Workers World Vol. 18, No. 16
April 14 – If ever there were a golden opportunity for the Soviet Union to take a bold, genuine, and timely initiative to normalize its relations with the People’s Republic of China, it is now. Such an opportunity has not presented itself for more than a decade – certainly not since the fall of Khrushchev.
The West is supremely conscious of the possibility of such an initiative. And nowhere is this prospect viewed with greater apprehension, if not alarm, than in Washington.
This should go a long way to explain why the Pentagon so hurriedly trotted out its old war horse, former Defense Secretary Schlesinger, to plead for military assistance to China and to disclose that this was already under consideration during his tenure in office (“Face the Nation,” CBS, April 11). Schlesinger’s appeal on CBS was deliberately timed to offset any diplomatic overtures by the USSR to China.
On the same day Joseph Lelyveld writing in the Sunday New York Times Week in Review section reported that “the possibility of détente between the two great Communist powers is viewed here (Washington) as a nightmare.” Indeed!
That is precisely why the USSR should quickly undertake an initiative of its own. The world bourgeoisie has never for a moment overlooked the fact that a new accommodation between the USSR and China is inherent in the situation.
The detour from Leninist norms of conduct between socialist countries, on the part of both the USSR and China, is strictly conjunctural and not at all structural. The deviations from proletarian internationalism flow not from the organic character of the social regimes in China and the USSR – as aggression and national chauvinism flow organically from monopoly capitalism – but from conjunctural factors based upon mistakes, false policies, miscalculations, and illusions, all deepened by the pressures and maneuvers of U.S. imperialism. The terrible legacy left by Stalin and a whole series of events in Western Europe and in Asia, as well as in America, have added up to formidable obstacles in the way of truly socialist internationalism.
A careful reading of Schlesinger’s message on CBS shows that the Pentagon is in a hurry to offer China what would amount to a virtual military alliance which, for all we know, may be wholly unsolicited on the part of the People’s Republic. Suffice it to say that when a rabid and unbridled militarist like Schlesinger refers to China as a “quasi-ally,” it speaks volumes for the eagerness with which at least a section of the bourgeoisie in the U.S. pursues its intention to complete what it calls “the connection with China.”
A large section of the ruling class, however, as represented by Ford and Kissinger, is not ready at this moment to move that rapidly and is either vacillating or awaiting what Lelyveld in the same article refers to as the “post-Mao era” in the hope of getting a better deal from Mao’s successors.
It seems most opportune, therefore, from the viewpoint of the socialist interests of both China and the USSR, that the Soviet leadership should now take the initiative which alone can really reverse the process of rapprochement between Washington and China. This it can do if it pulls back all its troops from one end of the Sino-Soviet border to the other. Admittedly this may pose some risk, but the greater risk is to allow the processes, long set in motion by the Sino-Soviet split, to reach a truly dangerous situation.
If a pullback of troops is commenced with due notice to and consultation with the People’s Republic, it will by the logic of the move itself begin to defuse the character of the confrontation which exists on the border.
The pullback should not be conceived in the spirit of an attempt to capitalize on, exploit, or promote sympathy for the anti-Mao forces – whose influence in China, in spite of the recent suppression, is nevertheless deep and widespread. Precisely such a mistake was made by Premier Kosygin during the height of the Cultural Revolution, when, while on a visit to London, he categorically stated, “We sympathize with the other side.”
It is widely believed that the Soviet leadership is profoundly in sympathy with the anti-Mao forces while the U.S. clearly favors the Mao group in the current struggle. Of course, if one views the reciprocal relationships between the USSR, China, and the U.S. solely on the basis of their official pronouncements and propaganda, such a view is irresistible. It is nevertheless a misconception.
Closer examination, even of the official pronouncements and propaganda in the U.S., will find a note of caution as well as frustration. This is true of the Soviet press as well, when seen against the background of the recent Tien An Men Square demonstration and its aftermath.
In truth, the U.S. capitalist media would like to be letting out the biggest red-baiting howl ever against the suppression of “dissidents” in China, following the Tien An Men demonstration and the ouster of Teng. They are, however, restrained by the fact that there is at least a “parallel” foreign policy position between U.S. imperialism and the Mao forces, to use Kissinger’s euphemistic phraseology.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union, or even the Soviet bureaucracy, has absolutely nothing to gain in supporting the anti-Mao forces – which are a heterogeneous grouping running the gamut from ordinary political differences within the framework of Maoist ideology all the way up to and including neo-restorationist bourgeois elements.
If the anti-Mao forces were to come to the fore as a result of having invoked the support of open mass struggle on a really large scale, there is no denying that it might result in the kind of dangerous shift to the right that took place under Imre Nagy in Hungary and Dubcek in Czechoslovakia.
Both these men were Communists who started out with difference of opinion over the correct road to socialism, and advocated a “liberalization” which they may have thought was needed and healthy. But they brought in their train forces so hostile to the workers’ state that it opened up a wave to the right, a wave of restoration and counter-revolution in which they themselves might have been swept away, had it not been cut short by Soviet intervention.
The specter of a similar development in China gain credence with the news that the rightist demonstration in Tien An Men was not isolated, but has been repeated to varying degrees in other cities. Like the Nagys and Dubceks, the Chinese Communist Party leaders supporting these demonstrations may not intend to promote counter-revolution, but could nevertheless set into motion a wave to the right.
No Soviet leaders, emanating from the contradictory social stratum of the Soviet Union where most if not all come from at the present time, could possibly look with favor upon such a development. It would undermine their own position in the USSR, not to speak of Eastern Europe. And in foreign affairs, such a leadership in China would be most conducive to becoming pliable tools of Wester, and particularly U.S., imperialism. This explains why the Ford and Kissinger administration prefers to wait for the post-Mao era, or at least is vacillating in that direction.
All the more reason, then, for the USSR, in spite of its ideological differences with the Mao regime, to take the opportunity to make that kind of initiative which would be absolutely free of any kind of bias toward the rightists in China and have no taint whatever of collusion with U.S. imperialism.
Embarking on such an initiative could not but deescalate the violent anti-Soviet polemics from China (and from the USSR) which, were they to continue, would increasingly fall on deaf ears. The troop pullback would be the best answer to the charges of so-called Soviet aggressiveness and would exert a healthy influence throughout the worldwide working class movement and even in the USSR – perhaps there above all.
How interesting that the so-called Soviet dissidents – the Solzhenitsysns, Sakarovs, Amalriks, etc. – a bourgeois and pro-imperialist grouping, are so keen on a pullback of troops in Eastern Europe but eloquent in their silence about a pullback from the Sino-Soviet border! This is not to say that we favor the permanent stationing of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe – by no means. But withdrawal there, just a stone’s throw from Western, and above all U.S., troops, poses another question, and one must not forget the large and substantial reserve of reaction which still exists in practically all of Eastern Europe.
So much talk is concentrated on détente between the U.S. and the USSR; so much of the workers’ attention is focused on the dialogue with the West, on false and fruitless polemics that are supposed to bring a reduction in international tensions. But the real issue now is détente or accommodation between the Soviet Union and China – for that would radically transform the international situation.
Instead of cursing the darkness, the Soviet leaders could light a candle in the gloomy international situation by making a genuine offer of a troop pullback, with total indifference to the internal struggle in China and without conniving with the U.S.
In conducting the struggle against the heterogeneous opposition, the present Chinese leadership is making a total and vulgar identification of the anti-Mao forces with the Soviet Union, while slandering them in the extreme. This kind of false polemic may create a new Moscow Trial type of struggle. It is to be wondered if the talk of “verdicts that must be reversed” refers to the startling move of a few months ago when the crew of a Soviet helicopter was freed after two year’s detention in China.
Already, the demands for repentance from people who have been put into office by the Mao leadership itself smacks of the forced confessions that characterized the mid-1930s in the USSR.
Any move in this direction would only further discredit the Mao leadership and make it harder to rally the masses against the rightist opposition.
Last updated: 11 May 2026