“Soviet-Chinese Relations, 1945–1970”
Sino-Soviet Relations in the Late 1960s
In the second half of 1966 the Maoist leadership of the CCP launched a frontal attack against the position of socialism in China and openly broke with the principles of Marxism-Leninism in domestic and foreign policy. At the 11th Plenary Session of the CC CCP, convened in August 1966, the leadership initiated the task of launching the so-called “cultural revolution” against the foundations of socialism in the PRC.
The 11th Plenary Session met at a time when Maoists already had succeeded in disorganizing party ranks and eliminating leading party cadres who opposed them. On the eve of the Plenary Session the newspaper Hung Ch’i, taken over by Maoists, published the threat that “all who spoke against the ideas of Mao Tse-tung, regardless of the position they occupied, and regardless of their ‘prestige’ and ‘authority,’ would be overthrown.”
A secret session approved the decision whereby Lin Piao, PRC Minister of Defense and Mao’s close comrade-in-arms, was designated “Deputy Commander-in-Chief” of the CCP. Thus Lin Piao became second to Mao Tse-tung in leadership of the “cultural revolution.” This indicated clearly that the guiding force in antisocialist attacks of the Maoists was the military. Later on it became known that Mao Tse-tung, at the 11th Plenary Session, promulgated the call to “open fire on the staffs,” which was the signal to begin the pogrom of party organs from the top down.
The events unfolded in the PRC under the banner of “cultural revolution” reflected most adversely on Sino-Soviet relations and led directly to further aggravation of relations. Intensification of the struggle with the CPSU and the Soviet Union became a most important trend in the activities of Peking leaders during the “cultural revolution.”
1. Origins of the “cultural revolution”
The “cultural revolution” represented no sudden turn in the policy of the Maoists. Although formally initiated at the 11th Plenary Session of the CC CCP, it can in fact be traced to an earlier period, forming the concentrated expression of the deep political crisis resulting from the fatal course followed by CCP leaders.
As has been discussed, after failure of the adventurist policy of “Three Red Banners” (the new “general line,” the “great leap forward,” and the “people’s communes”), Maoists were forced to conduct a so-called normalization of conditions in the country. The main bulwark of PRC economic policy at that time was the policy established by the 1961–62 CC CCP plenary sessions that “agriculture is the basis of the entire national economy.”
But a “normalization” failing to restore fundamental principles of socialist economy could not bring the PRC’s economy out of crisis completely. The policy of “agriculture is the basis of the entire national economy” acted as a brake on the country’s economic development as a whole, and in individual branches of industry (machine-tool building, ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy, and others) led to cutbacks in production, or to significant underuse of productive capacity. In 1965, the last year of “normalization,” the gross production of industry was 26 percent below the 1959 level.1
Increase in agricultural production was limited, as always, because of the extremely low level of mechanization. The villages had some 100,000 tractors at the end of 1965, whereas the country’s minimum requirement was somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million units. Machines worked no more than 10 percent of the entire sown area, primarily on army farms. The grain harvest during years of “normalization” barely reached the 1957 level (180 to 185 million tons). What this amounted to was that annual per capita production of grain was 12 percent below the mean for the years of the First Five-Year Plan period, and 20 percent below that prior to the war with Japan. In 1965 the total grain harvest was well below the level called for by the Second Five-Year Plan adopted by the 8th Congress of the CCP in 1956, and set for achievement by 1962 (250 million tons). China had bought between 5 and 6 million tons of grain a year from foreign countries; that is, 30 percent of the cost of the country’s total imports,2 since the end of 1960.
Within the CCP economic difficulties resulted in exacerbation of the struggle over the direction for the country’s future development. Antagonisms between two directions in party leadership became even more pronounced. One direction was to apply rational methods to development of the national economy, taking the experience of socialist countries into consideration. The other, advocated by Mao Tse-tung, categorically rejected international socialist experience and insisted on voluntaristic methods of controlling the economy, and on stepping up tempos of economic development.
Those Chinese Communists who continued to support Marxist-Leninist views criticized the Maoist course. At the same time, Mao’s adventurist policy created increasing dissatisfaction, even among former adherents who, while generally favoring nationalist positions, doubted the future of the policy. This made the struggle among the CCP leaders particularly keen.
In 1964 and 1965 the Maoists embarked on a systematic attack against all who threatened their supremacy. This attack was carried out through further curtailment of party and state democracy, militarization of society, strengthening the role of the army, arousal of nationalistic passions, and greater exaggeration of the cult of Mao.
Even then principal targets of attacks by the Maoists were intellectuals, for they, more than any other stratum of the population, were capable of exposing the fatal consequences of Mao’s foreign and domestic policies. It was among Chinese intellectuals that the so-called campaign to rectify the style of work, the purpose of which was to force the intellectual class to accept the Maoist line unprotestingly, was intensified. The first casualties of the “cultural revolution” were party intellectuals, the leading body of the intelligentsia. Mao Tun, a world-renowned writer, was removed from his post as Minister of Culture. One can unequivocally state that between 1964 and 1966 the flower of the Chinese intellectual class was accused of political unreliability and subjected to repression, which began with degrading “criticism,” removal from their posts to the countryside, and ended with physical violence. Jen Min Jihpao, in October 1966, admitted that 160,000 intellectuals had been sent into the countryside for “labor reindoctrination” in the previous six months.
The Maoists simultaneously mounted attacks against the progressive cultural heritage of other peoples. The Maoists also attacked the creativity of such famous representatives of world culture as Shakespeare, Rabelais, Stendhal, Balzac, Romain Rolland, Beethoven, Mozart, and others. Peking leaders attempted to hide their hypocritical concern for observance of the “criteria of a revolutionary character” by hit-and-run attacks against outstanding classical works of literature and the arts. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, was condemned on the ground that it had been written and performed prior to the publication of the Communist Manifesto. Balzac was faulted for “propagandizing the bourgeois theory of humanity” in writing of the love of Pére Goriot for his daughters. The operas Carmen, Traviata, Yevgeniy Onegin, and the ballets Swan Lake and Giselle, were said to “stupefy and corrupt the workers.”
Soviet literature was a main target of the Maoist campaign to destroy culture. The works of A. Tolstoi, M. Sholokhov, K. Simonov. Y. Ehrenburg, A. Korneychuk, and other Soviet prose writers and poets were not only declared “bad” and “subversive,” but were liable to destruction. All who had the temerity to read them were subjected to repression as political criminals.
Marxism-Leninism teaches that it is impossible to build socialism unless ignorance and illiteracy are eliminated. It is well known that during the first years of Soviet power, even while civil war raged, V. I. Lenin made the appeal to “learn, learn, and learn.” He believed that the primary task of builders of socialism was that of mastering and critically reappraising everything “of value in the more than 2,000 years of development of human thought and culture.”3 The creator of the world’s first socialist state repeatedly insisted: “It is necessary to take all culture capitalism has abandoned and build socialism from it. It is necessary to take all the science, technology, all knowledge and art. Without this we cannot build the life of a communist society.”4
Lenin’s admonitions applied fully to China as well, where the accomplishment of a genuine cultural revolution is imperative. Even today there are over 300 million illiterates. There are not enough schools and teachers in the city or in the country. The national economy of China has a crying need for qualified scientific and technical cadres. It would seem that under such conditions the growth of culture and training of specialists would be of primary importance. Yet Peking leaders deliberately charted a different course. The building of schools and higher institutions of learning was curtailed at the end of the 1950s.
Propaganda campaigns calling for preparation for the so-called revolutionary war were used as a principal weapon to distract the Chinese people from their troubles, and to ensure their unquestioning obedience. The purpose of these campaigns was to strengthen the role of the army in the life of the country, to accelerate the militarization of the economy, the spreading of barracks-like procedures, and to justify the low standard of living of the populace. The following episode is a case in point. In the summer of 1965 a Chinese delegation visiting the Soviet Union was invited to attend a meeting of the Moscow City Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, in the course of which they were told about our huge housing construction program. The Chinese representatives, after listening to the discussion, expressed surprise at the expenditure of such huge sums on such “nonsense” as housing, and said that “we in the People’s Republic of China are not engaged in housing construction, we are preparing the people for revolution.”
The nationalists in the CCP, in militarizing the country’s economic life and advancing the army to a commanding position, almost immediately took steps to remove the army from party control by converting it to a tool of their military-bureaucratic dictatorship.
The most politically knowledgeable and active elements of the officer corps were eliminated between 1959 and 1965. The so-called “revolutionization” of the armed forces was carried out in May 1965, when all distinguishing military ranks and insignia were abolished under the pretext of “further strengthening the link between commanders and the masses.” In fact, this was an effort to reduce the role of a large segment of military cadres, trained during years of national-liberation and revolutionary war, who sided with enemies of the Maoists. There was simultaneous intensification of propaganda of the thesis that the “ideas” of Mao applied to all spheres of activity, including military. Those who advocated improvement in professional training and equipping of the army, and who ignored indoctrination work among the soldiers and officers devoted “to the ideas of the Great Helmsman,” were criticized. This “revolution” served to cloak the new wave of military purges.
“Revolutionization” of the army essentially was preparation for militarization of the country’s entire social life. Political sections composed of army cadres were established in plants and institutions in 1964–1965. In other words, it was now possible for the army to exert direct influence over activities of plants and institutions, thus simplifying the transition to a country-wide scale of the “cultural revolution.”
CCP nationalists, who knew they couldn’t depend solely on the army for staying in power, took action to shatter the moral and political unity of the Chinese people. They resorted to using the slogan “intensification of the class struggle” for setting one stratum of Chinese society against another. The worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, each was hounded relentlessly by the spectre of the “restoration of capitalism” in China through the “crafty designs of the class enemies.”
Long before official proclamation of the “cultural revolution” the Maoists also instigated a struggle against wholesome forces in the party and in government bodies. This struggle, in 1964 and 1965, took the form of the so-called movement to strengthen and clean up party and state apparati. This movement became the excuse to expel from the party all who showed the slightest deviation from the antisocialist course of the ruling faction. Among leading party notables who followed P’eng Teh-huai, a member of the Politburo of the CCP and Minister of Defense of the PRC, into political oblivion were such famous leaders as Ch’en Yun, also a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China, Teng Tzu-hui, Hsi Chung-hsun, Wang Chia-hsiang, and others. Active replacement of leading cadres went on as well within ministries and departments. According to incomplete data, some 1,000 ministers, vice ministers, heads of administrations, directors of scientific research institutions and of higher institutions of learning in the country were replaced in 1964 and 1965.
A procedure known as rehabilitation through labor was introduced in 1964 and 1965 for purposes of repressing those with different ideas. This was in addition to “labor indoctrination” practiced in special camps. A system was initiated whereby neighbors shadowed each other, denounced each other regularly and constantly criticized anyone suspected of disloyalty to the “Great Helmsman.” Such forms of “indoctrination” as holding “struggle meetings” were widespread. All present at such meetings censured the suspect, “detailing the history of the family,” in the course of which all “sins” were exposed and any misconduct on the part of any member of the family was criticized.
The cult of Mao Tse-tung was used on an ever-expanding scale to dupe the Chinese population. Chinese propaganda attempted to create around Mao an aura of “genius,” “wise,” “great,” “infallible,” “sagacious,” and so forth. His “ideas” were called the “food,” “weapon,” “compass,” and “lighthouse” of the Chinese people. Day in and day out the press and radio insisted that it was not the party, but the hero, standing above the masses, the “great leader” and his “ideas,” that lifted and mobilized all the Chinese people for the revolution, and who was organizing and leading the masses toward a new society. The Chinese revolution was described as the creation of the hands of Mao Tse-tung, as the child of his “ideas,” rather than of an objective historical process.
The low cultural level of the majority of Chinese, the dominance of petty bourgeois psychology, and the strong vestiges of feudalism and patriarchal principles enabled organizers of the “cultural revolution” to foist their dogma on the masses with comparative ease. The illiterate and semi-illiterate, systematically subjected to ideological indoctrination, were infected with fanatical faith in the leader, thus erecting virtually insurmountable obstacles along the path to their awakening from this mystical trance.
Let us cite one typical example of ugly turns taken in China by the cult of Mao Tse-tung even before widespread development of the “cultural revolution.” At the end of 1964 a Soviet delegation visiting a porcelain factory in Ch’angsha (the principal city in Hunan province) witnessed an “explanation” by the secretary of the factory’s party committee of elimination of flaws in the plant’s products. He said:
We had been struggling for a long time with the problem of how to eliminate shortcomings. Then we decided to study the works of Mao Tse-tung and, after seeking advice from higher authority, began with his work “On Contradictions.” We read it once (everybody in the factory studied it) and understood that the main contradiction in our work was the black spots on the plates. Reading the book the second time we were able to eliminate this shortcoming. Still, the quality of the plates and dishes produced did not meet all requirements. Then we read the book for the third time and understood that only the main contradiction had been eliminated, whereas secondary contradictions remained. Included were rough surfaces and cracks in the glazed layer. These shortcomings gradually were overcome too. So Mao-Tse-tung’s work helped us improve the quality of production.
Despite all its effort, the dominant faction in the CCP was unable decisively to strengthen its position. Dissatisfaction with the faction’s policies grew among leading party figures and in the broad party masses. Local party and state authorities arbitrarily restored procedures existing prior to the “great leap forward” and the “people’s communes.” Disregarding intimidation and repression, Chinese writers published works caustically ridiculing the cult of Mao Tse-tung in allegory, and subjected his “ideas” to devastating criticism.
The Maoist domination was threatened not only by the rising tide of discontent in the country, but also by major failures in the international arena.
The Maoists were unable to break down the socialist commonwealth. With the exception of Albania, CCP nationalists were unable to find support for their subversive aims. Despite intrigues of Chinese leaders, the striving for unity and further development of close cooperation became increasingly stronger in the socialist community.
The chauvinist course embarked upon by Peking leaders received no significant support from the world Communist movement. Attempts of Peking to establish hegemony in the movement failed. The overwhelming majority of fraternal parties decisively rejected the antiLeninist foreign policy platform of the Maoists.
The pro-Peking splinter groups, preaching alien ideas in alien voices, were unable to establish mass organizations and win influence in worker’s movements. Appeals for splitting the Communist parties and the collusion of Maoist forces in the struggle against Marxist-Leninist parties with activities of political police organs in capitalist states exposed proponents of the Peking line, making their isolation more complete. Dissension increased in many pro-Chinese groups, leading to their fragmentation and often to their complete disorganization.
The largest Communist party in the nonsocialist world, the Indonesian, figured prominently in the splitting plans of CCP leaders. They succeeded in foisting their political goals on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Indonesia. They pushed Indonesian Communists into organizing the armed coup in the fall of 1965, the outcome of which is well known. The Indonesian Communist Party and other democratic organizations were virtually destroyed; hundreds of thousands of Indonesian Communists were brutally murdered. Yet even after these tragic events, the Maoists continued to push leftists in Indonesia, now bled white, along the lethal path to civil war. Peking leaders simultaneously made every effort to isolate the Communist Party of Indonesia from the international Communist movement, despite the urgent need of the defeated Indonesian Communists for international help and support.
The tragic events in Indonesia provided a graphic lesson for the world revolutionary movement of dire consequences of practical application of the fallacious, adventuristic concepts of Maoist leadership. The regrettable outcome of events in Indonesia intensified the dissatisfaction smouldering among Communist parties under the influence of CCP nationalists.
Nor were efforts of the Chinese leadership to control such international democratic organizations as the World Peace Council, the World Federation of Trade Unions, and other organizations, successful. Machinations of Chinese leaders also failed with respect to the national liberation movement. The severe defeats suffered by those detachments of the national liberation movement blindly following Peking alerted both governments of developing nations and revolutionary democratic parties to the perfidious goals of the Maoists.
The failure of the attempts to turn Afro-Asian nations against the Partial Test Ban Treaty, the failure of hopes to dominate the 2nd Afro-Asian Conference, the necessity to abandon the establishment of a “revolutionary UN,” the failure of plans to wreck the Tashkent Conference convened for peaceful settlement of the Indo-Pakistan conflict, all corroborated the fact that the Maoist foreign policy was rejected by the Third World nations.
Peking leaders proved equally unsuccessful in constructing a separate bloc of Southeast Asian states under PRC hegemony. The Peking-Djakarta axis (the nucleus of the planned bloc) did not materialize. Relations between the PRC and Indonesia deteriorated drastically after the events of September 30, 1965 and reached the point of almost complete rupture.
The weakening of China’s foreign policy positions also became apparent in deterioration of relations with a number of Arab countries and in severence of diplomatic relations with Burundi, Dahomy, and the Central African Republic. Nor was Peking successful in pressing its course on progressive organizations in Nigeria, South Africa, Basutoland, and the Portuguese colonies. State leaders in liberated countries, as well as leaders of progressive left-nationalist parties, were fully cognizant of the ruinous foreign policy course of the PRC.
Progressive forces all over the world became increasingly convinced of the hypocrisy of Peking’s anti-imperialist slogans. It was apparent that despite their unrestrained “revolutionary” phraseology, Chinese leaders in relations with imperialist states followed mercenary nationalist motives. While accusing the Soviet Union “of collusion with imperialism,” they in fact proceeded to unprincipled rapprochement with capitalist countries.
Peking leaders were especially zealous in seeking a “mutual understanding” with the United States. They directed great attention to securing Washington’s understanding that their anti-imperialist declarations were without foundation. The response to continuous intrusions by American ships and aircraft into territorial waters and air spaces of the PRC was limited to verbose “serious warnings” by Peking. In August 1964 the PRC Minister of Foreign Affairs declared:
. . . if American warships do enter the territorial waters of the People’s Republic of China they clear out of their own accord. We Chinese do not shoot at them, nor are we going to bomb American military bases on Taiwan, although we could. China does not want war, and the United States knows it.
Peking sought to establish secret economic ties with the United States, particularly via Hong Kong and Macao, buying through them such American goods as petroleum products, chemicals, and others. In turn, as the magazine The Scotsman reported on November 12, 1965, China was not reluctant about shipping goods to the United States via third countries.
The Chinese leadership reconciled itself to the fact that Hong Kong was a “military base for the expansion by the United States of the aggressive war against Vietnam.” US naval vessels made 340 visits to Hong Kong in 1965, and 390 in 1966. The response to this by the Chinese was to dispatch formal protests to the British administration in Hong Kong.
The PRC steadily lost stature as a socialist state. Its line proved to sharply contradict the general position taken by socialist countries, the Communist movement, and by all anti-imperialist forces on important questions of international politics.
Domestically, so long as the CCP continued to function, so too did the organs of people’s authority; the trade unions, the Young Communists, and the mass workers’ organizations. In other words, so long as the political superstructure of the people’s democratic system, albeit greatly deformed, continued to function, the Maoists were powerless to turn the country from its socialist path. The ruling faction faced the alternative, either retreat and admit defeat, or try to wreck the political superstructure of the people’s democratic system, set up a military bureaucratic dictatorship, and provide conditions needed for undivided domination. As we know, the Maoists chose the latter course.
The most serious obstacle on this road was the CCP, which is why it was the chief target of attack by the Maoists. Here the Maoist faction had to face the issue of finding the forces to support it. The urgency of this issue increased as failures of Maoist policy became evident to active party members, as well as to broad strata of workers and peasants who had been victims of this policy.
The Maoists undoubtedly knew that the struggle with the Communist Party would not be easy. They considered the fact that the older generation of party workers had been indoctrinated, not only on Mao Tse-tung’s articles and speeches, but also on Marxist-Leninist theory. Despite the lengthy anti-Soviet campaign, this generation continued to sympathize with the Soviet people and the CPSU. It was more difficult to trick them with statements of “collusion between the Soviet Union and the United States,” and of “restoration of capitalism” supposedly taking place in the USSR. And they understood the importance of culture for building socialism, the need to master the heights of modern science and engineering. Better than others, they foresaw fatal consequences in rejecting the experience of socialist construction gathered by fraternal parties. This is why the ruling clique did not trust party activitists, why it did not trust the workers and peasants. Moreover, the Maoists feared this hidden dissatisfaction could trigger an open attack against its policies.
The Maoists found support for their antisocialist course in the army, which was declared to be “the most faithful and obedient weapon of the Great Helmsman.” School children and young students, too, were counted on for support. Youth was indoctrinated in the Maoist spirit, and had only a vague, distorted idea of the ideals of socialism, of Marxism-Leninism, and of current internal and external events. The cynical plan to exploit the emotionalism and instability of youth, its dissatisfactions and ambitions, played no small part in what followed. Significant too was that over half the students in China were of bourgeois and petty bourgeois stock.
The detachments of Red Guards became shock troops attacking party organizations. Moreover, nonparty youth, primarily petty bourgeois, who distinguished themselves during the pogroms, were singled out by the Maoists as the “best,” the “most advanced,” the “most conscious part” of the Chinese people. It was incumbent on old party members, experienced workers, and outstanding leaders in arts and sciences to learn from these youth and imitate their deeds.
The appearance of the Red Guard detachments, backed by the army and state security organizations, initiated one of the most tragic phases in the history of postrevolutionary China. The ruling clique officially sanctioned mass excesses in the capital and the provinces. These took the form of mockery, assault, and murder of Maoist antagonists, scoffing at cultural values, and destruction of the remnants of socialist law and order.
As they unleashed the “cultural revolution,” the Maoists declared that the struggle was against “a handful of counterrevolutionaries, remnants of antiparty, antisocialist elements, who had infiltrated the party and had been cloaked with authority.” The mendacity of this version was soon unmasked, however. As early as April and May 1966, when Red Guards began storming Peking committees of the party and the Young Communists, editorial offices of the central party newspapers, the party organization of Peking University, and other party and state authorities, it became clear that dismissal from active political life of a broad stratum of party and state workers was the true goal. By the beginning of September 1966 some 20 party committees in the provinces and in large cities had been charged with following an anti-Maoist line. The publication of over 100 central and provincial newspapers and journals, including organs of the Central Committee of the Young Communists, the Chinese Federation of Trade Unions, and others, was discontinued.
Growing antagonisms among Mao’s possible successors inflamed the struggle. The position of PRC Chairman Liu Shao-ch’i was seriously weakened, and members of the CC CCP Secretariat, P’eng Chen, Lu Ting-yi, and Lo Jui-ching, were removed from their posts as a result of clashes within party ranks. Mao’s wife Chiang Ch’ing, his closest collaborators, Kang Sheng, Ch’en Po-ta, and others now seized the limelight. These people led the general purge, “the shake-up” of the entire party and state apparatus.
The Maoists dealt savagely with enemies and rivals, subjecting them to torment and torture, and mercilessly belittling their dignity. Graphic evidence is contained in press photographs showing “court” scenes of the trials of P’eng Chen, Lo Jui-ching, Lu Ting-yi, and Yang Shengk’un. Photographs of these men, recent comrades-in-arms of Mao, show them to have their heads pushed forcibly downward. Lo Jui-ching’s leg is maimed, and he no longer is able to stand and walk. He was carried around the stadium in which his “trial” was held on his “round of shame” in a basket.
Organizers of the “cultural revolution” initiated the destruction of the CCP by removing from the political arena a great many members of the Central Committee, leading workers in party and administrative apparati, and all those Communists who had disagreed with Mao Tsetung’s course. Their methods included repressions, expulsion, and discredit. Over two-thirds of the CC CCP elected by the 8th Congress, the overwhelming majority of leaders of the central offices, the CCP provincial and city committees, the leading workers on ideological fronts, the leadership of creative unions of intellectuals, the leaders of higher institutions of learning and scientific research institutions, and many famous military leaders were persecuted. These people were accused of having approved decisions of the 8th Congress of the CCP and the general line for building a socialist society on the basis of Marxist-Leninist theory in cooperation with other socialist countries. They were persecuted for having censured the “Three Red Banners” policy and for having warned about dangers inherent in repeating the adventuristic “Great Leap Forward.”
The ruling clique simultaneously embarked on a course designed to undermine state institutions of people’s power. The work of the National People’s Congress and the standing committee was completely paralyzed. Over half the deputies to the National People’s Congress and members of its standing committee became victims of repression. PRC Chairman Liu Shao-ch’i, without knowledge of the National People’s Congress, and in violation of the Constitution, was dismissed. Elected bodies of people’s authority in the provinces were disbanded. Military control was established over the State Council of the PRC and over its central offices and ministries. Most of the vice premiers of the PRC State Council, directors of general offices, and ministers were removed from their posts.
At the outset of the “cultural revolution,” Maoists counted on replacing party and state bodies by groups or committees of the “cultural revolution,” with a central directing system residing in the “Cultural Revolution Affairs Group,” ostensibly set up in the CC CCP, but actually placed above it.
Once the “Cultural Revolution Affairs Group” revealed their inadequacies, efforts were made to establish the apparatus of authority in the form of “communes.” When results of the Peking, Shanghai, and other communal experiments showed this form of authority to be also unsatisfactory, the Maoists tried to strengthen their hold by using so-called “revolutionary committees,” based formally on the “triple alliance” of the army, the “revolutionary masses” (the Red Guards and the agitators), and some experienced workers. These “committees” in fact were completely controlled by the army and were organs of the military-bureaucratic dictatorship of the Maoists.
With the help of the army, the “revolutionary committees” were substituted for dispersed committees of the CCP. Their establishment was backed by the system of military control set up in June 1966, which at once encompassed the central and local state apparatus (the ministries and offices of the PRC State Council, state security, the courts, radio stations, civil aviation, warehouses, plants, ports, railroads, and the like). This enabled the ruling clique, at its discretion, to take charge of state apparatus and departments to issue orders, and to remove and shift cadres all in the name of the State Council. In fact, the country’s entire economic and cultural life came under military control. This situation remained even after establishment of “revolutionary committees,” the organization of which was not completed until September 1968 (and then only at the provincial level).
The comparative ease with which Maoists destroyed constituted organs of power, paralyzed CCP activities, and established the “revolutionary committees” is explainable in large measure by the peculiarities of Chinese social structure.
Only about 15 million of 300 million gainfully employed people in China, or about 5 percent, were associated with modern production, science, and culture; no more than 10 million were directly engaged in material production (workers, civil servants, engineering and technical personnel). The labor turnover that began in 1958 was created artificially by closing of plants, by laying up building projects, and by administrative resettlement of urban populations. The first to be sent to the country were experienced workers with long records in industry. This policy resulted in serious qualitative changes in the composition of the working class, with a sharp increase in the proportion of political laggards. These elements formed the detachments of so-called “agitators” during the “cultural revolution.”
An even more intensive disintegration of the working class resulting from the “cultural revolution” was to set unqualified workers, particularly youth, against experienced workers. The agitators, incited by Maoists, embarked on a wide-ranging campaign to replace the bonus system (which comprised 10 to 15 percent of the wages earned by qualified workers) with a wage reduction. This campaign, called the “struggle with bourgeois economism,” was counterattacked by experienced workers. Strikes began in many cities, but were ruthlessly put down with help of the military.
The introduction of the “worker, peasant” system, wherein workers and peasants alternated working in industry and agriculture, also contributed to disintegration of the working class. One purpose of this system was to bring the working class down to the ideological level of the backward peasantry. Workers sent to the country not only were forbidden to bring proletarian, advanced culture and ideology to the peasants, but quite the contrary, were forced to become like peasants in practice, living and working.
2. Anti-Sovietism—the most important aspect of the “cultural revolution”
The most important feature of the “cultural revolution,” from its inception, was the clearly distinguishable anti-Soviet bias. The 11th plenum of the CC CCP, convened in August 1966, approved all anti-Soviet measures undertaken by the Maoists during the preceding four years, citing as “entirely correct and necessary” open criticism of the CPSU, and approving all anti-Soviet editorials printed by Jen Min Jihpao and Hung Ch’i. The plenary session stipulated that “a clear line of demarcation must be drawn” between the CCP on the one hand and the CPSU and other Marxist-Leninist parties on the other, and that the “struggle against them must be carried through to the end.”
The 11th Plenary Session did not limit its declarations to a political line hostile to the Soviet Union and the CPSU. In its documents the plenum deliberately distorted the political course of the CPSU, and there were concentrations of slander summarizing all the basic theses of anti-Soviet propaganda. These documents were additional reminders that the Maoists’ most important goal was indoctrinating the Chinese people with a psychological barrier against rapprochement with the CPSU and other fraternal parties holding Marxist-Leninist positions.
The anti-Soviet campaign in the PRC received a new impetus from the 11th plenum. The location of the Soviet Embassy in Peking became the site of unruly anti-Soviet demonstrations. This street was renamed “Struggle Against Revisionism” Street on August 20, 1966. All houses and fences along the street, sidewalks, and roadway were slathered with slogans urging the “smashing” of the CPSU and the Soviet Union and the “destruction of all things Soviet.” Wall posters affixed to the Embassy of the USSR by Red Guards threatened Soviet personnel by declaring: “when the time comes, we will skin you, we will strip out your veins, we will cremate your corpses, and we will scatter the ashes to the winds.”
On August 22, 1966 an Embassy car flying the national flag of the USSR was detained on this street. In the car were the chargé d’affaires and other Soviet diplomats. Red Guards attempted to force them out of the car and make them walk past a portrait of Mao Tse-tung set up in the center of the roadway.
On August 26, 1966 the Soviet government handed a note to the PRC government containing an emphatic protest against the hooliganism in front of the Embassy and demanding that effective measures to ensure immediate and unconditional cessation of actions interfering with normal activities of the Embassy and staff be implemented. Chinese authorities pointedly ignored these lawful demands.
A new anti-Soviet demonstration was organized near the USSR Embassy on August 29. It lasted through the night and continued into the next evening. The meeting which inaugurated this mass excess had heard the so-called “Appeal to People All Over the Country,” where it was declared that “the Soviet Union is our deadly enemy.”
In the course of the “cultural revolution” monuments symbolic of friendship between the peoples of the USSR and China (the A. S. Pushkin memorial, the monument to Sino-Soviet friendship in Shanghai, and others) were defiled or destroyed. Soviet citizens residing permanently in China became targets of hooliganism, searches, assault, and outrages.
The Soviet press, on September 1, 1966, published a statement “In the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” pointing out that decisions reached by the CC CCP 11th Plenary Session “officially confirmed the intention of the Chinese party leadership to implement further their own course, opposing it to the Marxist-Leninist line jointly worked out by fraternal parties at the conferences of 1957 and 1960,” and that the Chinese leadership “is again provoking a sharp deterioration in relations between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.” The CC CPSU described Chinese actions and statements as steps “rendering a particularly big service to imperialism and reaction,” and stated that responsibility for the renunciation of joint, coordinated struggle against imperialism and reaction, for the unceasing attempts to split the Communist movement, the socialist community, and the anti-imperialist front, rested with the leadership of the CCP and the PRC. In line with its principled course, the CC CPSU stated: “despite the differences created by the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union will continue to promote further the line of strengthening friendship with Chinese Communists, with the multi-million Chinese people, will resolutely uphold the general line of the world Communist movement, the principles of Marxism-Leninism, and proletarian internationalism.”5
On September 20, 1966 Chinese authorities announced a decision reached by the PRC government calling a year’s halt to study by foreign students in Chinese higher institutions of learning, and requiring the departure of Soviet students for home within 10 to 15 days. Soviet students were forced to return; the USSR reciprocated by calling a halt to study by Chinese students and graduate students in the USSR. At the same time the Soviet side expressed readiness to review the question of restoring student exchanges on a reciprocal basis at the convenience of the Chinese.6
CCP leaders used the return of Chinese students to arouse further anti-Soviet hysteria. Yet another demonstration was mounted at the Soviet Embassy in Peking at the end of October 1966. On October 27 the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs forwarded a note of protest regarding the event, but Chinese authorities continued their excesses at the Soviet Embassy. Provocations were even organized on November 7, 1966, the 49th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution!
Continual provocations forced a Soviet delegation visiting the PRC, by invitation of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, to cut short its visit and return home. By this time the Association had been converted into an organization for conducting propaganda and other hostile activities against the CPSU and the Soviet Union. On September 16, 1966 the Embassy of the USSR in Peking was advised officially that the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association had been renamed the Association for the Friendship of the Chinese and Soviet Peoples. In this way CCP leaders reiterated their unwillingness to conduct friendly relations with the Soviet Union along party and state lines. The renaming of the Association also was dictated by plans to use the slogan of friendship between Chinese and Soviet peoples for the purpose of Maoist demagoguery.
In fact, Peking propaganda strove to persuade everyone, from the lowly to the great, that the Soviet Union was carrying out a hostile, even aggressive policy toward China, and that the PRC “was threatened with the danger of intervention not only by imperialist powers, but particularly by the USSR.” The Chinese leadership even dared to make provocative public statements that a military clash between the PRC and the USSR was possible. On September 29, 1965, for example, the PRC Minister of Foreign Affairs, addressing a press conference attended by 400 Chinese and foreign journalists invited to Peking from Hong Kong, Macao, and other places specifically for the purpose, expressed the view that in event of an attack by the United States on China “the modern revisionists” would “coordinate their actions in the north with the United States.” The shibboleth of the “threat from the north” then became a permanent theme of Chinese propaganda directed against our country. Propagandistic effort was undertaken among the Chinese people to “explain” that if the United States attacked China the Soviet Union probably “would occupy the northeast immediately”; that the USSR was numbered among the “dangerous friends,” without whom China “felt quite safe”; and that “Russian rockets could fly from Moscow to Peking.” The populace of the PRC had dinned into it in every way possible that the slightest sympathy for our country was equivalent to treason.
Chinese authorities instigated a violent anti-Soviet provocation in the case of the Soviet ship Zagorsk, which called at Port Dal’niy. On December 8, 1966, while the ship was leaving port with a Chinese pilot, he suddenly issued an order which, if executed, would have caused the Zagorsk to hit a breakwater, with resulting serious damage and possible loss of the ship. Under the circumstances the master of the Zagorsk could not, and of course should not, carry out the order. His failure to do so enabled the ship to continue through the port entrance, after which the master immediately stopped the ship, and upon demand of the Chinese pilot dropped anchor. The Zagorsk was boarded immediately by armed Chinese guards and representatives of port authorities. They forbade the ship to proceed and tried forcibly to break into the chart house and seize charts and ship’s papers.
On December 10 the Soviet Embassy in Peking requested assistance of the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs in obtaining permission for the Zagorsk to leave the port of Dal’niy. A representative of the Ministry, deliberately exaggerating charges against the Soviet seamen, stated that the Zagorsk had “violated the sovereignty of China.” Chinese authorities continued to ignore the requests and the ship with her crew remained under guard in the outer roadstead of Dal’niy.
On December 17, the Soviet side lodged a protest with the PRC Embassy in Moscow in connection with the illegal seizure of the Zagorsk, and demanded her immediate release. The statement condemned the fictitious charges lodged by the Chinese authorities against the ship’s master and other Soviet seamen. Particularly noted was that in accordance with generally accepted international norms and practice, and reinforced by legislation of maritime nations, the pilot is an advisor (a consultant) to the ship’s master. Regardless of whether a pilot is abroad, the ship’s master is not relieved of responsibility for the safety of the ship entrusted to him when the ship is maneuvering. This practice is also followed in PRC ports.
The Chinese took no action to release the ship and, in fact, made no reply to the December 17 statement. As a result, the Soviet side on December 24 lodged another vigorous protest against the arrest of the Soviet ship. Not until December 28 was the Zagorsk released.
The period after the CC CCP 11 th Plenary Session was marked by further hostile activity along Sino-Soviet borders. Armed Chinese units appeared along the Pamir section of the Sino-Soviet border for the first time at the beginning of October 1966 and proceeded to photograph Soviet territory. Numerous detachments of Red Guards materialized in border regions. People’s volunteer guards, commanded by PLA officers, conducted military exercises along the banks of border rivers, practicing attacks in the direction of the state boundary of the USSR, and “assaulting” the Amur River.
The Chinese leadership simultaneously moved adaptation of the “cultural revolution” to interfere in USSR internal affairs and to engage in subversive activities. Speaking at the military academy in October 1966, the PRC Minister of Foreign Affairs declared:
The cultural revolution, led by Chairman Mao Tse-tung himself, is an important innovation in the Communist movement, a great innovation in the socialist revolution. It has had a tremendous influence on the Soviet Union, on the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We must turn the great cultural revolution on the USSR. The day will finally arrive when there will be Red Guards on the streets in Moscow.
Peking propaganda tried to create the impression that the Soviet people supported the “cultural revolution” and were anxious to follow its example, already looking upon Mao Tse-tung as their leader. On November 16, 1966, in reporting an anti-Soviet meeting in Peking, the Hsinhua Agency asserted that the Soviet people “see the light and hope of the future in the greatest leader of revolutionary peoples of the world, Chairman Mao Tse-tung.”
Peking announced for all to hear the necessity of carrying China’s “cultural revolution” to the whole world. A Red Guard publication stated seriously their task of “redoing the universe with the help of the ideas of the Great Helmsman,” and of “putting the great rebellious spectacle on the international stage, as well as on the domestic one.” These goals led to the instigation of schismatic and anti-Soviet actions by Chinese representatives in international democratic organizations. Chinese representatives made slanderous anti-Soviet statements at the 4th Congress of Latin American Students (Havana, August 1966), at the 12th Conference on the Prohibition of Atomic and Hydrogen Weapons (Tokyo, August 1966), at the 5th World Conference on Trade Unions of Agriculture, Forest, and Plantation Workers (Berlin, November 1966), and others.
The CC CPSU plenum of December 1966 stated that recent events in China, and the decisions of the CC CCP 11th Plenary Session, indicated that the chauvinist, anti-Soviet policy of Chinese leaders had entered a new, dangerous phase. Approving the report of the CC CPSU Secretary General, L. I. Brezhnev, on “The International Policy of the USSR and the Struggle of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the Solidarity of the Communist Movement,” the plenum pointed out:
The course upon which the leaders of the Communist Party of China are now embarked in the international arena, their policy with respect to relations with the socialist countries, their hostile campaign against our country and against the Soviet people, and their splitting actions in the international Communist movement, all have nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism. This policy and these actions are harmful to the interests of socialism, of the international workers’ and liberation movement, to the socialist victory of the Chinese people and objectively lend aid to imperialism. . . .7
The Plenary Session of the Central Committee confirmed the firmness of our party’s course in terms of friendship and international solidarity with the CCP and the PRC. At the same time it considered it necessary to expose, once and for all, the anti-Leninist views and chauvinistic, nationalistic course of present Chinese leaders and to intensify the straggle to defend the general line set down by the Moscow conferences of 1957 and 1960.
The “cultural revolution” encountered new difficulties in 1967, showing that the Maoists were unable to solve their problems in one fell swoop.
First, the “cultural revolution” resulted in a recession, worsening the country’s economic crisis. It undermined industrial and agricultural production, reduced state income, and disrupted transportation. Tremendous numbers of man-hours were lost, and vast quantities of materials and money were expended unproductively. Of equal loss to the national economy was the destruction of administrative bodies, and repression against the cadres of experienced business executives and economists.
The coal, metallurgical, petroleum, and power industries suffered particularly severe losses. In one of the largest coal basins in the PRC, the Tatung Basin, mines worked at only half capacity for the greater part of 1967. Confusion reigned in the Fushun and Tsinsi mines.
The work load on large metallurgical plants dropped to 65–70 percent in the first half of 1967, as compared with a work load of 90–95 percent in 1966. The main metallurgical combines, Anshan, Yunnan, Paotow, and Shihchingshan, were idle for several months. According to the Far Eastern Economic Revue of August 24, 1967, “half of the oil refineries in Lanchow had ceased production; the chemical plant and the plant engaged in the repair of machinery and rolling stock were closed.” Even in Peking, where order was maintained by faithful Maoist troops, clashes between the different factions of Red Guards and militants resulted in fulfillment of only 55 percent of industrial plans. Electric power plants operated sporadically. For example, the supply of electric power to plants and the populace of Yunnan was cut off in April. The same thing happened in May in Kunming, Tsinan, Chungking, and T’aiyuan; and in July in Lanchow, Changchun, and other cities.
Difficulties in light industry at the end of 1966 caused conflicts in many plants. The source of the problem was replacement of the piecework and bonus systems accompanied by a reduction in wages of at least 10 percent. Jen Min Jihpao, on June 4, 1967, reported that armed clashes had occurred in the 6th Chenghsien Textile Mill. Disturbances and strikes occurred in the 2nd Peking Textile Mill, and in many plants in Shanghai, Tsingtao, Canton, Yshe, and other cities.
The defense industry alone, and particularly those branches engaged in production of nuclear missiles, was a special case. These plants were placed under strict army control from the start and were protected against excesses of the “cultural revolution.” According to estimates in the Western press, military expenditures by the PRC in 1967 were larger than all capital investments made in the national economy as a whole.
Overall, the gross industrial production in the PRC dropped by 15 percent in 1967. Coal production comprising 90 percent of the country’s fuel balance fell 40 percent, electric power production fell 30 percent, steel fell 25 to 30 percent.8 Premier Chou En-Iai was forced to state publicly that “one had to pay a price in productivity for the cultural revolution.”9
Transportation was badly disorganized during the “cultural revolution,” and this is understandable. Railroads were forced to carry over 20 million Red Guards and other “representatives of the revolutionary masses” between the fall of 1966 and February 1967 alone, resulting in total disruption of railroad schedules. Freight failing to reach its destination clogged warehouses and spur lines at plants and railroad stations. Disturbances, strikes, and, finally, armed clashes periodically led to complete breakdowns in communications between different parts of the country. Railroad construction ceased entirely with the onset of the “cultural revolution.” Disorganization of transportation reached proportions where hostile Red Guard factions seized weapons and equipment moving by rail to Vietnam.
At first the “cultural revolution” did not involve the countryside. But by the end of 1966 its disorganizing influence was felt even in agriculture. Between January and March 1967 peasants began the arbitrary appropriation of the commodities which were public property, the raiding of food warehouses, and the slaughter of commonly owned livestock.
Peking leaders, unable to depend on organization of the peasants and on experienced agricultural workers for the spring sowing season of 1967, were forced to send regular army units to the country to supervise work in the fields. Even the official Chinese press acknowledged that peasants in a number of main agricultural provinces, such as Shansi, Hunan, Hopeh, Shensi, Szechwan, and Hupeh had left their villages, migrating to cities in order to take part in the “struggle for power.” The exodus of peasants to the cities reached so enormous a scale that Hsieh Fu-chih, speaking to the Peking “revolutionary committee” on August 13, 1967, said “the tendency for the countryside to surround the cities is not a deviation but a reactionary phenomenon.”
The result of breakdowns in production and transportation and disorganization of trade was a deterioration in quantity and quality of the food supplies reaching the cities. Prices of certain items (rice, pork, tomatoes, cucumbers) were raised at the end of 1966. Ration cards were issued for bread, rice, vegetable oil, sugar, cotton cloth, shoes, and tobacco; this was soon followed by rationing of meat, vegetables, fuel, and kerosene. Special chits even were needed to visit public baths.
The severe shortage of basic commodities and consumer goods induced black market speculation of major proportions. The Chinese press, at the end of 1967 and beginning of 1968, reported that speculators “had large quantities of scarce industrial goods, cement, building materials, fuel, gold, weapons, and ammunition.” Special groups were set up in the “revolutionary committees” to “control markets and destroy speculation.” Mass round-ups took place in many cities. In Shanghai, for example, 10,000 soldiers, security workers, and “revolutionary cadres” took part in such round-ups. The scourge of speculation was accompanied by a sharp increase in crime. Gross violations of social order by all types of “left revolutionary organizations,” actually gangs of hooligans and robbers, became a general phenomenon. The streets of Peking, Shanghai, Kwangchow, Yunnan, and other large cities in China were festooned with reports of sentences meeted out to thieves and exposures of hooligans and other criminal organizations.
The 1967 political situation in the PRC was characterized by a general weakening of centralized authority, an increase in anarchy, an intensification in disagreements between factions of Red Guards and militants, and an aggravation of bickering within the ruling clique.
Armed clashes broke out in virtually every region of the country by the fall of 1967. Whereas it had been youth involved in earlier skirmishes, now such skirmishes involved large masses of workers. Kwangchow (Canton), for example, was for a long period divided into hostile sections, and thousands of its inhabitants took part in the struggle. Even the official Chinese press reported that during fighting in Anshan on August 10, 1967, over 2.000 “revolutionary rebels” were killed or seriously wounded. Mao Tse-tung was forced to recognize that the working class in the PRC “had split into two large opposing factions.” The actions of the Red Guards, often uncontrollable, escalated to anarchy.
The reduction in the people’s standard of living stirred deep discontent. A wave of mass strikes hit the country at the beginning of 1967. Plants, factories, and whole industrial complexes shut down for long periods of time. Disorders in the plants often were accompanied by destruction of buildings and equipment.
The army became the sole support of the regime, for the Maoists had destroyed the party, the trade unions, and the constituted system of organs of authority. Lin Piao, in September 1967, declared that “the party and administrative authority in the country has been toppled. Military authority must not be allowed to collapse.” He was seconded by the Minister of Public Security, Hsieh Fu-chih, who said, “if the army is stricken with disorders the country will have no government.”
But even the army was not united. There were many areas where military authorities refused to support the Maoists, and the threat of an open split in the army, and of local armed clashes turning into civil war, was very real.
The development of the situation in China exposed the real nature of the “cultural revolution” as deeply inimical to interests of the Chinese people, hostile to the cause of socialism, and detrimental to friendship and cooperation between the PRC, the Soviet Union, and other socialist countries.
It had become increasingly apparent, not only in China but abroad as well, that the pseudorevolutionary Maoist slogans were lies. The adventurist plans and intentions of the ruling clique and its unscrupulous attempts to move China off the socialist road were exposed with increasing clarity. L. I. Brezhnev, on March 10, 1967, said that the legend of the “proletarian cultural revolution” is only a clumsy disguise for a policy alien to Marxism-Leninism, that it looks more like the suppression of the socialist revolution, and a reactionary military coup d’etat.10
Faced by extreme aggravation of domestic political crises, instigators of the “cultural revolution” once again attempted to improve their position by intensifying anti-Soviet agitation. They attempted to distract the attention of the Chinese people from their grave domestic problems, to encourage nationalism, and to unite the warring factions on a nationalistic platform by further aggravating anti-Soviet hysteria.
Propaganda weapons employed by Peking leaders were no longer successful in inflaming anti-Soviet tendencies in the PRC. The malicious propaganda, endlessly repeating the same primitive, slanderous concoctions about the CPSU and our country, ceased to have significant effect on the Chinese populace. Recognizing this, ringleaders of the “cultural revolution” resorted to additional methods for promoting anti-Sovietism in China. They organized a series of crude demonstrations both on Soviet territory and against Soviet representatives in China.
Their objectives were several. First, to provide the possibility of obtaining “concrete material” for propaganda, the shortage of which was quite obvious. The Maoists had so isolated the populace from all things Soviet that discussions about the Soviet Union, completely divorced from facts, had ceased to have reality for the Chinese. The last remnants of plausibility had vanished. Thus, despite Peking’s assertions concerning the threat “from the north,” or the Soviet-American deal on the struggle against the PRC, the Chinese public remained calm; in practice it was persuaded of the friendly policy of the Soviet Union and perceived no signs of change. The meaningless mouthings of anti-Soviets concerning “bourgeois backsliding” of the Soviet society, “restoration of capitalism in the USSR,” and the like, became increasingly unpopular.
Second, Peking anticipated that its crude acts would provoke the Soviet Union into drastic countermeasures, up to and including severance of diplomatic relations. This not only would provide the Maoists with fodder for a new anti-Soviet campaign, but also would make their efforts to shirk responsibility for disruption in Sino-Soviet relations more credible.
The hooliganistic demonstration by Chinese students and personnel of the PRC Embassy in Moscow’s Red Square on January 25, 1967 was the first in a series of anti-Soviet provocations. They created a disturbance among visitors to Lenin’s tomb and brawled with Soviet citizens who happened to be there. The First Secretary of the Chinese Embassy openly led the hooligans. The USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs lodged a strong protest against these disgraceful tactics with the Embassy of the PRC on that same day.
But it soon became clear that the provocation in Red Square was not an isolated episode in the overall objectives of CCP leaders. The next day Chou En-lai and Chen Yi, in a telegram representing Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao, not only approved the hooliganism, but even went so far as to send the provocateurs enthusiastic greetings. On January 28, the PRC Embassy in Moscow called a press conference on the “assault” committed against Chinese citizens in Red Square. Chinese diplomats proceeded to use the conference to distort the incident, offering anti-Soviet concoctions to representatives of the bourgeois press. Appealing for imperialistic cooperation in attacking the CPSU and the Soviet Union, instigators of the provocations even presented “material evidence” in the form of students and Embassy personnel, the supposed victims. This fraud, however, was so crude and primitive that even the Western anti-Soviet press refused to take it up. Despite the outpouring of protests of other Communist parties, CCP leaders stubbornly held to their planned line. On February 1, 1967 the acting PRC chargé d’affaires in the Soviet Union approached the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs for permission for reading of Mao Tse-tung’s quotations by Chinese students at Lenin’s tomb, to be accompanied by speeches and propaganda handouts. Permission denied, the PRC Embassy used its photographic display window for anti-Soviet propaganda. On February 3 the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded that the Chinese Embassy remove all anti-Soviet materials from its window and cease anti-Soviet propaganda activities of any description. The PRC Embassy pointedly ignored these demands. Moreover, on February 7, 1967 loudspeakers installed on the Embassy building were used to broadcast hostile, inflammatory slogans directed against the Soviet people, the CPSU, and the government of the USSR.
On February 9, 1967, during the departure of a group of Chinese citizens, the PRC Embassy attempted to provoke a new incident, this time in the Yaroslavl’ Railroad Station. Embassy personnel, upon arriving at the station in violation of rules governing traffic regulations, stopped their cars in the middle of the street, interfering with traffic, and holding up pedestrians.
On March 18, 1967, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a statement to the Embassy of the PRC in connection with the incessant provocations of Chinese diplomats, pointing out that the Embassy “was deliberately ignoring conditions and norms prevailing throughout the world in permitting actions completely incompatible with the status of a foreign diplomatic mission.” Two Embassy people whose conduct was particularly obnoxious were declared persona non grata.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made nine official protests to the Chinese Embassy in 1967, all dealing with its provocative activities. Travel limitations within the USSR were imposed on personnel assigned to the PRC Embassy in retaliation for hostile acts to Soviet diplomats and correspondents accredited to China. The ever-increasing tendency of Chinese leaders to interfere in the internal affairs of the USSR forced the Soviet government to abolish its practice of permitting PRC citizens to enter the Soviet Union without visas.
The Maoists also used the Chinese crew of the Peking-Moscow train to organize varied provocations on Soviet territory. Crew members attempted to distribute anti-Soviet literature within our country, deliberately violating rules and procedures established for our railroads.
Chinese train crews in March, April, and May 1967 organized provocative demonstrations rehearsed in advance with a most unoriginal scenario, in connection with Soviet authorities’ seizure of illegal propaganda. The trainmaster and conductors on the Peking-Moscow Chinese train refused to permit customs authorities at Naushki station to inspect their personal belongings, proceeded to organize an anti-Soviet demonstration in the station, and insulted Soviet authorities. As a result the train departed quite late. On December 17, in Novosibirsk, a Chinese train crew forcefully dragged a Soviet passenger into a compartment, accused him “of insulting a portrait of Mao Tse-tung,” and demanded written apologies. This escapade also resulted in upsetting train schedules.
Chinese authorities organized a total of 40 anti-Soviet provocations in transportation in 1967, 17 on the railroads, 15 on the airlines, and 3 in river and maritime transportation. The result was 18 protests by the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other Soviet agencies.
The January 1967 provocation in Moscow’s Red Square signaled new outrages at the Soviet Embassy in Peking. They were prepared in advance, and began promptly the following day.
This time anti-Soviet demonstrations around the Embassy assumed a particularly widespread and malicious aspect. They lasted over two weeks, continuously, day and night. The Soviet citizens within Embassy grounds literally were subjected to assault by noise. Loudspeakers set up around the Embassy blasted away, twenty-four hours a day. No Soviet newspapers or journals were delivered to the Embassy between January 26 and February 13. Chinese workers left the Embassy, saying they were going on “strike.” When the Chinese were advised that the Embassy no longer had need of their services they tried to return by force. On February 3 those Chinese citizens who had been fired burst into the Embassy’s consular section and issued an ultimatum that they be reinstated. They detained the chief of the consular section in his office for almost a day and threatened him with physical violence.
On January 29, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs lodged a strong protest against these anti-Soviet outrages and demanded, on behalf of the government of the USSR, that the Embassy be protected against hostile demonstrations interfering with its normal activities and threatening the personal safety of its personnel.
The outrages persisted. This led the USSR to evacuate families of Soviet representatives, Embassy personnel, trade delegation personnel, economic advisors, and TASS correspondents from Peking.
On February 2, A. N. Kosygin, Chairman of the Council of Ministry of the USSR, sent the Premier of the State Council, Chou En-lai, a letter requesting a guarantee of safety for families of staff members of Soviet institutions during their return.
But PRC leaders failed to provide a normal departure for the Soviet citizens. Quite the contrary, Soviet women and children leaving Peking confronted an atmosphere of humiliation, flagrant violence, and the flouting of the most elementary norms of international law and morals. All this was coordinated and encouraged by Chinese authorities. Representatives of Soviet Aeroflot were advised that the safety of the special aircraft being flown to Peking, with official permission of the Chinese authorities, to evacuate the families of USSR delegations in the PRC could not be guaranteed. Our Embassy in Peking appealed three times to the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs for assistance in getting the women and children out of the country, but each time the stereotyped answer came back, “the safety of Soviet people cannot be guaranteed.”
On February 5, when returning Soviet citizens and accompanying personnel from the Soviet and other socialist embassies arrived in Peking airport, they were surrounded by a crowd of Red Guards and agitators. Alternating malicious anti-Soviet taunts and curses with readings from the works of Mao, unrestrained provocateurs terrorized the defenseless people for eight hours. The jeering continued even during boarding. The Red Guards made the people run the gauntlet; they shook their first at women and children, struck their feet and pulled their hair. The same thing happened upon departure of succeeding groups of Soviet citizens.
La Stampa, the Italian newspaper, in describing these events wrote :
. . . the disgusting, unprecedented hooliganistic actions of the “Red Guards” with respect to the Soviet Union definitely surpassed all bounds. They are absolutely intolerable to all foreigners living in Peking. One gets the distinct impression that the government of Mao Tse-tung also wants to force the USSR to break its official relations with China, and at the same time wants to arouse in its country fanatical hatred for the Soviet Union. The Soviet citizens behaved splendidly, demonstrating firmness and retaining their dignity in this disorderly and howling crowd, ready for any baseness. Women and men, pressing the smallest of the children to their breasts, stood with their heads held high among the howling crowd.11
On February 4, 1967 the Soviet government issued a statement elucidating the crude anti-Soviet actions by Chinese authorities and lodging a stern protest with the PRC government. The statement noted that provocations directed against Soviet institutions in Peking indicated intentions of the Chinese leadership to further exacerbate relations with the Soviet Union. It stressed that outrages around the Soviet Embassy in Peking, arbitrary humiliation of staff members of Soviet institutions, appeals “to overthrow” the Soviet government, and “to take care of” state and political leaders in the USSR, all were just causes of indignation to the Soviet people, whose self-restraint and patience were not inexhaustible. The Soviet government demanded that the Chinese authorities take most urgent measures to ensure the safety of workers and their families assigned to Peking, and to punish severely organizers of provocations. The statement emphasized that the Soviet Union reserved the right to take whatever measures were dictated by the situation to protect the safety of its citizens and of its lawful interests.12
Chinese leaders continued to inflame the situation around the Soviet Embassy in Peking. On February 6 the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially advised the Embassy of the USSR that the safety of Soviet personnel leaving the Embassy grounds “could not be guaranteed.”
The USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs on February 9 dispatched a note to the PRC government demanding that the safety and mobility of the staff members of the Soviet Embassy be guaranteed. The note stated:
. . . the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, upon the request of the Soviet government, declares that the steps taken by the Chinese authorities can mean either a deliberate attempt to undermine relations between the People’s Republic of China and the USSR, or the inability of these authorities to provide in the country elementary conditions for the life and activities of representatives of a state maintaining normal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. The Soviet government demands the immediate cessation of the arbitrary measures taken by the Chinese authorities directed against the Soviet Embassy in Peking and the freedom of its staff members to move about. If this is not done in the shortest time possible, the Soviet side reserves to itself the right to take the necessary retaliatory measures.”13
Two days later the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs advised the Embassy of the USSR that the February 6 notification was retracted.
The chaotic events at the Embassy of the USSR would remain forever a disgrace to their instigators and organizers; even so they could not help the Maoists reach their objectives. Pravda, in an editorial published on February 16, 1967, wrote:
The anti-Soviet campaign by the Chinese leaders is being carried out in the most provocative, truly hooliganistic forms. But this outward aggressiveness should not delude anyone. In fact, the actions of the Mao Tsetung faction are based not on its strength but on its weakness, by fear of its own party, its own people.
The fraternal parties were unanimous in observing that anti-Soviet actions by CCP leaders played into the hands of imperialism. As one example, Nuestra Palabra, the newspaper of the Argentine Communists, on February 27, 1967 wrote:
. . . Mao intends to show the world that no one is more anti-Soviet, more anti-Leninist, more anti-Marxist, than he, and in this he has been successful. Yankee imperialism should be deeply indebted to him for this. Needless to say, it is no accident that the Yankees began their bombing of Vietnam at precisely the moment the unlimited anti-Soviet campaign on the part of the Chinese leaders was unleashed. The aggressive anti-Sovietism of the clique we are talking about is a tremendous gift to the imperialist aggressors.14
A leader of the CP USA, James Jackson, expressed the same thought in the newspaper The Worker:
. . . This spectacle of how far behind the leaders of China have left even the sworn enemies of Communism in their slander of and attacks against the fraternal party cannot help but attract the attention of the strategists of imperialism. Anti-Sovietism is what currently unites the adherents of Mao Tse-tung and the imperialists.15
The imperialist camp expressed unabashed satisfaction over the anti-Sovietism of the Maoists. A columnist for The Washington Post, Joseph Kraft, commented:
Officials in Washington think that Mao is serving American interests because his efforts to galvanize the Chinese masses are drawing China into conflict with Russia to a greater degree than with the United States.
American officials, in the words of the columnist, “even are thinking of cultivating Maoism as a means of putting pressure on Moscow.”
It was openly said in Washington that US ruling circles were interested in keeping Mao Tse-tung in power. In February 1967 a directive sent to all centers by the Director of the United States Information Service (USIS), pointed out that members of the service should “take every opportunity to strengthen the positions of Mao’s adherents,” because the United States wanted “Mao and his faction to remain in power” since their activities were directed against the CPSU and other Communist parties. “The United States is betting on Mao,” wrote the journal U.S. News and World Report, continuing:
American officials are inclined to prefer a Mao Tse-tung victory in his struggle to eliminate the more moderate elements, because this would mean a continuation of the unpleasantness for Soviet Russia.
The journal noted with satisfaction that the anti-Soviet campaign in China exceeded all Peking’s anti-American campaigns in its “maliciousness.”16
Instigators of the “cultural revolution” continued efforts to incite anti-Soviet provocations in other countries. They staged a meeting of Chinese citizens in the Ulan Bator railroad station under the pretext of greeting those Chinese students responsible for the Red Square demonstrations. This led to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Mongolian People’s Republic lodging a strong protest with the acting chargé d’affaires for China. The Chinese Embassy was given a stern warning that any further “rallies” or any other provocative acts directed against a sister nation, and occurring on the territory of the Mongolian People’s Republic, would be suppressed as an illegal act. Two weeks later the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Mongolian People’s Republic also lodged a stern protest with the PRC Embassy in Ulan Bator in condemning propaganda efforts of the Chinese Embassy on Mongolian territory directed against the USSR and other socialist countries.
This was also the period when Chinese citizens living in Algiers, acting upon instructions from Peking, engaged in hooliganistic acts with respect to diplomatic personnel attached to the Embassy of the USSR and Soviet citizens in the Algerian People’s Democratic Republic. On February 2, 60 Chinese grossly violated the generally accepted norms of international law and diplomatic immunity by stopping a Soviet Embassy car containing the First Secretary and his daughter. Hooligans surrounded the car, hammered on windows, roof, and doors, then tried to open the doors and get into the car. All the while they screamed threats against the Soviet Union and insulted the Soviet people, their party and government.
It should be noted that Chinese authorities organized numerous hostile acts against representatives of other socialist countries in the PRC during the “cultural revolution.” The wife of the First Secretary of the German Democratic Republic Embassy, for instance, was attacked and seriously injured in Peking on April 29, 1966. Military attachés of the GDR, their wives and children, were beaten on August 28, 1966. Red Guards, the same day, attacked the correspondent of the Polish news agency. Hooliganistic demonstrations were held near the Embassies of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and the Hungarian People’s Republic.
While the outrages near the Embassy of the USSR in Peking in January and February 1967 continued, and Soviet evacuations were in progress, Chinese authorities also permitted hostile actions against personnel attached to the Embassies of Bulgaria, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, the Mongolian People’s Republic, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Korean People’s Democratic Republic. On January 26, 1967 Red Guards in Peking attacked two Czech diplomats and damaged an official car belonging to the Embassy of Czechoslovakia. On February 5, fanatical groups of youths, in the presence of police, abused the Ambassador of the Polish People’s Republic, Rodzinski. The crowd detained the Polish diplomats for several hours, cursed them, threw paint, and pasted placards with hooliganistic inscriptions on the Ambassador’s car, which flew the Polish national ensign. The Ambassadors of the Mongolian People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia were grossly insulted on that same day. The car carrying the deputy trade counselor from Bulgaria and his family was almost overturned by Red Guards, who threatened to “execute” the passengers.
On August 9, 1967 there occurred an infamous provocation in Peking involving Mongolian representatives. A group of Red Guards attacked the car belonging to the Ambassador of the Mongolian People’s Republic in China, turned it over, and set it on fire. The driver, a Mongolian citizen, was rudely jeered at and then arrested. On that same day a crowd of hooligans broke into the official premises of the Mongolian People’s Republic Embassy, committing outrages which continued for several hours.
The line aimed at maximum exacerbation of Sino-Soviet relations was not limited to staging outrages before the Embassy of the USSR in Peking. The whole of 1967 literally was full of provocations directed against Soviet representatives in the PRC. For purposes of illustration, we have compiled a short incomplete chronology of these disgraceful actions.
On January 28, Red Guards engaged in a hooliganistic attack on a bus en route to the USSR Embassy carrying a group of Soviet railroad men working on the Moscow-Peking train.
The following day Red Guards spewed their venom at our diplomats arriving at a hotel for a meeting with the Soviet train brigade. They were surrounded by an unruly crowd for four hours. Police witnesses said they “were not responsible for the actions of the revolutionary masses.”
Another provocation occurred at the Peking airport on January 31, when aircraft carrying our specialists en route to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to help the Vietnamese people landed. Soviet personnel were not permitted to disembark and, in violation of safety regulations, the aircraft was required to refuel with passengers on board. After takeoff, representatives of Soviet Aeroflot in Peking were detained and suffered vulgar insults.
A group of Soviet diplomats and personnel assigned to other Soviet institutions in Peking was detained in the vicinity of the Chinese Civil Aviation Adminstration building on February 2. They were held until about 3 A.M.on the 3rd of February, when energetic protests on the part of the Soviet Union resulted in their release. The Soviet people had been subjected to insults, blackmail, and threats for 16 hours. Physical force had been used on some. Soviet Embassy cars were defaced with vandalist graffiti. The chief of the Embassy’s consular section and several other Soviet diplomats proceeding to the scene were also detained on a city street. On that same day, there was an attack on a group of Embassy personnel and on the trade representative of the USSR near the Embassy. Hooligans surrounding them chanted anti-Soviet slogans under the very eyes of the police.
A crowd of Red Guards detained a group of Soviet specialists and diplomats just returned from Hanoi for six hours on February 3. Rocks, clumps of dirt, and the like were thrown at their bus.
Two Soviet passenger trains, arriving in Zabaykal’sk Station from Peking on January 30 and February 6, were plastered with anti-Soviet posters, covered with provocative slogans, and daubed with paint.
On February 21 the Soviet Embassy in Peking was forced to protest the gross discrimination of Embassy personnel to the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Normal functions of the Embassy staff were constantly disrupted. They were forbidden to eat in public places, their hotel was saturated with anti-Soviet graffiti, and stores refused to take their orders. But provocations against Soviet representatives in China continued. On March 11, the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared two second secretaries of the Embassy persona non grata on the trumped-up charge that they interfered in PRC internal affairs. On May 6, the press section of the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs, without reason, declared the Pravda correspondent in Peking undesirable and demanded his immediate departure. There were incidents in April and May when Soviet diplomats going about the city on official business were detained by hordes of Red Guards for several hours. Their cars were plastered with anti-Soviet slogans, daubed with paint, and efforts made to thrust anti-Soviet materials upon them.
PRC officials refused permission for USSR Embassy personnel to travel in Yunnan, Harbin, Mukden, Dal’ny, and Port Arthur; they were also forbidden to place wreaths in honor of the 49th anniversary of the Soviet Army and Victory Day on graves of Soviet soldiers fallen in battles for liberation of the Chinese people.
Personnel of the Soviet trade delegation in the PRC arriving with Chinese permission on business in Mukden on June 17, were met by a provocation. Efforts were made to try them for “espionage”; they were subjected to interrogation; the farce of “judicial process” was indulged. The outrages ceased only after protests by the Soviet Embassy.
Ringleaders of the “cultural revolution” missed no opportunity to demonstrate their hostility toward our country. They even went so far as to organize anti-Soviet demonstrations outside China’s boundaries. On July 20 and 21, a naval vessel and armed fishing vessels of the PRC engaged in threatening actions against the Soviet ship Gidrograf in international waters in the Yellow Sea, 150 kilometers off the China coast.
The August 1967 provocation against the Soviet ship Svirsk in the port of Dal’niy occupies a special place in the chain of premeditated actions organized by instigators of the “cultural revolution.”
A large party of armed Chinese border guards boarded the Svirsk on August 8. They accused the second mate, S. V. Ivanov, who refused to accept a badge bearing the image of Mao Tse-tung, of “violation of the sovereignty of China,” and demanded that he be turned over to Chinese authorities. The ship’s master, V. A. Korzhov, naturally refused.
On August 11, Chinese authorities unceremoniously flouted the generally accepted norms of international law and arrested the skipper. Despite protests, he was subjected to a humiliating search and was locked up in a cell containing a loudspeaker blasting full force.
At the same time, Red Guards stormed the Svirsk, used cutting torches to cut down the door to the radio room, broke portholes, pipelines, and ventilators, tore down antennas, and clogged the ship’s stack. They entered the cabins, seized S. V. Ivanov, and placed him under arrest. Both V. A. Korzhov and S. V. Ivanov were subjected to humiliating interrogation. They then were hauled to the city stadium where “court” was convened.
On August 11, the Soviet government lodged a strong protest in connection with provocative actions against the Soviet ship and crew, demanding immediate release of the ship’s master, a guarantee that the ship would be permitted to leave port without further interference, and full accountability by those responsible for authorizing the arbitrary actions.17
The Trade Union of Maritime and River Fleet Workers of the USSR, in a statement condemning outrages perpetrated in the Svirsk case, stated:
In the name of the many thousands of Soviet seamen, we hold up to shame the organizers of this filthy provocation, and all those who are trying to sow enmity between the Soviet and Chinese peoples.18
Numerous meetings were held in Soviet ports and aboard Soviet ships to protest the Svirsk incident, but Chinese authorities continued their provocations. This led A. N. Kosygin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, on August 12, 1967, to address a letter to the Premier of the State Council of the PRC, Chou En-lai, containing the categorical statement:
The Soviet government expects the immediate adoption of appropriate measures by the government of the People’s Republic of China to ensure the safety of the crew, the return of the captain and other crew members to the ship, as well as to ensure the unhindered departure of the motor-ship Svirsk from the port of Dal’niy. . . . 19
The Soviet seamen were released on August 13, and the Svirsk departed Dal’niy for Vladivostok. The workers of Vladivostok held a huge rally for the Soviet seamen, who had conducted themselves with great courage and patriotism throughout the disgusting incident.
The Svirsk provocations were used by Maoists to organize new outrages at the Embassy of the USSR in Peking. On August 14, Red Guards surrounded the Embassy, threw rocks on the grounds, and broke glass and windows in the living quarters. The Embassy was ringed with powerful loudspeakers, just as in February, spewing streams of obscene anti-Soviet abuse day and night.
On August 17, 1967 anti-Soviet agitators raised Chinese flags on the fence of the Soviet Embassy, after which almost a hundred hooligans broke into the grounds, destroyed the sentry box and consular section, broke the glass in the Embassy’s office building, and burned two vehicles. Another Soviet vehicle was burned that same day in the center of the city. The result of such outrages was material damage to the Embassy estimated in the tens of thousands of yuan.
Anti-Soviet demonstrations and hooliganistic brawling at the Embassy of the USSR continued. They were even organized on November 7, 1967, the 50th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
In all, some eighty provocations with the PRC were committed during 1967, either instigated by or on direct orders of the ruling clique, against the Embassy, other Soviet missions and institutions, their personnel and families. Another 120 or more outrages took place more or less “spontaneously.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR and the Soviet Embassy lodged 90 protests with Chinese authorities as a result of these events.
The activization of provocations by Peking was fully apparent in the increase in frequency and scope of Sino-Soviet border violations. Violations in 1967 more than doubled as compared with 1966, now numbering over 2,000. Noteworthy is the fact that border violations occurred most frequently precisely when general anti-Soviet hysteria in China peaked, that is in January-February, August-September, and December. In August-September, for example, Chinese violators, in groups of 13 to 20, tried more than 30 times to land on the Soviet island of Kultuk in the Amur river. Actions of the Chinese in the vicinity of Kirkinskiy Island in December 1967 were openly provocative. Throughout the month, groups of military and civilian Chinese trespassed on the island several times a day.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR lodged nine protests in 1967 as a result of border violations. All Chinese border violations, without exception, bore the appearance of premeditation, and all followed the same pattern. Here is but one example. A truckload of Chinese drove onto a Soviet island in the frozen Ussuri river at the beginning of February 1967. Soviet border guards suggested that the violators leave Soviet territory. But the provocateurs, many of whom were drunk and armed with clubs and crowbars, tried to force a fight with the border guards. In about 30 minutes new groups moved out from the Chinese shore, where they had been hiding. Military uniforms were visible under their sheepskin coats. The Chinese screamed curses at the Soviet border guards, trying to force them aside with crowbars, axes, and poles, and force their way into our territory. The bandits then beat up one of their own people, put him on a litter and a photographer, fortuitously on the scene, took pictures of this “victim of the atrocity” committed by the Soviet border guards. That same day, representatives of Chinese border authorities lodged a protest with Soviet border guards against molesting a “Chinese fisherman on Chinese territory.”
So-called “self-defense detachments” were organized among Chinese fishermen during the fishing season. Their task was to organize confrontations with Soviet border guards. Local Chinese authorities decorated with honors border violators who had been turned out of Soviet territory, and used such occasions to organize anti-Soviet meetings and demonstrations. Attempts also were made to broadcast anti-Soviet propaganda in Russian by mounting loudspeakers on military cutters. On October 19 the Embassy of the USSR in Peking delivered a verbal protest to the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs in connection with the massive provocations by Chinese authorities along border rivers. On October, 26 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR handed the Chinese Embassy in Moscow a note of protest on this same matter.
The border violations perpetrated by the PRC reflected a policy geared toward unleashing major border conflicts. This was made quite clear in statements by leading Chinese officials. In February 1967 the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chen Yi, referring to the future of Sino-Soviet relations, said that “a severance of relations is possible; so is war.” Chou En-lai, on March 26, 1967, in a speech before representatives of bourgeois democratic parties, flatly stated that in addition to large wars, there are “border wars as well,” and that “a border war between China and the USSR will begin sooner than a war with the United States.”
One characteristic feature of Peking’s anti-Soviet policy was evidenced quite clearly in 1967: The attacks of Chinese leaders against our party and country intensified with the expansion of US aggression in Vietnam. Organizers of the “cultural revolution,” stirring up hatred of the Soviet Union and rejecting any joint action on the part of socialist states to frustrate US tactics, gave American imperialists to understand that they could escalate the Vietnam war without any obstacles, and without risking confrontation with the combined front of the USSR, the PRC, and other socialist countries. In a January 1967 speech M. A. Suslov said:
The struggle to curtail American aggression in Vietnam, to increase assistance to the Vietnamese people, is intensifying all over the world. Solely because of the leadership of the People’s Republic of China we cannot achieve the unity of action we need in this struggle of the socialist countries and of. all progressive forces to completely isolate the American aggressors. By their rejection of unity of action in supporting Vietnam, and by their criminal policy of anti-Sovietism and splinterism, the leaders of the People’s Republic of China are actually aiding imperialism.20
Our party in 1967 continued efforts to mobilize all forces in support of the heroic struggle of the fraternal Vietnamese people. The Secretary General of the CC CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, in statements at the Seventh Congress of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany on April 18, 1967, and in speeches to the conference of Communist and workers’ parties in Karlovy Vary on April 24, 1967, and to the meeting of Soviet-Bulgarian friendship on May 12, 1967, steadfastly emphasized the need for united action, to include the Soviet Union and the PRC, in defending the Democratic Republic of Vietnam against aggression by American imperialism. L. I. Brezhnev, at the Karlovy Vary conference, said:
. . . the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet government are ready for unified action with China in planning and providing practical assistance to struggling Vietnam. We are ready for such unified action on the broadest scale.21
And how did Peking leaders react to this appeal, supported by the entire revolutionary movement? On April 30 Jen Min Jihpao, which calls itself the organ of the CC CCP, flatly stated that Chinese leaders “of course, would not in any case” consider unity of action for “this is what was the case in the past, is now, and this is how it always will be in the future.”22
The ruling faction in Peking disgraced itself by this statement; people aspiring to the title of revolutionaries certainly could not do a more odious thing than refuse to carry out their international duty.
The anti-Soviet schismatic course of the Peking leaders was flagrantly obvious in connection with Israel’s aggression in the Middle East during June 1967. Chinese leaders unleashed filthy, slanderous attacks against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries which decisively supported the struggle of the Arab peoples against Israeli aggressors and their imperialist accomplices. CCP leaders did everything possible to disrupt the friendly relations enjoyed between the USSR and the Arab states, disseminating for this purpose provocative rumors about Soviet foreign policy.
Events in the Middle East emphasized how vital it was for the Communist and workers’ parties, the international workers’ movement, and the national liberation movement of the Third World to unite in their actions. At the same time these events once again exposed the adverse effects of Maoist policy on the interests of unity and solidarity of revolutionary forces.
In June 1967 the plenary session of the CC CPSU heard and discussed a report by L. I. Brezhnev “On the Policy of the Soviet Union in Connection with the Aggression of Israel in the Middle East.” The plenary session pointed out the need:
. . . to carry on the struggle against the slanderous campaign and splitting activities of the Mao-Tse-tung group, the purpose of which is to divide the anti-imperialist forces and to destroy the trust that exists between the peoples of the Arab states and peoples of the socialist countries. . . .23
The anti-Soviet course of the Peking leaders was particularly apparent during celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Great October Revolution. This historic event, celebrated by all revolutionary forces of the world, was exploited by Peking to unleash an even more unbridled anti-Soviet campaign. Jen Min Jihpao, the mouthpiece of the “cultural revolution,” devoted whole columns to slanderous attacks against the CPSU, against its foreign and domestic policies, and all Soviet actions over the past 50 years.
In order to forestall improvement of Sino-Soviet relations, the ruling clique rudely refused to send a PRC delegation to Moscow for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Great October. Thus once again this clique demonstrated its alienation from the Chinese people’s vital interest in strengthening friendship and cooperation with the Soviet People.
Nevertheless, our party, as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, once again confirmed the immutability of its internationalistic course with respect to China:
The Soviet peoples [asserted the theses of the CC CPSU for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution] always have considered the great Chinese people as friends and allies in the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society. A breaking away of the Communist Party of China from its present fatal policy, a strengthening of relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union and the other countries of socialism, would be in the interests of world socialism and above all in the interests of China itself.24
Our party and the whole Soviet people expressed great confidence that the future of China belongs to forces which champion the ideas of Great October and are steadfastly true to Sino-Soviet friendship. L. I. Brezhnev, in a report devoted to the 50th anniversary, emphasized the fact:
We believe that the present events in China are historically a transient stage in its development. We believe that despite all the difficulties the cause of socialism will triumph in the People’s Republic of China.25
The anti-Soviet policy of the organizers of the “cultural revolution” developed further in 1968.
Propaganda hostile to our party and country became even more widespread in China. Jen Min Jihpao alone published over 600 verbose articles full of unbridled, slanderous attacks on the CPSU and the Soviet Union in 1968.
At the end of March and beginning of April 1968, Chinese authorities perpetrated a gross provocation in the case of the Soviet tanker Komsomolets Ukrainy upon its arrival in the port of Whampoa (near Canton) with cargo for struggling Vietnam.
Soviet ships ceased calling at Chinese ports after the Svirsk incident in Dal’niy. However, at the end of 1967, by request of Hanoi, the Soviet Union agreed to deliver certain cargoes for Vietnam through Chinese ports providing that PRC authorities guaranteed the safety of ships and crews. This promise was not kept. In fact, the first time the Soviet tanker Komsomolets Ukrainy arrived in Whampoa (December 1967) Chinese officials who boarded the ship to complete port formalities lined up on deck and organized a reading of Mao Tse-tung’s sayings, including those anti-Soviet in nature. The tanker also was flooded by quantities of anti-Soviet literature. The Chinese persisted in trying to give Soviet seamen books of Mao Tse-tung’s sayings and buttons with his picture. The same thing happened during the second call of Komsomolets Ukrainy in Whampoa.
On March 27, 1968 Chinese authorities organized a more serious provocation involving the Soviet tanker. This time they demanded that the ship’s master turn over to them the second mate, A. P. Ponomarchuk, whom they accused of having photographed the Chinese port. This slanderous accusation was used as a pretext for still another anti-Soviet provocation. On March 30, Chinese authorities once again tried to arrest Ponomarchuk. Soviet seamen attempting to protect their comrade were abused. Then, during the night of April 3, an armed Chinese detachment boarded the tanker and organized a pogrom, using force to seize the ship’s papers and arrest the ship’s master and his mate. The bandits broke down cabin doors, damaged watertight bulkheads, broke hatches in the aft superstructures, cut the antenna and radio-telephone line, and smashed the standby receiver. They twisted the arms of Soviet seamen and beat them. Eleven crewmen were seriously injured. The ship’s master was seized and thrown in jail. Throughout the entire shocking affair, the tanker’s crew performed courageously. A hunger strike was organized to protest the arrest of the ship’s master.
The Embassy of the USSR in Peking requested permission to send Embassy personnel to Kwangchow to look into events on board the Komsomolets Ukrainy. Chinese authorities refused to approve this legitimate demand.
On March 31 and April 3, the Soviet government lodged strong protests with the PRC government, demanding that it take steps to guarantee the safety of the crewmen and to remove the ban on the tanker’s departure from the port of Whampoa. The Soviet government was emphatic in placing full responsibility for the consequences of the unwarranted violence aboard the tanker and against Soviet seamen squarely on the government of the PRC.26
These measures forced the Chinese authorities, on April 4, to release the master of the Soviet ship and to give the ship permission to leave port.
The provocation instigated by the Maoists involving the Komsomolets Ukrainy caused deep indignation among Soviet seamen and our entire populace. Protest meetings were held in Soviet ports with participants branding actions of the provocateurs as disgraceful. Speeches at these meetings stressed that Soviet seamen were ready to make every effort to continue delivery of cargo to heroic Vietnam.
The Trade Union of Maritime and River Fleet Workers sent an appeal to the government of the USSR which stated:
Soviet seamen consider it to be a matter of honor to deliver to the Vietnamese people the cargo they need to repel American aggression. Their journey to Vietnam is not an easy one. United States naval and air forces simulate attacks on our ships on the high seas, and they are subjected to bombing and strafing in ports in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. But Soviet seamen are also concerned with the bandit attacks on the crew of the tanker Komsomolets Ukrainy in the port of Whampoa in the People’s Republic of China, and resolutely condemn the Mao Tsetung faction, which, hypocritically declaring itself to be a friend of the Vietnamese people, in fact is interfering with the rendering of aid to it by the Soviet Union.” 27
The Chinese side continued its attempts at hostile actions on the territory of the Soviet Union as well. In April 1968 a citizen of the PRC, Chen Tsi-hsian, on official business in Tashkent, violated existing laws, photographing the airport and engaging in an altercation with a Soviet official. As a result, competent Soviet organs took decisive and immediate action to expel him from the Soviet Union and to forbid his ever returning.28
The Chinese authorities continued to hamper the normal activities of the Embassy of the USSR in the PRC. In February 1968 the delivery of provincial periodicals to the Embassy and to the TASS bureau in Peking was stopped and future subscriptions to them were refused. Soviet representatives in the PRC have ever since received only two Chinese newspapers, Jen Min Jihpao and Kungmin Jihpao. Similar discriminatory measures were carried out by Chinese authorities with respect to the embassies of other socialist countries in Peking.
Provocative outrages against Soviet representatives were common occurrences in Peking. On May 20, 1968 a crowd of hooligans, incited by soldiers, detained TASS correspondents on a street for seven hours, giving them no opportunity to communicate with the Soviet Embassy or to summon official representatives to the site. Red Guards wrote anti-Soviet slogans on the sidewalks around the detainees and threatened the correspondents with physical violence.
The police illegally detained an Embassy chauffeur on August 3, 1968. He was taken to a police station and subjected to ten consecutive hours of interrogation, blackmail, and threats. The employee of the Soviet Embassy was forced to make false statements, and to slander his own country. He was told flatly that if he refused he would have to deal with the “revolutionary masses.” In other words, he would be turned over to Red Guards for summary justice.
The anti-Soviet policy of the Maoists created untenable conditions for Soviet citizens permanently residing in China. They became open victims of rude humiliation and oppression, from the outset of the “cultural revolution.” Soviet citizens had their property illegally confiscated; they were dispossessed from their quarters, discharged from their jobs, excluded from schools and forbidden to correspond with their families in the USSR, or to appeal to their Embassy. Many such citizens were arrested, yet Chinese authorities did not advise the Soviet Embassy in Peking.
In its external relations, Peking, at the height of the counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, joined West German revanchists and the other reactionaries and right revisionists. In company with them the Maoists began a malicious, slanderous campaign in connection with measures taken by five sister nations to help the Czechoslovak people defend socialism in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Peking leaders undertook an intensive propaganda campaign based on the thesis that a socialist camp, as such, no longer existed, so there really could be no talk of common interests of the socialist community.29
The Maoists, with this position as point of departure, intensified attacks against collective organizations of the socialist countries and actively tried to destroy them. They disseminated the slanderous assertions that the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Aid, ensuring the security and successful development of socialist states, were being used to bring about the “restoration of capitalism in the countries of Eastern Europe.” Mao Tse-tung, in a telegram to Enver Hoxha on September 17, 1968, openly called for a struggle against the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Aid. In this same telegram he declared that Peking was beginning a “new historic period of struggle” against the CPSU and the Soviet Union.
The ruling faction continued efforts to hammer into the Chinese populace an awareness of the possibility of armed conflict between the USSR and the PRC. Leaders began to participate directly in intensification of anti-Soviet hysteria. Premier Chou En-lai, at a state reception of October 30, 1968, said that “we can expect anything, including an attack on China,”30 from the Soviet Union.
In resorting to such provocative statements, Peking attempted to reinforce the fabrication of fantasies about “the hostile actions of the USSR with respect to China.” Included among such fantasies was the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ note of September 16, 1968 complaining about so-called intrusions of Soviet military aircraft into China’s airspace. This assertion was totally unfounded. A thorough investigation established beyond doubt that Soviet military aircraft had not flown into China’s airspace, and had not violated China’s sovereignty. Inventing numerous “intrusions” by Soviet military aircraft into China’s airspace and accusing the Soviet Union of “serious incidents,” of “reconnaissance,” “military provocations,” “aggravating tensions along the border,” “infringing on the territorial integrity and sovereignty of China,” and so on, obviously were necessary primarily to disguise the anti-socialist essence of Peking’s position regarding Czechoslovakia. These actions merged, for all practical purposes, with the position of imperialist circles which had started a noisy anti-Soviet campaign. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR lodged a strong protest against actions of PRC authorities so clearly hostile to the Soviet Union, the purpose of which was to further complicate relations between the two states.31
The provocative concoctions concerning alleged violations of PRC borders by Soviet military aircraft were convincingly demolished in an interview with the Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces, published in Izvestiya on November 2, 1968.
The Chinese press deliberately suppressed all such materials which exposed the falsity of their accusations. As in similar cases, Peking cynically counted on success in concealing the truth from its people, thus extracting some benefit from its provocative lies.
Actually, it was the Chinese side that had committed grossly provocative border violations. Ninety such cases were recorded in January-February 1968 alone. This number had increased to 164 by mid-May 1968.
Instigators of the “cultural revolution” tried to strengthen their anti-Soviet policy at the CC CCP 12th Plenary Session, convening in October 1968.
The 12th plenum marked a new phase in China’s political development. Though they had completely discredited and destroyed the original CCP, Maoists suddenly found it necessary to convene a plenary session of its Central Committee. An extremely dangerous situation encountered during the “cultural revolution” forced this paradoxical action.
Organizers of the “cultural revolution” soon were persuaded that without a mass political party they would not long be able to lead. Even with military assistance, the Red Guards and Chinese militants were unsuccessful in creating a stable system of new authority. At the same time, the ruling clique feared to remain alone with the army, whose power had conspicuously increased. What worried those in power was that party cadres and millions of rank and file Communists remained discontented. Resumption of CCP activity was also necessary in order to strengthen results of the “cultural revolution” and to cover up the scandalous lawlessness which accompanied reprisals against its enemies.
A cloak of the party also was needed because of the problems created in the international Communist movement by their splitting actions. Despite the bravado of their propaganda, Chinese leaders feared the consequences of condemnation and criticism by the international Communist movement. Had they completely repudiated the role of the party, it would have been difficult for them to consolidate into an independent movement various pro-Peking factions and renegade groups, who as a result of the destruction of the original CCP found themselves in a most ridiculous situation.
Under pressure of these circumstances, the Chinese ruling group by the end of 1967 had begun work on creating a qualitatively different political organization, “the Maoist party,” which, borrowing the authority of the CCP, would become the blind instrument of the “cultural revolution.” This work was camouflaged under the slogan of “rectification and reorganization of the party,” although it was openly stated that the topic under discussion was the creation of a qualitatively new political organization. Directives issued in connection with its establishment emphasized the fact that it would be incorrect to speak of the “restoration” of the party organization in its previous form, that the “renewal of the organizational life of the party in no way meant the restoration of the old order existing prior to the “cultural revolution.”
The struggle to convert the Communist Party into an obedient instrument of the Maoists was waged in many directions.
Basic changes were effected in the composition of the CCP. “Rectification and reorganization” were accompanied by a mass purge of the party, by checking the loyalty of each former member of the CCP, by expelling all who showed the slightest doubt or vacillation with respect to present leadership and policies, or who had not been active in the “cultural revolution” proving their devotion to anti-Sovietism. Steps were taken simultaneously to inject “fresh blood” into the party in the form of the most rabid Maoists. Directives dealing with the “rectification of the party” urged “devoting special attention to acceptance into the party of activists from among Red Guards and militants.” The press collaborated, steadfastly emphasizing the decisive role of the “revolutionaries outside the party” that is, nonparty people. Included among the leadership of party groups in lower echelon organizations were nonparty militants “co-opted” into the party, bypassing the candidate stage. Any attempt by party members to defend the thesis that “rectification of the party is the business of Communists” was considered incorrect and harmful.
The ideological base of the new party was Maoism, which replaced completely Marxist-Leninist ideology. The December 10, 1967 resolulution of the CC CCP and the “Group for Cultural Revolution Affairs” emphasized that “the thought of Chairman Mao should be at the basis of the new program theses and the party constitution.” The criterion for “party worthiness” was personal devotion to Mao Tse-tung, faith in his “thought” and in his political line. “Only devotion to Chairman Mao Tse-tung and mastery of the thought of Mao Tse-tung give one the right to speak and to leadership,” declared Lin Piao.
Anti-Sovietism was a main plank in the ideological and political platform of the new party. The ruling group inspired proposals that appeals for struggle against the Soviet Union and the CPSU be written into program documents. The Chinese press reported that the new party “should become a bastion of a fierce struggle” with the CPSU and other parties not sharing Mao’s “thought.”
The CC CCP 12th Plenary Session revealed that the leadership of the “cultural revolution” had moved far along the path of “rectification and reorganization.” The Plenary Session occurred after the constitution of the CCP was dismantled. All that need be said is that more than 130 of 173 members and candidate members of the CC CCP were already discredited and repressed when the session convened. Losses suffered by the Central Committee were so extensive, and the demand of Maoists for obedience so adamant, that it was necessary to import people who were not members of the Central Committee, who in fact were not even members of the party, in order to constitute a quorum for the convention.
The Plenary Session officially sanctioned the antisocialist, antidemocratic, and unconstitutional acts of the Peking leaders from the outset of the “cultural revolution.” It approved Mao Tse-tung’s directive “Fire on the Staffs” of August 5, 1966, which signaled the pogrom of party organizations and elected organs of government; confirmed the “Decree on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” of August 8, 1966, as well as all of Mao’s “instructions” and Lin Piao’s statements; noted the important role of the “Group for Cultural Revolution Affairs” in the struggle for realization of the “Great Helmsman’s” policy. The Plenary Session officially announced plans for convening the 9th Congress of the CCP “at a suitable time,” an act destined by Maoists to complete the creation of the new “Mao Tse-tung Party.”
All documents of the 12th Plenary Session were permeated with livid anti-Sovietism. They officially confirmed the policy of open struggle with our party and country. The Plenary Session’s communiqué and the approved draft of the Constitution of the new CCP demonstrated that an antisocialist, anti-Soviet policy was the basis for long-term PRC domestic and foreign policies.
The magazine Kommunist, appraising the significance of the 12th Plenary Session in an article “The Situation in China and Conditions in the Communist Party of China at the Contemporary State,” wrote:
The staging of the 12th “Plenary Session” was necessary to the Maoists to once again justify the “cultural revolution,” to isolate them from the policy line of the 8th Congress of the Communist Party of China, and at the same time cancel the period of development of the People’s Republic of China along the socialist path, and ideologically prepare the country for the formation of a new system of authority.32
5. Armed provocation by Chinese authorities along the Soviet border in March 1969
Peking leaders, constantly escalating anti-Sovietism, organized an armed provocation on the Sino-Soviet border in March 1969 on the Ussuri river, in the Damanskiy* Island area.
During the night of March 1–2 a specially trained detachment of the Chinese army numbering some 300 men violated the Soviet state boundary and intruded on Damanskiy Island. This detachment was joined by another group of 30 armed soldiers on the morning of March 2. Concentrated in advance on the Chinese bank were reserves and fire power, including a battery of antitank guns, mortars, grenade launchers, and heavy machine guns.
When Soviet border guards approached the border violators, planning to protest and demand immediate withdrawal from Soviet territory as had been previous practice, the intruders treacherously and without warning opened fire, literally mowing down the Soviet soldiers point-blank. Another group of Soviet border guards was fired on in simultaneous ambushes on the island and from the Chinese bank.
Soviet border guards, together with reserves from neighboring border posts, formed a battle line boldly, valiantly repulsed the surprise attack, and drove the intruders off Soviet territory.
The armed provocation in the Damanskiy Island area undertaken by the PRC was planned in advance and carefully prepared. Inspection of the battle site on Soviet territory turned up Chinese infantry weapons and military equipment discarded when the Chinese fled; also field type telephones, communication lines leading to PRC territory, mine fins, shell and grenade fragments were discovered. The result of this bandit raid organized by Chinese authorities was 45 Soviet casualties: 31 dead and 14 wounded.
On March 2 1968 the Soviet government sent the PRC a strong note protesting the impudent armed incursion into our territory and demanding immediate investigation and the stringent punishment of the persons responsible. The government of the USSR stated that it “insists that immediate steps be taken which would preclude any violation of the Soviet-Chinese frontier.” The note further asserted that the Soviet government in relations with the Chinese people, was guided by sentiments of friendship and was going to continue this line in the future.33
The Chinese authorities paid no heed to these proposals. Quite the contrary, steps were taken to further increase tensions. Beginning on March 3, 1969, specially trained groups once again subjected the Soviet Embassy in Peking to organized siege. An unruly anti-Soviet campaign began in China, during which territorial claims were openly made against the USSR, and all methods used to cultivate an atmosphere of chauvinistic intoxication and military hysteria.
Meanwhile, Chinese authorities were preparing a new armed provocation along the border with the USSR, which took place on March 14–15, 1969.
On March 14 a group of armed Chinese soldiers made another attempt to invade Damanskiy Island. The following day a large Chinese detachment, supported by artillery and mortar fire from the bank, attacked Soviet border guards protecting the island. But the provocateurs were repulsed.
The Soviet government, in its statement of March 15, 1969, severely condemned the new Chinese provocations. The statement stressed that “if the lawful rights of the USSR are flouted, if further attempts are made to violate the integrity of Soviet territory, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and all its peoples will resolutely defend it and give a crashing rebuff to such violations.34
Armed provocation along the Soviet-Chinese border was undoubtedly conceived as a multipronged action. It was used to incite nationalist and chauvinist feelings in the PRC, and once having created this situation, to strike new blows against their internal enemies, yet another step along the road of assuring Maoist supremacy.
The armed conflict on the Soviet-Chinese border was deliberately organized to coincide with preparations for the 9th Congress of the CCP. The Maoists, fanning anti-Soviet hysteria and rousing chauvinist intoxication, tried to create an atmosphere that would permit them to use the congress for officially establishing anti-Sovietism as a general line of PRC foreign policy.
The inflaming of anti-Soviet psychosis in China and attempts to exploit armed provocation on the Soviet-Chinese border to discredit our country in the international arena also served to intensify the schismatic activities of the Maoists with respect to the socialist commonwealth and the world Communist movement. One of their short-term goals was to impede and disrupt the convening of an international conference of the Communist and workers’ parties, preparations for which had already reached the final stage.
At the same time, armed border provocations instigated by Chinese authorities created conditions necessary for Peking’s unprincipled political flirtation with the imperialist states. By organizing criminal intrusions on the Soviet-Chinese border, Peking was in effect making overtures to extreme imperialist reaction and laying claim to cooperation with it. Hence it was no accident that Chinese authorities coordinated the attack on the Soviet border guards with Bonn’s provocative undertaking of presidential elections in West Berlin.
The provocation in the Damanskiy Island area was an important link in Maoist efforts to force radical reorientation of PRC foreign and domestic policy, a shift into a posture openly hostile to socialist countries.
The Marxist-Leninist Communist and workers’ parties and progressive world public opinion sharply condemned these provocations playing into the hands of international imperialism. This provocation caused grave concern among Communists and progressive forces all over the world.
The Soviet Union, while dealing a crushing rebuff to the armed Chinese provocations, still remained true to its unchanging policy of achieving normalization of relations between the USSR and the PRC, including issues concerning the Soviet-Chinese border. This policy was clearly expressed in the statement made by the Soviet government on March 29, 1969.
The statement offered convincing proof of how groundless were attempts of the Chinese leadership to support its territorial claims by using historical references to “prove” the unequal nature of treaties establishing the present boundary between the Soviet Union and the PRC.
Peking leaders, in their efforts to “justify” their territorial claims, had the audacity to declare themselves heirs of Genghis Khan, including him among “emperors of China.” But these chauvinist falsifications of history had long since been scoffed at by Lu Hsün. In 1934 he wrote:
I was 20 when I heard that “our” golden era had been when “our” Genghis Khan had conquered Europe. Not until I had reached 25 years of age did I know that in fact in the so-called golden era of “ours,” the Mongols had conquered China and that we had become slaves. In August of that year I leafed through three books on the history of Mongolia in order to refine certain historical facts, and only then did I understand that before having conquered all of China, the Mongols had conquered the “Rus” and had invaded Hungary and Austria. He was not yet our Khan at that time. The Russians had been enslaved before us, and it was they who should have said that “when our Genghis Khan conquered China our golden era began.”35
Worth recalling is another opinion of this great revolutionary and internationalist Chinese writer, which, while directed at imperialists, could be a direct indictment of the provocateurs in the Damanskiy Island area. In a 1932 article, “We Shall No Longer Be Tricked,” he wrote:
We are against attacking the Soviet Union. We shall strive to destroy the dark forces attacking it, whatever the honeyed speeches they make, whatever the pretence at justice they use as a cover. This and only this, is our own path to life!
Chinese leaders, in attempting to provide a semblance of justification for their assertions as to the “unequal nature” of the border treaties, go so far as to juggle citations from works of the founders of Marxism-Leninism, even those of V. I. Lenin! But it is well known that not a single statement by the first head of the Soviet state ever asserted that the treaties dealing with the Chinese border were supposedly unequal, or among those subject to review. The principled position of V. I. Lenin is well known. He emphasized that “we reject all points concerning pillage and violence, but we gladly accept all points containing conditions for good neighborliness and economic agreements. These we cannot reject.”36 V. I. Lenin left no doubt about the fact that the Maritime Provinces were Soviet soil. Lenin’s words are well known: “Vladivostok is a long way off, but this city is ours. . . . our Republic is here, and it is there.”37
The Soviet people, under the leadership of V. I. Lenin, between 1918 and 1922 freed at great cost their Far Eastern lands from foreign interventionists who tried to wrench from the young Soviet Republic the Maritime Provinces, Chabarovsk Region, and Eastern Siberia.
Japanese militarists and their accomplices frequently tried to test the strength of Soviet frontiers in the Far East in following years. After the occupation of Manchuria, they planned the seizure of Soviet islands in the Amur and Ussuri rivers but suffered a crushing rebuff. Their anti-Soviet adventures at Khasan and Khalkhin-Gol ended the same way. The aggressors were completely routed and dislodged from Soviet territory.
The Chinese government, after the foundation of the PRC, repeatedly emphasized its obligation to respect the state sovereignty and territorial integrity of the USSR. This obligation was confirmed in the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance between the USSR and the PRC, signed in 1950. Article 5 of this treaty envisages observance of the principles of “mutual respect for state sovereignty and territorial integrity.” This same obligation is embodied in joint declarations of the Soviet and Chinese governments of October 12, 195438 and January 18, 1957.39
Early in the 1950s, at China’s request, the Soviet Union handed over complete sets of topographic maps showing the line of demarcation in accordance with the Russo-Chinese treaties. At that time, Chinese authorities made no comments on the border shown on the maps; this line was observed in practice.
After the conclusion of the Soviet-Chinese Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, both sides agreed to joint study and use of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers. The population living on both sides maintained friendly relations and developed trade, cultural, and other relations. A Soviet-Chinese agreement on navigation on the Amur, Ussuri, Argun’, and Sungari rivers, and on Lake Khanka, was signed in 1951. It included provisions for the establishment of aids to navigation on these waterways. An agreement on complex joint utilization of water resources of the rivers in the Amur basin, and on conduct of joint research, was concluded in 1956.
Soviet and Chinese border guards dealt with issues in a businesslike manner and settled misunderstandings in a good-neighborly spirit. There were no conflicts or misunderstandings along the border.
Deterioration in these comradely relationships began when those in authority in the CCP set out along the road to exacerbation of Sino-Soviet relations. As already has been said earlier, the violations of the Soviet border by the PRC became more and more frequent after 1960, taking on an ever-increasingly aggressive and provocative nature. It is no accident that Chinese leaders opposed the very principle of peaceful settlement of border disputes. They violently attacked and rejected the Soviet government’s December 1963 proposal that an international agreement outlawing use of force by states in settling territorial disputes and boundary questions be concluded. Significantly, Chinese leaders vented their anger on the efforts of the Soviet Union and other countries to arrive at a peaceful settlement of a conflict between India and Pakistan. The Tashkent Declaration, ending that conflict, was violently attacked in Peking. In fact, Chinese leaders continue to ignore the initiative of the Indian side in proposing a settlement of the Indo-Chinese border dispute.
On its part, the government of the USSR attempted from the beginning to settle disputes with the PRC by bilateral consultations. This position was clarified in the March 29, 1969 statement by the government of the USSR.40 The statement once again proposed that consultations on border questions which had begun in Peking in 1964 be resumed in the near future. Guided by an earnest desire to ensure lasting peace and security and to maintain friendship and cooperation with the Chinese people, the government of the USSR emphasized the need for immediate practical steps to normalize the situation on the Soviet-Chinese border. It urged the government of the PRC to refrain from any border actions that could cause complications, and further urged the Chinese to resolve differences, should they arise, in an atmosphere of calmness.
The USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on April 11, 1969, addressed a note to the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs proposing renewal of consultations between plenipotentiaries of the two governments, and expressing readiness to begin them in Moscow on April 15, 1969, or at an approximate date convenient to the Chinese side.41
On April 26, 1969 the Soviet Union, in order to normalize conditions along boundary rivers and to ensure normal conditions for navigation, proposed that the PRC call, in May 1969, the 15th session of the Soviet-Chinese Commission on Navigation, which had been established in accordance with the intergovernmental agreement of 1951 on rules for navigation on the boundary rivers.
Efforts of the Soviet Union to solve differences through discussions in a calm atmosphere were reaffirmed in statements made by Soviet leaders. L. I. Brezhnev, Secretary General of the CC CPSU, in a Red Square speech of May 1969, emphasized that the Soviet Union was in favor of resolving unsettled international differences by discussions. Secretary of the CC CPSU I. V. Kapitonov, in a report during the Kremlin ceremony on April 22, 1968, pointed out the need for immediate practical steps to normalize the border situation and repeated the appeal of the Soviet government to the government of the PRC to refrain from any action that could cause complications, and to solve differences, should they arise, in an atmosphere of calm discussion.
On April 14, 1969, in response to the USSR note of April 11, the Chinese side stated that Soviet proposals for the settlement of the border situation “were being studied,” and that a reply would be forthcoming. However, practical actions of Chinese authorities on the border and the overall political course of the leadership not only did not diminish their anti-Soviet nature, but in fact became even more hostile.
Armed provocations on the Soviet-Chinese border formed a background of preparation for convocation of the 9th Congress of the CCP, held in Peking between April 1 and 24, 1969. The Congress assembled under conditions of further aggravation of the domestic policy crisis and of intensification in the factional struggle in the Maoist camp. The CCP ruling faction decided to hold the Congress on a wave of chauvinist intoxication and anti-Soviet hysteria, in order to divert the Chinese people from failures in domestic and foreign policies.
The 9th Congress was held in an atmosphere of complicated internecine struggle within the CCP. Finally the Maoists successfully imposed their policy on the Congress.
The Congress “summed up” the “cultural revolution,” and directed PRC policy for the next few years. Materials of the Congress—the report by Lin Piao, and the new by-laws of the CCP—reaffirmed that internally this policy mitigated against socialist gains of the Chinese people, and that internationally its purpose was to engage in a struggle against socialist countries and the world Communist movement.
The 9th Congress in the official party constitution approved the Mao Tse-tung cult of personality, envisaging conditions ensuring the triumph of the “thought” of Mao on a long-term basis. The constitution states that Mao Tse-tung is the “leader of the Party” and that Lin Piao is “his successor.” The main standard of internal party life, as set forth by the 9th Congress, is the requirement of loyalty to Mao Tse-tung. “Those who dare oppose Mao Tse-tung’s thought, regardless of when, and under what circumstances, will be condemned by the entire party and punished by the entire country.”42
The goals of the 9th Congress with respect to internal development of China were to create a militaristic, bureaucratic state suited to the conduct of an adventurist, great-power policy in the international arena. The Congress made no effort whatsoever to advance a positive program for economic construction, social development, or improvement in the material well-being of the people. Instead the task assigned was that of a “continuous revolution, to prepare for war, prepare for famine.” The ruling faction divested itself in advance of responsibility for deterioration in workers’ living standards, for a breakdown in the national economy, and for foreign policy adventures.
Lin Piao’s major report to the Congress gravely distorted the picture of contemporary world development. He lumped into one category the imperialist states and all socialist countries opposed to Peking. These countries were declared to be “revisionist” or “social-imperialist,” and were numbered among forces hostile to revolution. This breakdown was not based on class analysis, but simply on postures of the particular countries with respect to Peking’s policies. The Congress essentially proclaimed the socialist countries the main enemy of China.
Anti-Sovietism formed the foundation of foreign policy as planned by the 9th Congress. The new constitution established it as the party’s official policy. Lin Piao emphasized that “a new historical period had begun” as of that time, one that was to be a struggle with the USSR; stated the task of setting up an international anti-Soviet front; emphasized territorial claims; once again commented on “unequal treaties” and on “seizures of Chinese territory” by our country; and propagandized a false version of the Damanskiy Island incidents. The report attempted to twist the meaning of the Soviet government’s statements in the 1920s relative to the Soviet-Chinese border and asserted that our country supposedly failed to keep its “promises” to return everything “seized from China” by the Tsarist government.
The policy laid down in the report concerning Sino-Soviet relations completely reversed the spirit and the letter of the Sino-Soviet treaty of 1950. Peking’s leaders evidenced no interest in cooperation with the USSR or in normalizing relations. The Congress failed to put forth a single constructive proposal designed to achieve this goal.
In his report to the 9th Congress Lin Piao spoke of the Chinese leadership’s desire “to settle territorial questions through diplomatic channels by conversations,” but that “until they are settled the situation existing on the border must remain and conflicts must be avoided.” In fact, however, the Chinese side engaged in provocative violations of the Soviet border while the Congress was still in session, as well as after its adjournment.
At the end of April 1969 a large body of Chinese landed on the Soviet Union’s Kultuk Island in the Amur river and, covered by military detachments, made ostentatious attempts to engage in economic activities. This led the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs to send a strong note of protest to the Chinese side on April 25. On May 2, 1969, PRC soldiers, over 300 strong and armed with machine guns and mortars, violated the state boundary of the USSR along the western sector of the Soviet-Chinese border. The provocative nature of this action is all too apparent from the fact that Chinese authorities used the civilian population, shepherds with their flocks, to cover the violators. A large group of Chinese citizens landed on a Soviet island near the city of Blagoveshchensk on May 14. The intruders responded to demands of Soviet border guards that they depart Soviet territory by attacking them with axes and iron bars. It took decisive action to clear the provocateurs from our territory.
In the first half of 1969 alone, representatives of Soviet border troops lodged over 20 protests with the Chinese side in connection with gross violations of the Soviet border.
The Chinese government, on May 24, 1969, after a two-month delay, responded to the USSR’s March 1969 statement. The response demonstrated that its authors were not at all interested in settling disagreements. Quite the contrary, its purpose was to exacerbate further Sino-Soviet relations. The absurd demand was again advanced that the “unequal nature” of the treaties establishing the border between the USSR and the PRC be acknowledged, and attempts were made to justify claims of the present leaders of China to age-old Soviet lands. The PRC government did not formally reject the idea of discussion, but the possibility of engaging in such talks was based on a series of obviously unacceptable conditions. In his speech to the international conference of Communist and Worker’s Parties (June 1969), L. I. Brezhnev, discussing the Chinese reply, said:
. . . the statement of the government of the People’s Republic of China can in no way be said to be constructive, either in its content or in its spirit. This verbose document is full of historical falsifications, of perverted facts of the present time, and full of hostile attacks against the Soviet country. It repeats unfounded claims of a territorial nature against the Soviet Union, and we decisively reject these claims.43
The May 24 statement of the PRC government not only confirmed the hostile statements of the 9th Congress with respect to our party and country but also justified the actions of Peking, actions designed to exacerbate Sino-Soviet interstate relations. The Chinese government, talking as an accuser, which is impermissible in relations between sovereign states, attempted to judge the Soviet government and its domestic and foreign policies. The Soviet Union was officially included among countries hostile to China. In this way Peking attempted to justify its expansionist aims, and to represent anti-Sovietism as a struggle with “social-imperialism,” thereby masking their own renegade and backsliding nature.
The issuance of the May 24 statement served to signal further incitement of anti-Soviet hysteria in the PRC. Anti-Soviet propaganda took on an increasingly belligerent character, emphasizing the inevitability of war between China and the Soviet Union. Kungmin Jihpao, on June 6, 1969, for example, published an article containing an appeal for “readiness to fight a conventional, as well as a large-scale nuclear war with the Soviet revisionists.” Jen Min Jihpao alone published 653 anti-Soviet articles in the first five months of 1969, more than in all of 1968.
Interwoven with provocative anti-Soviet attacks in the Chinese press were prophecies of the imminence of a new world war. Chiehfang Jihpao, on May 14, 1969, wrote that 22 years had passed between the first and second world wars, that 23 years had elapsed since the end of the Second World War, and that now “we already smell powder. The question of a world war is in essence a question of the future of the proletarian revolution, the future of mankind.” Jen Min Jihpao, on May 25, 1969, urged the world proletariat not to worry about a new world war, “because the result would only be loss of its chains and acquisition of the whole world.”
On June 13, 1969 the Soviet government issued a new statement responding to the May 24 document which once again set forth a positive program for settling border disagreements.44 Confirming its proposal to resume discussions on the issue of refining the border line along certain sections on the basis of existing treaties, the Soviet side suggested:
. . . by agreed opinion of the sides, those sections of the border about which there is no disagreement be fixed; that where there are disagreements about individual sections, mutual discussions be held to reach an understanding of where the border runs, using the treaties as a basis for so doing; and that where natural changes have occurred the existing treaties be used to determine the boundary line, observing the principles of mutual concessions and economic interests of the local populace in those sections; and that once agreement is reached, that the countries sign the corresponding documents.”
The Soviet government proposed that the Peking talks, interrupted in 1964, be resumed within two to three months in Moscow, and named P. I. Zyryanov as plenipotentiary of the USSR with rank of Deputy Minister to head the Soviet delegation. The Soviet government in its statement emphasized:
The policy of the USSR with respect to the Chinese people has been, and continues to be, the same. It is built on the basis of the long-term future. We remember that the interests of the Soviet and Chinese peoples coincide. The Soviet Union is for good neighbor relations and friendship with China, for eliminating everything that can complicate relations between our two states.
The anti-Soviet course of Peking provides the most important link in its conflict with all contemporary revolutionary forces. The Maoists had long hoped to convince these forces that their disagreements lay solely with the CPSU. They resorted to all sorts of maneuvers to conceal the fact that their position was hostile to the entire world revolutionary movement. But as time passed, it became evident that Maoism was actually warring with all Communist parties. In 1967, for example, in an article dealing with the Karlovy Vary conference of the European Communist and Workers’ Parties, the Maoists openly designated as implacable enemies and “cliques” such detachments of the world Communist movement as the Communist and Workers’ Parties of Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, Italy, France, England, Spain, Finland, and other countries. At the 9th Congress the Maoists generally referred to the socialist community and the world Communist movement as “nonexistent.” They condemned the Warsaw Pact, which serves as a dependable shield, providing security for socialist countries and a stronghold of peace in Europe; they railed against the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the most important tool for providing mutually advantageous cooperation between fraternal peoples.
Peking’s conflict with the socialist community and the world Communist movement, and their anti-Soviet schismatic activities, were severely criticized at the June 1969 Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow.
The CPSU and other parties continually tried to persuade the CCP to take part in preparations for the conference. The CC CCP received invitations to participate in all preparatory measures; it was given timely news of progress in preparations; and it had every opportunity to familiarize itself in good time with documents that would be presented for discussion.
But Peking leaders held stubbornly to their hostile position with respect to the international Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties and rudely rejected the idea of participating in its work.
The convening of the Conference caused extreme irritation in Peking, signifying itself that Maoist plans to isolate the CPSU and other parties firmly and consistently holding to Marxist-Leninist positions had failed. The Conference fully emphasized the key trend in development of the world Communist movement as that of strengthening the unity and solidarity of its ranks.
The Conference adopted a document entitled “Tasks of the Struggle against Imperialism in the Current Stage and Unity of Action of Communist and Workers’ Parties, of All Anti-Imperialist Forces.” This document provided a comprehensive analysis of the world situation and completely refuted the distorted presentations on the same subject rendered by Lin Piao to the CCP 9th Congress. Not one of the 75 Communist parties active in the Conference expressed support for the insular views which Peking had attempted to foist upon revolutionary forces.
Peking propaganda attacked the Conference with impotent fury, attempting to distort its goals and tasks, to disparage its historical significance, and to prevent the dissemination of its documents. Chinese leaders declared the slogans of unity of action against imperialism advanced by the Marxist-Leninist parties to be “rotten banners,” and the idea of alliance between the international working class and the peasantry “shopworn.”
The need to consistently expose and then to criticize in principle the theory and practice of Maoism, particularly in connection with the CCP 9th Congress, was emphasized repeatedly in speeches by representatives of a great many parties.
Representatives of fraternal parties stressed that condemnation of Peking’s disruptive tactics in no way signified interference in CCP internal affairs. The chief of the delegation from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Gustav Husak, said:
One cannot consider the efforts of the Mao Tse-tung faction to undermine relations between socialist countries, to support and expand separatist nationalistic tendencies and anti-Soviet feelings, to weaken and disrupt friendly relations and ties of alliance between the Soviet Union and other socialist countries as internal affairs of the Communist Party of China.
The convincing analysis of the anti-Leninist aims of Maoist leaders presented to conferees by the head of the Soviet delegation, the General Secretary of the CC CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, met with great attention by conferees. He stated:
The combination of the political adventurism of the Chinese leaders and their constant incitement of an atmosphere of war hysteria has introduced new elements into the international situation, and these we have no right to ignore.
Thus the CPSU, which initially had no intention of dragging before the conference the problem of Sino-Soviet relations, was forced to do so. The head of the delegation from the CPSU delineated the principled position on China of our party and the Soviet government, a position based on long-term perspective, and stemming from the fact that root interests of the Soviet and Chinese people coincide.45
The conferees made statements concerning the break the present-day leaders of China had made with Marxism-Leninism and emphasized the particularly pernicious nature of the line taken by the Chinese leadership in the struggle against the socialist community. Sharp criticism of this criminal line was heard in the speeches made by the heads of the delegations from the Communist parties of Bulgaria, Hungary, the Mongolian People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic, France, Denmark, the United States of America, Uruguay, and many other countries.
Many speakers cited numerous facts of gross interference in internal affairs of fraternal parties by CCP leaders and their stooges. For example, the head of the delegation from the Brazilian Communist Party, the General Secretary of its Central Committee, Luis Carlos Prestes, said that his party was:
. . . one of the first parties to experience the consequences of factionalism, instigated and openly supported in our country by Chinese leaders from the Mao Tse-tung faction. . . . In the interests of the unity of our party we have been forced to come out in the open against the antiproletarian and anti-Marxist positions of the Maoists.”46
The conferees pointed out that in their struggle the Maoists did not hesitate to employ terrorism. The head of the delegation from the People’s Party of Panama recounted how since 1964 CCP leaders had waged a hostile campaign against his party differing in no way from actions of the ruling oligarchy. In fact, Peking went even further, deciding it would be acceptable to physically eliminate opponents. The leader of the Federation of Students and the head of the anti-imperialist movement, Victor Avila, suffered a head wound inflicted from a shot fired by a Maoist lackey. Later on, another Communist youth leader suffered two bullet wounds in the leg.47
The conferees severely condemned the disruptive, schismatic activities of Peking and its agents in the national liberation movement. The Chairman of the South African Communist Party, John B. Marx, told the conference that the Chinese leaders had not only cut off aid to the Afrikaans National Congress but were in fact subsidizing and protecting groups of right-wing renegades who undertook their activities upon insistence and support of the CIA.48 It was emphasized that activities of the Maoists played directly into the hands of imperialism in its struggle against revolutionary forces. As the head of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party delegation, Janos Kadar, put it:
“Objectively, the present policy of the Chinese leadership is the greatest gift that could be made to international imperialism, for it gives it advantages, and inspires it with hope.”49
The consequences of Maoist treachery impacted particularly on fraternal parties leading the revolutionary struggle in places that world imperialism considers its bridgehead. The head of the delegation of the West Berlin Communists, G. Danelius, said:
In West Berlin, “Maoism” is a direct weapon of the bourgeoisie. It undermines the unity of all adversaries of the latter-day capitalist system, binds the democratic and socialist movement to an ultra-left and adventurist line and confuses young people who are entering the movement.”50
The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Germany, M. Reiman, also noted that while the Communist Party was outlawed in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Bonn government encouraged officially existing Maoist factions, using them for its own purposes. “The West German imperialists,” he said, “consider the Chinese leaders to be their strategic reserve.”51
The anti-Marxist thesis of the Maoists concerning the inevitability of a new world war was severely criticized during the conference. Acceptance of this thesis, it was emphasized, would imply rejection of the struggle for creating conditions most favorable to settling the main conflict of our epoch, the conflict between socialism and capitalism; it would infer doubts in the strength of the socialist system, the international working class, and the national liberation movements. Participants in the conference also convincingly demonstrated the fallaciousness of Maoist assertions that, so far as war was concerned, there exist two possibilities, namely, that “war either will lead to revolution, or revolution will avert war.”52
Representatives of the Communist and workers’ parties stated concern that CCP leadership, headed by Mao Tse-tung, was attempting to subordinate China’s entire development to warlike goals; the militarization of the country, and the generating of war psychosis.
The armed border provocations instigated by Chinese authorities roused deep indignation among the conferees. Walter Ulbricht, head of the delegation from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, said that “these acts of military aggression directly support the global strategy of the United States and the expansionist policy of West German imperialism.”53
The CC CPSU plenum, convened at the end of June 1969, having heard and discussed a report by L. I. Brezhnev, “Results of the International Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties,” fully and completely approved activities of the Soviet Politburo directed at strengthening the solidarity of the world Communist movement, as well as work accomplished by the CPSU’s delegation to the conference. The Plenary Session declared that our party would carry on an unrelenting struggle against the anti-Leninist goals of China’s leadership against its schismatic policy and great-power, nationalistic course, and would do everything necessary to protect the interests of the Soviet people against infringement. The resolution of the Plenary Session noted that:
“. . . the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is proceeding on the basis that the root interests of the Soviet and Chinese peoples coincide. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union henceforth will endeavor to preserve and support the friendly feelings the Soviet people have for the Chinese people and which the Chinese people unquestionably also have for the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries.”54
8. Meeting of the heads of state of the USSR and the PRC in September 1969
At the beginning of July 1969 a session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR discussed the issues of the international situation and the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. In his address, the USSR Minister of Foreign Affairs, A. A. Gromyko, devoted great attention to problems of Sino-Soviet relations, once again stating that, with regard to China, the basic policy of the Soviet state remained that of restoring and developing friendship without encumbering preliminary conditions.55 The Soviet government expressed readiness to discuss a wide range of questions of mutual interest with the Chinese leadership in order to achieve this goal.
However, Peking leaders continued stubbornly to disregard Soviet proposals directed at normalizing relations. Furthermore, on July 8, 1969, they instigated a new action calculated to increase tension along the Soviet-Chinese border. Chinese authorities organized an armed attack on Soviet river workers on Gol’dinskiy Island.*
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR strongly protested this latest incursion and demanded that the PRC government punish the guilty and take steps to insure that such actions were not repeated. The note further emphasized that the Soviet side, in order to protect its legal rights, would be forced to take additional measures against Chinese actions directed at violating the state border of the USSR and jeopardizing the security and lives of Soviet citizens.56
At the end of July 1969 the Soviet government took the initiative in suggesting a bilateral Soviet-Chinese meeting, in which to discuss problems of principle in relations between the USSR and the PRC on a state level, to exchange views on ways to ease tensions in relations, and to discuss questions of trade, economic, scientific-technical, and cultural cooperation.
The PRC State Council gave no reply to this initiative. The extremist wing of the ruling Peking clique, striving to consolidate fully China’s position of implacable hostility toward the Soviet Union, continued its policy of exacerbating relations with the USSR, resorting to the organization of direct armed provocations on the border.
An obstacle in the path of Peking’s designs was a meeting between the USSR Chairman of the Council of Ministers, A. N. Kosygin, and the Premier of the PRC State Council, Chou En-lai. This meeting, taking place by Soviet initiative, occurred in Peking on September 11, 1969, during A. N. Kosygin’s return from the funeral of the President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh. Representing the Soviet side were Secretary of the CC CPSU, K. F. Katushev, and the Deputy Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, M. A. Yasnov. The Chinese side was represented by Vice Premiers Li Hsiennien and Hsieh Fu-chih.57
Certain questions of Sino-Soviet relations were discussed. The exchange of views was then continued in official correspondence. The most important result was the resumption of discussion of border disagreements in Peking in October 1969. The governmental delegation assigned to attend this discussion was headed by First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs V. V. Kuznetsov. The Chinese delegation was led by the PRC Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chiao Kuan-hua.
The Soviet Union attached great importance to discussions of border questions with the PRC. L. I. Brezhnev, in a speech on October 27, 1969, said:
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet government would like to hope that a positive, realistic approach will prevail at these discussions.
There is no lack of good will on the Soviet side. We favor a solution to the border and to other differences between the USSR and the PRC on a firm and just basis, in a spirit of equality, mutual respect, and consideration of the interests of both countries. If the Chinese side demonstrates good will too, there is no question but that this will all be possible.58
The Soviet side strove to create an atmosphere favorable to successful progress of the discussions. The press ceased critical remarks about the policies of CCP leaders, and all possible steps were taken toward normalizing the border situation and toward resolving differences by friendly consultations.
The Chinese side took the opposite tack. Shortly before discussions began, the PRC government published documents repeating earlier, unfounded assertions that Sino-Soviet treaties establishing the present border were unequal, and attempting to place responsibility on the Soviet Union for the aggravation of the border situation.
Anti-Soviet propaganda in China intensified as discussions began. The very day the delegations started their work, anti-Soviet brochures in Chinese, Russian, and other languages, containing malicious attacks on the Soviet Union, territorial claims to our land, deliberately distorted historical facts relating to the Soviet-Chinese border, and inflammatory assertions that the USSR was nurturing plans to seize Chinese territory went on sale in state stores.
Chinese cinema again showed so-called documentary films designed to inflame hostility and hatred for the Soviet people. Anti-Soviet photographic displays appeared in store windows, in parks, and other public places; slogans appealing for “cracking the heads, spilling the blood, and burial” of the Soviet people were common. Such slogans were propagandized in the official Chinese press as well.59
In the fall of 1969 a campaign to “prepare for war” began in China. This campaign, constantly fed by provocative warnings of a Soviet attack on the PRC, encompassed virtually the whole of the populace, and subordinated to it the country’s entire political and economic life. Preparation for war was declared to be “the fundamental purpose of economic construction in China.”60 Mass movements of industrial plants deep into the interior were initiated, and stockpiles of goods, medicines, and the like were established. The populace, preparing for a “state of siege,” was mobilized on an emergency basis in cities and in agricultural regions to build defenses and bomb shelters. Air raid drills accompanied by simulated enemy attacks were held constantly.
The Maoists created this atmosphere of war psychosis in the country to sustain anti-Soviet feelings during discussions of border disagreements between the USSR and the PRC, to dispel hopes of the Chinese people for normalization of relations, to suppress the rising tide of political discord, to rally the broadest possible strata of the populace against the so-called “Soviet threat,” to justify economic difficulties, and to establish reasons for further increasing military production.
To justify its military preparations, Peking took a clumsy step by declaring that the PRC supposedly was under military pressure from the Soviet Union. Chinese propaganda frantically disseminated provocative fabrications to the effect that the Soviet Union was preparing an “attack on the PRC,” and was conducting “large-scale military actions.” The Soviet-Chinese territorial situation was deliberately distorted, the Maoists asserting that Soviet troops were being massed along borders.
A TASS statement published in the Soviet Union on March 14, 1970 decisively refuted attempts to distort the policy of our country with respect to China:
. . . distortions such as these are utterly groundless. Anti-Communist propaganda (in the West) is attempting to use them to interfere with the Soviet-Chinese discussions now going on in Peking, “to throw in” material designed to increase tension in relations between the USSR and the PRC. The Soviet Armed Forces are carrying out their routine, everyday duties and are improving their combat proficiency within the framework of conventional plans and programs, strengthening the defense of the Soviet state throughout its territory. . . .61
The TASS statement emphasized that the permanent policy of the USSR and of its government was one of attempting to normalize Sino-Soviet relations, to develop cooperation, to restore and strengthen the friendship between the two countries.
Even so Chinese leaders continued to distort the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, representing it as a force hostile to the PRC. The “prepare for war” campaign, encouragement of militarism, and anti-Soviet diatribes continued unabated. The statements of a “Soviet threat” to China, clearly provocative in nature, were necessary to the devious purposes of Peking. These purposes were to influence the USSR by subjecting it to military blackmail, and to put pressure on our country at the discussions of border disagreements.
These efforts were fruitless. The position of the Soviet Union was set forth in no uncertain terms by the General Secretary of the CC CPSU, L. I. Brezhnev, in his April 14, 1970 speech in Khar’kov. Regarding the Soviet-Chinese border discussions he stated:
The Soviet Union’s position at these discussions is clear-cut and unambiguous. We believe that it is necessary to reach an agreement that will turn the Soviet-Chinese border into a line of good-neighborly relations, not enmity. Maintaining our legal, principled position, upholding the interests of the Soviet motherland and the inviolability of its frontier, we shall do all we can to normalize interstate relations with the People’s Republic of China. Of course, all are well aware of the fact that this depends not on us alone.
We firmly proceed from the fact that long-term interests of the Soviet and Chinese people do not conflict, they coincide. At the same time, we do not close our eyes to the fact that the atmosphere that is artificially created around the talks now going on in China cannot promote their success. As a matter of fact, who can seriously assert that the fanning of anti-Soviet military psychosis and the calls to the Chinese people to prepare for “war and hunger” promote the success of the talks? If this is being done to bring pressure to bear on the Soviet Union, then it can be said in advance that these efforts are wasted. Our people have strong nerves, and this is what the organizers of the war hysteria in China should know. And in the final analysis, the People’s Republic of China is as interested in clear-cut regulation of the border question as is the Soviet Union, which has everything that is needed to uphold the interests of the Soviet people, the builders of communism.62
9. Sino-Soviet economic ties, 1967—1969
The Chinese side, in the second half of the 1960s, took steps to close all channels of economic and interstate cooperation with the Soviet Union, and with the majority of other socialist countries.
On June 24, 1967, Peking issued a statement that the agreement on cooperation for rendering assistance to ships and aircraft in distress at sea signed July 3, 1956 by the governments of the USSR, the PRC, and the Korean People’s Democratic Republic would cease as of January 1, 1968. This was the third multilateral agreement between socialist countries abrogated by the PRC.
In 1967 the Chinese continued sabotaging multilateral agreements between socialist countries on international rail shipments and passenger traffic (Agreement on International Railroad Freight Traffic, and Agreement on International Railroad Passenger Traffic). Chinese representatives engaged in splitting tactics within the organizing committee for the conference of ministers of the Railroad Cooperation Organization, trying to paralyze its efforts.
Chinese authorities, despite numerous Soviet appeals, refused passage through the PRC of food and medicines for Soviet specialists in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. On June 9, 1967 they officially canceled the existing agreement on Soviet flights en route to Vietnam via Chinese territory.
Peking’s policy of rupturing Soviet-Chinese state-to-state cooperation was graphically demonstrated by activities of the Soviet-Chinese navigation commission on boundary sections of the rivers in the Amur basin. The 14th session of this commission, which was to have discussed unresolved problems of improving conditions for navigation along the Amur and Ussuri rivers, convened in Harbin at the end of July 1967. The Chinese side ignored constructive proposals advanced by the Soviet section of the commission and resorted to unfounded political attacks against the Soviet Union. The goal of disrupting the work of the conference was planned in advance, resulting not only in a gross violation of the 1951 agreement, but also in further increasing tensions between the USSR and the PRC.
On April 27, 1968, the Soviet section of the Mixed Commission on Navigation proposed to the Chinese section that the next scheduled session be held in Khabarovsk in May 1968, in order to exchange views and jointly draft measures to maintain normal navigation conditions along border sections of the Amur and Ussuri rivers. The Chinese were given a draft of the preliminary agenda, and the field work plan for 1968. The plan envisaged completion of a number of projects during the 1968 navigation season necessary to maintain normal depths and ensure safety of navigation. On August 16, 1968 the Chinese side rudely rejected this proposal for another meeting.
This step was but a link in overall Chinese policy. For several years it had demonstrated its disinclination to cooperate in solving practical navigation problems on border sections of the rivers. For example, natural processes result in changes taking place in the bed of the Amur river. This in turn makes it necessary to update systematically the direction of the navigable channel by changing the positions of the aids to navigation. Yet the Chinese side responded with stubborn refusals, despite the repeated proposals made by river workers along the Amur river that corresponding re-establishment of many of the aids to navigation established along the bank take place in order to mark the channel with the greatest depths. The Chinese side would not agree to the route work planned for 1968, thus wrecking the extremely necessary plans designed to clear out the shoals and bars that were limiting shipping. Failure to do so resulted in artificial reductions in the quantities of cargo carried in Soviet ships, inflicted substantial losses on transportation, and created danger for shipping.
In 1967 the greater volume of deliveries occurred in the second half of the year as a result of the tardy signing of the goods exchange protocol. These deliveries became very complicated because of the position of the Chinese authorities. Their provocative actions deprived Soviet merchant ships of the possibility of conducting transportation and commercial operations in Chinese ports. In August 1967, for example, the motorships Turkestan and Kamchatskles were forced to depart the port of Dal’niy without the cargo called for under the existing trade agreement. Actions of Chinese authorities with respect to Soviet ships and crews in Dal’niy were an integral part of the anti-Soviet campaign waged in the PRC. Their actions created a real threat to commercial shipping because Soviet ships, under such abnormal conditions, were deprived of the possibility of calling at Dal’niy.63
According to protocol, Soviet-Chinese trade for 1967 had been set at 228 million rubles, or 58 million rubles less than the actual 1966 trade. In fact, however, it was 96 million rubles, about one-third of the 1966 amount. The Soviet Union dropped to fourteenth place on the PRC’s foreign trade list.
Trade between China and other socialist countries also dropped off sharply in 1967. Compared with 1966, trade between the PRC and countries participating in the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance decreased from 528 million to 313 million rubles.
The year 1967 marked the first time that the USSR and the PRC failed to sign a plan for cultural and scientific exchange and cooperation through the medium of friendship associations and tourist organizations.
A similar situation evolved in the field of tourist exchanges. There was correspondence in 1967 between the “Intourist” and its Chinese counterpart, “Lu Hsing She,” exchanges. The Soviet side, on August 9, 1967, declared that given a guarantee of normal conditions for Soviet tourists in the PRC, to include banning anti-Soviet provocations, trips by Soviet tourists could be arranged under conditions of equal exchange for the remainder of 1967, and in 1968. “Lu Hsing She,” the Chinese tourist agency, in its September 1 letter of reply to “Intourist,” rejected this initiative.
Nor was a trade protocol signed in 1968. This was the first year without such a protocol since 1949 and the blame falls on the Chinese. Trade between the USSR and the PRC was conducted on the basis of individual contracts covering specific commodities. The actual trade in 1968 was 10 percent below that of 1967, totaling 86 million rubles.
A. A. Gromyko, USSR Minister of Foreign Affairs, in his report to the session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on June 27, 1968, referred to the condition of Sino-Soviet interstate relations:
Let me say bluntly that these relations are a long way from what relations can and should be between two socialist countries, and even simply between neighbors. Our side is doing everything it can to see to it that state relations with China do not worsen. This year the Soviet government has made concrete proposals to the government of the People’s Republic of China on questions of trade, joint use of the border rivers for navigation, and on some others. But Peking remains deaf to any initiative reflecting concern for current and future Sino-Soviet relations. . . . The Mao Tsetung faction is carrying on hostile, disruptive activities against our state. Peking newspapers and radio, in their vile attempts to defame the internal life of the Soviet Union and its foreign policy, are competing with imperialist propaganda.64
The Soviet side, in 1969, advanced a number of proposals for activating economic ties between the USSR and the PRC. These included plans for expanding trade in 1969, for more than doubling trade in 1970 as compared with 1969, and for resuming border trade.
The Chinese side failed to respond to any of these proposals. Soviet-Chinese trade in 1969 fell 41 percent as compared with 1968, to a figure of 51 million rubles, the lowest level in the entire history of mutual trade relations.
A clear expression of the neighborly and cooperative policy of the Soviet Union is the fact that indoctrinating our populace in a spirit of friendship and respect for the Chinese people and for their glorious history and revolutionary progress never ceased. The Soviet-Chinese Friendship Association engages in a great deal of fruitful activity. It systematically stages programs devoted to the most important events in the life of the Chinese people, celebrates jubilees of outstanding Chinese revolutionary leaders, world-renowned leaders of Chinese culture and literature, and famous dates from the history of Soviet-Chinese friendship and cooperation. In the last three years the association celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of that great son of the Chinese people, the revolutionary democrat Sun Yat-sen; the 80th birthday of a founder of the CCP, Li Ta-chao; the 70th birthday of the famous Chinese Communist-internationalist Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai; the 80th birthday of the father of modem Chinese literature, Lu Hsün; the 60th birthday of the famous Chinese writer Chou Li-po; the 70th birthday of the famous scientist and writer Cheng Chen-do; the 1,200th anniversary of the birth of the Chinese humanist and classicist of Chinese literature, Han Yung; the 40th anniversary of the death of the famous leader of the CCP, P’eng P’ai; and the 60th birthday of the Chinese poet In Fu. Public meetings in the capital, held in the House of Friendship with the Peoples of Foreign Countries, were devoted to these dates. Central newspapers printed special articles on the life and activities of these famous sons of the Chinese people. The Far East Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR has been making a great contribution to research on the problems of Sinology and to popularization of knowledge about China. Its scholars have published a great many fundamental works on China in recent years.
Unfailingly friendly attention to China and the dissemination of propaganda on friendship and cooperation between the Soviet and Chinese peoples are elements of our Leninist foreign policy. The Soviet-Chinese Friendship Association and the Far East Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR held a jubilee conference, “Lenin and China,” in Moscow on February 24–25, 1970, to honor the 100th anniversary of the birth of V. I. Lenin. Participants included representatives of the public, activists in the Soviet-Chinese Friendship Association, sinologists, and distinguished military leaders and specialists who had helped the Chinese people in their revolutionary struggle and in building a new society. Speeches stressed the role of Leninist ideas in the national liberation and revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people and in the founding of the CCP, noted the fruitful nature of friendship and cooperation between the USSR and the PRC at different stages of the Chinese Revolution, and affirmed the great importance of friendship between these two great peoples as a crucial factor in the struggle against imperialism, and for the unity of revolutionary forces of our time.65
NOTES
1. B. Zanegin, A. Mironov, Ya. Mikhailov, K sobytiyam v Kitaye (Events in China) (Moscow, 1967), p. 25.
2. Ibid., pp. 25–26.
3. V. I. Lenin, Complete Collected Works, Vol. 41, p. 337.
4. Ibid., Vol. 38, p. 55.
5. Pravda, September 1, 1966.
6. Pravda, October 3, 1966.
7. Pravda, December 14, 1966.
8. Kommunist, No. 4, p. 93, 1969.
9. Korni nyneshnikh sobytiy v Kitaye (The Roots of Today’s Events in China) (Moscow, 1968), p. 31.
10. Pravda, March 11, 1967.
11. Pravda, February 7, 1967.
12. Pravda, February 5, 1967.
13. Pravda, February 10, 1967.
14. Pravda, February 28, 1967.
15. Pravda, February 6, 1967.
16. Pravda, February 15, 1967.
17. Pravda, August 12, 1967.
18. Pravda, August 13, 1967.
19. Ibid.
20. Pravda, January 6, 1967.
21. Pravda, April 25, 1967.
22. Jen Min Jihpao, April 30, 1967.
23. Pravda, June 22, 1967.
24. 50 let Velikoy Oktyabr’skoy sotsialisticheskoy revolyutsii. Postanov-leniye Pienuma TSK KPSS. (50 Years of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Resolution of the Plenary Session of the CC CPSU) (Moscow, 1967), p. 54.
25. L. I. Brezhnev, Pyat’desyat l’et velikikh pobed sotsializma (Fifty Years of Great Victories of Socialism (Moscow, 1967), p. 41.
26. Pravda, April 4, 1968.
27. Trud, April 13, 1968.
28. Pravda, April 9, 1968.
29. Jen Min Jihpao, September 2, 1968.
30. Jen Min Jihpao, November 1, 1968.
31. Pravda, November 1, 1968.
32. Kommunist, No. 4, p. 87, 1969.
33. Pravda, March 4, 1969.
34. Pravda, March 16, 1969.
35. Lu Hsün, Sochineniya (Works), Vol. 6, Peking, p. 109.
36. V. I. Lenin, Complete Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 20.
37. Ibid., Vol. 45, p. 303.
38. Izvestiya, October 12, 1954.
39. Izvestiya, January 19, 1957.
40. Pravda, March 30, 1969.
41. Pravda, April 12, 1969.
42. Lin Piao, Otchetnyi doklad na IX Vsekitayskom s’yezde KPK (Report to the 9th All-China Congress of the Communist Party of China, hereinafter referred to as 9th All-China Congress) (Peking, 1969), p. 64.
43. Mezhdunarodnoye Soveshchaniye kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partiy (The International Conference of Communist and Worker’s Parties, hereinafter referred to as Communist and Worker’s Parties) (Moscow, 1969), p. 199.
44. Pravda, July 14, 1969.
45. Communist and Worker’s Parties, p. 195–200.
46. Ibid., p. 473.
47. Ibid., p.852.
48. Ibid., p.862.
49. Ibid., p.422.
50. Ibid., p. 270.
51. Ibid., p. 226.
52. Ibid., p. 118–120.
53. Ibid, p.290–291.
54. Kommunist, No. 10, 1969, p. 6.
55. Pravda, July 11, 1969.
56. Pravda, July 9, 1969.
57. Pravda, September 12, 1969.
58. Pravda, October 28, 1969.
59. Jen Min Jihpao, December 13, 1969.
60. Hung-chi, No. 10, 1969.
61. Pravda, March 14, 1970.
62. Pravda, April 15, 1970.
63. Pravda, August 22, 1967.
64. Pravda, June 28, 1968.
65. Pravda, February 26, 1970.
__________________
* Translator’s note: called Chenpao (Treasure) by the Chinese.
* Translator’s note: this is referred to by the Chinese as Pacha Island, and as being part of Fuyuan county in Heilungkiang province.
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