, says Pravda, that Peking attacks the attempts by the Soviet Union to achieve collective security in Europe, disarmament, collective security in Asia, a "political settlement" in Vietnam and a "solution of the Middle Eastern crisis". According to Peking, says Pravda, these efforts are no more than an attempt to undermine the "revolutionary effort of the oppressed peoples" and an attack on the sovereign independence of other nations. The article accuses Peking of actually desiring a war, whether with conventional or with nuclear weapons: "the arsenals of the Maoists are filling up with more and new weapons". A war between China and Russia is just what the imperialists would like to see: but it is quite clear that such a war, if it did break out, would "leave no single continent unscathed". It is possible that the Soviet Union believes that China actually wants war: the unfortunate remark first made in 1957 by Mao that even if 300 million Chinese were destroyed in a nuclear war that would still leave 300 million alive to build a new society, has never been forgotten. However cautious China may have been in the past to avoid serious military conflict in her actual policy, the theme that China would like to embroil the U.S.S.R. in a nuclear war with the U.S.A., and then inherit the ruins by virtue of the advantage of her greater population, has occurred repeatedly in Soviet utterances. But it is not to China, it would seem, that this article is addressed: there are more effective ways of warning China, and indeed the Soviet Union seems to have found quite a convenient channel of communication in the Australian Communist Party. The stress in the Pravda article on the theme of rivalry for revolutionary leadership and on China's action in frustrating the Soviet Union's pacific efforts suggests a different 1 The same theme has been developed further by B. Gafurov in Pravda of September 4, 1969
I24
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM
audience--to some extent the Soviet reader, but more particularly communist parties outside the U.S.S.R. For nearly five years, since the fall of Khrushchev, the present leaders, and particularly Brezhnev, have been indefatigable in trying to win over those communist parties which, in the main, accepted Soviet leadership, to a policy of all-out condemnation of China. In this they have been singularly unsuccessful. The issue of China nearly wrecked the recent international communist conference in its preparatory stages. At the meeting of the conference in June of this year Brezhnev's attempt to drag in the issue of China, in spite, apparently, of an assurance that this would not happen, seriously shattered the already precarious fagade of unity. And a semblance of some kind of agreement was in the end only achieved by omitting all reference to China (other than an antiimperialist demand for the admission of China to the United Nations and for the surrender of Formosa) from the final communiqur. If, as seems likely, the Pravda leader is primarily addressed to the communist parties, some of its arguments, however powerful, are unlikely to be accepted by them. These parties, including some, at any rate, of the ruling parties, realize only too well that a formalized exclusion of China from the communist community composed of the great majority of parties, will only strengthen the authority of Moscow, and will undermine the degree of independence of action which they have been able to achieve. Still, the persistence which the Soviet leaders have shown in trying to rally support against China may well explain yet another attempt, and, it must be emphasized, an attempt in which the arguments--the danger of universal war and the frustration of Soviet peace efforts--are put more forcibly than they have been hitherto, at all events in public. Since we do not know who started the frontier incidents, and since there is no more reason to believe one side than the other, it is possible that the clashes were started by the Soviet Union in order to reinforce its case against China. There is another possibility: that the clashes and the Pravda leader are part of Soviet preparations for a pre-emptive attack on Sinkiang, in which the majority of China's nuclear installations are situated. Viewed in this light, the article could be intended to prepare both internal
COMMUNISTS IN COLLISION
I2 5
and external communist opinion for military action in the near future. But is it? The military case for crippling China's nuclear deve!opment in its comparatively early stages may appear strong in Soviet eyes. According to estimates by several experts outside China (including Mrs. Alice Langley Hsueh of the Rand Corporation and the U.S. Secretary of Defense) China maybe expected to test her first intercontinental ballistic missiles within as little as eighteen months; and according to Mr. Laird might have up to twenty long-range missiles with nuclear warheads by the mid1970s. Now that the cultural revolution has come to an end, progress may be expected to be somewhat faster. The importance of retarding this progress may well appear considerable. The Soviet armed forces are in a state of high confidence: unlike the politicians, they have a record of success behind them, where the politicians have hardly been distinguishing themselves. Even if some Western estimates of the growing influence of the military on Soviet policy have been exaggerated, it is nonetheless true that the opinion of the Soviet armed forces has become a factor of greater importance in recent years. Moreover, an invasion of Sinkiang can be conveniently dressed up as an intervention of fraternal aid in response to suitably organized requests from oppressed minorities. Nevertheless, the case against such an intervention is very strong. The parallel of Czechoslovakia is quite inapplicable. There is, in the case of the Sinkiang border, no recent evidence of any substantial build-up of Soviet forces and supplies, as there was in the case of Czechoslovakia, in the guise of a military exercise. If the Czech operation was strongly urged by the military leaders, which is possible, there was the equally strong political incentive of putting down a dangerous area of infection to counteract the damage which was caused to Soviet relations with other communist parties, and to the image of the U.S.S.R. generally. Invasion of China would cause even greater damage in this respect, without offering any comparable political compensation. Above all, in the case of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union could be reasonably confident that there would be no resistance, and that the operation would be swiftly concluded. There can be no such
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STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM
confidence in the case of China, either that the operation will not meet with stubborn resistance, or that it will be confined to targets in Sinkiang, and will not escalate into a long drawn-out war against China's millions. Only time can tell what course the Soviet Union will follow. On present (September 1969) evidence the most that can be said is that the Soviet Union is engaged in contingency planning for an operation in Sinkiang, and that the political and military moves of the past months form part of that contingency planning. The warning in Pravda that in the event of an armed conflict between China and the U.S.S.R. no continent would remain unscathed, seems genuine enough, since no one can foretell how such a conflict would develop, particularly if nuclear weapons were involved--and China, according to some estimates, may already have as many as eighty nuclear bombs. This part of the Pravda article may well be a reflection of Soviet fears, however unfounded, that outside powers may be tempted to encourage the conflict in the hope that the two giants will exhaust themselves in a protracted struggle. But the warning is also a powerful appeal addressed to the communist parties to rally more decisively to the Soviet side against China, and thus represents a further step in the policy which Brezhnev has been patiently and persistently, if unsuccessfully, pursuing for over four years. If war should come, all predictions fall by the wayside. But assuming that serious conflict is avoided, what is the outlook for international communism? From the Soviet point of view the best course might well be to wait for the death of Mao, in the hope that this could bring a change in China's short-term policy. The prospect is not necessarily unrealistic: even if genuine, long-term reconciliation is improbable, if only because the rivalry for world leadership will not come to an end with Mao's death, a change toward a more workable and rational relationship between the two powers is far from impossible to imagine. Frontier clashes can be stopped as swiftly as they can be started. The abuse and the recriminations can be turned off as swiftly as they can be turned on. A relationship of tolerable rivalry could be maintained for years with at any rate as much decorum as subsists between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. After all, having failed to subvert
COMMUNISTS IN COLLISION
:27
Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union has had perforce to live with the fact that a military conquest of Yugoslavia, though obviously possible, is not politically acceptable. One can imagine a similar relation ship developing between the U. S. S.R. and China after Mao's death. It is plain that for such a situation the support of as much of the world communist movement as possible would be a very important factor to the Soviet leaders. It is this importance, perhaps, which has been in their minds when, looking to the future, they have so patiently pursued their policy of rallying the communist parties against the extremism of Mao. And yet, what are the prospects of rescuing the Soviet portion of the world communist movement from the near-disintegration into which it has fallen? For, in truth, it is threatened by two maladies which seem well nigh incurable. The first is the fact that the days when a communist party could survive or thrive only if it were a plain satellite of Moscow are over. On the contrary, a degree or show of independence of Soviet control is often an essential condition for most of the parties today---even, as the case of Rumania shows, inside the Soviet east European bloc. Czechoslovakia illustrates the limits of dependence on Soviet control that a communist party can endure and yet enjoy a measure of popularity: having lost its shortlived period of independence, when it enjoyed a spell of popularity during the time when it was engaged in dismantling some of the more patent absurdities imposed by the Russians, its power is now once again based on tanks, and thugs. The paradox of this situation, outside the Warsaw Pact bloc, at any rate, is that the more effective a communist party becomes as a political force, the less dependent it becomes on Moscow, and the less useful it becomes as an instrument of Soviet policy. Evidently there is no escaping from the rigid pattern of Soviet control which Stalin imposed on the movement in order to make it an extension of Soviet power, or what is called "proletarian internationalism". The Soviet dilemma in its relations with the communist parties will remain, and indeed is likely to increase: either to attempt to impose its own control, where it can, and thereby weaken the political or electoral chances of the party in its own country; or else to give it free rein and thus lose, in many respects, an instrument of Soviet policy abroad.
I28
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM
The second malady of the communist movement is the fact that the party of the proletarian revolution has lost its role in the very countries where a developed industry and an influential labor force exist. The proletariat if such it can still be called--has a great deal of interest, so far as its majority is concerned, in preserving the system which supplies it with an ever increasing slice of the national cake. Discontent, injustice and underprivilege remain, of course, and those afflicted by them might well lend support to a "proletarian" revolution. But they could find themselves outnumbered and crushed by those whose interest lies in preserving the high standard of living, and the "system" which makes this high standard possible. The communist parties are well aware of this: the events in Paris in May 1968 demonstrated this all too clearly. But to say that the party of the proletariat has lost its role is far from saying that revolution has lost its role. On the contrary, the past years have witnessed an upsurge of revolutionary fervor and activity--whether based on privation, frustration or psychological disturbance is not for this purpose relevant. It may well be that this growing revolution threatens the foundations of advanced industrial societies--it remains to be seen what the response of these societies is going to be. But one thing is certain: the traditional communist parties cannot place themselves at the head of this new revolution without losing the support of the great majority of the working class. They, and for that matter the Soviet Union, are at the receiving end of this non-proletarian revolution, the revolt of students, negroes, and what Mao has called "the poor and the blank" all over the world, whose leader he aspires to become. If faced with the choice in a revolutionary situation where the revolt does not stem from the proletariat, communist parties will perforce have to choose the side of law and order, the side of the bourgeoisie. There is as yet no sign that the Soviet Union has realized this new situation, far removed from Marx and Lenin: in his speech to the international communist conference last June Brezhnev spoke patronizingly of student revolt expressing the confident hope that the new revolutionaries would soon realize the importance of true Leninist principles of leadership, discipline and doctrine. Perhaps he was whistling in the dark to keep up his courage: the future of the
COMMUNISTS IN COLLISIOn/
I29
world may not lie with the Cohn-Bendits, but neither does it lie with men like Brezhnev, nor with any Soviet leader whose political thinking has remained so rigidly unadaptable to the changes that have taken place in the world since 1917.
Peter Berton
DOCUMENTS
Border Incidents • Internal Repercussions International Repercussions
LEONARD SCHAPIRO
Communists in Collision The collection of recent documents relating to the clash between the Soviet Union and China, to which a large part of this issue is devoted, illustrates, in one respect, most graphically the essence of the dispute. For the documents fall broadly into two categories: those which contain reciprocal accusations on the subject of recent frontier skirmishes; and those in which each side in turn indulges in rich vituperation on the errors of the other's ways. This juxtaposition of themes serves to remind us that the dispute is not an "ideological" one, as is so often asserted; nor yet a clash of rival interests between two great powers (if China, by virtue of size and age, should be so described); but a fusion of both. It is not, and never has been "ideological," in the sense that some of the religious disputes of the past have been "ideological": a true collision of minds in which each side is primarily motivated not by self-interest, nor yet by desire to advance some cause (unless avoiding hell-fire is self-interest), but by commitment to abstract truth. But communists do not believe in hell-fire, and they have never been conspicuous for their veneration for abstract, or any
I22
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM
other, truth. They believe in causes, and in theories as something which helps to advance them: where the cause demands, the theories can change. Every one of the heresies now charged by China against the Soviet Union has at some period of its history been embraced by China when it suited her purpose. But it is also a mistake to interpret the dispute as merely a conflict over territorial expansion, a collision between two rival expanding empires. This may well be an underlying element of the dispute, since the Soviet Union could with reason fear, for demographic reasons if for no other, that a billion Chinese will one day in the future prove uncomfortable neighbors to two hundred and fifty or three hundred million Russians. But it is scarcely a realistic fear today. Indeed, if it were not for the fact that human lives are being sacrificed, one would be inclined to dismiss the skirmishes on the Ussuri River, at all events, as a comic parody of a territorial claim of the minimum possible importance or reality. Whatever the recent skirmishes are about, it is certainly not the question of Lebensraum. Clearly the recent armed clashes play some different part in communist tactics--whoever may have started them. (The Sinkiang situation is perhaps different, and it is dealt with below.) There is, no doubt, good reason for supposing that the long term rivalry between China and Russia will prove to be the rivalry of neighbors for territory. But to overlook the fact that this rivalry takes place within the framework of communism, with all the levers of control and influence which this provides over many forces in the world, is to overlook half of its significance. As the documents show, the dispute is neither ideological nor territorial it is nearer the truth to say that it is a fusion of both. The penultimate document in this issue raises some interesting speculations on the future course of the Sino-Soviet dash. This is an official lead article on policy in Pravda of August 28, 1969, entitled "Peking's Adventurist Course". In form it is a warning to China not to play with fire, because the Soviet Union is strong enough to defend itself. Since China is presumably aware of this, it is unlikely that this is the main purpose of the article. The article is conspicuous for the frankness with which it exposes the real, underlying cause of the dispute between the two powers since its inception in 1958: rivalry over the leadership of
COMMUNISTS IN COLLISION
123
the world revolutionary movement. Pravda is particularly bitter about Peking's accusations of revolutionary ineptitude against Moscow based on its alleged failure to support revolutionary and national liberation movements. "The Maoists calculate that such propaganda must assist the establishment of the hegemony of Peking in the contemporary revolutionary movement and to increase China's influence in the 'third world'. 'u It is for this reason, says Pravda, that Peking attacks the attempts by the Soviet Union to achieve collective security in Europe, disarmament, collective security in Asia, a "political settlement" in Vietnam and a "solution of the Middle Eastern crisis". According to Peking, says Pravda, these efforts are no more than an attempt to undermine the "revolutionary effort of the oppressed peoples" and an attack on the sovereign independence of other nations. The article accuses Peking of actually desiring a war, whether with conventional or with nuclear weapons: "the arsenals of the Maoists are filling up with more and new weapons". A war between China and Russia is just what the imperialists would like to see: but it is quite clear that such a war, if it did break out, would "leave no single continent unscathed". It is possible that the Soviet Union believes that China actually wants war: the unfortunate remark first made in 1957 by Mao that even if 300 million Chinese were destroyed in a nuclear war that would still leave 300 million alive to build a new society, has never been forgotten. However cautious China may have been in the past to avoid serious military conflict in her actual policy, the theme that China would like to embroil the U.S.S.R. in a nuclear war with the U.S.A., and then inherit the ruins by virtue of the advantage of her greater population, has occurred repeatedly in Soviet utterances. But it is not to China, it would seem, that this article is addressed: there are more effective ways of warning China, and indeed the Soviet Union seems to have found quite a convenient channel of communication in the Australian Communist Party. The stress in the Pravda article on the theme of rivalry for revolutionary leadership and on China's action in frustrating the Soviet Union's pacific efforts suggests a different 1 The same theme has been developed further by B. Gafurov in Pravda of September 4, 1969
I24
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM
audience--to some extent the Soviet reader, but more particularly communist parties outside the U.S.S.R. For nearly five years, since the fall of Khrushchev, the present leaders, and particularly Brezhnev, have been indefatigable in trying to win over those communist parties which, in the main, accepted Soviet leadership, to a policy of all-out condemnation of China. In this they have been singularly unsuccessful. The issue of China nearly wrecked the recent international communist conference in its preparatory stages. At the meeting of the conference in June of this year Brezhnev's attempt to drag in the issue of China, in spite, apparently, of an assurance that this would not happen, seriously shattered the already precarious fagade of unity. And a semblance of some kind of agreement was in the end only achieved by omitting all reference to China (other than an antiimperialist demand for the admission of China to the United Nations and for the surrender of Formosa) from the final communiqur. If, as seems likely, the Pravda leader is primarily addressed to the communist parties, some of its arguments, however powerful, are unlikely to be accepted by them. These parties, including some, at any rate, of the ruling parties, realize only too well that a formalized exclusion of China from the communist community composed of the great majority of parties, will only strengthen the authority of Moscow, and will undermine the degree of independence of action which they have been able to achieve. Still, the persistence which the Soviet leaders have shown in trying to rally support against China may well explain yet another attempt, and, it must be emphasized, an attempt in which the arguments--the danger of universal war and the frustration of Soviet peace efforts--are put more forcibly than they have been hitherto, at all events in public. Since we do not know who started the frontier incidents, and since there is no more reason to believe one side than the other, it is possible that the clashes were started by the Soviet Union in order to reinforce its case against China. There is another possibility: that the clashes and the Pravda leader are part of Soviet preparations for a pre-emptive attack on Sinkiang, in which the majority of China's nuclear installations are situated. Viewed in this light, the article could be intended to prepare both internal
COMMUNISTS IN COLLISION
I2 5
and external communist opinion for military action in the near future. But is it? The military case for crippling China's nuclear deve!opment in its comparatively early stages may appear strong in Soviet eyes. According to estimates by several experts outside China (including Mrs. Alice Langley Hsueh of the Rand Corporation and the U.S. Secretary of Defense) China maybe expected to test her first intercontinental ballistic missiles within as little as eighteen months; and according to Mr. Laird might have up to twenty long-range missiles with nuclear warheads by the mid1970s. Now that the cultural revolution has come to an end, progress may be expected to be somewhat faster. The importance of retarding this progress may well appear considerable. The Soviet armed forces are in a state of high confidence: unlike the politicians, they have a record of success behind them, where the politicians have hardly been distinguishing themselves. Even if some Western estimates of the growing influence of the military on Soviet policy have been exaggerated, it is nonetheless true that the opinion of the Soviet armed forces has become a factor of greater importance in recent years. Moreover, an invasion of Sinkiang can be conveniently dressed up as an intervention of fraternal aid in response to suitably organized requests from oppressed minorities. Nevertheless, the case against such an intervention is very strong. The parallel of Czechoslovakia is quite inapplicable. There is, in the case of the Sinkiang border, no recent evidence of any substantial build-up of Soviet forces and supplies, as there was in the case of Czechoslovakia, in the guise of a military exercise. If the Czech operation was strongly urged by the military leaders, which is possible, there was the equally strong political incentive of putting down a dangerous area of infection to counteract the damage which was caused to Soviet relations with other communist parties, and to the image of the U.S.S.R. generally. Invasion of China would cause even greater damage in this respect, without offering any comparable political compensation. Above all, in the case of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union could be reasonably confident that there would be no resistance, and that the operation would be swiftly concluded. There can be no such
126
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM
confidence in the case of China, either that the operation will not meet with stubborn resistance, or that it will be confined to targets in Sinkiang, and will not escalate into a long drawn-out war against China's millions. Only time can tell what course the Soviet Union will follow. On present (September 1969) evidence the most that can be said is that the Soviet Union is engaged in contingency planning for an operation in Sinkiang, and that the political and military moves of the past months form part of that contingency planning. The warning in Pravda that in the event of an armed conflict between China and the U.S.S.R. no continent would remain unscathed, seems genuine enough, since no one can foretell how such a conflict would develop, particularly if nuclear weapons were involved--and China, according to some estimates, may already have as many as eighty nuclear bombs. This part of the Pravda article may well be a reflection of Soviet fears, however unfounded, that outside powers may be tempted to encourage the conflict in the hope that the two giants will exhaust themselves in a protracted struggle. But the warning is also a powerful appeal addressed to the communist parties to rally more decisively to the Soviet side against China, and thus represents a further step in the policy which Brezhnev has been patiently and persistently, if unsuccessfully, pursuing for over four years. If war should come, all predictions fall by the wayside. But assuming that serious conflict is avoided, what is the outlook for international communism? From the Soviet point of view the best course might well be to wait for the death of Mao, in the hope that this could bring a change in China's short-term policy. The prospect is not necessarily unrealistic: even if genuine, long-term reconciliation is improbable, if only because the rivalry for world leadership will not come to an end with Mao's death, a change toward a more workable and rational relationship between the two powers is far from impossible to imagine. Frontier clashes can be stopped as swiftly as they can be started. The abuse and the recriminations can be turned off as swiftly as they can be turned on. A relationship of tolerable rivalry could be maintained for years with at any rate as much decorum as subsists between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. After all, having failed to subvert
COMMUNISTS IN COLLISION
:27
Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union has had perforce to live with the fact that a military conquest of Yugoslavia, though obviously possible, is not politically acceptable. One can imagine a similar relation ship developing between the U. S. S.R. and China after Mao's death. It is plain that for such a situation the support of as much of the world communist movement as possible would be a very important factor to the Soviet leaders. It is this importance, perhaps, which has been in their minds when, looking to the future, they have so patiently pursued their policy of rallying the communist parties against the extremism of Mao. And yet, what are the prospects of rescuing the Soviet portion of the world communist movement from the near-disintegration into which it has fallen? For, in truth, it is threatened by two maladies which seem well nigh incurable. The first is the fact that the days when a communist party could survive or thrive only if it were a plain satellite of Moscow are over. On the contrary, a degree or show of independence of Soviet control is often an essential condition for most of the parties today---even, as the case of Rumania shows, inside the Soviet east European bloc. Czechoslovakia illustrates the limits of dependence on Soviet control that a communist party can endure and yet enjoy a measure of popularity: having lost its shortlived period of independence, when it enjoyed a spell of popularity during the time when it was engaged in dismantling some of the more patent absurdities imposed by the Russians, its power is now once again based on tanks, and thugs. The paradox of this situation, outside the Warsaw Pact bloc, at any rate, is that the more effective a communist party becomes as a political force, the less dependent it becomes on Moscow, and the less useful it becomes as an instrument of Soviet policy. Evidently there is no escaping from the rigid pattern of Soviet control which Stalin imposed on the movement in order to make it an extension of Soviet power, or what is called "proletarian internationalism". The Soviet dilemma in its relations with the communist parties will remain, and indeed is likely to increase: either to attempt to impose its own control, where it can, and thereby weaken the political or electoral chances of the party in its own country; or else to give it free rein and thus lose, in many respects, an instrument of Soviet policy abroad.
I28
STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM
The second malady of the communist movement is the fact that the party of the proletarian revolution has lost its role in the very countries where a developed industry and an influential labor force exist. The proletariat if such it can still be called--has a great deal of interest, so far as its majority is concerned, in preserving the system which supplies it with an ever increasing slice of the national cake. Discontent, injustice and underprivilege remain, of course, and those afflicted by them might well lend support to a "proletarian" revolution. But they could find themselves outnumbered and crushed by those whose interest lies in preserving the high standard of living, and the "system" which makes this high standard possible. The communist parties are well aware of this: the events in Paris in May 1968 demonstrated this all too clearly. But to say that the party of the proletariat has lost its role is far from saying that revolution has lost its role. On the contrary, the past years have witnessed an upsurge of revolutionary fervor and activity--whether based on privation, frustration or psychological disturbance is not for this purpose relevant. It may well be that this growing revolution threatens the foundations of advanced industrial societies--it remains to be seen what the response of these societies is going to be. But one thing is certain: the traditional communist parties cannot place themselves at the head of this new revolution without losing the support of the great majority of the working class. They, and for that matter the Soviet Union, are at the receiving end of this non-proletarian revolution, the revolt of students, negroes, and what Mao has called "the poor and the blank" all over the world, whose leader he aspires to become. If faced with the choice in a revolutionary situation where the revolt does not stem from the proletariat, communist parties will perforce have to choose the side of law and order, the side of the bourgeoisie. There is as yet no sign that the Soviet Union has realized this new situation, far removed from Marx and Lenin: in his speech to the international communist conference last June Brezhnev spoke patronizingly of student revolt expressing the confident hope that the new revolutionaries would soon realize the importance of true Leninist principles of leadership, discipline and doctrine. Perhaps he was whistling in the dark to keep up his courage: the future of the
COMMUNISTS IN COLLISIOn/
I29
world may not lie with the Cohn-Bendits, but neither does it lie with men like Brezhnev, nor with any Soviet leader whose political thinking has remained so rigidly unadaptable to the changes that have taken place in the world since 1917.