PART 5:NEW LIES FOR OLD :THE COMMUNIST STRATEGY OF DECEPTION AND DISINFORMATION

NEW LIES FOR OLD
The Communist Strategy of 
Deception and Disinformation

15 

The Third Disinformation Operation: 

The Soviet-Albanian 

"Dispute" and "Split" 

The Overt Picture of 

Soviet-Albanian Relations 

Esoteric evidence indicated to Western observers of the communist scene that disagreements between the Soviet and Chinese and Albanian party leaders had developed by 1959 into a serious cleavage on policy issues. In 1960 the dispute came out into the open: "The first international communist confrontation where the Sino-Soviet dispute and Albanian support for China publicly emerged was at the June 5- 9,1960, meeting in Peking of the General Council of the World Federation of Trade Unions."1 

According to evidence published in the West some time after the event, there were furious polemics, mainly between the Soviets on the one side and the Chinese and Albanians on the other, at the closed sessions of the Romanian party Congress in June 1960 and the Eighty one-Party Congress in Moscow in November 1960. The dispute acquired the status of a split when Khrushchev denounced the Albanian leaders publicly at the Twenty-second C.P.S.U Congress in October 1961 for their criticisms of the Soviet party program, for their dogmatic Stalinism, and for their rejection of peaceful coexistence. Chou En-lai, the leader of the Chinese delegation, withdrew from the congress as an apparent gesture of support for the Albanian position. Hoxha, while expressing through the Albanian party press his party's continuing solidarity with the C.P.S.U, responded to the Soviet attack with bitter criticism of "Khrushchev and his group" for their public attack on the Albanian party and for their revisionism. He said that they had betrayed Leninism; that they were restoring capitalism in the Soviet Union; that they were conducting an opportunistic policy of concessions to, and cooperation with, imperialism; and that they were conspiring with the leading revisionist, Tito. A break in Soviet-Albanian diplomatic relations followed in December 1961, and from 1962 onward Albania refused to attend Warsaw Pact and Comecon meetings. Chinese support for and alignment with the Albanian position against the Soviets can be traced back at least to 1959 and possibly even earlier in the esoteric evidence. 

Inside Information and 

Its Interpretation 

The author's information contradicts this generally accepted version of the development of Soviet-Albanian relations between 1959 and 1962. Briefly, this information was to the effect that relations between all the communist states, including Albania and China, had been normalized by the end of 1957; that the Soviets had successfully mediated in the secret reconciliation of the Yugoslav and Albanian leaders in 1957-58; and that, from late 1959, the KGB's disinformation department was actively collaborating with the Central Committee's Department of Active Operations and with the Yugoslav and Albanian security services in joint disinformation operations. 

The effect of Shelepin's instructions was to make Albania a party to a triangular disinformation operation with the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, an ingenious method of turning to the advantage of the bloc's long-range policy the earlier genuine disputes and difficulties in relations between the three countries. The strategic considerations the bloc leaders would have had in mind when planning this operation would probably have been both internal and external. 

Internally both the Yugoslav and Albanian regimes would have faced major political problems if the radical step of immediately and publicly normalizing their relations had been taken by those same leaders under whom the hostilities between the parties had originated and developed. In the case of Yugoslavia it was predictable that public reconciliation would have carried with it a grave risk of factionalism within the Yugoslav party because of the strength of feeling against Albania that had built up in the Stalin period. For the Albanian leaders the problems would have been even more acute. They were the same leaders who had been responsible for executing their own Albanian colleagues, including the former minister Koci Xexe, for their pre-Yugoslav sympathies. Open reconciliation with Yugoslavia might well have released pressure for the posthumous rehabilitation of Xexe and his friends and for an admission by the leadership that they had committed crimes against loyal and innocent fellow-countrymen on Stalin's orders. In other words, there might have been a popular and inner-party reaction in Albania similar to that in Hungary which accompanied the rehabilitation of the former minister, Laszlo Rajk, in 1956. Furthermore, for strategic reasons, Yugoslavia's true role as an active participant in the formulation and execution of long-range bloc policy had to be kept a closely guarded secret known only to the inner circle of Albanian party leaders. An open Yugoslav-Albanian reconciliation could not have been fully explained to the Albanian rank and file and might well have led to a revival of genuine revisionism in the party. A disinformation operation to which both the Yugoslav and Albanian leaders were parties offered substantial advantages by providing scope for intimate secret collaboration between the party leaders in an operation of importance to the whole bloc while at the same time providing a means of delaying open acknowledgment of their secret reconciliation to the party rank and file and to the populations at large. 

In the Soviet Union Khrushchev had been enlightened enough to see that the best way to solve the problem of genuine dissent from and opposition to the regime among intellectuals and victims of Stalin's persecution was to involve them actively in one or another aspect of the new long-range policy. The same principle could be applied to healing splits in the bloc and preventing their recurrence. For this reason Yugoslavia was allowed to contribute significantly to the formulation of the long-range policy and was given an important role to play in its execution. The inclusion of the Albanian leaders was the logical next step. They too could be actively involved in, and committed to, the new policy. A disinformation operation embracing a calculated, spurious dispute with the Soviet Union gave them the opportunity to project themselves to their own people and to enhance their own and their party's prestige as an independent national force robust enough to stand up to Khrushchev's bullying interference in their affairs. In addition, they were given a chance to play a strategic role in a disinformation operation to misrepresent relations between members of the bloc, and especially those between the Soviet Union and China, as degenerating into a state of rivalry and hostility, the object of the misrepresentation being to widen the openings for the bloc countries to develop their political strategies vis-a-vis the non-communist world. 

Given Albania's past alignment with Stalin in the genuine TitoStalin split and Western knowledge of that alignment, it would have seemed logical and convincing to make Albania a "Stalinist" country in partnership with the Chinese in a calculated and controlled dispute with the Soviets. It also served as a useful preliminary move toward a more open and official Soviet-Yugoslav alignment from 1961 onward, in apparent opposition to the Sino-Albanian partnership. The realignment of Yugoslavia with the Soviet Union after 1961 would be less likely to prejudice her independent image and her political and economic relationships with the advanced and developing countries if the Soviets themselves were to be seen by those countries as revisionists, in comparison with the militant Chinese dogmatists. 

The fact that Albania was the smallest and most isolated of the communist countries made her a particularly suitable choice to be the first full member of the bloc to split away from the Soviet Union after 1958. The Soviet-Albanian "split" should in fact be regarded as a pilot project for the much more significant Sino-Soviet split, which must already have been in the preliminary stages of development. It gave the bloc strategists an opportunity to test the validity of their disinformation concepts and techniques and to examine the internal and external consequences of a spurious minor split before committing themselves finally to a spurious major split between the Soviet Union and China. If the West were to see through the Soviet-Albanian split, the minimum of political and strategic damage to the bloc would have been done. If, on the other hand, the West were to be successfully taken in by it, if there were no uncontrollable repercussions of the split elsewhere in the bloc, if it proved possible to arrange for the political and economic survival of the Albanian regime, and if the West concluded from the Soviet-Albanian split that the Eighty-one-Party Congress in November 1960 was indeed a watershed in the disintegration of the communist monolith rather than the reverse, then there would be every justification for moving ahead with the Sino-Soviet split, to the credibility of which the Soviet-Albanian split would have made its contribution. The Sino-Soviet split would help to build up the moderate image of both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1960's, to the advantage of their strategic political rapprochement with the advanced and developing countries. The last, but not the least significant, of the reasons for bringing the Soviet-Albanian dispute out into the open as a split would have been to provide the West with confirmation of the reliability of information on intrabloc relations derived from esoteric evidence, from retrospective leakages, from articles in the communist press, and from "secret" Western intelligence sources. 

Anomalies in the "Dispute" and "Split" 

Detailed examination of the origins and development of the Soviet-Albanian dispute and split, using the new methodology, brings to light a number of additional points casting doubt on the authenticity of the differences between them and confirming that the dispute was manufactured in the interests of long-range policy. 

According to the esoteric evidence, the Soviet-Albanian dispute began in the very period during which the long-range policy was being formulated. Hoxha himself, and other Albanian leaders, participated in the process. In January-February 1959, Hoxha led the Albanian delegation to the Twenty-first C.P.S.U Congress, which discussed the roughly simultaneous transition to communism in all the countries of the bloc. This entailed an attempt to level up the economics of the more backward communist countries, including Albania, at the expense of the more advanced countries, including the Soviet Union. 

In May 1959 an official Chinese delegation, which included Chang Wen-tien, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, formerly a Comintern official and Chinese ambassador in Moscow, and Peng Te-huai, the minister of defense, visited Tirana. Their visit coincided with the visit of a Soviet delegation, headed by Khrushchev, that included Marshal Malinovskiy, the Soviet minister of defense. It is generally supposed in the West either that meetings were held in an unsuccessful attempt to iron out the differences between the three countries, or that the opportunity was taken by Peng and Chang to conspire with Khrushchev against Mao. The reception Hoxha gave the delegations, the course of the negotiations, and the official communique issued after the meeting provided clear evidence that there were no differences between them and that their relations were extremely close. Bearing in mind also that these high-level meetings in Tirana took place at the same time as the joint Soviet-Yugoslav disinformation operation was being launched, it is more likely that the leaders discussed the development of the Albanian disinformation operation than that they discussed differences between them for which there were no solid grounds. 

In the same month of May 1959, Comecon met in Tirana. The fact that the Soviet delegation was headed by Kosygin, then chief of the Soviet Planning Commission, indicates the importance of the session and gives weight to the supposition that it dealt with long-range economic planning. Despite the esoteric evidence of a Soviet-Albanian dispute, the Albanians continued to participate in both Comecon and Warsaw Pact organization meetings in 1960 and 1961 up to and including the plenary session of Comecon in Moscow in September 1961, the month before Khrushchev's first public attack on them. 

Most significant of all, Hoxha was among the signatories of the Manifesto of the Eighty-one-Party Congress in November 1960. In a special resolution approving the participation of Albania in the congress, the Albanian party stated that the C.P.S.U was "the most experienced and competent body of the international communist movement," and added that "the hopes of the imperialists, headed by the USA, to split the communist camp are doomed to failure." Hoxha's official report to the Fourth Congress of the Albanian party, published on February 14, 1961, attacked the US and NATO and was replete with praise for the Soviet Union, China, and the decisions of the Eighty-one-Party Congress; it acknowledged the "general collaboration" between Albania and the Soviet Union. 

The esoteric evidence of a Soviet-Albanian dispute between 1959 and 1961, relying mainly on a detailed comparison of the Soviet, Albanian, and Chinese press during these years, was developed in the West. From this comparison different approaches by the different parties to certain issues could indeed be deduced. At the same time, it should be remembered that none but a privileged few in either the Soviet Union or Albania were able to obtain and read the press of the other country and make the sort of comparison which is the stock in-trade of Western analysts. Given the existence of a disinformation program, the clear implication is that much of the esoteric evidence was specifically directed at Western analysts and was not intended for domestic consumption. 

Nevertheless, Khrushchev's public attack on the Albanians at the Twenty-second C.P.S.U Congress, in October 1961, seemed to most observers to confirm that the esoteric evidence had all along reflected a genuine dispute. It is interesting to note, however, that press coverage of the exchanges between Khrushchev and Hoxha varied widely in the bloc. The Soviet press did not name China or give any indications of Chinese support for Albania. Some East European party leaders openly criticized Chinese support for Hoxha's position. The Chinese press refrained from editorial comment on the Kremlin but printed the Albanian attacks on Khrushchev. Press coverage of the dispute was incomplete throughout the bloc; some documents and speeches were not published, even by the Soviets or the Albanians. 

In contrast, official information on Albanian attendance between 1958 and 1961 at Comecon and Warsaw Pact meetings, at the Twenty-first C.P.S.U Congress, and at the Eighty-one-Party Congress was published at the time in the press of every communist country. Commitments by communist parties to the decisions of multilateral meetings are taken extremely seriously. The point applies as much to the Albanian commitment to the Manifesto of the Eighty-one-Party Congress as to any other. The day-to-day official evidence of continuing Albanian cooperation with the rest of the bloc in the years 1958 to 1961 should be considered as reflecting far more accurately the true state of affairs than the esoteric, unofficial, incomplete, and retrospective evidence from communist sources pointing to a dispute. 

Comparison with the Tito-Stalin "Split" 

In the case of the genuine Tito-Stalin split in 1948 and the continuing Soviet-Yugoslav differences in 1956 and early 1957, confidential briefings and guidance on the subject were given to C.P.S.U members. The author was a C.P.S.U member in good standing until his break with the Soviet regime in December 1961. He received no such party briefing on the state of Soviet-Albanian relations. 

Tito and other leading Yugoslavs could not and did not visit Moscow during the Tito-Stalin split, but Hoxha and other Albanians had no fears of visiting Moscow as late as November 1960. Even Khrushchev's attack on Hoxha in October 1961, which might have been expected to have the most serious consequences, did not prevent an Albanian delegation from attending the Fifth World Congress of the W.F.T.U in Moscow in the following December, the month in which Soviet-Albanian diplomatic relations were broken off. 

In contrast with the Tito-Stalin split, there was no formal condemnation of Albania by any bloc or international communist meeting or conference. There was no systematic, overall communist bloc boycott of Albania, ideologically, politically, economically, or diplomatically, despite attacks and critical comments by individual parties or their leaders. These cannot be considered as binding on the communist movement as a whole or as overriding in importance the common obligations and commitments made at the international communist conferences in 1957 and 1960. 

Only the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Albania. Even in this case the circumstances were peculiar, in that the note to the Albanians was delivered by the Soviet deputy foreign minister, Firyubin, a former ambassador to Yugoslavia who was responsible at the time, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for relations with the nonaligned countries, not with other communist countries in the bloc. The use of Firyubin for this purpose suggested that the breach had more to do with bloc strategic interests in the outside world than with intrabloc relations. Although the other East European countries withdrew their ambassadors, they did not break relations. Even Yugoslavia retained a diplomatic mission in Tirana. 

Although Albania ceased, by its own account, to attend Warsaw Pact and Comecon meetings in 1962 and claimed to have terminated its membership in both organizations, neither took formal action to expel Albania, which therefore retains its de jure membership.

The Soviet-Albanian Friendship Society survived the split. Its board meeting in Moscow on January 9, 1981, celebrated the thirty fifth anniversary of the Albanian People's Republic.2 

No economic pressure was brought to bear on Albania by the rest of the bloc. Albanian trade representatives stayed on in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary despite criticism of Albania by the party leaders in those countries. In 1962 Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany all signed trade agreements with Albania. After the split, as before, 90 percent of Albania's trade was with other communist countries. The main difference was that China replaced the Soviet Union as Albania's principal supplier. So smooth was the transition that it might well have been jointly planned by the Soviets, Chinese, and Albanians in advance.3 

Conclusion 

Western interest in splits in the communist world is understandable. The potential benefits of genuine splits would be enormous. Moreover, the esoteric evidence on which so much Western analysis is based was genuinely valid so long as Stalin was alive. But the failure to understand the changes that took place in the seven years after his death, especially the reintroduction of strategic disinformation, has rendered the old methodology acutely vulnerable. So intense is the interest in actual and potential splits that conflicting evidence is undervalued or ignored. For example, few if any commentators have remarked on the continuing high level of Albanian trade with Eastern Europe, despite the fact that Eastern Europe aligned itself with the Soviet Union against Albania and China. The same bias is evident in the analysis of communist documents. The passages containing mutual criticism are exhaustively discussed; those expressing solidarity are ignored. But Hoxha was not just uttering empty phrases when he reported to the Fourth Congress of his party in February 1961 that "friendship with the Soviet Union has been, is, and will always remain the cornerstone of the foreign policy of the new Albania [stormy applause, ovations]. . . . This friendship is expressed and tempered every day by the fraternal relations and general collaboration between our two countries. . ."4 If all the evidence given above is weighed objectively, it leads to the inescapable conclusion that, in this instance, Hoxha was telling the truth and that the Soviet-Albanian dispute and split were and are no more than the products of bloc disinformation. 

Objectives of the 

Disinformation Operation 

The objectives of this disinformation were to: 

• Avoid the adverse internal consequences of an open reconciliation between the Albanian and Yugoslav leaders. 

•-Enhance the prestige of the Albanian leaders and their parties in the eyes of their own people as an independent, national force. 

• Support the projection of Yugoslav revisionism as a Trojan horse within the communist bloc. 

• Suggest that, after 1961, Khrushchev himself was under revisionist influence, and thus to build up his image as a moderate in contrast to the militant Chinese and Albanian Stalinists. 

• Confirm that efforts to unite the communist bloc and movement at the Eighty-one-Party Congress in November 1960 had failed and that the bloc and movement were disintegrating over the unresolved issues of Stalinism, revisionism, national communism, and the pursuit of conflicting national interests. 

• Test reactions inside and outside the bloc to a minor split before the further development of the nascent Sino-Soviet dispute. 

16 

The Fourth Disinformation Operation: 

The Sino-Soviet "Split" 

C.P.S.U-C.P.C Collaboration, 1944-49 

Historically relations between the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties have been the subject of much confusion. To a significant extent, this was due to a wide-ranging and successful wartime and postwar disinformation effort designed to mislead the West on the nature of Chinese Communism and to conceal the steady buildup of Soviet diplomatic, intelligence, and military help to the CPC in the final years of the civil war in China. The similarities between Soviet and Chinese comments on the nature of Chinese Communism are strongly suggestive of a coordinated disinformation operation. Western journalists who visited Yenan during the war were told that the Chinese Communists were not traditional communists, but agrarian reformers who admired the West and had more in common with Christian socialism than Soviet Communism.1 

Similar remarks were made by Soviet leaders. For example, in June 1944 Stalin told Averell Harriman, then US ambassador in Moscow, that the Chinese Communists were not real, but "margarine" communists.2 In August 1944 Molotov, then Soviet foreign minister, told Patrick Hurley and Donald Nelson, President Roosevelt's two personal representatives to Chungking, that many of the so-called Chinese Communists were simply desperately poor people who would forget this political inclination when their economic condition improved.3 In a conversation with Harry Hopkins on May 26, 1945, Stalin made some contemptuous remarks about Mao and discounted the CPC as a serious factor in the situation; he said he thought the Chinese Communist leaders were less capable than Chiang Kai-shek and would be unable to unite their country.4 

In the course of negotiations with Wang Shih-chieh, the Chinese foreign minister, in the summer of 1945, Stalin said that Chinese Communism did not amount to much. Assurances that Chinese Communists were not real communists were given by the Soviet leaders to Secretary of State Byrnes at Potsdam in July 1945 and to a group of American congressmen visiting Moscow in September 1945.5 [All gullible idiots DC]

Another indication of an agreed Sino-Soviet disinformation theme was Mao's inaccurate statement, after the dissolution of the Comintern, that China had received no assistance or advice from it since its Seventh Congress in 1935.6 

Stalin's apparent ignorance of the situation in China was of course feigned. There was close collaboration throughout between the C.P.S.U and the C.P.C Soviet intelligence coverage of the Chinese Nationalist government and its policies was at least as good as its coverage of American and British policy. 

While serving in the section of the Committee of Information that was responsible for counterintelligence work in Soviet organizations in China, Korea, and Mongolia, the author learned of a Soviet decision, taken after secret negotiations with a high-level C.P.C delegation to Moscow in the autumn of 1946, to step up Soviet military aid to the C.P.C; the Soviet general staff, military intelligence, and the Ministry of Transport were all instructed to give priority to the Chinese Communist army. In addition to the Japanese arms captured by the Soviets in Manchuria, large quantities of Soviet arms and ammunition, including American weapons received by the Soviet Union from the United States during the war, were secretly shipped by train to China between 1946 and 1949. In a lecture to students of the High Intelligence School in Balashikha in 1949, General Roshchin, the head of Soviet intelligence and Soviet ambassador in China, claimed that Soviet assistance had enabled the Chinese Communist army to swing the military balance in its favor and to launch its final and successful offensive against the Nationalist army in 1947-48. 

Further assistance was sent to China through Sinkiang. Soviet control over Sinkiang had been lost in 1943 when the Governor, Sheng Shih-tsai, a Soviet agent, broke with the Soviet Union. In order to restore the situation, a revolt in the Ili region of Sinkiang was organized by Fitin from Moscow, Pitovranov from Kazakhstan, Ogol'tsov and Byzov from Uzbekistan, and Langfang and Ivanov from Outer Mongolia, all of them generals of the Soviet security and intelligence service. The revolt was successful and an independent East Turkestan Republic was proclaimed under the leadership of Saifudin, a Soviet agent. Thereafter Sinkiang was used by the Soviets as a supply route to the C.P.C until they had taken over complete control of the province. The camel track to Ningsia from Outer Mongolia was also used as a supply route. 

A major Soviet intelligence effort went into obtaining military information on the Kuomintang army for the benefit of the C.P.C and into the subversion of the Nationalist administration and police. When the Soviet embassy followed the Nationalist government to Canton, it did so not, as is often supposed, to demonstrate Soviet allegiance to the Treaty of Friendship with the Nationalist government, but, according to Soviet intelligence telegrams between China and Moscow, to facilitate contact with Soviet agents in the Nationalist administration. It is worth noting that Soviet recognition of the new Chinese Communist government and the establishment of diplomatic relations with it were conducted through the head of Soviet intelligence and consul-general in Peking, Colonel Tikhvinskiy.7 It was the same Tikhvinskiy who, in answer to Nationalist charges that the Soviets were helping the CPC, issued an official denial on behalf of the Soviet government, carried in an Associated Press dispatch datelined Peking, December 30, 1947, to the effect that "my government recognizes only one government in China—the Nationalist government—and is not supplying the communists with anything. This is a 100 percent denial." The denial was, of course, 100 percent false. It was but one aspect of a major joint Sino-Soviet intelligence and disinformation operation designed to help the CPC to power while concealing from the West that Soviet aid was being given. After his defeat Chiang Kai-shek frankly and correctly admitted that the C.P.C "stole intelligence from our government and at the same time closed all avenues of intelligence to the government. That was to be expected. But they went one step further by furnishing the western nations with false intelligence about the Chinese government in order to create wrong impressions of our country."8 If the United States administration had not fallen victim to communist disinformation and had realized at the time the scope and scale of Soviet aid to Chinese Communism, more decisive American aid might have been given to the Chinese Nationalists. Even if it had failed to save China from communism, at least the reaction of American public opinion to the failure of United States policy might have been more balanced than it was in the McCarthy era. 

Sino-Soviet Friction, 

1950-57, and Its Removal 

The changed character of Sino-Soviet relations after the C.P.C came to power found expression in the thirty-year Treaty of Friendship signed during Mao's state visit to Moscow in February 1950.9 Soviet support for the "liberation" of Tibet and Taiwan was promised. Mao was told by Stalin that all Soviet intelligence work in China had ceased and that the names of former Soviet agents in China would be disclosed to the Chinese intelligence service. 

Despite the success of Mao's visit, there were still unsolved problems and maladjustment's in relations between the two countries. It would be quite wrong to regard China at that time as a Soviet satellite. The extent of Soviet infiltration and control over the Chinese party and government was small, compared with that over the East European satellites; it was, broadly speaking, limited to Sinkiang and Manchuria. Nevertheless, the relationship was not one of equals, and at times the Soviets continued to interfere in Chinese internal affairs, especially in Manchuria, the Liaotung peninsula, Sinkiang, and the border areas. Many Soviet agents, especially in Sinkiang, were disclosed to the C.P.C, among them Saifudin, who had been one of the leaders of the Soviet-organized revolt, in East Turkestan in 1945. He was a member of the first government of Communist China and remained in power in Sinkiang for many years after the development of the Sino-Soviet split. 

Despite Stalin's assurances, some Soviet agents in China, such as the long-standing Soviet agent in Shanghai, a Chinese citizen named Kazakov, were not declared to the Chinese. Nor were the Soviets entirely frank about properties they owned secretly in China in connection with their intelligence operations; when the Chinese caught the Soviets out, as they sometimes did, there was friction between them. Another source of tension in 1950 arose from dealings with Russian emigre groups in China. Either the Soviets highhandedly carried out arrests using local Chinese security officials without informing Peking, or the Chinese refused to carry out arrests themselves on the scale demanded by the Soviets. 

A serious disagreement arose when the Soviet advisers, concerned over the unusual Nationalist background of Li K'u-nun, the head of Chinese political intelligence, demanded his dismissal. The Chinese flatly refused to comply. 

Since there was no formal machinery in existence for dealing with Sino-Soviet disagreements, they showed a tendency to fester. 

The most serious disagreement of all arose over the Korean War, on which Stalin embarked without having taken Mao fully into his confidence. When the war started to go badly from the communist point of view as a result of the unexpectedly prompt and effective UN intervention, the Soviets suggested that the Chinese should send troops to the aid of the North Koreans. Not surprisingly, the Chinese at first refused. Only after severe Soviet pressure had been brought to bear, culminating in a secret and personal letter from Stalin to Mao, did the Chinese agree to send "volunteers" into Korea. 

The uneasiness in Sino-Soviet relations, though carefully concealed from the West, remained in being as long as Stalin was alive. As soon as he was dead, the Soviets took steps to improve matters. Settlement of the Korean War was a priority objective of Stalin's immediate successors and was first discussed with Chou En-lai when he attended Stalin's funeral. Another thorny problem, which was quickly solved, centered on Kao Kang, the unofficial "Governor of Manchuria," with whom the Soviets had maintained secret contact even during the Korean War. After Beriya's arrest, the Chinese leadership was told in confidence that Kao Kang had been one of Beriya's agents. In February 1954 the Chinese government dismissed Kao Kang "for separatist tendencies and plotting to establish an independent Kingdom of Kao Kang in Manchuria." Kao Kang was imprisoned without trial and hung himself. 

In October 1954 Khrushchev and Bulganin visited China for discussions that led to the voluntary surrender to China of all Soviet extraterritorial rights. The age-old problems of Manchuria and Sinkiang having been solved, the Sino-Soviet boundaries were then finally settled. Soviet economic and military aid to China was stepped up. On January 17, 1955, the Soviet government announced that it would assist China in setting up nuclear research establishments. Later the USSR undertook to construct a nuclear reactor in China that would be operational by March 1958. 

In the intelligence field the Soviets climbed down over Li K'u-nun. Li retained his position, and the Soviet adviser who could not get on with him was replaced. The earlier decision to disclose to the Chinese all former Soviet agents in China was put fully into effect without exceptions. Among the Soviet agents thus declared to the Chinese was Soong Ch'ing-ling, the widow of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. This lady was admitted to the C.P.C and made an honorary President of the Chinese People's Republic shortly before her death in May 1981. She was given an impressive state funeral attended by the C.P.C leadership. Another declared agent was Kuo Mo-jo, the well-known poet and scientist, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an active member of the World Peace Council. Probably few, if any, of the names of Soviet agents came as a surprise to the Chinese leaders, but the Soviets' evident frankness finally removed this potential source of friction. Thereafter, at Chinese request, the Soviet intelligence service sent to China a number of its leading experts on such subjects as scientific intelligence, the penetration of Western embassies in Moscow, the physical protection of nuclear and rocket installations, the production of audio-surveillance equipment, and the conduct of sabotage and assassination operations. 

During the turbulent events in Eastern Europe in 1956, there were signs of a divergence between Soviet and Chinese views on Stalin. While the Chinese agreed that Stalin had made mistakes, particularly on Yugoslavia, they seemed inclined to a more balanced view of his place in history than that given in Khrushchev's report to the Twentieth Party Congress. Toward the end of October 1956, a high level Chinese delegation paid a secret visit to Moscow, criticized the Soviet leaders for their handling of satellite affairs in general, and urged immediate Soviet military intervention in Hungary. One of the consequences of the Chinese visit was a public undertaking by the Soviet government to review the status and functions of Soviet advisers in all the countries of the bloc. 

Mao and Teng Hsiao-p'ing led the Chinese delegation to the  conference of bloc leaders in Moscow in November 1957. A joint assessment of Stalin was unanimously agreed upon. Mao said that Stalin's principal mistakes were his repression of party members and a tendency towards "great-nation chauvinism." The latter had found expression in Stalin's policy in Manchuria and in the behavior of some of the Soviet advisers in China. The only criticism Mao had of the Soviet decision in 1956 to admit Stalin's mistakes was that the Soviets had failed to consult other communist parties properly in advance. Khrushchev accepted the criticism as justified. The Soviet leaders undertook not to repeat Stalin's mistakes; in particular, they agreed that repressive measures would not be taken against former members of the opposition. They were to be treated as Lenin would have treated them. This explains why Malenkov, Molotov, and Bulganin were not shot. 

The status and functions of Soviet advisers, including intelligence and security advisers, was settled to Chinese satisfaction. The advisers' roles were limited to consultation and coordination. Interference in the internal administrative affairs of the Chinese services was excluded. The Soviets genuinely treated the Chinese services as equals in status, if not in experience. The Soviets had at last dealt frankly with them in declaring to them all their agents of Chinese nationality. The question of Soviet bases in China for "illegal" intelligence operations into non-communist countries was solved. New bases for "illegals," together with the necessary support facilities, were provided to the Soviet intelligence services by the Chinese in several of their ports, including Shanghai. There were other instances of practical cooperation. At Chinese request the Soviets built a special factory to manufacture highly sensitive eavesdropping devices. Soviet advisers with experience of political intelligence work against the United States and Britain were provided. These included Colonel Smirnov, a former Soviet intelligence resident in New York, and Colonel Voronin, a former head of the British Department of Soviet Counterintelligence. At the end of 1957 the Chinese asked for an adviser on political assassinations and sabotage. The Soviets responded by sending their best man, General Vertiporokh, a former head of their own assassinations and sabotage department and former intelligence resident in Iran. Vertiporokh worked as a KGB adviser in China until his death in January 1960. 

Regular personal consultation between the leaders of the Soviet and Chinese services was established. Shortly after taking over as chairman of the KGB in December 1958, Shelepin paid a visit to China, from which he returned much impressed with Chinese skill in dealing with opposition to the regime from young people, intellectuals, religious leaders, and national minorities, especially during the elimination of the "thousand weeds" in the summer of 1956. Shelepin recommended that the KGB study and learn from Chinese experience in these matters. General Sakharovskiy, the head of Soviet intelligence, paid a visit to China at about the same time as Shelepin. At the first conference of the heads of bloc security and intelligence services in Moscow in mid-1959, the Chinese were represented by the minister of public security, Lo Jui-tsin. The conference decided to put security and intelligence liaison within the bloc onto a multilateral footing, and established a joint security and intelligence coordinating center for the purpose. 

Early in 1960 General Pitovranov, one of the most experienced of all KGB generals and a former deputy minister of state security, who was known to and respected by the Chinese for his wartime work against the Chinese Nationalists in Sinkiang, was appointed chief KGB adviser to China. 

In 1959-60 there was a regular exchange of secret political and military intelligence between the Soviets and the Chinese. This covered in particular Western views and predictions on Sino-Soviet relations. The KGB passed on to the Chinese confidential and top secret intelligence from its sources in NATO and Western Europe. The Polish intelligence service obtained and passed on to the KGB a set of papers recording the discussions at a meeting in 1958 or 1959 of the Bilderberg group of distinguished Western statesmen and commentators concerning the possibilities of a Sino-Soviet split, the likely consequences of such a split for the communist bloc, and the ways in which it might be exploited for the benefit of the West. These were among the documents taken to China by General Sakharovskiy in person. Among other documents sent to the Chinese by the KGB were secret US State Department assessments of Sino-Soviet differences over communes and the Chinese reaction to Khrushchev's visit to the United States in 1959. A copy of a secret report delivered to NATO in 1959 by its former secretary-general, Spaak, on Sino-Soviet differences and their implications for NATO was also given to the Chinese by the KGB. 

It is of course a deliberately propagated myth that the Soviet and Chinese leaders are ignorant of the situation in the outside world and incapable of understanding it even if provided by their intelligence services with texts of official Western documents. Intelligence material is in fact carefully studied, absorbed, and used in the planning of communist political strategy. 

In addition to secret intelligence material, it is likely that the communist strategists would have studied books like The Prospects for Communist China, by Walt Rostow, which openly speculated as early as 1954 on the possibilities of the Sino-Soviet alliance breaking up.10 

It is therefore probably no coincidence that Mikoyan, in his speech to the Twenty-first CPSU Congress in February 1959, said that Western hopes and expectations of a split were doomed,11 a line echoed in the basic communist documents of the period— the Eighty one-Party Manifesto of November 1960 12 and Khrushchev's strategic report of January 6, 1961.13 The theme of unbreakable Sino-Soviet friendship was also to be found in speeches and interviews by Chou En-lai 14 and the Chinese foreign minister, Chen Yi,15 despite the accumulating evidence of a dispute. 

More than a year after the reported withdrawal of Soviet economic and technical specialists from China, in July-August 1960, at least some of the KGB advisers were still in place there. A former colleague and friend of the author who had been sent to China to advise on the physical protection of Chinese nuclear installations was still in China in November 1961, the month after Khrushchev denounced the Albanians at the Twenty-second C.P.S.U Congress and Chou En-lai walked out in apparent protest. By way of contrast, the Soviet military, intelligence, and counterintelligence advisers were the first to leave Yugoslavia when the genuine Tito-Stalin split occurred in 1948. The intimacy of the intelligence and security connection between the Soviets and Chinese up to the end of 1961 was incompatible with a serious deterioration in their overall relations before that date. 

The discrepancies between the evidence of a split and the open and inside information on continuing good relations must be viewed against the past history of intimate collaboration between the Soviet and Chinese parties in disinformation operations in 1944-49, which effectively concealed the extent of Soviet aid to the Chinese party in the final years of the civil war and successfully misrepresented Chinese Communism as a relatively harmless agrarian reform movement. 

Against this background, the fact that Sino-Soviet relations in 1959- 61 closely followed the pattern of Soviet-Yugoslav and Soviet-Albanian relations in the same period—a period in which the grounds for tension and splits between the members of the bloc had been removed and all members, including the Chinese, contributed to the formulation of the new policy—suggests that the Sino-Soviet dispute was, like the others, the product of bloc disinformation. The fact that China continued to send observers to meetings of Comecon and the Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Pact up to the end of 1961 supports this conclusion. 

The Historical Evidence of 

Sino-Soviet Differences 

Since the Sino-Soviet "split" became common knowledge, it has become fashionable, with some encouragement from Soviet and Chinese sources, to seek an explanation for it in traditional rivalries and disputes between the two countries dating back as far as the sixteenth century. It would be no more far fetched to try to explain the deterioration in Franco-American relations in the 1960's by reference to the French colonization of Louisiana. Given the nature of communist ideology, the acquisition of power by communist parties, whether in the Soviet Union, China, or elsewhere, entails in every case a radical break with a country's political traditions.16 

It would be more relevant to seek the origin of the current split in differences between the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties since 1917. Such differences have undoubtedly existed. There were differences between the Soviet and Chinese Communists on the tactics to be used toward workers and peasants in the 1920s. Stalin was opposed to Mao's leadership of the CPC in the period 1932-35; but these were transient differences that did not prevent close cooperation between the parties in the period 1935-49. The alleged differences between them on united front tactics with the Kuomintang and in their attitudes to the Chinese Nationalist government were false differences deliberately projected by joint disinformation designed to conceal Soviet support for the C.P.C, to contain the scale of American aid to the Nationalist government, and to enable the Soviets and Chinese to subvert that government the more effectively through the development of a duality in their policies toward it. 

Soviet military support for the C.P.C may well have tipped the balance in favor of the communist victory in China. After the communist victory, differences and sources of friction once more appeared between the Soviet and Chinese parties. The insensitivity of Stalin's handling of Sino-Soviet and other intrabloc relations, if it had remained uncorrected, might have led to a genuine Sino-Soviet split analogous to the split with Tito. But in fact the necessary corrective measures were taken in time. By the end of 1957 there were no outstanding differences left between the members of the bloc. It is noteworthy that the Chinese, in justifying their attitude in their polemics with the Soviet Union, did not base themselves on the real difficulties they encountered with the Soviets in the period 1949- 53, but on alleged differences with Khrushchev after 1957 over issues that had in fact been settled by that date. Khrushchev's contribution to the elimination of past mistakes in Sino-Soviet relations was recognized by Mao himself in 1957.17 

The Form of Sino-Soviet Differences 

Roughly speaking, three periods can be distinguished in the development of the split: the first from 1957 to mid-1963, the second from 1963 to 1969, and the third from 1969 onward. For most of the first period official communist sources aimed gt communist audiences gave no recognition to the existence of Sino-Soviet differences; on the contrary, the record of Chinese participation in the world conferences of communist parties held in Moscow in 1957 and 1960 and in the Twenty-first C.P.S.U Congress in February 1959, and also Chinese attendance as observers at meetings of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, all indicated continuing and even increasingly close collaboration at a high level between the Soviet and Chinese governments and parties. The same conclusion could be drawn from the exchange of delegations. In 1959 alone no less than 125 delegations visited China from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; over 100 Chinese delegations paid return visits.

The evidence of disagreements was to be found in unofficial communist sources: different lines on various issues in the Soviet and Chinese press, remarks by communist leaders to Western journalists and statesmen, and retrospective accounts of polemics at closed meetings of, for example, the Romanian party congress in June 1960 and the Eighty-one-Party Congress in November 1960. This unofficial evidence, much of it retrospective, pointed to a deterioration in party and diplomatic cooperation in 1959, to a termination of Soviet military and nuclear collaboration in that year, and to the cessation of Soviet economic aid to China in 1960. 

From late 1961 onward indications of Sino-Soviet differences began to appear in the official communist sources. There was symbolic Chinese support for Stalin and the Albanian position when Khrushchev denounced them both at the Twenty-second C.P.S.U Congress. Friction and competition between the Soviet and Chinese delegations at the meetings of international front organizations became conspicuous. The flow of information from official communist sources on the subject of Sino-Soviet collaboration dwindled. 

During the second period of the split, the existence of differences was fully acknowledged. An ostensible attempt to settle them was made when a high-level Chinese party delegation visited Moscow for talks in July 1963. The talks apparently failed and public polemics between the parties began. Hitherto secret party letters revealing differences between the parties were disclosed in the Soviet and Chinese press. Some Chinese diplomats were expelled from the Soviet Union for distributing leaflets. China withdrew from the international front organizations. Some communist parties in the non-communist world openly took up pro-Soviet or pro-Chinese positions; in some cases pro-Chinese splinter groups broke away from pro-Moscow parties. 

In the third period, beginning roughly in 1969, the apparent deterioration in Sino-Soviet relations was expressed in actions as well as words. Troop levels were built up on the Sino-Soviet frontier. Border incidents took place between the two countries against a background of mutual accusations of "hegemonism." China began publicly and systematically to take up an opposite position to the Soviet Union on NATO, the Warsaw Pact, the EEC, detente, disarmament, European security, and many Third World issues, including Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. After the communist victory in Vietnam, the Vietnamese aligned themselves more closely with the Soviet Union. The Soviets and Chinese backed opposite sides in the conflict between rival communist factions in Kampuchea. In 1979 the Chinese "punished" the Vietnamese with a brief invasion of their territory. But, despite all the apparent violence of Chinese hostility to the Soviet Union and her close Vietnamese ally, by 1980 the split had still not led to a breach in diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, as did the Soviet-Albanian dispute in 1961. Nor was the Sino-Soviet treaty of friendship, mutual cooperation, and assistance abrogated. Up to 1980 each side remained committed to support the other in an emergency. 

From this brief outline survey of the split, it will be seen that for most of the first period there was a total conflict between the evidence from unofficial communist sources and the evidence from official communist sources supported by the author's inside information. In the second period there was a closer coincidence in the evidence from official and unofficial communist sources, although there was still a conflict between the official sources in the first period and the evidence of differences leaked retrospectively in the second period. The new methodology, taking into account the launching of a disinformation program in 1958-60 and the historical precedents on which it was based, gives greater credence to the evidence from official communist sources and calls into question the authenticity of the secret party letters and polemics published in the second period of the split. 

Several inconsistencies can be pointed out. First, the official evidence of close Sino-Soviet relations was carried in the press of both countries. The Manifesto of the Eighty-one-Party Congress, in November 1960, specifically underlined that Western hopes of a split in the bloc were doomed. By signing it the Chinese specifically endorsed the tactic of peaceful coexistence as one of the options in a common long-range policy. The Chinese president, Liu Shao-chi, who led the Chinese delegation to the congress, subsequently toured the Soviet Union in the company of the Soviet president, a curious thing to do if there was a serious rift between them. Khrushchev's report of January 6, 1961, widely distributed in the Soviet Union, emphasized the closeness of Sino-Soviet relations. 

Second, although the Soviet and Chinese press and radio must be regarded as official communist sources, they should also be regarded as subordinate to official sources, such as the Manifesto of the Eighty-one-Party Congress, or the decisions and declarations of Soviet and Chinese party congresses. These decisions and declarations should not be regarded as being controverted by statements in the press and radio of individual parties, especially in the light of all the evidence of a decision in 1958-60 to support the new long-range policy with a program of disinformation operations. 

Third, neither the Russian nor the Chinese public was informed of the existence of a dispute before the end of 1961, and even then, up to mid-1963, only indirectly and by implication. Neither the Russian nor the Chinese public is in a position to study the press of the other country and to note the divergences between them on foreign policy or doctrinal issues. It is doubtful whether the reduction in the coverage of each other's affairs in their national presses, even if noticed, would have been accorded much significance. Furthermore, as the author can personally testify, the Soviet party was not briefed on the dispute up to the end of 1961. In contrast, as already recorded above, confidential guidance was given to the party from the beginning in the case of the genuine Tito-Stalin split in 1948. 

Fourth, although it would be impossible to assess how much of the polemical material was made available and how widely it was distributed within the Soviet Union and China, it can at least be said that a proportion of the material available in and directed at the West would not have reached the Russian or Chinese public. For example, much of Novosti's material on Sino-Soviet relations was distributed in English and in magazine supplements, which may or may not have been distributed in the Soviet Union. According to the Soviet press, the Chinese distributed polemical material to communists in the Soviet Union in English, which would have been pointless if it was really aimed at a Soviet, rather than a Western, audience.18 

This, along with the esoteric evidence, supports the conclusion that the evidence of the dispute was deliberately made available to the West either directly to Western statesmen and commentators or indirectly in such a manner that Western analysts would be likely to pick it up. The question arises: Why would the Soviet and Chinese leaders deliberately draw Western attention to the existence of a dispute that they were at pains to conceal from their own parties and populations unless by so doing they could serve their mutual interests in promoting their recently agreed upon long-range policy for the bloc? 

Fifth, the polemics between the Soviets and Chinese were not continuous, but intermittent. They could well have been coordinated, rather than spontaneous. In the Soviet press they began in July 1963, continued until the beginning of October, and were then dropped until April 1964. They were revived in that month with the publication of material on the meeting of the C.P.S.U Central Committee in February 1964, allegedly because the Chinese had continued to publish polemical material despite appeals from Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership to desist.19 

The new methodology further suggests that the Sino-Soviet hostilities of the third period, however convincing they may appear, should be reexamined to see whether they could have been staged, and if so, with what strategic object. At this stage, four general points may be made. 

First, frontier incidents in a remote corner of the world, like on the Ussuri river, though spectacular and convincing evidence of hostility, can very easily be staged—particularly if, as will be shown later, means of coordinating action between the two "opponents" are readily available.[hmmm,wonder if this carries over to 'fake' chemical attacks? DC] 

Second, the hostilities, like the verbal polemics, have been intermittent as well as pointless. 

Third, despite all the apparent violence of Chinese hostility to the Soviet Union and her close Vietnamese ally, by 1980 the split had still not led to a breach in diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, as did the Soviet-Albanian dispute in 1961. Nor was the Sino-Soviet treaty of friendship, mutual cooperation, and assistance abrogated. Up to 1980 each side remained committed to support the other in an emergency. 

Fourth, the hostilities can be correlated in timing with important communist initiatives or with the opening of East-West negotiations—for example, SALT—or with the visits of Western statesmen to the Soviet Union and China. Like the verbal polemics, therefore, minor hostilities cannot be accepted as evidence of a genuine dispute, and in the light of the new methodology should be examined for the possible relevance they may have to communist political and strategic aims in furtherance of a common long-range policy. 

In the same light must be seen the adoption of opposing positions on international issues by the Soviet Union and China. The question must be asked whether the ultimate goal of a worldwide communist victory cannot be achieved more expeditiously by the two leading communist powers adopting dual foreign policies in apparent opposition to one another than by pursuing a single policy in open solidarity. 

The Content of Sino-Soviet Differences 

Differences between the Soviets and Chinese have allegedly arisen since 1958 in the ideological, economic, military, political, and diplomatic fields. To many observers it appeared that the differences stemmed from a clash of national interests between the two leading communist powers. The various types of difference must be examined in turn to see what substance, if any, there is to each of them. 

Ideological Differences 

Historically, as already noted, one of the first indications of the Sino-Soviet dispute was an apparent difference over the subject of the introduction of communes in China, which Khrushchev mentioned to the late Senator Humphrey in December 1958. According to some Western interpretations of communist theory, communes are the highest form of organization of socialist agriculture, and their introduction ought therefore to be preceded by industrialization and by a lower form of socialist agricultural organization, such as collective farming. The attempt to introduce communes in Soviet Russia in 1918-20 failed because the time was not yet ripe. By introducing communes before collectivization, the Chinese, according to this line of argument, were sinning against orthodoxy in two respects: They were not abiding by communist theory, and they were implicitly rejecting the Soviet model in their agricultural development. By so doing, it was argued, they had incurred Soviet displeasure. Furthermore, comparisons were drawn between the "leftist" policy of the Chinese in setting up communes and the "rightist" policy of the Soviets in permitting collective farms in 1958 to purchase state-owned farm machinery. 

This reasoning was outdated. The 1957 conference of bloc communist parties reached agreements, endorsed by the Eighty-one- Party Congress in November 1960, on the basic laws of communist development, which legitimized the Chinese course of action. As far as agriculture was concerned, the basic law was that it should be collective. The exact type of organization, whether commune or collective farm, was not specified; it was left to be determined by the specific national conditions in each country. 

In China the specific national conditions and problems confronting the C.P.C were how to break up the strong family ties in the vast mass of the Chinese peasantry; how to overcome the lack of agricultural machinery and to use mass manual labor to best advantage; and how to appropriate the land, which belonged not (as in the Soviet Union) to the state, but to the peasants. The commune provided the best solution to all three problems. In addition the Chinese leaders would undoubtedly have taken into consideration, in agreement with their Soviet colleagues, the high cost in human and material terms of Stalin's method of collectivization, the obloquy it had brought on his regime, and the impossibility of contemplating a repetition of that experience with the even greater numbers of Chinese peasants. The Chinese choice of communes was no more unorthodox than the continued existence of private agriculture in Yugoslavia, Poland, and Hungary, which was accepted by the bloc leaders as a temporary phenomenon until the specific conditions in those countries could be changed. 

Scant Western attention was paid to the speech of the then Soviet ambassador to China, Yudin, in which he told the Twenty-first C.P.S.U Congress in February 1959 that "the Chinese peasantry, in alliance with the working class, is advancing confidently and resolutely toward socialism under the leadership of the Communist party and has achieved enormous successes. The Communist Party of China—a glorious detachment of the international Communist movement—is wisely leading the Chinese people along the path of socialism, despite tremendous difficulties and constant threats and attempts at interference on the part of American imperialism." 

Chinese allegations of a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union were unfounded. Economic reform in the Soviet Union was aimed at increasing the efficiency of the economy and improving party control over it. The impression of a return toward capitalism was deliberately fostered by disinformation for tactical and strategic purposes. The Chinese would have been aware of this. Similarly,the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" was dropped by the C.P.S.U, not as the result of any dilution of the party's monopoly of control, but to widen the party's political base and to suggest an "evolution" of the regime. The notion that the Soviet regime was less ideological than the Chinese was unfounded. It is interesting to observe how the Chinese, following the Soviet example, have themselves introduced economic incentives and other elements of capitalism. 

Economic Differences 

The disparity in the levels of economic development between China and the Soviet Union—or, in wider terms, between the Asiatic and European communist zones—presented the communist strategists with a dilemma. In 1960 the Chinese, saddled with a backward industry, lack of capital, a population explosion, and a low level of trade with the advanced non-communist world, could hardly expect to carry out ambitious industrialization and military programs without help from the European zone; and help from the European zone could only make a significant impact on the rate of Chinese industrial development if the European zone severely curtailed its own development programs and abandoned its aim of outstripping the level of production in the United States. 

The difference in economic levels between the Soviet Union and China was a potential source of tension within the communist bloc, but it is worth noting that the problem existed at the time of the communist victory in China and did not lead to a Sino-Soviet split in the decade thereafter. 

As late as October 1958, the year in which the formulation of long range bloc policy got under way, a leading Soviet theoretician, T. A. Stepanyan, took the view that the European socialist states, led by the Soviet Union, and the Asiatic socialist states comprised "particular economic zones" and that the former, being more advanced, would be the first to "enter communism."20 

However, at the Twenty-first C.P.S.U Congress in January-February 1959, Khrushchev in a speech that must be regarded as authoritative, overrode this view and announced that all socialist countries would achieve communism "more or less simultaneously on the basis of the planned and proportionate development" of the economy of the bloc. A month later he went on to speak of the future economic integration of a communist bloc without internal frontiers.21 [Sounds like a world order to me,with no borders,and the goal remains the same here in 2018.Of course they do not refer to themselves as Communists,but none the less,it is the same ideology DC]

Khrushchev's points were underlined by Yudin, the Soviet ambassador to China, who referred to the socialist camp as a "single economic system" and said that the economic plans of the socialist countries would be more and more coordinated and that "the more highly developed countries will help the less developed countries in order to march in a united front towards communism at an increasingly faster pace."22 Khrushchev referred to the "unity of the socialist camp" as one of the advantages enjoyed by the Soviet Union in its struggle to overtake the United States in economic power. Chou En-lai, who led the Chinese delegation to the congress, and Soviet Deputy Premier Mikoyan both spoke of the unbreakable friendship between the Soviet Union and China. 

The period around the Twenty-first C.P.S.U Congress was one in which there was a shift of emphasis toward long-range economic planning in Comecon. These discussions took place in the presence of Chinese observers. It seems that, at the time, a decision was taken to step up Soviet industrial aid to China. As a result of Khrushchev's visit to Peking in August 1958, the Soviet Union agreed to build forty seven additional industrial projects in China. Chou En-lai's visit to Moscow for the Twenty-first C.P.S.U Congress resulted in another Soviet agreement to build seventy-eight additional projects in China between 1959 and 1967 at a total cost of $1.25 billion.23 

In July 1960 the picture of closer Sino-Soviet relations changed abruptly. The conventional view is that the Soviet Union terminated its economic aid to China, withdrew its technical and economic advisers, and took steps to curtail Sino-Soviet trade drastically. Support for this view came from reports on the departure of Soviet technicians from China (later confirmed in Sino-Soviet polemics in 1963-64), from the widely different treatment given the subject of bloc assistance to China in the Soviet and Chinese press, and from statistics on Sino-Soviet trade. There were also reports on the economic damage done to China by the cessation of Soviet economic aid, which came on top of the introduction of communes and the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Letters from the communes to the outside world and Chinese grain purchases in Australia  and Canada underlined the point. 

The alleged withdrawal of Soviet economic and technical specialists in July 1960 was not accompanied by, or even followed by— at least up to the end of 1961—a withdrawal of Soviet intelligence and security advisers. 

On the evidence available, the most likely interpretation of what occurred in mid-1960 is that a switch took place in Chinese thinking on economic development in favor of self-reliance and concentration on small-scale projects. As a consequence of the completion of some projects and the cancellation of others, a proportion of the Soviet technical experts was withdrawn from China in July 1960. If some were replaced by Czechoslovakians  and other East Europeans, this would have been done to reinforce the impression of a split. Soviet and East European aid continued to be given after 1960, but on a narrower front and with a concentration on the scientific and technical fields. It can further be surmised that these changes took place by agreement between the Soviets and the Chinese and that the extent and the consequences of the contraction in Soviet economic aid were misrepresented by each side in accordance with their common disinformation program. Apart from the wider strategic purpose of supporting the authenticity of the split, the publicity on the withdrawal of Soviet technicians could have been intended, in line with historical precedent, to hide continuing Sino-Soviet collaboration in sensitive key areas—in this case, the development of Chinese ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. 

Military Differences 

It is often thought that the real nub of the Sino-Soviet split was a decision by the Soviets in 1959 to withhold assistance to China over nuclear weapons. According to a secret Chinese party letter, which was made public by the Chinese on August 15, 1963, the secret Sino-Soviet agreement on the sharing of military nuclear secrets and the provision to the Chinese of the necessary help in developing their own nuclear potential, which was concluded on October 15, 1957, was broken by the Soviets on June 20, 1959.24 

The letter is tantamount to an admission that collaboration in the military nuclear field, up to June 1959, was close. It would have been unconvincing to deny it, given the earlier publicity about Sino-Soviet nuclear collaboration in general.25 But there are several anomalies in the statement that this secret agreement was repudiated by the Soviets in June 1959. The most important is that, in spite of the alleged decision and the fury it is supposed to have generated in China, the Chinese continued to be represented at meetings of the Warsaw Pact in 1960. It is difficult to believe that a Soviet decision with such profound implications would not have been reflected immediately and across the board in the field of Sino-Soviet military relations. In fact, not only did the Chinese continue to send observers to Warsaw Pact meetings for more than a year afterward, but several years of virtually open Sino-Soviet military collaboration followed over the supply of military assistance to North Vietnam. The references to Chinese military students returning from the Soviet Union in 1964-65 indicate that at least some Soviet military training continued to be given to the Chinese armed forces after the split had developed. 

It is also more than surprising that if, as alleged, there was an abrupt cancellation of Soviet nuclear help to China, the Soviets should have continued to provide, and the Chinese to accept, advice on the physical protection of their nuclear installations. As already recorded, a KGB officer known to the author was still in China in November 1961, having been sent there as one of a group of Soviet advisers on nuclear security requested by the Chinese. 

Sino-Soviet cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy continued after June 1959. There are references in the Chinese press to a prominent Chinese scientist, Professor Wang Kan-chang, serving as vice-director of the Joint Nuclear Research Institute at Dubna, near Moscow, in April 1960.26 

Many observers at the time believed that within the Chinese military leadership there were differences on strategy, which were associated with the Sino-Soviet split and which led to the dismissal of the Chinese defense minister, Peng Te-huai, allegedly for conspiring with the Soviet leaders against Mao. Part of this conspiracy supposedly took place during the visit of Khrushchev and Peng to Albania in May 1959, but this visit is far more easily explicable in terms of preparation for the spurious Soviet-Albanian split and the need to coordinate the replacement of Soviet by Chinese military, political, and economic support for Albania. The suggestion  that Peng and other Chinese leaders were disgraced for acting as Soviet agents is inconsistent with the declaration by the Soviets to the Chinese in 1954-55 of all their intelligence assets in China and with the close Sino-Soviet intelligence relationship that persisted at least up to the end of 1961. In any case, as Edgar Snow pointed out, Peng neither led a conspiracy against Mao nor suffered arrest in 1959.27 He was still a member of the Chinese Politburo in 1962. 

Interestingly enough, there does seem to have been a genuine discussion, in China, between two schools of military thought between 1955 and 1958.28 Settlement of the argument occurred in the same period in which many other problems were resolved in the Soviet Union and the bloc, such as the elimination of the anti-Khrushchev opposition in July 1957; the ousting of Marshal Zhukov in the following October; and the first conference of bloc parties in November, at which relations between them were normalized and the decision was taken to formulate a new long-range policy for the bloc. In his speech to the conference, Mao argued in favor of using the whole potential of the bloc, especially its nuclear missile potential, to swing the balance of power in favor of the communist world. By their own account the Chinese agreement with the Soviets on collaboration over nuclear arms dated from the end of 1957. It is tempting to suggest, therefore, that in line with the basic technique of reviving dead issues and using them for disinformation purposes the argument in the Chinese armed forces was artificially revived, together with allegations of a Khrushchev-Peng conspiracy, to support joint Sino-Soviet-Albanian disinformation on their mutual relations. Furthermore, in view of his long services to Sino-Soviet strategy, Peng would have been an obvious candidate to continue to serve in a secret Sino-Soviet or bloc policy coordinating center. His "disgrace" could have been designed to cover up a secret assignment of this kind. 

In parallel with the alleged differences in the Chinese army, there were allegedly differences in the Soviet army that led to, among other changes, the dismissal of Marshal Sokolovskiy as chief of general staff in April 1960 and the dismissal in the same year of Marshal Konev as commander in chief of the Warsaw Pact forces. Sokolovskiy was replaced by Zakharov and Konev by Grechko. 

If there had in fact been genuine differences in the Soviet general staff, the author would have expected to pick up some reflection of them from two former G.R.U officers, Bykov and Yermolayev, who served with him in the NATO section of the KGB's Information Department and kept in close touch with the general staff. If Sokolovskiy was really in disgrace in 1960, it is curious that he was chosen by the Soviet Ministry of Defense to edit a basic book on Soviet military strategy two years later.29 

        Differences in National Interest 

Many factors have been cited as contributory causes of the split. The list includes the racial and cultural differences between the Russian and Chinese peoples; the Chinese population explosion; the decline in the influence of communist ideology; the reassertion of purely national interests; and hegemonism, or the desire of the Soviet and Chinese parties to dominate others. 

No one could deny the existence of racial differences. The Chinese in particular have used the racial issue for political purposes.30 But these differences did not prevent the closest possible alliance between the Soviets and Chinese between 1957 and 1959, nor were they responsible for the Sino-Soviet friction between 1949 and 1955. If they are now thought to have been important in the causation of the split, it is largely because of the evidence provided by the Soviets and Chinese themselves in the course of their polemics in the mid-1960's. 

For the same reason attempts were made to reinterpret Khrushchev's virgin lands campaign of 1954-56 as inspired by Soviet concern over China's population explosion and designed to preempt any future Chinese expansion into Siberia. As Professor W. A. Douglas Jackson rightly pointed out, the motives for the campaign were domestic.31 

Cultural differences undeniably exist, but it is interesting that cultural relations between China and the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe should have survived the Sino-Soviet split. The Chinese Friendship Association still exists in the Soviet Union and the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association still exists in China.32 Cultural visits were exchanged at least until November 1966.33  

National rivalry is seen by the West as the force behind the apparent struggle between the Soviets and Chinese for influence in the developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The assertion of Chinese national interests is seen in Chinese claims on Taiwanese, Indian, and Outer Mongolian territory and in demands for revision of "unequal treaties," dating from the nineteenth century, which awarded certain Chinese territories to Russia. Soviet national self-assertiveness was seen in Soviet attempts to incite revolt in Sinkiang and among tribal groups straddling the frontier with China and in Soviet complaints about Chinese border violations, which, according to Soviet official sources, amounted to five thousand in 1962 alone. The clash of Soviet and Chinese national interests was seen in short-lived and sporadic outbreaks of border hostilities, especially on the Ussuri River, which were intensified in 1969— 70. Border clashes were sometimes accompanied by Soviet and Chinese student demonstrations outside each other's embassies and in ostentatious walkouts by Soviet and Chinese representatives from international gatherings. 

The manner in which the traditional problems over Manchuria and Sinkiang were solved after Stalin's death has been described, as has the normalization of relations between the members of the bloc, including the Soviet Union and China, in 1957. Khrushchev's contribution to this achievement was recognized by Mao in 1957.34 Against this background it would have made no sense for the Soviet Union to meddle in Sinkiang. Chinese confidence that they would not attempt to do so is demonstrated by the continuance in high office in Sinkiang throughout the 1960's of a known former Soviet agent, Saifudin. Far from trying to "liberate" areas of one another's territory, the two powers cooperated in a war of national liberation in a third country, Vietnam. 

Before the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet split, the border area had been converted, in Professor Jackson's words, from a zone of tension into a zone of cooperation and stabilization.35 The split was not therefore the culmination of a continuing series of border problems; the frontier incidents cannot be seen as a cause of the dispute. In this connection attention should be drawn to articles on the border problem published in 1964-65 by Academician Khvostov, whose connection with the KGB was known to the author. Equally, anything said or written on the subject by Tikhvinskiy, the former Soviet intelligence resident in Peking and Britain, should be regarded as reflecting the communist disinformation line. 

Western belief that nationalism is the driving force behind Soviet or Chinese policy fails to take into account the nature of communist theory and the distinction that must be made between the motives of a communist regime and the sentiments of the people which it controls. [better take note of that word,because he is not talking about a government of any type,but rather a controlling ideology over the people. DC]

In communist theory nationalism is a secondary problem. The fundamental political force is the class struggle, which is international in character. Once the "victory of the international working class" has been achieved, national differences and national sentiment will disappear. Meanwhile, the "class enemy" is not nationalism, but capitalism and its adjunct, imperialism. It is in large part because of communism's claims to an international, rather than a national, form of loyalty that it has managed to retain its appeal and its hold over its acolytes. The main point, however, is that the disinformation about the Sino-Soviet split provides a new, more effective way for fighting nationalism by investing the communist parties with a nationalist image in the eyes of their people. 

Differences in Political and 

Diplomatic Strategy and Tactics 

Marked differences have existed since 1960 in what the Soviets and Chinese have said on subjects such as detente, peaceful coexistence, and the inevitability of war. In the 1960's the Soviet press defended peaceful coexistence, the Chinese press attacked it. Under the banner of peaceful coexistence, the Soviet leaders established personal contact with Western statesmen, sought an expansion of East-West trade, and adopted a generally moderate and businesslike approach to negotiations with the West. The Chinese denounced the Soviet approach as a betrayal of Leninism and a capitulation to the forces of imperialism and capitalism. Eschewing closer contacts with the West, the Chinese advocated implacable, militant revolutionary policies toward it. Khrushchev's visit to the United States in 1959, Soviet detente with Western Europe, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 all came in for their share of Chinese communist abuse. The Chinese and Soviets took diametrically opposing lines on the Sino-Indian conflict in 1959, the Cuban crisis of 1962, and other matters. In relation to the developing world, the Soviets emphasized the importance of diplomacy and economic aid; the Chinese advocated wars of national liberation. 

Was there any real substance to this war of words? The thesis that war is not inevitable was formulated by Khrushchev at the Twentieth C.P.S.U Congress in February 1956. At the time the Chinese frequently expressed their agreement with it.36 It was only in 1960 that divergent views on the topic began to appear in the Soviet and Chinese press, to be followed by open polemics, beginning in 1963. Broadly speaking, the Soviets maintained that, although the causes of conflict between the two different social systems had not disappeared, the strength of the communist bloc was such that nuclear war, which would mean the destruction of both sides, was no longer inevitable; communists should seek the victory of their cause through peaceful coexistence and peaceful competition. The Chinese argued that the communist aim was world revolution. Communists should not fear world war because it would mean the final victory of communism, even if at the sacrifice of many million lives. 

The unreality of the dispute is clear when the record of the two sides is examined. The Soviets were far from moderate in their approach to the Berlin problem from 1958 onward, in their disruption of the summit conference in 1960, in their supply of weapons to Indonesia and their resumption of nuclear testing in 1961, in their provocation of the Cuban crisis in 1962, and in their Middle Eastern policy in 1967. The Chinese were no more aggressive than this in practice. They were not even consistent in their maintenance of an aggressive posture, sometimes maintaining that they did not want world war and would fight only if attacked.37 Indeed, without Soviet backing the Chinese were in no position in the 1960's to wage an aggressive war. 

On the question of support for wars of national liberation in the developing countries, which the Chinese accused the Soviets of betraying, there was nothing to choose between the two sides in practice. Khrushchev's verbal support for this form of war was given practical expression in the foundation of Lumumba University and in support for guerrilla movements in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Africa.38 

There was, in fact, duality both in Soviet and Chinese policies and in the interaction between them. Both countries, in different areas or at different times, used provocation and negotiation, aggressiveness and moderation. In the 1960's Chinese militancy provided a helpful backdrop to Soviet detente diplomacy; there was an apparent common interest between the Soviets and the West in confronting the "Yellow Peril" from the East. In the 1970's the roles were more or less reversed. Soviet aggressiveness in Africa, her menacing stance in Europe, her domestic neo-Stalinism, and her intervention in Afghanistan all helped to create a favorable climate for the Chinese to extend their relations with both advanced and developing countries as a potential ally against Soviet expansionism. 

Differences over Tactics 

for Non-bloc Communist Parties 

Sino-Soviet differences spilled over into questions of the tactics of the international communist movement. Despite the mutual accusations of hegemonism and despite the alignment of extremist communist groups with China and the more moderate communist parties with the Soviet Union, rivalry between the Soviets and Chinese was not carried as far as it might have been in practice. There was no serious Chinese attempt to disrupt the international communist movement. China withdrew from the international front organizations in the 1960's, but did not set up rival organizations under Chinese auspices. 

The accusations of hegemonism were false. Neither the C.P.S.U nor the C.P.C seeks to impose its diktat on the communist movement. Neither needs to do so. At the same time, the rejection of hegemonism in principle is not incompatible with recognition of the undeniable fact that the C.P.S.U has the longest and widest experience in power of any communist party and is the best placed to play a leading role. It was the Chinese themselves who insisted on this point in 1957. 

The Technique of the "Split" 

It will be objected that, even if there is no substance to the differences that are alleged to divide the Soviets from the Chinese, it is inconceivable that they could have sustained a fictitious split for over twenty years without being found out and without doing serious damage to their own cause. If the Soviet Union and China were democracies, that would be a correct judgment; but in communist states, controls over the communications media, the discipline imposed on party members, and the influence of the intelligence and security services are combined to provide unparalleled facilities for practicing disinformation. It should not be forgotten that the closeness of C.P.S.U-C.P.C relations between 1935 and 1949 was successfully concealed from the outside world. Communist victory in China was achieved more swiftly through the duality of Soviet and C.P.C policies toward the Nationalist government and the United States than it would have been through an outward show of solidarity between them. 

The technique of the Sino-Soviet split was not developed overnight. Historical precedents drawn on in developing disinformation on false splits and secret coordination, such as Lenin's Far Eastern Republic, have already been cited in this and earlier chapters. The genuine Tito-Stalin split was also obviously of prime importance, and it is interesting to note how the published texts of the alleged secret party letters between the Soviet and Chinese parties recall the genuine party letters on the Tito-Stalin split and how the spurious allegations that Peng and Lin Piao, both Chinese ministers of defense, were Soviet agents echo the well-founded accusation that the Yugoslav chief of staff in 1948 was working for the Soviet intelligence service. 

There is also a certain parallel between the Mao-Khrushchev polemics in the 1960s on the subject of peaceful coexistence and the Lenin-Trotskiy argument over the issue of war and peace after the revolution of 1917. This earlier controversy could well have been used as a model for the later polemics. 

The Eighty-one-Party Congress Manifesto of November 1960, to which the C.P.C acknowledged its commitment, spoke of the need for "unity of will and action" of all communist parties, not for unity of words.39 It also spoke of "solving cardinal problems of modern times in a new way" (author's italics). What it meant by this in practice was that centralized, Stalinist control over the movement having proved a failure, the aim of a worldwide federation of communist states would be pursued in the transitional stage by an agreed variety of different strategies and tactics to be followed by different parties, some of which would appear to be at loggerheads with one another. Traces of Chinese communist thinking about splits can be found in the Chinese press. The analogy is drawn between growth in nature, which is based on division and germination, and the development and strengthening of the communist movement through "favorable splits." The creation of two or more communist parties in one country was advocated openly.40 One Chinese paper used the formula: "Unity, then split; new unity on a new basis—such is the dialectic of development of the communist movement." Problems of Peace and Socialism referred disparagingly to Ai Sy-tsi, a Chinese scholar well versed in dialectics, who developed the idea of the contradiction between the left and right legs of a person, which are mutually interdependent and move in turn when walking.41 All of this suggests that the communist leaders had learned how to forge a new form of unity among themselves through practical collaboration in the exploitation of fictitious schismatic differences on ideology and tactics. 

It would be erroneous to attempt to separate the Sino-Soviet split from the four disinformation operations already described and those that will be described in succeeding chapters. The disinformation program is an integrated whole. The Chinese have played an important part in every operation. As Chapter 22 will argue, the Sino-Soviet split is the underlying factor in all the different strategies developed in support of long-range policy. 

Mutual criticism between two parties should be seen as a new way of supporting the credibility of the disinformation each is trying to spread about itself. For example, Chinese criticism of Soviet and Yugoslav revisionism, the decay of ideology, and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union helped to build up the illusion that Khrushchev was truly moderate and that Tito was truly independent. The Soviet and Chinese lines on different issues should be seen as the left and right legs of a man, or better still, as the two blades of a pair of scissors, each enhancing the other's capacity to cut. 

The communist strategists proceeded cautiously and pragmatically with the development of the Sino-Soviet split. The second period of open polemics was not introduced until 1963, which gave time for thorough study of the consequences of the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute of 1958-60, the Soviet-Albanian split, and the first period of the Sino-Soviet split. Even now, precedents exist for the further extension of the Sino-Soviet split that have not yet been exploited. The Soviet-Albanian split was carried to the point of a breach in diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The SinoVietnamese split was carried to the point of a major Chinese incursion into Vietnamese territory in 1979. Either of these could presage similar developments in Sino-Soviet relations. 

Strategic Objectives of the "Split" 

The strategic exploitation of the split will be described in Chapter 22. Its overall objective can be defined briefly as the exploitation of the scissors strategy to hasten the achievement of long-range communist goals. Duality in Sino-Soviet polemics is used to mask the nature of the goals and the degree of coordination in the communist effort to achieve them. The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the non-communist world. Each blade of the communist pair of scissors makes the other more effective. The militancy of one nation helps the activist detente diplomacy of the other. Mutual charges of hegemonism help to create the right climate for one or the other to negotiate agreements with the West. False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states. In Western eyes the military, political, economic, and ideological threat from world communism appears diminished. In consequence Western determination to resist the advance of communism is undermined. At a later stage the communist strategists are left with the option of terminating the split and adopting the strategy of "one clenched fist." 

next

The Fifth Disinformation Operation: Romanian "Independence" 

notes

Chapter 15: The Third Disinformation Operation: The Soviet-Albanian "Dispute" and "Split" 

1. See Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift by William E. Griffith (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1963), p. 37. NOTES 379 

2. Izvestiya, January 10, 1981. 

3. In one article (June 1962) David Floyd in the London Daily Telegraph noted that "it was through Durres and . . . Vlora . . . that the Albanians received last year the grain shipments which enabled them to resist the Russian economic blockade. It was the Chinese who brought the wheat from Canada, paid for it in clearing rubles, and shipped it to Albania in West German ships." 

4. Zeri-I-Poppulit, February 14, 1961; reprinted as Document 6 in Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift, p. 207. 

Chapter 16: The Fourth Disinformation Operation: The Sino-Soviet "Split" 

1. Joy Homer Dawn Watch in China, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1941), pp. 194-95: "from the day that I set foot in Yenan, I noticed a lukewarm attitude towards Russia on the part of students and young officials. Far more popular than Russia were America and Great Britain. At least once a day I was told very earnestly something like this: 'You must not confuse our communism with the communism of Russia. Today we do our own thinking. In your country, you would probably call us socialists. We believe in sacrifice for each other, and in hard work and love for all men. Almost it is like your Christianity." 

2. An account of Harriman's interview is in The China Tangle by Herbert Feis (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 140. 

3. Charles B. McLane, Soviet Policy and the Chinese Communists 1931-1946 (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, Copyright 1958 by Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 1-2. 

4. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Bros., 1948), p. 902-3: "[Stalin made the] categorical statement that he would do everything he could to promote unification of China under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek. . . . He specifically stated that no Communist leader was strong enough to unify China." 

5. McLane, op. cit. 

6. Robert Payne, Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse-Tung (London and New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1961), footnote, p. 175. 

7. See the official announcement in Pravda, October 23, 1949. Tikhvinskiy was named as an intelligence officer by the former Soviet intelligence officer Rastvorov in his article in Life, December 6, 1954. 

8. See Chiang Kai-Shek, Soviet Russia in China (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), p. 369. 

9. This treaty remained in force throughout the Vietnam War. On its expiry in April 1980, it was not renewed; by then, there was no discernible threat to China from any Western nation. 

10. Walt Whitmaa Rostow in The Prospects for Communist China (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1954), pp. 216-220, notes "under what circumstances, if any, is a break up of the alliance to be foreseen? In a technical sense the evidence of an alliance lies in the relative weakness of China vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. This means that three conditions are probably required to effect a Chinese withdrawal from the SinoSoviet alliance: 

"1. Acute dissatisfaction among an effective group of Chinese leaders with the workings of the Soviet alliance, and probably with the consequences of applying Soviet technique to the problem of China's economic growth. 

"2. Assurance that withdrawal would be met by more favourable terms of association with the West. "3. The neutralization of potential Soviet strength vis-a-vis China either by severe internal Soviet difficulties or by some third power. "In the light of this basic situation there are several conditions, now beyond the horizon of immediate possibility. . . . The Sino-Soviet tie might be definitively altered if the uneasy process of adjustment ... in the Soviet Union created by Stalin's death should break into open conflict, resulting in either a drastic weakening of Moscow's power on the world scene or a drastic shift in its internal and external political orientation, even the present Chinese communist rulers might be prepared to rethink their relationship to Moscow and move towards a greater degree of independence from the Soviet Union or association with the non-communist world. Their precise course of action would depend on many factors, notably the character and probable duration of changes in the Soviet Union and the terms the Free World might offer for a change in [Chinese] orientation." 

11. See CSP, vol. 3, p. 129: "in the U. S., I was asked many questions about the relations between the Soviet Union and China. I must assume that these questions derived from the revisionist anti-Chinese propaganda in the Yugoslav press which recently . . . published insinuations about incipient disagreements, if you please, between the Soviet Union and China. ... I replied that the gentlemen questioners were evidently dreaming sweet dreams in which, lo and behold, magic could cause disagreements to appear in the socialist camp between the Soviet Union and China. But I said that . . . the dream was unrealisable. Soviet-Chinese friendship rests on the unshakable foundation of Marxist-Leninist ideology, on the common goals of communism, on the fraternal mutual support of the peoples of our countries, on joint struggles against imperialism and for peace and socialism. [Applause.] The greetings of the CPC Central Committee to our congress, signed by Comrade Mao Tse-tung . . . are a reaffirmation of the eternal, indissoluble friendship between our parties and between our countries. [Applause] We shall cherish this friendship as the apple of our eye. Our friendship is a sacred thing, and let not those who would seek to defile it reach out with unclean hands for this purpose. [Applause.]" 

12. "Imperialist, renegade and revisionist hopes of a split within the socialist camp are built on sand and doomed to failure. All the socialist countries cherish the unity of the socialist camp like the apple of their eye." (Manifesto) 

13. "I want to emphasize our constant effort to strengthen the bonds of fraternal friendship with the CPC, with the great Chinese people. ... the friendship of our two great peoples, the unity of our two parties ... are of exceptional importance in the struggle for the triumph of our common cause. . . . The CPSU and the Soviet people will do their utmost to further increase the unity of our parties and our peoples, so as not only to disappoint our enemies but to jolt them even more strongly with our unity, to attain the realisation of our great goal, the triumph of communism." (Khrushshev's speech, January 6, 1961) 

14. In his speech to the Twenty-first CPSU Congress (CSP, vol. 3, pp. 77-78), Chou En-lai said: "The Soviet Union and China are fraternal socialist countries . . . the close friendship of the peoples of our two countries is eternal and indestructible." In an interview published in Peking Review on November 8, 1960, he said, "The solidarity between the two great countries, China and the Soviet Union, is the bulwark of the defence of world peace. What the imperialists and all reactionaries fear the most is the solidarity of the socialist countries. They seek by every means to sow discord and break up this unity." 

15. The Sino-Soviet Dispute, an article by Geoffrey Francis Hudson, Richard Lowenthal, and Roderick MacFarquhar which was published by the China Quarterly, 1961, p. 35. 

16. A timely warning against false historical analogies was given by former leading American communist Jay Lovestone in testimony before the Internal Security Committee of the U. S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary on January 26 and February 2, 1961: "We must guard against the temptation to resort to historical analogies. Since Communist Russia and Communist China are bound together by this overriding common objective [communist conquest and transformation of the world], it would be dangerously false to equate their differences or jealousies with the hostility and clash of interests between Czarist Russia and pre-World War I China." 

17. Kommunist, no. 5 (1964), p. 21. 

18. Party Life, no. 10 (1964), p. 65. 

19. Ibid., no. 7 (1964), p. 9. 

20. Problems of Philosophy (October 1958). 

21. See his speech at Leipzig on March 7, 1959, reprinted in World without Arms, World without Wars (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), vol. 1, p. 198: "Broad co-operation is developing between the sovereign countries of the socialist camp in every sphere of economic, public, political and cultural life. Speaking of the future, I believe that the socialist countries' further development will in all likelihood follow the line of consolidating the single world socialist economic system. The economic barriers that divided our countries under capitalism will be removed one after another, and the common economic basis of world socialism will be steadily strengthened, eventually making the question of boundaries pointless." 

22. CSP, vol. 3, p. 188: "The thesis in Comrade N. S. Krushchev's report that "from the theoretical standpoint it would be more correct to assume that by successfully employing the potentialities inherent in socialism, the countries of socialism will enter the higher phase of communist society more or less simultaneously" will be of tremendous interest not only to Communists of the Soviet Union but also to Communists of all the socialist countries as well as Communists of the entire world. This is the first formulation of the new thesis that the law of planned and proportional development applies not only to individual socialistcountries but also to the economy of the socialist camp as a whole. This is a new pronouncement in the theory of scientific communism. It expresses the profound truth of Leninism that the world socialist camp constitutes a single economic system. As time goes on, the economic plans of these countries will be more and more coordinated and the more highly developed countries will help the less developed countries in order to march in a united front toward communism at an increasingly faster pace." 

23. Mende, China and Her Shadow, pp. 175-76, 338-39. 

24. The following is an extract from this letter: "It is not only at present that the Soviet leaders have begun to collude with US imperialism and attempt to menace China. As far back as 20th June 1959, when there was not yet the slightest sign of a treaty on stopping nuclear tests, the Soviet government unilaterally tore up the agreement on new technology for national defence concluded between China and the Soviet Union on 15 October 1957, and refused to provide China with a sample of an atomic bomb and technical data concerning its manufacture. This was done as a presentation gift at the time the Soviet leader went to the US for talks with Eisenhower in September." 

25. For an example, see Trud, August 31, 1963: "The 10 MW pilot nuclear power plant and the 24 million electron volt cyclotron commissioned in 1958 were another aspect of Soviet aid to China which was too many-sided to be mentioned in all the details." 

26. See Peking Review, April 26, 1960: "A new nuclear particle—anti sigma minus hyperon—has been discovered by scientists of the socialist countries working together at the Joint Nuclear Research Institute in Dubna, outside Moscow (established in 1956 by representatives of 12 governments of the socialist states). In addition to the Soviet physicists who led in obtaining this remarkable result, Professor Wang Kan-chang, prominent Chinese scientist who is the vice-director of the Joint Institute played a big part. He has long been a figure of world reknown in the field of physics. Speaking of the new success, Professor Wang described it as the first discovery of a charged anti-hyperon ever made, marking another step forward in man's knowledge of the basic particles of the micro-world. Professor Wang attributed this triumph first of all to leadership and support by the Soviet director of the Institute and to close co-operation in work by scientists of other socialist countries. It is truly, he said, a fresh testimony to the superiority of the socialist system." 

27. Snow, Other Side of the River, p. 642. 

28. See Mende, China and Her Shadow, pp. 182-93. 

29. Military Strategy: Soviet Doctrine and Concepts, ed. Marshal V. D. Sokolovskiy (Moscow, 1962). 

30. For an instance, see Pravda, August 27, 1963, on the alleged Chinese objection to the admission of the Soviet delegation to the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference in 1963 in Moshi on the grounds that the Soviet delegates were neither black nor yellow. 

31. See Douglas Jackson, Russo-Chinese Borderlands, p. 91: "Salisbury also attributes the Khrushchev virgin and idle lands programme which in 1954-56 resulted in the ploughing of millions of acres of unused land in Western Siberia  and Northern Kazakhstan and the settling of several hundred thousand Russians and Ukrainians there, as proof of Soviet concern for its vast empty Siberian spaces. The Khrushchev programme unquestionably has political overtones, but more compelling reasons for its implementation may be found in domestic conditions in the Soviet Union than in the Chinese population problem." 

32. In Moscow on September 2, 1980, the Chinese Friendship Association celebrated the anniversary of the Japanese defeat in Manchuria. A report was delivered by the association's deputy chairman, Tikhvinskiy. 

33. New York Times, November 22, 1966. 

34. Kommunist, no. 5 (1964), p. 21. 

35. See Douglas Jackson, Russo-Chinese Borderlands, p. 110: "As events have unfolded their role has changed with circumstances. From zones of tension between Imperial Russia, Imperial China, Soviet Russia and Nationalist China, the borderlands have become, since the Communist revolution in China, zones of co-operation and stabilisation. Their further economic development will undoubtedly strengthen the hold that the Communists have over them—and in turn, they will contribute much to the overall Communist strength. Indeed, the role of the borderlands in future SinoSoviet relations may in some ways be as dramatic as that played in preceding centuries of Russo-Chinese competition and distrust. Whatever the future may bring, the lands of Asia, where Russia and China meet, will continue to fascinate us, and what is more, demand our awareness and understanding." 

36. For examples, see the speeches of Mao, Liu Shaochi, Peng Te-huai, and Teng Hsiao-p'ing at the Eighth CPC Congress in September 1956. (Jen min-Jih-Pao, September 1956) 

37. See Field-Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, Three Continents (London: Collins, 1962), p. 40: "Chou emphasized again and again that China must have peace, although she will always fight to resist aggression against her own territory. . . . Marshal Chen Yi, the foreign minister, had given me exactly the same views during my talks with him." See also Chou En-lai's emphasis on China's recognition of the policy of peaceful co-existence in the article in Peking Review, November 8, 1961. 

38. See Khrushchev's speech of January 6, 1961: (the war in Algeria) is a liberation war, a war of independence waged by the people. It is a sacred war. We recognize such wars; we have helped and shall continue to help peoples fighting for their freedom. ... is there a likelihood of such wars recurring? Yes, there is. Are uprisings of this kind likely to recur? Yes, they are. But wars of this kind are popular uprisings. Is there the likelihood of conditions in other countries reaching the point where the cup of the popular patience overflows and they take to arms? Yes, there is such a likelihood. What is the attitude of the Marxists to such uprisings? A most favourable attitude. These uprisings cannot be identified with wars between countries, with local wars, because the insurgent people are fighting for the right to selfdetermination, for their social and independent national development; these uprisings are directed against the corrupt reactionary regimes, against the colonialists. The Communists support just wars of this kind wholeheartedly and without reservations."  

39. "The interests of the struggle for the working-class cause demand of each communist party and of the great army of communists of all countries ever closer unity of will and action." (Manifesto) 

40. Kommunist, no. 13 (1964), p. 21; and Jen-min Jih Pao and Iluntzi, February 4, 1964. 

41. World Marxist Review—Problems of Peace and Socialism, no. 6 (1964), p. 33