WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Parade on Red Square, photograph from 1961
On November 7, 1966, at celebrations commemorating the 49th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued a sharp statement condemning the “cultural revolution” being led by Mao Zedong in China. The denunciation by the Moscow Stalinists sparked a walkout by the Chinese representatives.
“What is going on now in China under the name of the so-called ‘cultural revolution’ has nothing to do with the revolution or with culture, with Marxism or with the policies of socialism,” the statement declared. “The Chinese leadership is promoting a political struggle against our country and the other socialist countries, intensifying its activities in the international Communist movement.”
The feud between the Soviet and Chinese Stalinist communist parties—which was based not on political doctrine but on the rival national interests of two competing bureaucracies—was the central topic of the report issued by the Soviet Politburo on the eve of the anniversary. During the same speech, given by Arvid Y. Pelshe, a participant in the Russian Revolution and one of the few survivors of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the Soviet bureaucracy called for closer ties to the imperialist powers, citing favorably the recent development of improved relations with the regime of Charles de Gaulle in France. Pelshe called for the development of similar collaboration with Japan, Italy and Canada.
The bureaucracy gave only a perfunctory acknowledgment of the ongoing US imperialist aggression in Vietnam in its political attack, cynically accusing China of undermining the unity of “socialist countries supporting the Vietnamese people.”
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