Georgia State University

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History Theses Department of History

Summer 8-8-2017

Which East is Red? The Maoist Presence in the Soviet Union and
Soviet Bloc Europe 1956-1980
Andrew M. Smith
asmith120@student.gsu.edu

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Recommended Citation
Smith, Andrew M., "Which East is Red? The Maoist Presence in the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc Europe
1956-1980." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2017.
https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/history_theses/111

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WHICH EAST IS RED? THE MAOIST PRESENCE IN THE SOVIET UNION AND SOVIET

BLOC EUROPE 1956-1980

By

ANDREW SMITH

Under the Direction of Douglas Reynolds, PhD

ABSTRACT

“Which East is Red?” is a study of the little-known “anti-revisionist” currents within the

Soviet Bloc in the wake of the Sino-Soviet Split, particularly those which described themselves

as Maoists. This study primarily concentrates on the Maoist wind that blew through the USSR

and Eastern Europe during the 1960s, when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China

generated anti-revisionist storms around the globe. It also discusses the effects of the Cultural

Revolution on diplomacy in the socialist Second World. Finally, this thesis challenges

mainstream academic studies of Marxism and dissent in the Soviet Bloc, which presents a false

dichotomy of dissidence within the region: a false dichotomy, that is, between those who

embraced liberal democracy of the West versus the Kremlin’s official version of Marxism-

Leninism. In short, a new historiography of dissident movements in the USSR and Eastern

Europe during the Cold War must include the Maoist, communist opposition.

INDEX WORDS: 1960s, Cold War, China, Soviet Union, Soviet Bloc, Sino-Soviet Split,
Communism, Cultural Revolution, Dissident Movements
 WHICH EAST IS RED?

THE MAOIST PRESENCE IN THE SOVIET UNION AND

SOVIET BLOC EUROPE 1956-1980

by

ANDREW M. SMITH

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

in the College of Arts and Sciences

Georgia State University

2017
 Copyright by
Andrew M. Smith
2017
WHICH EAST IS RED? THE MAOIST PRESENCE IN THE SOVIET UNION AND SOVIET

BLOC EUROPE 1956-1980

by

ANDREW M. SMITH

Committee Chair: Douglas Reynolds

Committee: Ian Fletcher

Electronic Version Approved:

Office of Graduate Studies

College of Arts and Sciences

Georgia State University

May 2017
 iv

DEDICATION

To my family
 v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank many people, foundations, and organizations for their help in my

work. I am particularly indebted to journalist and activist Alexei Volnyets of the International

Democracy Fund in Moscow, Dimitri Rublev of Moscow State Pedagogical University, Evgeniy

Kasakov of the University of Bremen, and opposition activist Dimitri Kostenko for their aid in

directing me to Soviet sources. I would also like to thank the Marxist Internet Archive, the From

Marx to Mao Internet Library, the Russian Maoist Party, the 23 September Resistance

Movement of Bulgaria, and the Russian Left Front for their invaluable help with sources that I

would otherwise not been able to access. I am also, naturally, greatly indebted to Douglas

Reynolds, Ian Fletcher, and Jared Poley of Georgia State University, my Russian language

instructors across the years, and my comrades in communist parties around the world for their

wisdom and encouragement. This endeavor would have been impossible without them.
 vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ V

1 INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................. 1

2 CHAPTER 1: AN UNEASY ALLIANCE ...................................................................... 5

3 CHAPTER 2: THE FIRST CRACKS: DESTALINIZATION AND THE

BEGINNINGS OF THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT ......................................................... 10

4 CHAPTER 3: INAKOMISLYASHCHII (OTHER-THINKERS): ANTI-

REVISIONIST COMMUNISTS IN THE SOVIET UNION ...................................... 12

5 CHAPTER 4: COMRADES-IN-ARMS: CHINA AND ALBANIA ........................... 36

6 CHAPTER 5: RUMBLINGS IN BULGARIA: THE COUP ATTEMPT OF 1965

AND THE 1968 WORLD FESTIVAL OF YOUTH & STUDENTS ......................... 41

7 CHAPTER 6: “BECOMING CHINESE”: MAOISTS IN THE GERMAN

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC......................................................................................... 46

8 CHAPTER 7: MAO ON TRIAL: MAOIST STUDENTS IN HUNGARY DURING

THE KÁDÁR ERA ......................................................................................................... 53

9 CHAPTER 8: THE CURIOUS LIFE OF KAZIMIERZ MIJAL: POLISH

MAOISM IN THE 1960S AND 1970S .......................................................................... 59

10 CONCLUSION: INTERROGATING HISTORY AND THE MYTH OF

MONOLITHIC MARXISM IN EASTERN EUROPE ............................................... 64

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................ 66
vii
 1

1 INTRODUCTION

Make trouble, fail, make trouble again, fail again . . . until their doom; that is the logic of
the imperialists and all reactionaries the world over in dealing with the people's cause, and they
will never go against this logic. This is a Marxist law. When we say "imperialism is ferocious," we
mean that its nature will never change, that the imperialists will never lay down their butcher
knives, that they will never become Buddhas, till their doom.
Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again . . . till their victory; that is the logic of the
people, and they too will never go against this logic. This is another Marxist law. The Russian
people's revolution followed this law, and so has the Chinese people's revolution.

Mao Zedong, "Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle" (14 August 1949), in Quotations from
Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 58-59.1

From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, the theories of Mao Zedong inspired many

people - youth, students, workers, and intellectuals - to “make trouble” for the status quo across

the world. It was a time when the world was experiencing a whirlwind of decolonization and of

new horizons beyond the global Cold War between the US and USSR. Hard on the heels of

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and Stalinism at the Twentieth

Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, the international communist

movement suffered a dramatic schism within both the socialist countries in Asia and Europe -

and the ranks of and communist parties all across the world - with the USSR and Eastern Europe

on one end and China and Albania on the other. Seemingly at stake were ideological purity,

political authority, and revolutionary praxis in overcoming capitalism and advancing toward

communism. The Chinese and their Albanian allies seemed isolated in their struggle: China was

the most populous country in the world and the second-largest socialist power, but after Sino-

1
Each section of this writing opens with a quotation from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [Zedong], i.e.,
the “Little Red Book,” with a further citation of the source of the quotation found in Selected Works of Mao Tse-
tung. While not standard practice, full citation of my epigraph is essential to inform readers of the location of the
original quote. The format for citing each epigraph, using the above as an example, is, Mao Zedong, "Cast Away
Illusions, Prepare for Struggle" (August 14, 1949), in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign
Languages Press, 1972), 58-59, followed by the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press,
1965), 4:428.
 2

Soviet Split2 saw the majority of socialist nations align with the Soviets, while the North

Vietnamese and North Korean governments vacillated between the two sides.

If the governments and parties of most socialist countries opposed the new

positions that Mao and the Chinese Communist Party were taking, the same cannot be said of the

broader international communist movement. Indeed, communists across the First and Third

worlds split into rival pro-Moscow and pro-Beijing “Maoist” parties, each claiming to be the true

heir of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The world found itself doubling in number of leftist parties,

often with the appellation “(Marxist-Leninist)” added to the end of the names of the new Maoist

organizations. Usually starting out small, the Maoist parties grew over the course of the “Global

Sixties.” For a time at least, student and youth movements in many societies of both the First and

Third Worlds found the Maoist message appealing: a refreshing and rebellious alternative to the

revisionist, reformist, and authoritarian pro-Moscow parties of their elders. For example, the

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Union (later the Revolutionary Communist Party) in the

US, the Gauche Prolétarienne (Proletarian Left) in France, and African anticolonial groups such

as the FNLA (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola or National Liberation Front of Angola)

in Angola, and the ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) in Zimbabwe all waved the

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (the “Little Red Book”) and wore the ubiquitous Mao

badges, those icons of iconoclasm.

Modern historical discourse has spent a great deal of time looking at how Mao

became an inspiration to anti-revisionist communists across the First and Third World, but a gap

seems to exist: what about the Second World? Apart from Albania, was Eastern Europe devoid

2
In most literature, the diplomatic and ideological fracturing between the USSR and People’s Republic of China is
written as the “Sino-Soviet split.” However, Maoists then and now emphasize the term “split” and stylize it as the
“Sino-Soviet Split,” marking it as a particularly important part of socialist history. In keeping with the Maoist
essence of this work, the term “Split” remains capitalized.
 3

of Maoism? My research has found this not to be the case: a careful examination of even

English-language sources at the margins of discourse around Maoism in the Sixties shows that it

was there. The advent of the Internet not only allows us access to new sources (especially newly-

opened archives) around the world, but also to connect to networks of veterans of the struggle as

well as scholars in the field. This research has certainly not been easy to undertake: thankfully,

my own years of personal study of Soviet history and Maoist theory helped make it possible to

accomplish. Soviet archives are still mostly inaccessible, with the Russian government divulging

its sources only slowly and sporadically. Even other countries that are part of this study would

have been impossible to research had it not been for my contacts inside Maoist organizations in

those countries.

The present study is a challenge to these discourses that omit the effects of the

Sino-Soviet Split and its effects on the Eastern European intellectual world and to the arguments

that Marxism and dissent in Eastern Europe were monolithic in being either pro-Soviet or pro-

Western. Why would the Eastern Bloc continue to be exempt from the zeitgeist of the Global

Sixties? While these countries had extensive police surveillance apparatuses (from the Stasi of

the German Democratic Republic to the KGB of the USSR) that made it particularly difficult to

organize new communist parties or militant groups, they certainly failed to prevent the “East

Wind” of China any more than the “West Wind” of the American-led First World from blowing

through their globally-connected societies and cultures. Dissidents who held left-wing or

Marxist-Leninist convictions at variance with official doctrine and whose voices were silenced or

lost, should be heard again as part of the new historical scholarship on the Second World, the

Global Sixties, and the Cold War

 4

The structure and methodology of this study begins chronologically with a presentation

of the post-1949 alliance between the Soviet Union and the newborn People’s Republic of China.

It then segues into a narrative of the Sino-Soviet Split and the ideological divergences between

Moscow’s and Beijing’s interpretations of Marxism, or the clash between “revisionism” with

“Mao Zedong Thought.”3 Each of the following chapters discuss the people and events

connected to Maoism in the Soviet bloc, with a key chapter devoted to the case of the Soviet

Union. The study concludes with a longer, more thorough explanation of my challenge to fellow

historians and a call to change the way we view Eastern Europe during the Long Global Sixties.

It should be noted that this study glaringly omits the Socialist Federal Republic of

Yugoslavia, the Socialist Republic of Romania, and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. While

there was indeed a brief attempt at a small group of youth to distribute the Serbo-Croatian

translation of the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung gifted to them by the Chinese

embassy in Belgrade, their attempt was so brief and lacking in any success that any significant

discussion of Maoism in Yugoslavia (i.e. lack thereof) would be moot.4 While China and

Romania had tepidly friendly diplomatic relations, I found no evidence of any attempts by

3
The terms “Maoism,” “Mao Zedong Thought,” and “anti-revisionism” are key terms in this study that oftentimes
overlap or seem to be used interchangeably: however, they are distinct terms in and of themselves. “Mao Zedong
Thought” was the most common appellation for what is today considered “Maoist” ideology, as the Chinese
Communist Party and its international allies viewed Mao’s theories as not necessarily being a new and higher stage
of Marxism-Leninism, but rather Marxism-Leninism as applied to the stage of history marked by national liberation
struggles, anti-Soviet revisionism, and cultural revolution within socialism. It was not until after Mao’s death that
the surviving pro-Beijing parties proclaimed “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism” as being a third and universally
applicable stage of communism. The term “anti-revisionism” is an umbrella term for all communist schools of
thought which rejected Khrushchev’s Destalinization and deemed the Soviet bloc to having “revised” genuine
Marxism-Leninism out of official state ideology: the Chinese Communist Party, Party of Labour of Albania, and
their international allies referred to themselves as “anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists” when contrasting themselves
to the Moscow-approved interpretation of “Marxism-Leninism.” In the twenty-first century, Maoists refer to
themselves as “Marxist-Leninist-Maoists,” while pro-Albanian Hoxhaists continue to refer to themselves as “anti-
revisionist Marxist-Leninists.”
4
Dominique Kirchner Reill, “Partisan legacies and anti-imeprialist ambitions: the Little Red Book in Italy and
Yugoslavia,” Alexander J. Cook ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), 197-204.
 5

Romanian citizens to bring Maoism to their home country in any scholarly work on Sino-

Romanian relations; the exact same can be said of Czechoslovakia. Hopefully future studies on

communist dissidence in the Eastern Bloc, however, will bring to light any attempts to bring

Maoism to these countries during the 1960s and 1970s.

My primary sources include numerous contemporary periodicals, pamphlets, and other

writings. They are supplemented by scholarly sources, especially monographic studies of the

Sino-Soviet Split and the Cultural Revolution. Reports by other scholars documenting their

findings in state archives and compilations of essays concerning the historical experiences of

movements in various countries have been invaluable to the construction of my narrative.

Indeed, the ability to network with scholars and activists via social media and public forums has

greatly enhanced my access to research materials and activist recollections that would have been

otherwise impossible for me to acquire.

2 CHAPTER 1: AN UNEASY ALLIANCE

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the
revolution.

Mao Zedong, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
(Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 12-13.5

Even before his own revolution, Lenin saw a revolutionary storm culminating in Asia.

Speaking about Xinhai Revolution of 1911-1912 that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and

established China's first republic, Lenin proclaimed that "China is a land of seething political

activity, the scene of a virile social movement and of a democratic upsurge" and that the rise of

anticolonial and left-leaning democratic movements across Asia was a promising new

5
For the original, see Mao Zedong, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” (March 1926), Selected Works of
Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1965), 1:13.
 6

development alongside the communist movements of World War I taking form among the

European working class.6 As the Communist International (Comintern) developed in the wake

of the Russian Revolution and with the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in

1921, the Soviets now had a stake in China's political trajectory. Eager to help foment world

revolution, Moscow sent Comintern agents into China to help along the infant CCP in its

struggle to become a party with a mass base capable of seizing power.7

However, the Comintern and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) advised

the Chinese Communists to take a unique route compared to that of other communist parties in

the world. Taking into account the small and scattered nature of the Party and the fractured

warlordism continuing to plague China, the Soviets suggested that the CCP form a "united front"

with the ruling Guomindang (Nationalist Party, hereafter known as the GMD). This arrangement,

which came to be known as the "First United Front" of 1923, created a political dynamic where

the CCP and GMD achieved a uniquely close symbiosis. Joint membership in both parties

became a near-requirement for CCP members and the CCP was able to put prominent cadres into

the highest ranks of the GMD, all in hopes that not only would a GMD-CCP alliance unite

China, but would steer the GMD into becoming a socialist party itself (indeed, the Soviets were

keen on the possibility that the GMD could eventually join the Comintern).8

While the Chinese Communists certainly saw the First United Front as an excellent

opportunity for the growth of their party, it should be noted that the move was only semi-

voluntary. In theory, the Comintern acted as a worldwide council of communist parties in which

6
V.I. Lenin, "The Awakening of Asia” (May 7, 1913), Collected Works of V.I. Lenin (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1977), 19:85-86.
7
Alexander V. Pantsov and Stephen I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 100-
106.
8
Ibid., 151-155.
 7

all parties had an equal say and overall self-determination. In reality, the CPSU had an unspoken

final say in all matters, even at a global level, and by the 1930s the Comintern's central task had

essentially become one of defending the Soviet Union as the nucleus of a nascent socialist

world.9 Even during Lenin's tenure as leader of the USSR, deviating in any way from the

blueprint given by the Comintern was going to be exceedingly difficult for the CCP, if not

outright verboten.

The United Front was at first a successful endeavor: it created the National Revolutionary

Army (NRA) of the GMD, which was able to unite Communists and Nationalists into a fighting

force seeking to rid China of its warlord dilemma. In 1926, the NRA launched the successful

Northern Expedition that mopped up the eastern warlords and brought them loosely under a

party-state dominated by Chiang Kai-shek. The honeymoon between the CCP and GMD broke

down: GMD leader Chiang tired of the Communists' attempts to swing the GMD to the left. He

dissolved the First United Front midway through the Expedition, and on 12 April 1927 NRA

forces loyal to Chiang launched a massacre of Chinese Communist Party members in Shanghai,

sparking the beginning of the CCP’s insurgency that would last until 1949.10 While the warlords

had suffered critical defeats in the Northern Expedition, the CCP's strict following of Moscow's

orders to refrain from pursuing an independent path from the GMD ended in bloody tragedy.

The Soviets were quick to condemn Chiang (although the cessation of relations between

the Comintern and the GMD was a gradual one),11 and the Chinese Communist Party fled to the

countryside to begin its revolutionary "people's war." Moscow was overjoyed that a communist

revolution had broken out in the world's most populous country, even if it was initiated in a

9
David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2010), 124.
10
Pantsov and Levine, 178.
11
Ibid., 190.
 8

manner contrary to Comintern policy at the time. Unfortunately, due to the CCP's lack of holding

territory on the Soviet-Chinese border, the Soviets were unable to supply the new revolution with

arms, money, or extra Comintern agents. According to Edgar Snow's 1938 classic report on the

Chinese communist movement, Red Star Over China, "the Chinese Reds fought with less

material foreign help than any army in modern Chinese history."12

In June of 1941, the German Reich attacked the USSR with all its might. While the

Japanese had yet to engage the Soviets and were preoccupied with fighting in China and

Manchuria, Japan was still part of the Axis Powers and thus an indirect enemy of Moscow.

Across Europe and China, Moscow gave its moral and advisory support to the Chinese

Communists, who formed an anti-Japanese "Second United Front" with the GMD in 1937.

United against a common enemy, the GMD and CCP helped expel the Japanese from China, and

in August of 1945, mere weeks before the end of the war, the Soviet Red Army swooped in to

liberate Manchuria and the northern half of Korea from Japanese occupation. With two atomic

bombs dropped on Japan, Manchuria gone, and Japanese forces in China decimated, Japan

surrendered to the Allies.

The Second United Front crumbled almost immediately thereafter and the Chinese Civil

War surged on until the victory of the People's Liberation Army in 1949. On 1 October, 1949, in

Tiananmen Square, Mao Zedong, now undisputed leader of China and founder of the People's

Republic of China (PRC), declared that "the Chinese people have stood up!" Shortly after, in

December of 1949 and January of 1950, Mao left for a trip to Moscow to meet with Stalin and

other leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), where Stalin congratulated

the Chinese Communist Party for its victory over the GMD and its founding of the People’s

12
Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, 4th ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 359-360.
 9

Republic. During Mao’s Moscow visit, the Chinese and Soviets struck a deal that would allow

the Soviet Union to send economic advisers all across China to aid in China’s post-revolution

restructuring. Negotiations ended with the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship,

Alliance, and Mutual Assistance.13

Post-Liberation relations between China and the Soviet Union were still tense, however.

While Stalin was impressed that Mao had achieved victory against the Japanese and the

Guomindang by going against Moscow's specific orders, a sense of resentment remained and

Stalin continued to exercise dominance over Mao to maintain his position as head of the socialist

bloc. The Comintern had been dissolved in 1943, but the USSR still saw itself, to an extent, as

the undisputed leader and architect of the postwar socialist order.14 Still, when the Korean War

broke out on 25 June 1950, the Chinese and Soviets unconditionally united alongside the

Democratic People's Republic of Korea out of fear that a Korea united under a Seoul government

could be used as a "jumping off point" for US attacks on China.15 The Soviet-Chinese alliance,

however tenuous, began to crack when Stalin died on 5 March 1953 mere months before the

armistice between North and South Korea on 27 July.

13
Pantsov and Levine, 367-373.
14
Ibid, 371.
15
Zhou Bangning, “Explaining China's Intervention in the Korean War in 1950,” Interstate: Journal of International
Affairs, vol. 2014/2015, no. 1, (2015): 1, http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1069/2/explaining-chinas-
intervention-in-the-korean-war-in-1950.
 10

3 CHAPTER 2: THE FIRST CRACKS: DESTALINIZATION AND THE

BEGINNINGS OF THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT

We must never adopt an arrogant attitude of great-power chauvinism and become conceited
because of the victory of our revolution and certain achievements in our construction. Every nation, big or
small, has its strong and weak points.

Mao Zedong, "Opening Address at the Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China," (15
September 1956), in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972),
180.

In 1953, despite the loss of Stalin, the socialist bloc still seemed to have every reason to

be confident: the world’s two largest nations had experienced successful communist revolutions,

aided the Western Allies in the defeat of the Axis in both European and Pacific theaters, had built

a network of socialist-aligned “people’s democracies”16 in Eastern Europe, and had partially

defeated Western forces in Korea. The Soviets had developed their own atomic bomb in 1949,

demonstrating to the capitalist world that the socialist world would not find themselves helpless

in the event of another global war (and thus setting off the Cold War). In much of their rhetoric,

the communist parties of world boasted of how capitalism was in its twilight years and that the

inevitable victory of socialism was nigh.

Internally, however, the Eastern Bloc was filled with tension. The Soviets were

experiencing an intense power struggle over who would succeed Stalin, which ended with the

rise of Nikita Khrushchev, a Politburo member who had received the Hero of the Soviet Union

award for his service as a commissar at the Battle of Stalingrad during the Second World War.17

On 14 February, 1956, Khrushchev presided over his first congress of the Communist Party of

16
The term “people’s democracies” has been used within the international communist movement to denote the
Eastern European nations that did not experience a socialist revolution within their own borders, but whose
communist parties were externally installed by the Soviet Red Army after liberating the Eastern European countries
from Nazi occupation. The term denotes that while the “workers and peasants” were now in charge of the
government with the help of Moscow, socialist modes of production had yet to take root within their economies and
cultures, delaying the transformation of these societies into comprehensive dictatorships of the proletariat.
17
William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), 168.
 11

the Soviet Union - and the twentieth since the birth of the Party. The Twentieth Congress was

heralded with a stark condemnation of Stalin’s cult of personality, the Great Purges, and

authoritarian manner of rule. Khrushchev’s so-called “Secret Speech” initiated the beginning of

“Destalinization,” which would dismantle Stalin’s personality cult, including removing his body

from the Lenin Mausoleum, tearing down almost every statue of him, and ceasing publications of

his works.

In October of the same year, an uprising in Hungary against the Soviet-backed

government caused even more confusion and tension. Khrushchev immediately called for Soviet

troops to put down the Hungarian Revolution brutally. Chinese officially denounced the

Hungarian Revolution but in secret were hesitant about the ramifications of it: publicly Mao said

“It [the counter-revolutionary rebellion in Hungary in 1956] was a case of reactionaries inside a

socialist country, in league with the imperialists, attempting to achieve their conspiratorial aims

by taking advantage of contradictions among the people to foment dissension and stir up

disorder. This lesson of the Hungarian events merits attention.”18 Yet initially, and even

afterward, Beijing felt uneasy about the ramifications of the Soviet Union being able to meddle

in the affairs and quash the self-determination of their socialist brethren.19

In the wake of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism paired with the crushing of the

Hungarian Revolution, Mao stood before the Central Committee of the CCP, saying “I would

like to say a few words about the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet

Union. I think there are two "swords": one is Lenin and the other Stalin. The sword of Stalin has

18
For the original, Mao Zedong, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” (February 27,
1957), Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, (Peking: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1965), 5:15.
19
Lorenz M. Luthi, The Sino-Soviet Split (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) 58-62.
 12

now been discarded by the Russians.”20 The CCP’s concern of the trajectory of the USSR was

becoming clearer.

4 CHAPTER 3: INAKOMISLYASHCHII (OTHER-THINKERS): ANTI-

REVISIONIST COMMUNISTS IN THE SOVIET UNION

A Communist must never be opinionated or domineering, thinking that he is good

in everything while others are good in nothing; he must never shut himself up in his little room, or
brag and boast and lord it over others.

Mao Zedong, "Speech at the Assembly of Representatives of the Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border

Region" (21 November 1941), in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign
Languages Press, 1972), 33.

The “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Congress was not only causing concern in Beijing,

however. Significant sections of Soviet people who had grown up revering Stalin as a father

figure who saved the nation from the Nazi jackboot became confused. How could it be that

someone so revered - if at times frightening - could so suddenly be stripped of all his

sanctity? Small gatherings of protest began in Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, albeit with no

major unrest.21 In one particular case, however, confusion and contempt turned to rage, and in

early March of 1956 the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic - Stalin’s birthplace - became a

storm-center of pushback by common Soviet citizens against the earliest stages of

Destalinization

The third anniversary of Stalin’s death on 5 March brought out thousands to lay wreaths

and flowers at the foot of the statue of Stalin in the main square of Tbilisi, with the knowledge

that authorities were planning to tear down the statue shortly. Unrest had already begun the night

20
For the original, see Mao Zedong, “Speech at the Second Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China” (November 15, 1956), Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, (Peking: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1965), 5:341.
21
Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2014), 115.
 13

before, however: according to Soviet Georgian special reports and MVD (Ministry of Interior

Affairs) correspondence, a young college student attempted to stab a Soviet Army officer for not

setting up an honor guard around the statue of Stalin, where a crowd had gathered that night to

commemorate him.22 The next morning, 50,000 people - primarily Komsomol youth and

students - came to Stalin Square to commemorate the death of “the father of the peoples” and

150-200 people laid at the foot of the statue.23 On 7 March, university and workplace walkouts

caused the demonstration to swell to well over 70,000 workers, students, and Party

members.24 That same night, the cities of Gori (Stalin’s birthplace), Sukhumi, and Batumi broke

out into unrest.25 Clearly, the people of Soviet Georgia were not going to allow their revered

leader to be put to the dustbin of history without a fight.

The Communist Party leadership in Georgia seemed at a loss. A Stalinist movement of

tens of thousands of citizens swirl at their doorstep, yet they dared not defy Moscow.26 Even

more of a strain came as a result of the presence of Chinese PLA delegations led by Marshal Zhu

De, who had wished to make a pilgrimage of sorts to Soviet Georgia as an homage to

Stalin.27 While the international implications of the coinciding Sino-Soviet military summit were

already enough stress on them, the Georgian Party leaders would later see implications on a local

level, and the first significant historical “node” of meeting between China and Soviet citizens in

an exchange of anti-revisionist ideology. Yet the worst to come for the republic-level leadership

was only two days away.

22
Vladimir A. Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years (London: M.E.
Sharpe, 2002), 113.
23
Ibid., 113, 129.
24
Ibid., 115.
25
Jersild, 115..
26
Kozlov, 114-116.
27
Jersild, 115.
 14

The 8 March protests had tens of thousands – possibly near 100,000 - occupying the

square across the day. At one point, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Georgian

Communist Party Vasilii Mzhavanadze came out to address the crowd and promised to defend

Stalin. However, the crowd also demanded that Zhu De address the meeting.28 According to

author and eyewitness Faina Barzova, some even specifically requested Mzhavanadze “support

the efforts of Mao to restore the remains and honor of Stalin.”29 According to scholar Vladimir

Kozlov, “at the request of the republican[-level] leaders, Zhu De greeted30 the demonstrators

twice, but the crowd still did not disperse… Five students, according to the information of the

Georgian MVD, met face-to-face with Zhu De, but failed to convince him to visit the

Stalin monument in Tbilisi. Someone from the Chinese delegation, however, did speak at a

meeting there [emphasis added].”31

After the Chinese delegate had spoken, clashes began between demonstrators and local

militia as they shouted pro-Stalin slogans and hung banners of Lenin and Stalin across the center

of the city.32 Signs of the protests being peaceful ebbed slowly away into the night, as the clashes

escalated in ferocity. Finally, the breaking point was reached the next day: workers and students

gathered together and violently stormed the Ministry of Communications building. Realizing a

full-on revolt was on their hands, the Soviet Army’s district of defense for the Caucasus region,

the Transcaucasus Military District, was called into Tbilisi.33

The arrival of the Army brought with it immediate tragedy. With the riots now an

organized rebellion, tanks appeared around the Stalin monument and opened fire on the crowds,

28
Kozlov, 117.
29
Jersild, 115.
30
But did not give a speech.
31
Kozlov, 118.
32
Ibid., 117.
33
Ibid., 124-125.
 15

causing the deaths of numerous Georgian protesters. While still unclear as to who fired the first

shot- the protesters were now armed with pistols and rifles- the Army’s reaction to the riots was

disproportionate at the beginning. The 9 March Massacre- as it came to be known in Georgian

history- ended with somewhere between 100 and 800 (according to later Russian sources)

dead.34

The final day of demonstrations on 10 March saw the demonstrators greatly dispersed

and ragged: sporadic riots were attempted in Tbilisi and Gori but instantly quashed by the Soviet

Army. By dawn, the largest Stalinist- if not largest generally antigovernment- uprising of the

Khrushchev years had been completely crushed. Workers, students, and rank-and-file Party

members retreated to their regular lives, and while the riots had made national press,35 within

days life returned to normal in Soviet Georgia.

An important point should be made about the motivations of the March rioters in terms of

ideology: not all the demonstrators were Stalinists, much less Maoist. Many Georgians simply

opposed Khrushchev as an incompetent leader who ignored the needs of non-Russian Soviet

citizens. For some, it was a sheer matter of Georgian nationalism: while very few were

explicitly anticommunist, some protesters began to call for the Georgian SSR to leave the

USSR.36 This eclecticism, the motley of motivations for opposing the new Soviet order, was to

characterize other manifestations of organized anti-revisionism across the 1950s through 1970s.

While some of the demonstrators had reached out to China, the Chinese said nothing in

regards to the uprisings. Even Zhu De, who had saluted the crowd and had one of his delegates

speak at one of the rallies, was completely silent on the matter. From a geopolitical viewpoint,

34
Ibid., 126-127. The veracity of claims of casualties ranging in the higher hundreds are unclear.
35
“We Shall Not Allow Criticism of Stalin: The Incidents in Georgia, March 1956”, Revolutionary Democracy 5,
no. 2 (September 1999), http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv5n2/georgia.htm.
36
Kozlov, 134-135.
 16

this is honestly unsurprising. Mostly likely, it could be wagered, a major pro-Chinese uprising

against the Soviet establishment by the Soviet peoples was not on the table for Beijing at this

particular point. After all, the Sino-Soviet Split had only begun: indeed, both countries were still

in the stage of the Split where they hoped that a full schism could be prevented.

While the rest of the Khrushchev era had its share of further (though far less extensive or

violent) unrest, and Khrushchev grew increasingly unpopular among the Communist Party

leadership, the center still held and the Soviet Union looked outward to create a new

global position in a post-Stalin order. The Cold War was in full swing and the socialist bloc was

already showing cracks on its periphery, something Moscow certainly could not afford.

The Soviet invasion of Hungary, the same year as the Tbilisi riots, was causing enough

concern across the world, even within the socialist bloc. However, as said before, the Soviets had

a far more expansive plan for global hegemony, and would continue enacting foreign policy that

made the Chinese and Albanians more and more uneasy. Khrushchev now reached out to the

Third World, and was ready to bring newly-independent nations or anticolonial movements into

the Soviet orbit. The Soviet Union broke with the traditional Leninist notion of the inevitability

of war between socialism and capitalism in its new policy of “peaceful coexistence.” Instead of

fomenting communist revolution in the newly independent countries, Moscow pushed a policy of

pouring large amounts of economic aid and advisement into them in order to curry the favor of

these countries’ governments and convince them of the superiority of a socialist-based economy

and the advantages of staying within the Soviet camp. Moscow also used “peace,” rather than

militant struggle, as a major propaganda tool to gain international prestige in the face of the

“warmongering” Western imperialist powers.37

37
Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World. (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2015), 37-39.
 17

It seems there was a sense of puzzlement among some Soviet citizens over this and the

widening split between the Soviet Union and China. Local branches of the Communist Party of

the Soviet Union recorded citizens and local officials asking questions such as “Are we not in

fact compromising with imperialism over West Berlin?” and “Why did the USSR stop giving aid

to China when we still give aid to bourgeois countries such as India, Syria, Iraq, and

the UAR?”38 This is striking, as the wording and position of these questions denotes them as

asked by persons who were genuinely Marxist-Leninist, expressing their concern about the

CPSU’s divergence with the militant anti-imperialism of Lenin. These were exactly the kind of

people who might deviate from the Party line and embrace anti-revisionist dissidence.

Khrushchev found himself ousted in October of 1964, and the Party leadership was

transferred to Leonid Brezhnev as General-Secretary and to Alexei Kosygin as

Premier (positions that Khrushchev had held simultaneously during his administration). By this

time, the Sino-Soviet Split had become irreconcilable as the Chinese had declared the USSR

“revisionist,” “state-capitalist,” and “social-imperialist” (socialist in form, capitalist-imperialist

in essence). It was just as much an enemy to world communist revolution, the Chinese argued, as

the US and Western Europe.39 Coinciding with this were the dual ideas of “Actually Existing

Socialism” and the “Brezhnev Doctrine” - the former meaning that all true socialism must fit the

Moscow model economically and politically, while the Brezhnev Doctrine set a precedent where

the Soviet Army could intervene in any Warsaw Pact countries began to deviate from “Actually

Existing Socialism.” The first manifestation of the Brezhnev Doctrine came three years after the

new General-Secretary assumed power, with the swift and brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia in

38
Ibid., 103.
39
The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement (Peking: Foreign Languages Press,
1965), 418-467.
 18

retaliation to the 1968 “Prague Spring.” The Chinese and Albanians were quick to condemn the

invasion, citing it as evidence of the USSR’s true nature as an imperialist aggressor, which pro-

Beijing parties echoed across the world.40 In contrast, the majority of Soviet citizenry (and pro-

Moscow communist parties) passively supported or kept silent about the Brezhnev

Doctrine, except for a small incident in Red Square on 25 August, 1968, where seven

demonstrators were arrested for vocally opposing the invasion of Czechoslovakia.41

Does this mean the vast majority of Soviet citizens subscribed to the general line of the

CPSU? Surely not: treating any population in a heavily-controlled society as either fully

complicit or fully secretly dissident is irrational. The USSR was a country of over a hundred

different nationalities with generations that had grown up with distinct experiences. The postwar,

post-Destalinization generation of the 1960s-1970s own distinct experience was one where a

nation had reconstructed itself and reconstituted itself but was slowly becoming static and

stagnant: a mixture that could potentially galvanize and cause discontent among a generation. In

order to understand how this developed, a look at the social and economic changes the Soviet

Union went through across the 1960s must be examined.

In the compilation Soviet Youth Culture, Tanya Frisby states that by the end of the

Khrushchev period “[m]ost young people were eager to move further along the road of political

liberalization…. By and large, young people were idealistic; they tended to expect more from the

leadership because, at the same time, they still firmly believed in socialism… Political

development after the fall of Khrushchev, therefore, must be seen in terms of the destruction and

disillusionment of youthful idealism. In so far as previous political and social experience of the

40
“Brutal Aggression by Soviet Revisionist Renegade Clique Against Czechoslovakia Resolutely Condemned,”
Peking Review, 11, no. 35, (August 30, 1968): 9-12.
41
Vladimir Kara-Murza, “Remembering Seven Dissidents and Soviet Brutality,” World Affairs, August 23, 2013,
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/vladimir-kara-murza/remembering-seven-dissidents-and-soviet-brutality
 19

Khrushchev Thaw had shown young people the possibility of attaining genuine political and

social awareness, many young people joined dissident groups at the end of the 1960s, when the

political situation under Brezhnev deteriorated.”42

“Dissidence” and “rebellion” are a sliding scale, of course. For most Soviet youth,

enthusiastic adherence to the Party and Komsomol line was not particularly common, but

neither was fierce opposition to the entire system itself. Granted, in 1965 over twenty million

youth - some 65% of the population between 18 and 29 - were members of the

Komsomol;43 indeed, membership was almost an absolute prerequisite for admission into

university. It was also a major place for youth to meet and socialize, and was viewed as “a place

to learn diligence, discipline, and selflessness.”44

Nevertheless, Soviet youth tended to regard the Komsomol leadership and the more

enthusiastic Komsomol activists with relative suspicion. Many criticized the Komsomol

leadership “from a socialist viewpoint” [emphasis added] as “insincere moralizers and cynical

careerists.”45 In Soviet culture a social framework developed known as svoi, literally meaning

“us” or “ours”: svoi was an idea of socialization in which youth did not actively dissent or even

personally oppose the regime behind closed doors, but simply felt no compulsion to

become serious activists in the Komsomol or aspire to become Party members on the basis that

they knew that the “script” (i.e. the ideological paradigm) that the nation’s leadership had

imposed on all aspects of society was overall meaningless and open to interpretation by leaders

and citizens alike.46 As long as you stuck to “the script” and took part in the rituals of Soviet

42
Tanya Frishey, “Soviet Youth Culture,” in James Riordan, ed., Soviet Youth Culture. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989), 3-4.
43
Ibid., 22.
44
Riordan, 38.
45
Ibid., 93.
46
Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005), 108.
 20

society (joining the Young Pioneers as a child, attending the May Day or October Revolution

anniversary parades, etc.), passive dissent was allowed or at the very least ignored. 47 This is an

interesting contrast to the sincere enthusiasm for participation in revolutionary activism of their

peers in China, who as Red Guards were willing to do anything and spend every waking hour to

keep their nation on the socialist road.

1965 was a watershed year for the Soviet Union: while the Chinese were still a year away

from the Cultural Revolution, Premier Kosygin oversaw a complete overhaul of the Gosplan

(State Planning Committee) and a drastic change in the direction of the Soviet economy. While

Khrushchev had already partially liberalized thought and expression among economists and

some regional decentralization had been enacted,48 the “Kosygin Reforms” of September

1965 went a step further and began to enact decentralization across the entire Union.

In her monograph Economic Reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe Since the

1960s, Canadian economist Jan Adam described succinctly the new Soviet economy (as well as

the general model for the economies of the rest of the Soviet Bloc):

At first experimentation in profit was confined to a few targets - particularly garment

enterprises and light industries, but by 1968, 72% of Soviet enterprises were fixed to profit to

one extent or another. While enterprises were still not free to determine what they would produce

and where they would buy and sell, the 1965 reforms enlarged the autonomy of these enterprises

by giving leeway to managers within enterprises in terms of decision-making about planning,

incentives, employment, profit, and investment. At more points than not, the Soviet planners put

47
Ibid., 93.
48
Abraham Katz, The Politics of Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 53-58.
 21

ideology entirely aside when agreeing to link the calculation of profitability to invested

capital.49

Adam points out that according to a guideline formula, the profit margin was related to

capital employed (fixed and working). The so-called price of production was applied to whole

branches or groups of products. Profit was divided between individual products according to cost

of production. State regulations on investment were relaxed, and Party functionaries heading

different enterprises were encouraged to engage in decentralized personal investment in their

own ventures. Profit, for all intents and purposes, had taken control of the economy rather than

concentrating on achieving world revolution and classless society.50

However, as late as 1969 a “conservative” (as deemed by Kosygin) trend within the Party

still existed. The conservative wing, although small, issued the occasional attack against “right-

wing opportunist theoreticians” who advocated “market socialism” to press forward. Profit as the

main regulator of the economy was routinely denounced by these “conservatives,” saying that

such a planning model inherently stood against the very essence of socialist economics.51 These

denunciations are quite interesting, as they seem to echo most of the Chinese criticisms of the

Soviet economy. Yet these voices never seriously dissented or broke off from the establishment,

instead allowing themselves to be reabsorbed into the fold of the Party as the Era of Stagnation

witnessed an economic freeze that would last until the mid-1980s.

The staff at the Chinese embassy in Moscow mounted their own criticism of - and

resistance to - the CPSU’s line. In October 1966, the CCP’s Central Committee proclaimed that

the dissemination of Mao Zedong Thought was the principal task of all Chinese embassy staff in

49
Jan Adam, Economic Reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe Since the 1960s. (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1989), 41-42.
50
Ibid., 46-49.
51
Katz, 182.
 22

every country.52 Their embassies in the Eastern Bloc were no exception. In Maoist theory, these

embassies might be considered base areas of the world revolution, much like the CCP guerrilla

base areas of the Chinese Civil War. Despite being thousands of miles behind enemy lines,

embassy staff were “rebels,” obligated to continue the Cultural Revolution against revisionism

within Soviet borders.

These orders would be enacted most notably three months later, on 25 January 1967. Ma

Jisen - a former Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs worker - wrote in her work The Cultural

Revolution in the Foreign Ministry of China the story of sixty-five Chinese embassy staff and

students who marched on Red Square, carrying a large wreathe toward Lenin’s tomb. They

joined the long queue of people who came each day to see Lenin’s body, and once arriving at the

feet of Lenin’s embalmed body, stood in silence. When a guard asked for them to move

along, they opened their Little Red Books and began shouting quotes about the inevitable

triumph of socialism and the friendship of Lenin and Stalin toward the Chinese people. When

ejected from the mausoleum, the students and staff ran back out into the Square and

started singing “The Internationale,” the police rushed onto them. Chanting “Down with Soviet

revisionism!”, “Long Live Leninism!” and “Be resolute, fear no sacrifice to win victory!” The

Chinese and Russians clashed while Muscovites looked on in horror. Every student and staff

member was assaulted by police with no exception, and the students were all sent back home by

train. In Beijing, they were greeted back home with great fanfare and a million-person march on

the Soviet embassy in Beijing. In Moscow, no further significant trouble was elicited from the

Chinese embassy there.53

52
Ma Jisen, The Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry of China (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press,
2004), 152.
53
Ibid., 168-172.
 23

One of the most notable post-Tbilisi attempt at starting an anti-revisionist Marxist-

Leninist party by Soviet citizens themselves occurred in 1964, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist

Republic. Based out of the Kharkov region in the small industrial city of Balakleya, local

organizers called themselves the "Workers 'and Peasants' Revolutionary Party of Communists”

(WPRPC). Founded by the brothers Adolf and Vladimir Romanenko, Vladimir was a 35 year-

old electrician who worked in Kharkhov, but then went on to study journalism at Leningrad State

University. Adolf was a labor union activist and a journalist for the

local union newspaper Hammer & Sickle. While in Leningrad in 1963, Vladimir met with

Chinese students studying at his university, from whom he received Maoist literature. After

studying works given to him by his foreign classmates, Vladimir brought the literature home and

Adolf began to study them as well.54

In October 1961, the brothers wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Chinese

Communist Party denouncing the Twenty-Second Congress of the CPSU. In a later report to

authorities by Vladimir, the brothers had “fallen under the spell of Chinese propaganda” and

believed that the CPSU was now a “party of the petty-bourgeoisie” that did not represent the

interests of the Soviet working people. In September 1964, the brothers created the

WPRPC, issuing a manifesto saying:

"The gap between the earnings of the average worker and leading specialists and

party bureaucrats continues to grow with each passing day... even the bodies of the so-

called party-state control are stealing the surplus product [i.e. extracting profit from the

labor of the workers] from its manufacturer ...

54
V.A. Kozlov and S.V. Mironenko, eds. Kramola: Inakomiclie v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve 1953-1982
[Sedition: Other-thought in the USSR Under Khrushchev & Brezhnev] (Moscow: Mainland, 2005), transcription
available at http://www.universalinternetlibrary.ru/book/24151/ogl.shtml and http://library.sakharov-center.ru/.
 24

…The working class dictatorship has outlived its usefulness: it is necessary not to

the working class, not to the peasant class… those who have even mention the

dictatorship of the working class causes a toothache, [they who] rob the surplus product

in the framework of the "whole people" [referring to Khrushchev’s declaration of the

Soviet Union having become a “dictatorship of the whole people” and not a “dictatorship

of the proletariat”] in a semi-bourgeois state, and when the ruling party does not fight it,

and promotes it legally, then such party is petty-bourgeois ... "

However, within months the brothers were arrested by the KGB and what little there was

of their party (no evidence can be found that the “party” stretched beyond the two brothers) was

broken apart. Still, Adolf continued to speak his mind and defended the Cultural Revolution. He

later said: “I draw the conclusion that fraternity and equality is out of the question in the present

set up and believe that the CPSU can’t be an expression of the people’s will… I believe that the

interests of the working people and the leadership are diametrically opposed to each other and

from this, I believe, that there is no unity of Party and the People.”

The brothers faced a long prison sentence, but were let off the hook by sheer luck of

timing. The day after their arrest, the CPSU held its Extraordinary Plenum on 14 October

1964, which toppled Khrushchev and replaced him with Leonid Brezhnev as General-Secretary

of the CPSU and Alexei Kosygin as Premier. Brezhnev, upon assuming power, hoped that he

would be able to reverse the Sino-Soviet Split. A decision was made by the local KGB

department in Kharkhov to release the Romanenkos in order to aid Brezhnev in easing tensions

with a Chinese delegation which was present. However, the Romanenko brothers remained under
 25

close KGB surveillance for the rest of their lives, making it impossible for them to ever

reestablish their short-lived party or engage in dissident activity ever again.55

In 1966, a communique from Albania, China’s stalwart European ally, was published

which proclaimed the existence of an underground organization known as the Soviet

Revolutionary Communists (Bolshevik), or SRC(B). The SRC(B)’s seventy-nine-

page “Programmatic Proclamation” and rousingly condemned the Khrushchev and Brezhnev

cliques for their slander of Stalin, their doctrines of peaceful coexistence and détente, and the

lavish lifestyles of the Party leadership, while hailing Albania and China as the only remaining

bastions of socialism. The mysterious manifesto proclaimed to have already been distributed

among CPSU cadres who were ready to already be on a mission to build a new “Communist

Party (Bolshevik) of the Soviet Union” to overthrow the Soviet government and institute a new

anti-revisionist direction.56 This may not have been the first declaration of a new Marxist party in

the Soviet Union, but it certainly was the first to garner international attention among the pro-

Beijing parties of the world. Nevertheless, while the document was widely circulated within

international leftist publications and received official support from both the Party of Labour of

Albania and the Chinese Communist Party, nothing else seems to have come of the SRC(B),

which may have been nothing more than a paper organization confined to Albanian borders.

Recent archival work done within the Supreme Court and Prosecutor’s Office of the

USSR has revealed a vast swathe of people brought to court for pro-Stalin sentiment and even

some Maoist sentiments (the latter particularly students, journalists, and writers).57 A collection

55
"Istoriya: Bratya Romanenko," [History: the Romanenko Brothers], Sait Goroda Balakleya [Official Website of
the City of Balakleya]. http://bal.at.ua/index/bratja_romanenko/0-33.
56
Programmatic Proclamation of the Soviet Revolutionary Communists (Bolsheviks) (Tirana: Foreign Languages
Press, 1966), 75-79.
57
Kozlov and Mironenko, Kramola [Sedition].
 26

recently published and edited by Vladimir Kozlov and Sergei Mironenko - Sedition: Other-

Thought in the USSR Under Khrushchev & Brezhnev (now available via multiple online Russian

resources) - is a veritable treasure-trove of these cases from the Romanenko brothers in Ukraine

to student militants in Siberia.

At one point the writers of the compilation go on to list a number of small groups who

attempted to build new parties or currents within the CPSU but were broken up by

authorities: "Union of Struggle for Justice," "Organization of Mass Struggle for Justice," "Party

of the Struggle for the Reality of Lenin's Ideas," "Socialist Party of the Soviet Union," "Union of

Struggle for Workers’ Liberation," "Workers' and Peasants’ Underground Party," "Russian Labor

Party," "Union of Honest Workers," and "People's Party." The text goes on to say that the name

of these organizations show “that their members acted under the banner of the struggle for the

right of socialism” and that “the vast majority of workers' organizations did not intend

to overthrow the Soviet regime. Documents from these groups deem their main enemies

as "bureaucrats," "the Soviet bourgeoisie," and "the Communist-capitalists."58

One particularly common way of showing opposition to the CPSU’s line and advocacy of

a return to pre-Khrushchev socialism was spoiling one’s ballot. Sedition gives us multiple

examples of spoiled ballots and pamphlets thrown into ballot boxes: one ballot from March 1957

local soviet elections in Ulyanovsk proclaimed that Khrushchev had climbed to power by

“murdering Beria” and “slandering Comrade Stalin,” and was wrong to crush the Hungarian

Revolution. In the 1958 Supreme Soviet elections, polling places and train stations in Vologda

were covered with posters denouncing Khrushchev as having destroyed the contributions of

Stalin, Malenkov, Molotov, and other hardliners, and that the CPSU had become traitors to “all

58
Ibid., “Documentation.”
 27

peoples of the world.” More continue to harp upon and denounce the “Soviet

bourgeoisie”: something possibly lifted from Chinese rhetoric.

In 1999, the International Democracy Fund in Moscow published another compilation of

anti-Soviet sedition cases, also edited by Kozlov and Mironenko. It revealed cases of specifically

Maoist sentiment among some Soviet citizens. As early as 8 October 1962, a “D. Elefteriu,” a

former member of the Communist Party of Greece now in exile in the USSR, was arrested for

distributing a leaflet around Tashkent, Soviet Tajikistan, proclaiming that Albania and China had

now become the only guardians of socialism.59 On 12 August 1966, a Russian technician student

in Moscow was accused of attempting to defect to China after distributing “slanderous

manuscripts” against the CPSU. In Komsomolsk-on-Amur, three Komsomol members were

arrested for pasting posters around the city saying "Mao Zedong is the Reddest Red Sun in Our

Hearts! Proletarian communists, fight the gang of modern revisionists,

the anticommunist successors of Khrushchev!"60

On 12 Jan, 1967, Guo Dan-Ching, an international student studying economics at the

USSR Academy of Sciences, recruited a handful of Russian graduate students to found a Maoist

organization called the "Revolutionary Socialist Party of the Soviet Union." They issued a

programme called "The Manifesto of Socialism," but were arrested after being caught

distributing Little Red Books and other Maoist literature from the Chinese embassy. Guo

was deported back home, but the case against the native Russian students was

surprisingly dismissed.61 Maoism struck Moscow twice the next year, where in January of 1968 a

59
Vladimir Kozlov and Sergei Mironenko, eds. Nadzornie Proizvodstva SSSR Po-Delam Ob Antisovietskoi agitatsii
i propagandi. [Review of Proceedings of the USSR Prosecutor's Office in Cases of Anti-Soviet Agitation and
Propaganda, Annotated Catalog 1953-1991] (Moscow: Mezhdunarodni Fond «Demokratiya» [International
Democracy Fund], 1999), 672-673.
60
Ibid., 678.
61
Ibid., 679.
 28

history student at Moscow State University put up seven large posters denouncing the CPSU and

was arrested after having purportedly written a letter to Mao declaring his intent to defect to

China. In September of that same year, two Moscow construction workers formed a group called

the “Union of Struggle Against Revisionism” and were arrested when seen distributing Chinese

Communist Party literature to their fellow Muscovites.62

The amount of data discovered by Kozlov and colleagues is startling. Among the

numerous examples of pro-Stalin and/or pro-Beijing leaflets, spoiled ballots, and letters

published are data from archival sources showing that 4,000-5,000 court proceedings concerning

“anti-Soviet propaganda” occurred between 1953 and 1986.63 If it is true that the “vast majority

of workers’ organizations [who wrote this literature] did not intend to overthrow the Soviet

regime,” then can we deduce that, while fragmented, spontaneous, and scattered, there was a

major current within Soviet society that could be considered anti-revisionist (or at least hardline

leftist) dissent? If we are to believe what the court records of the USSR say, it seems quite so.

Records of leftist sedition were already being published in English during the late Soviet

period. Prominent historian, liberal-democratic dissident, and cofounder of the Moscow Helsinki

Watch Group (a think-thank whose mission was to monitor human rights violations in the

USSR) Ludmila Alexyeva writes in her monograph Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements

for National, Religious, and Human Rights about even more “anti-revisionist” and “Marxist-

Leninist” micro-sects popping up and down across the 1960s into the early 1980s. In her book

she notes that “among the organized socialists were underground and semi-underground groups

and organizations which consisted almost exclusively of young people. In most cases each such

group was closed in upon itself; only a few had contacts with two or three more groups, and even

62
Ibid., 685, 690.
63
Kazolov and Mironenko, Kramola.
 29

these contacts did not go beyond joint meetings. These youths of the new postwar generation

were sincere Marxists, socialists, and patriots. They did not want to subvert the existing order.

Rather, they wanted to better it by a return to ‘true Leninist socialism’…”64

In one instance, Alexyeva describes a group of graduates came from the Technological

Institute of Leningrad. Originally a Komsomol anti-crime patrol brigade, they wrote

a programme titled “From the Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy to the Dictatorship of the

Proletariat,” written primarily by 2 members Valery Ronkin and Sergei Khakhayev in 1962. In

1965 they began to publish a journal called Kolokol (The Bell). However, by their third issue, the

group was arrested. That same year, a group of students and teachers in Gorky wrote a text

called “Socialism and the State” which also landed them in jail.65 On the day of the anniversary

of the October Revolution in November 1969, three young Latvian workers Gunar Berzins,

Laimonis Markants, and Valery Akk were arrested for distributing 8,000 leaflets in three regions,

criticizing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet attitude toward China.66

In the 1970s a group called the “True Communist Party” arose in Sorotov, and the “Party

for the Struggle of the Realization of Leninist Ideas” was broken up in Voroshilovgrad. A

“Union for Struggle for the Rebirth of Leninism” was founded in 1963 by military officers in the

Far East. Its founder, war hero Gen. Pyotr Grigorenko, wrote leaflets calling for a renewal of

“true Leninist socialism” and had his officers hand them out at the Moscow “Hammer & Sickle”

factory.48

On 24 February 1976, opening day of Twenty-Fifth Party Congress, four youths threw

100 leaflets from the gallery of the Gostinny Dvor department store on Nevsky Prospect in

64
Lyudimila Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 421.
65
Ibid., 421-422.
66
Ibid., 98.
 30

Leningrad, crying “Long Live the New Revolution! Long Live Communism!” The four students,

led by graduate student Arkady Tsurkov, were arrested and expelled from the Komosomol and

their schools. In April of the same year a group of Tsurkov’s classmates and comrades called the

“Leningrad School” announced a platform directed toward achieving “true” communism. They

referred to the Soviet system as “monopoly capitalism” (echoing the Maoists). They demanded

“the removal from power of state bureaucrats” after a class struggle by the workers. Later that

year they formed a commune outside Leningrad; by the spring 1978 the group now had begun to

call itself the “Left Opposition” and began publishing the journal Prospekti (“Prospects”).

Fellow thinkers from Moscow, Gorky, and other cities planned to join them upon reading the

journal but 40 of them were arrested on their way. A few months later, the entire commune

was arrested, with Tsurkov serving five years in prison and two years in exile.67

It is important to note that in the text Alexeyeva, as pro-Western as she is, writes clearly

that “those who wished to subvert the Soviet system were rare among dissidents, actually an

isolated few.” This is an interesting proclamation. Although written three decades ago, it is worth

revisiting in order to gain a new view of the “other-thinker” terrain.68

The final tale of a notable attempt within the Soviet Union to build an anti-revisionist

Marxist-Leninist movement documented in either Russian or English is the story of the

Workers’ Centre led by workers Grigori Isaev and Alexei Razlatsky. Razlatsky was an oil

engineer living in Samara who had been brought up in an intellectual family and had already

published some works of poetry. Across the 1970s, Razlatsky - well-read in Marxist “classics”

- began to grow unhappy with the establishment, particularly after having been rejected from

67
Ibid., 423.
68
Ibid., 423.
 31

joining the Party.69 Soon after meeting Isaev - a technician and engineer at the factory where he

was working - the two began churning out revolutionary pamphlets and circulating them among

coworkers. Soon, according to Razlatsky’s son, the two had gained a following of 30-50

followers and began to hold meetings outside the workplace; eventually they had comrades in

other workplaces in the city.70

Finally, their work culminated in a coherent programme. Naming themselves the

Workers Centre, they launched a successful strike at the Maslennikov Factory in which they

won several demands concerning working conditions. Eventually the group was able to launch

around ten minor strikes and organize multiple factory committees.71 While the state enterprises

did end up giving in to the less political demands of the strikes, the Workers’ Centre had

garnered the attention - and the ire - of the local authorities.

A few years after their successful strikes, the Workers’ Centre put out a “Second

Communist Manifesto” in 1979. In their manifesto, the organization stated that capitalism had

been restored in the Soviet Union and that it was up to the workers to create a new vanguard

party to be called “Party of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”72 Razlatsky and Isaev used the

document to state their own case for Mao, saying “The ‘Cultural Revolution’ is a direct appeal to

punish… formative bureaucracy, an attempt by crude facts to demonstrate to the masses that it is

they who are the masters of the situation in the country, that in their collective actions they

69
Ibid., 416.
70
Evgeniy Karsakov, "The Razlatsky-Isaev Case: Pro-Marxist Opposition in the Soviet Provinces Part I." The
Stanford Post-Soviet Post. March 14, 2013. http://postsovietpost.stanford.edu/history/razlatsky-isaev-case-pro-
marxist-opposition-soviet-provinces.
71
Ibid.
72
Mikhail Kruglov, “Samii Proletarskii iz Diktatorov” [The Most Proletarian of Dictatorships], Party of the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat Official Website, http://www.proletarism.proletarism.ru/biogis.shtml
 32

are all-powerful….. The death of Mao Zedong for China has meant, like the death of Stalin for

the Soviet Union, the end of the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”73

Although their organization’s activities had declined since their first year of existence,

Razlatsky and Isaev continued to produce more and more literature. Finally, in December 1981-

the same month as labor unrest began in Poland - the authorities had had enough. The

KGB arrested the two men and dispersed their Party.74 Razlatsky’s son writes that his father

“was sentenced to 7 years of prison plus 5 years of exile, and Isaev to 6 + 5 (one year fewer since

he had two children at home). One more of Razlatsky’s companions, Koparov, was sentenced

to prison. The others mostly just showed remorse, but those who were members of the

Communist Party were expelled, and those who held administrative positions were fired.”75 A

small, recently-formed leftist organization that refers to itself as the “Party of the Dictatorship of

the Proletariat” (PDP) currently exists in Russia; although they take inspiration from Razlatsky’s

works, they do not label themselves anti-revisionist, Stalinist, or Maoist.76

Yet with the dispersion of the PDP at the end of 1981, all signs of attempts to build an anti-

revisionist line within in the USSR vanish.

What are we to make of this? Two questions must be asked in order to sum up - or launch

a larger conversation about - the “anti-revisionist” (Maoist and Neo-Stalinist) experience in the

USSR.

First: what do we take from seeing these tiny sects - usually with memberships only in

the dozens at most - popping up and down across the USSR? If it is true what Kozlov and

73
Alexei B. Razlatsky, "The Second Communist Manifesto." Chebarkl Literary Portal.
https://www.proza.ru/2008/10/24/244.
74
Mikhail Kruglov, “Arest, poluchaetsya, ne stal vnezapnostu?” [Arrest, did it not come quickly?]
75
Evgeniy Karaskov, "The Razlatsky-Isaev Case: Pro-Marxist Opposition in the Soviet Provinces Part II." The
Stanford Post-Soviet Post, April 17, 2013, http://postsovietpost.stanford.edu/node/197.
76
The Party of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat Official Website. December 12, 2014. http://www.proletarism.ru/.
 33

Lyudmilla say in that the majority of Soviet citizens who dissented from the Party line were

doing so out of conviction to socialism and not aspiring to attain liberal-democratic capitalism,

then how do we re-categorize the various trends of sedition or dissent within the USSR? A

broader interpretation of how the Soviets viewed ideologically misaligned thought must be

injected into Western discourse. While anyone who would not be described as a “true” Marxist-

Leninist in mainstream Soviet press was seen as being a danger to social order and needed to be

suppressed, these persons might not have necessarily been labeled as an agent of foreign-

fomented sedition. Anti-Soviet, yes, but not necessarily anticommunist. Either way, it is telling

that most of those arrested and convicted for membership in these organizations or who

attempted to promote an anti-revisionist line were given prison sentences of only a few years, a

fine, or simple expulsion from the Party or Komsomol (this contrasts to pro-Western dissidents,

who were given long or even life sentences in the gulags) is telling about how the Soviet state

viewed these anti-CPSU Marxist-Leninists. It seems that the category of dissyidenti- which had

more traitorous connotations - is but one part of the broader concept of inakomyslyashchii (the

other-thinkers).

Second: why did Soviet anti-revisionism fail? Why was the most powerful and populous

of the Warsaw Pact countries one of the countries where anti-revisionism manifested the least in

Eastern Europe? Despite a thorough investigation, it seems that anti-revisionism of either a

Maoist or Neo-Stalinist type was a series of micro-movements that regularly sprung up, but were

perpetually confined to isolated individuals, tiny “parties,” or to the actions of Chinese

government officials living or working in the Soviet Union, with the Tbilisi Uprising and the

Workers Centre strikers being the only exceptions of note. With all things considered, anti-
 34

revisionism is a flash in the pan in Soviet history, with only a few sparks of specific Maoism

within it.

Permit me to posit a few of my own hypotheses of what contributed to the stifling of

Maoism in the USSR. For starters, chipping away at the hegemony of the CPSU would have

been exceedingly difficult: the ideological landscape of the USSR was so monolithic that to

perceive anything as being “left in form, right in essence” (as Mao would say) would be

conceptually borderline impossible. There was nothing in the Soviet concept of the development

of communism that could be comparable to Mao's more “anarchic” concept of ideological

struggle (i.e. the Cultural Revolution), with struggle being cemented as a police matter or as a

matter of the top levels marginalizing of those at the lower levels who may have different ideas

on the direction the CPSU was to go. All other strains of leftist thought were perceived as either

not having reached the sophistication of Soviet Marxist-Leninism or deviated from the “correct”

path towards inevitable counter-revolutionary hijacking and had become a threat to the project

of socialism overtaking capitalism globally (as in the case of Maoism).

It is also important to notice that, compared to later chapters of this

thesis, Chinese embassy dissemination of Maoist literature to the common Soviet citizen is

significantly lower than efforts by the Chinese embassies in other Warsaw Pact countries such as

East Germany or Hungary. Perhaps the Chinese didn’t want to risk funding a full-blown revolt

against the Soviet government because of the military pressure the Soviets had on them, instead

preferring to chip away at the edges of its empire? The Chinese had already clashed with the

Soviets enough both within China and in PLA-Soviet Army border skirmishes: being accused of

fomenting dissent within Soviet borders might only escalate already-seething hostilities. In the
 35

end, Soviet Maoists may have been “left hanging” because of sheer realpolitik on the part of the

Chinese Communist Party.

One must also take into account that Soviet society was a vast surveillance state. The

KGB, Party, and Komsomol maintained firm social and judicial control in the USSR up until the

coming of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, and Brezhnev had taken steps to reverse much

of the Khrushchev Thaw’s social openness. Phones were easily tapped, the post routinely

searched and censored, and every workplace and institution of learning had KGB agents posted

to them. All forms of press were state-owned and only through some samizdat (self-published)

publications and periodicals do we see any amount of independent written word. The vast

amount of state oversight over - and surveillance within - the Komsomol also made it nearly

impossible for youth to organize clandestine dissent that could operate for any significant length

of time.

Adding to this was the fact that this police state stretched over 8.6-million square miles of

forest, mountains, desert, steppe, and tundra. In an age before the internet and with

no discreet forms of communication in order to network with one another, any attempt

at building an all-Union Marxist-Leninist party across such vast swathes of land would be

easily doomed to fail. In the end, Maoism (and broader anti-revisionism) in the Soviet Union was

not a storm, but a mere sporadic cloudburst.

Yet the historiography is there. Kozlov’s scholarship in his account of the Tbilisi

Uprising as well as his research from the archives of the Supreme Court and Prosecutor’s Office

of the USSR show waiting a story to be told. Alexeyeva’s earlier work as a liberal-democratic

dissident chronicling Soviet ideological repression revealed that hardline leftist opposition to the

CPSU existed, and a few modern-day Russian leftists are attempting to keep alive the memory of
 36

these forgotten revolutionary organizations. English language historians must get to work

translating already-existing works published in Russian, aiding their Russian peers in opening up

old archives, and constructing a new history of sedition in the USSR.

5 CHAPTER 4: COMRADES-IN-ARMS: CHINA AND ALBANIA

The socialist countries are states of an entirely new type in which the exploiting classes
have been overthrown and the working people are in power. The principle of integrating
internationalism with patriotism is practiced in the relations between these countries. We are
closely bound by common interests and common ideals.

Mao Zedong, "Speech at the Meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in Celebration of the
40th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution" (November 6, 1957), in Quotations
from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972,) 178.

As the Soviet Bloc countries closed ranks against China, one Eastern European country

stepped forward as the sole defender of their comrades in Beijing. Enver Hoxha and the Party of

Labour of Albania (Partia e Punës e Shqipërisë, or PPSH)77 denounced Khrushchev’s

Destalinization and took it upon themselves to be supporters of Stalin and opponents of Soviet

social-imperialism. Across the Sino-Soviet Split and the Cultural Revolution, Albania and China

would be closest of comrades in their fight against both Moscow and Washington.

Albania did not take up Mao Zedong Thought as it official ideology per se: officially they

referred to themselves as “anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists.” However, Mao’s theories were

still disseminated by the Party of Labour and its mass organizations. At a meeting in Shanghai in

late summer of 1967, two Albanian PPSH cadres were sent by Hoxha to request an Albanian

translation of the Little Red Book. Mao gave them permission, saying “See if you find [my

quotations] useful.” He added, “China’s experience may serve other countries, but they must

77
To differentiate the Party of Labour of Albania from the People’s Liberation Army of China (PLA), the
abbreviation “PPSH” will be used.
 37

judge this for themselves.”78 Upon the release of the Little Red Book across Albania, Zeri I

Popullit (“Voice of the People”), the official newspaper of the PPSH) wrote an editorial entitled

“In Albanian - Chairman Mao’s Quotations - a Great and Precious Gift from the Fraternal

Chinese People!” A week later, East German diplomats in Tirana reported that a Chinese

professor was teaching Mao’s quotations at Tirana University.79

Most curiously, the Albanians did not just disseminate the works of Mao Zedong. First

Secretary Hoxha took it upon himself to partially replicate the Chinese experience with his very

own “Ideological and Cultural Revolution”, initiated in May of 1966. In February of 1967,

Hoxha declared Albania to be the first atheist state in history80 and called for a campaign to

dismantle all religious institutions in the country. He appointed his mission to be carried out by

his own version of the Red Guards, dubbed the “Albanian Youth.”81

The Ideological and Cultural Revolution had a curious beginning. Originally, Hoxha had

declared in 1961 that “internal economic and social conditions for the restoration of capitalism

have now been eliminated [in Albania]” and that class struggle was no longer necessary within

the Party or society. However, upon the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in China, Hoxha

abruptly reversed this summation and seemingly changed ideological course entirely. 82 The

Albanian Cultural Revolution started with a notable number of reforms: the abolition of ranks in

the military, reintroduction of political commissars into the armed forces, sending mid-to-high

78
Elidor Mehilli, “Mao and the Albanians,” in Cook, 166.
79
Ibid., 166-167.
80
Before Albania, all other socialist states simply called for separation of church and state. While atheism was
encouraged via state propaganda and taught in institutions of learning, nations like the USSR and China were not
officially “atheist” in either constitution or law.
81
Nertila Haxhia Ljarjaa, “An Analysis on the Consequences of the Ideological and Cultural Revolution,” Sociology
Study 1, no. 6 (November 2011): 469.
82
Peter R. Prifti, Socialist Albania Since 1944: Domestic and Foreign Developments, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1978), Prifti argues that some form of cultural revolution-style campaign would have eventually been inevitable,
considering the fact that Tirana and Beijing had become united in terms of ideology and economics, 143-144.
 38

level officials to work in factories and fields, collectivization of remote mountain areas, and a

concentrated effort to keep out foreign influences.83

The Ideological and Cultural Revolution was, interestingly, mainly characterized by its

antireligious aspect: one study showed that “Within the month of May 1967, 2,169

religious objects were destroyed and violated or converted into other usages. This figure included

600 monasteries and 327 buildings of the Catholic Church.”84 Ironically, around the time

Chinese authorities began to discourage Red Guards from destroying ancient temples, relics, and

other symbols of “the Old World,” Hoxha had begun his own campaign of wiping away the “Old

Albania.” In his own variation of Mao’s theory of the role of superstructure in the process of a

cultural revolution, the Albanian government decreed “the superstructure must get rid of all

retrograde things and foreign elements.” In other words, Hoxha justified it with the

inappropriateness of the basis with the superstructure.85

Despite the inspiration of the Cultural Revolution of China, the Albanian Cultural

Revolution never reached the massive scale of the former. The Albanian Youth were only used

to attack religious institutions and already-toppled landlords, and there were no mass workers’ or

women’s organizations that particularly aided in the attack on the old society. Unlike the PLA in

China, the Albanian People’s Army was consigned mainly to the background, acting as

something to be transformed rather than a tool with which to transform.86 In the end, it was a top-

down initiative orchestrated primarily by Hoxha himself. The Ideological and Cultural

Revolution was launched for more calculated and pragmatic reasons than the ideological

83
Raymond Zickel and Walter R. Iwaskiw, eds. Albania: A Country Study, (Washington: GPO for the Library of
Congress, 1994), 49.
84
Ljarjaa, 469.
85
Ibid., 470.
86
Prifti, 146.
 39

convictions that Mao held which caused him to launch the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The

Albanians knew that officially breaking from the Warsaw Pact would cause serious military and

economic setbacks, and that they needed to be ready to weed out any form of social

vulnerability.87

Isa Blumi writes in his substantial article about the Ideological and Cultural Revolution,

“Hoxha’s Class War,” that “initially, subtle criticism of the work of enterprise directors found its

way into the public…” While this sounds like the workplace denunciations seen in the Chinese

Cultural Revolution, the criticisms in Albania were directed strictly through the Party-led trade

unions and the vocabulary of “party line” was far more prevalent than the Chinese vocabulary of

“mass line.”88 Instead of Maoist “bombarding the headquarters” (transforming the Party), Hoxha

wanted to concentrate on creating a “new man” out of Albanian workers (transforming the

people themselves).89 The ICR copied the GPCR’s dazibao (“big character sheets”) by

creating Flete-ruffe, or “wall newspaper,” but only used them for propaganda sloganeering and

targeting of “misguided” citizens.90 On 9 April 1968 a call for new “workers’ committees” (a la

the revolutionary committees of China) was released by the PPSH; however, by the end of 1969

the Party pulled the plug on the workers’ committees because they felt that the Soviet-era

managers (who Hoxha characterized as the revisionist class in Albania) had been decisively

pushed out of power.91 This brought about a noticeable doctrinal difference between the

Albanian Cultural Revolution and Chinese Cultural Revolution. Compared to the Albanian view

that all contradictions had ceased, the Chinese believed that capitalist-roaders were to be

87
Isa Blumi, Hoxha’s “Class War: the Cultural Revolution and State Reformation, 1961-1971,” East European
Quarterly, 33, no. 3 (September 1999): 305.
88
Ibid., 311.
89
Ibid., 312.
90
Ibid., 319.
91
Ibid., 320.
 40

constantly fought until full communism was achieved due to old ideas having the ability to

regenerate.92

Anti-revisionism outside of the PPSH’s ranks, i.e., specifically Maoist anti-revisionism,

was decisively impossible. Hoxha said that “even if demanded by our Chinese comrades,” there

was to be no independent pro-Beijing activity in Albania. Any Maoist works or propaganda

material from China was to be solely distributed by Albanian authorities.93 This stringent

handling of ideology and broader society was seen by Hoxha as a way of making sure that Sino-

Albanian anti-revisionism would stay on its intended course at all times. Unfortunately for

Hoxha, he made the fatal error of not waging cultural revolution primarily on his opponents in

the Party itself, but rather on aspects of Albanian culture that had already been stripped of their

power by the foundation of the people’s socialist republic. This led him to remain wide open to

attacks by those around him as he began diverging greatly from the Maoist doctrine of

continuing revolution. Hoxha abruptly broke from the Chinese line shortly after Mao’s death,

declaring that Mao had been a revisionist all along and that Hoxha had opposed him across the

entirety of the Sixties and Seventies. This led to a Sino-Albanian Split which led to many Maoist

parties fracturing in three-way splits between pro-Gang of Four factions, pro-Deng Xiaoping

factions, and pro-Hoxha factions, greatly weakening the Maoist movement globally.94

92
Mehilli in Cook, 175.
93
Ibid.
94
For primary documents concerning the Sino-Albanian Split and the impact it made upon Maoist parties around the
world, I would recommend the Marxists Internet Archive’s Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online
(https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/). Particularly noteworthy are Enver Hoxha’s own polemic against Maoism,
Imperialism and the Revolution (Tirana: Foreign Languages Press, 1978) and American Maoist J. Werner’s rebuttal
of the text, “Beat Back the Dogmato-Revisionist Attack on Mao Tsetung Thought: Comments on Enver Hoxha’s
Imperialism and the Revolution,” published in the Revolutionary Communist Party USA’s theoretical journal The
Communist, no. 5, (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1979), accessible at https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-
5/rcp-hoxha/index.htm.
 41

6 CHAPTER 5: RUMBLINGS IN BULGARIA: THE COUP ATTEMPT OF 1965 AND

THE 1968 WORLD FESTIVAL OF YOUTH & STUDENTS

“Our army has always had two policies. First, we must be ruthless to our enemies; we must
overpower and annihilate them. Second, we must be kind to our own, to the people, to our comrades and to
our superiors and subordinates, and unite with them.”

Mao Zedong, Speech at the reception given by the Central Committee of the Party for model study
delegates from the Rear Army Detachments (September 18, 1944), in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-
Tung. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 148.

Other cracks of Mao-inspired dissent began to show in the Eastern Bloc as the Sino-

Soviet break had become irreversible, with one of the most dramatic- and high-ranking- being

the military coup attempt in Sofia, Bulgaria in April of 1965. While partially a symptom of the

Sino-Soviet Split, it was also the inevitable conclusion of a major split that had arisen between

particular factions within the Bulgarian Communist Party: the Chervenkov faction (Stalinist,

“anti-revisionist”), the Yugov faction (more nationalistic, known for opportunistic vacillation),

and the prevailing Zhivkov faction (pro-Soviet, pro-Khrushchev).95 The split had been growing

over the process of twenty years: even as early as 1945 there was a distinct split between the

“home communists” and the “Muscovites.”96

While a new General-Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), Todor

Zhivkov, was elected by the Central Committee in March 1954, much of the mid-tier and lower-

tier Party officials became displeased with him over the course of the next decade.97 The prior

General-Secretary (as well as the brother-in-law of Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov), Valko

Chervenkov, was known as Bulgaria’s “little Stalin” and was supportive of China’s resistance to

Destalinization, making it necessary for Zhivkov to sideline him despite his popularity with

95
J.F. Brown, “The Bulgarian Plot,” The World Today, 21, no. 6 (Jun 1965): 265-266.
96
Ibid., 264.
97
Ibid., 266.
 42

many BCP rank-and-file.98 The “home communists” (now consolidated between the Chervenkov

faction, Yugov faction, and Bulgarian nationalists within the military) felt that Zhivkov and the

“Muscovites” had not only allied Bulgaria with the USSR, but had transformed their country into

something akin to a Soviet vassal state. Angered by the military and economic reforms that

Zhivkov was replicating from the Soviet reforms, a hardline section of the BCP Central

Committee and Bulgarian People’s Army conspired to carry out a coup against the general-

secretary’s revisionism.99

The leaders of the coup plot were a motley crew: head conspirator Ivan Todorov-

Gorunya, a member of the Central Committee of the BCP, Deputy Minister of Agriculture, and

anti-Nazi partisan veteran from World War II; Tsolo Krastev, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and

former ambassador to North Korea; Major-General Tsvetko Anev, Commander of the Sofia

Military Garrison; and Slavcho Transki, Deputy Minister of National Defense as well as another

anti-Nazi partisan resistance hero.100 The military background of Todorov-Gorunya, Anev, and

Transki were particularly important: not only would such leadership be essential for an armed

coup, but the fact that “[t]hough not a militaristic nation in the accepted sense, the Bulgarians

have always accorded their army a special and honoured status among national institutions.”101

Rallying the populace around the banner of anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism, the plotters

decided, would not be enough: they would have to evoke a cultural sentiment that would bring

the Bulgarian masses to cast off the Soviet yoke.

98
Ibid., 264-265.
99
“Purge Expected in Bulgaria: Diplomats Link It to Coup That Failed,” Chicago Tribune, April 22, 1965, sec. 2A,
5.
100
There remains the possibility that there were other powerful figures that “at least promised their backing once the
first moves of the conspiracy had succeeded.” Whether or not Chervenkov was part of, or had knowledge of, the
coup seems to be unknown, Brown 262-263.
101
Ibid.
 43

The coup was to be enacted as follows: General Anev's military garrison was to cut off

all roads and bridges leading out the capital, take out all communication centers, and capture the

airport. Todorov-Gorunya, meanwhile, was to lead other troops to storm a meeting by the

Central Committee and arrest the eleven-man Politburo, including Zhivkov himself.102 However,

nothing went as planned for the plotters, and the coup attempt was quickly exposed. Little known

to the conspirators, Soviet and Bulgarian intelligence had been monitoring some of the individual

plotters and supporters for some time, and by the first week of April a wave of arrests, purges,

and demotions swept through the Party and Army, ending in Todorov-Gorunya’s suicide on 7

April.103

The coup attempt was unprecedented. With the exception of a coup attempt in 1960 in

Albania, any attempt at a military overthrow of a Soviet Bloc state was seen as simply

impossible.104 How could this have happened, and how could the BCP explain it? Rumors and

official state explanations began to fly. Western media such as Time magazine suggested that

Todorov-Gorunya and company were plotting a “pro-Peking putsch”105 and were directly

inspired by Mao’s opposition to Soviet social-imperialism. The Chicago Tribune reported that

Zhivkov had declared the conspirators were “pro-Chinese elements… people of primitive

thinking.”106 The Tribune also noted that the coup plot had begun to coalesce shortly after a

diplomatic visit by Chinese officials.107 American, Soviet, and Bulgarian press all seemed to

point their fingers at one culprit acting as the coup’s puppet-master: China.

102
“Bulgaria: The Black Sheep,” Time, 30 April 1965,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,898659,00.html
103
Ibid.
104
Brown, 261.
105
“Bulgaria: The Black Sheep”.
106
“Pro-Chinese Blamed for Bulgaria Coup: Zhivkhov Fixes Guilt in Abortive Effort,” Chicago Tribune, July 17,
1965, sec. A, 12.
107
“Purge Expected”.
 44

Yet it would be difficult to say with absolute certainty that the 1965 Bulgarian coup

attempt was a “Maoist” one. No material evidence or documentation of aid from Beijing to the

conspirators has been found, nor did the Chinese state press report on or express solidarity with

them upon their capture. Much like Zhu De’s presence in Tbilisi during the 1956 Georgian

uprising in the Soviet Union, the Chinese diplomatic mission shortly before the coup attempt

seem to be coincidental and can only entertain speculation. While China’s opposition to

Destalinization and economic reforms in the Soviet Bloc certainly inspired the coup plotters, the

aforementioned elements of nationalism and resentment of Soviet military dominance served as a

more immediate incentive to mutiny against the Zhivkov regime. With the coup quashed, the

Bulgarian government tersely swept all further discussion of the coup attempt under the rug until

its collapse in 1989.

Sofia would once again be struck by the specter of China three years later, however, this

time with far more overtly Maoist overtones and from a group of proud foreigners. In his 2012

monograph Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany, Quinn Slobodian tells

the story of how a group of Maoist students from the West German SDS (Sozialistischer

Deutscher Studentenbund, or Socialist German Students Union) caused a dramatic ruckus at the

Soviet-sponsored 1968 World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS). The WFYS, a semi-

annual gathering of youth leagues of left-wing parties from across the world (principally

comprised of the youth leagues of communist parties aligned with Moscow or non-aligned

within the Sino-Soviet Split), was to be hosted in Sofia, Bulgaria from 27 July to 6 August of

that year.108 A delegation of Red Guards from China was certainly out of the question; however,

108
Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2012), 194-195.
 45

the German SDS109 was invited, but arrived at the festival with the intent as being almost a

surrogate delegation for the Chinese Red Guards.110

The Bulgarian and Soviet leadership initially thought nothing of a group of West German

socialists representing the Federal Republic of Germany at the WFYS. Little did they realize the

trouble that was to ensue beginning on 27 July, 1968 at the opening ceremony. As the German

SDS delegation marched past the Soviet authorities, they shouted “Mao! Mao! Mao!” and carried

portraits of the Chairman in an act of brazen defiance.111 The festival’s events were constantly

rife with trouble, with the German Maoists repeatedly breaking up pro-Soviet youth activities or

demanding debates and discussions around key issues in the Sino-Soviet Split. The German

Maoists’ presence in Bulgaria finally climaxed in an unauthorized protest outside the American

embassy in Sofia against the Vietnam War, and at the closing ceremonies the German SDS left

the festival chanting “Castro, Mao, Guevara!”112 With this defiant gesture, Maoism parted

Bulgaria for Bonn rather than back to uninvited Beijing.

109
The term “German SDS” is used to differentiate from the American SDS, i.e. “Students for a Democratic
Society,” another radical student organization whose existence overlapped with the other and contained a Maoist
faction within itself.
110
A clarification should be made that while the Chinese government was supportive of the German SDS in general,
Beijing itself was ambivalent about the idea of German SDS being their official representatives at the WFYS, 195.
111
Ibid., 196-198.
112
Ibid., 195.
 46

7 CHAPTER 6: “BECOMING CHINESE”: MAOISTS IN THE GERMAN

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

“At certain times in the revolutionary struggle, the difficulties outweigh the favorable conditions
and so constitute the principal aspect of the contradiction and the favorable conditions constitute
the secondary aspect. But through their efforts the revolutionaries can overcome the difficulties
step by step and open up a favorable new situation; thus a difficult situation yields place to a
favorable one.”

Mao Zedong, "On Contradiction" (August 1937), in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.
(Foreign Languages Press: Peking), 1972, 200.113

The West German SDS were not the only German youth who were shouting Mao’s name

to defy Moscow. On the other side of the Berlin Wall, a small group of East German communists

of a younger generation (also joined by a small group of older, hardline communists who

survived the concentration camps of the Nazis) reached out to their fellow countrymen in the

West who had already formed a cohesive Maoist party named the Communist Party of

Germany/Marxist-Leninist (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/Marxisten-Leninisten. or

KPD/ML). The KPD/ML had been looking to form a German Democratic Republic (GDR)

section for some time, hoping to harness dissatisfaction among East German youth with the

ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) and its

stagnant, authoritarian, Soviet model of rule, especially as Beijing was heating up its global

propaganda war against Moscow.

The German Democratic Republic’s birth was a painful one that was seemingly destined

for political and economic tragedy. While the other Eastern European nations were liberated by

the Soviets from Nazi occupation, the GDR (popularly known as East Germany) was born from

the destruction of the German Reich itself, split into two by the Allies and much of its eastern

territories absorbed into Poland as geographic payback for wartime atrocities. The Soviet Red

113
For the original, see Mao Zedong, “On Contradiction” (August 1937), Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking:
Foreign Language Publishing House, 1965), 1:335.
 47

Army established a German Economic Commission (Deutsche Wirtschaftskommission, or

DWK) in 1947 to direct the construction of a socialist economy.114 Reparations to be paid to the

other Eastern Bloc nations was almost immediately forced upon the Germans by the DWK,

creating the basis for an economy intended to be a near-complete replication “down to the last

machine, down to the last production unit of industry”115 of Moscow’s model for the duration of

East Germany’s existence. In 1949, the DWK was dissolved and economic planning was handed

over to the government of the newly-declared German Democratic Republic and the Soviet-

manufactured SED ruling party.

Even after the transition from direct Soviet administration to East German domestic rule

and the denazification of society, the new political and economic model did not serve the

German people well, including the industrial working class that it was supposed to be ruled by.

The average East German’s monthly income was 256 Deutsche Marks a month, with prices for

even single items of food being up to a third of that income.116 Riots and uprisings ensued across

1953 and by the end of the year, SED General Secretary Walter Ulbricht tried to curtail further

discontent by enacting a series of significant economic reforms under a policy known as the

“New Course.” The New Course, while meant to satisfy the populace, deviated from the

traditional model of socialist planning by - much like the policies of Khrushchev and Brezhnev

in the USSR - halting collectivization of agriculture and returning property to farmers and

enterprise owners (particularly if they had fled to the West after having their property seized).117

114
Mike Dennis, The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic 1945-1990 (Essex: Pearson Education
Limited, 2000), 17.
115
Ibid., 42.
116
Ibid., 55.
117
Ibid., 64-65.
 48

Over twenty years later, in 1967 a new policy known as the “Economic System of

Socialism” added reforms to the setting of wages and prices, as well as the autonomy of

management of enterprises.118 Ulbricht, much like Khrushchev, was seen as incompetent in

moving the economic reforms forward and in 1971 was replaced with the much more Brezhnev-

esque (and Brezhnev-aligned) Erich Honecker. Much like the Kosygin Reforms did for Soviet

anti-revisionists, the Economic System of Socialism would later be used by the East German

Maoists of the KPD/ML as evidence that the GDR’s economy was a capitalist one and that the

SED was a junior partner in the CPSU’s social-imperialist policies.

1968 was a whirlwind year that left no part of the world untouched, including the

socialist countries. The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia attempted to turn the Czechoslovak

regime on its head, resulting in the Soviet invasion of the country and the crushing of the

movement. Meanwhile in China, the Cultural Revolution had reached a screeching crescendo,

with the Red Guards and other radical mass movements having spun out of Mao’s control and

leaving the country in what Mao called “an all-around civil war.”119 It was also a year that gave

birth to even more Maoist parties (many far more radical and youth-oriented than the initial wave

of Maoist parties a few years earlier), including the KPD/ML in West Germany (Federal

Republic of Germany, or FRG). Meanwhile, in the East, the youth of 1968 began to form a

Maoist nucleus via radical study circles in which they studied the “classics” of Marx, Engels, and

Lenin independent of their high school and university Marxism-Leninism classes, as well as the

officially disapproved works of Stalin, Mao, and Hoxha.120

118
Ibid., 117.
119
William Hinton, Turning Point in China: An Essay on the Cultural Revolution (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1972), 17.
120
Herbert Polifka, “New Revelations about the Activities and Destruction of the GDR Section of the Communist
Party of Germany/Marxist-Leninist (KPD/ML),” Revolutionary Democracy 5, no. 1 (April 1999),
http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv5n1/gdrkpd.htm
 49

In 1969, the Progressive Youth (Progressive Jugend, or PJ) was founded in Magdeburg.

The PJ only had around a hundred full-time cadres, but built a small subculture of supporters

who emulated other radical social movements internationally. The PJ, for example, was known

for dressing in American Black Panther Party-style uniforms121 and carry around the Little Red

Books that they had received via the Chinese embassy in East Berlin (an embassy which, at one

point, would cause grief for the East German authorities).122 By the early 1970s the PJ had

supporters not only in Magdeburg and Berlin but in the key port city of Rostock, allowing it to

form an even broader base.123

The PJ eventually reached out to the KPD/ML in the FRG and formed a “GDR Section”

of the Party. On 7 February 1976, a pamphlet titled “Declaration of the Founding of the GDR

Section of the KPD/ML,” was published, with the first page of the pamphlet topped with the

heads of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.124 The pamphlet contained a program for the new

communist party as well as a series of writings denouncing the East German economic model as

a “thoroughly capitalist program”125 and the SED as “traitors of the nation” and “vassals of

Moscow.”126 It was an incendiary text declaring all-out class war on the state and intending to

carry it to total victory. Like their Western comrades, the Maoists of the KPD/ML GDR Section

had succeeded in becoming “Chinese,” transferring the Chinese aesthetic onto themselves and

the Red Guards’ goal of destroying revisionism by any means necessary.127

121
Ibid.
122
Quinn Slobodian, “Badge books and brand books: the Mao Bible in East and West Germany” in Cook, 221.
123
“New Revelations”.
124
Gründungserklärung der Sektion DDR der KPD/ML [Declaration of the Founding of the GDR Section of the
KPD/ML], (Berlin: Roter Morgen, 1976), 1, http://www.mao-
projekt.de/BRD/ORG/GRM/KPDML_1976_in_der_DDR_gegruendet.shtml
125
Ibid., 13.
126
Ibid., 25.
127
Slobodian, Foreign Front, 177.
 50

The GDR Section began printing its own edition of the Party’s central newspaper Rote

Morgen (“Red Morning”) and disseminating it around university campuses and stuffing copies of

the newspaper regularly into the mail boxes of working class neighborhoods.128 While only

having a membership in the dozens, the GDR Section held together the small base of East

German citizens sympathetic to anti-revisionism as the PJ had, quickly arousing the wrath of the

powerful Ministry of State Security (commonly known as the Stasi). Avoiding the Stasi was as

impossible to avoid as the KGB, if not more so with its sprawling network of 2 million civilian

informants in a country of only 16 million citizens.129 Arrests of cadres was a regular occurrence

and Rote Morgen regularly contained coverage of KPD/ML prisoners in East German jails until

the newspaper’s dissolution in 1982.130

While the GDR had experienced a decade of small but vibrant Maoist activity, its time as

a cohesive vanguard political party for Maoism lasted a mere two years. In 1978 the KPD/ML,

including its GDR Section, sided with the Albanians in the Sino-Albanian Split, and in 1986 the

new Hoxhaist incarnation of the KPD/ML dissolved its GDR Section while merging with the

International Marxist Group to found the Unified Socialist Party, which dwindled away across

the late 1980s.131 East German Maoism had failed to build a popular base or become a serious

threat to the SED regime (although the Stasi certainly treated it as such), and Soviet-style

communism continued to be the only school of Marxist thought that the East German people

were engaged with until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

128
Dietmar Kestin, “'Roter Morgen': Zentralorgan der KPD/Marxisten-Leninisten, Ausgabe DDR,” Materialien zur
Analyse von Opposition (M.A.O.), http://www.mao-projekt.de/INT/EU/DDR/DDR_KPDML_Roter_Morgen.shtml
129
Dennis, 214.
130
Kestin.
131
“New Revelations”.
 51

Unlike the Soviet and Bulgarian experiences, the story of Maoism in the GDR is

nevertheless unique in that it had a much more significant transnational aspect to it, with more

direct Chinese involvement in the dissemination of Maoism. To truly appreciate the Maoist

presence in East Germany, we must turn to one of the Cultural Revolution’s most active “base

areas” behind the Iron Curtain: the Chinese embassy in East Berlin. The embassy had a knack for

“making trouble” (to quote Mao) and opening its doors up to Germans, acting as a conduit

through which Maoism enthusiastically and publicly flowed.

The Chinese embassy brazenly handed out German-language Little Red Books, leaflets,

and pamphlets to workers, students, and functionaries in the streets around the embassy’s

grounds, and posted German-language posters denouncing the SED without any of the reserve

shown in other countries.132 Thousands of copies of Peking Review were printed for distribution

in East Berlin, as well as other small pamphlets published by Beijing’s Foreign Languages

Publishing House.133 By late 1967, an average of 63 German students per day came to visit the

embassy to receive Little Red Books and Mao badges directly from the Chinese. Concerned with

this development, in January of 1968 the East German authorities cut off any civilian visitation

to the embassy and barred anyone from entering the building except diplomats and staff.134

Attempting to agitate among East German citizens was not the only reason that the

government took the initiative to contain the Chinese inside their embassy, as the Chinese had

become a headache for East Berlin since the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Quinn

Slobodian’s comprehensive paper (one of the few in the English language) “The Maoist Enemy:

132
Quinn Slobodian, “The Maoist Enemy: China’s Challenge in 1960s East Germany,” Journal of Contemporary
History, 51, no. 3 (2016): 19-20,
http://www.academia.edu/14288851/The_Maoist_Enemy_China_s_Challenge_in_1960s_East_Germany
133
Ibid., 20-21.
134
Slobodian, in Cook, 221.
 52

China’s Challenge in 1960s East Germany,” published by the Journal of Contemporary History,

recounts how conflict between Chinese and local authorities almost came to blows, preceded by

a concentrated campaign by the Chinese to illicit a reaction out of the East Germans. The first

major provocation on East German soil began when, shortly after the Red Square incident of

1967, Red Guards were brought to the embassy to act as escorts for the Chinese ambassador to

the GDR on a trip home. Shortly after this, the Chinese began to open new glass display cases

outside the embassy grounds, showcasing Chinese propaganda posters and art as well as posters

denouncing Soviet and East German revisionism.135

The campaign came to head in June of 1967, when four Chinese diplomats died in an

automobile accident in Berlin. The embassy staff immediately jumped to the conclusion that the

local authorities were to blame and that the accident had in fact been an assassination. Convinced

of this, the staff began to chant “blood must be answered with blood!” and “down with

revisionism!” via loudspeakers to passersby in the evenings.136 In return, East German citizens

scratched the glass on the embassy display cases with the word “pigs” and defaced the cases with

lipstick. The provocations by both sides eventually died down, but Stasi and military surveillance

of the embassy stayed at the utmost high.137

The Maoist presence in the GDR was, aside from its state dissemination in Albania and

similar student agitation in Hungary, far more intense than anywhere before in the Soviet Bloc.

Unlike the Soviet anti-revisionists, the anti-revisionists in East Germany coalesced into a single

national group, first as a youth group and then as a self-declared vanguard party, and were able

to make their presence known nationwide. They also continued to live on past the end of the

135
Ibid., 17.
136
Ibid., 19
137
Ibid.
 53

Cultural Revolution and into the mid-1980s, albeit as Hoxhaists and later as part of a party

comprised of a merger with another Marxist organization. While English-language resources are

still scant, hopefully this will change with translations and digitization of documents and texts

concerning an experience that captures the spirit of the Sixties within the Second World on a

transnational scale.

8 CHAPTER 7: MAO ON TRIAL: MAOIST STUDENTS IN HUNGARY DURING

THE KÁDÁR ERA

Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory.

Mao Zedong, "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains" (June 11, 1945), in
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 182.138

Through a Western lens, the German Democratic Republic and the Hungarian People’s

Republic were like night and day. East Germany was viewed as a gloomy police state rivaling

that of the USSR; the Hungary of the 1960s, however, was seen as surprisingly relaxed. Depicted

as humane and cosmopolitan, Hungary was sometimes described by the Western press as “the

happiest barracks in the socialist camp” for its access to Western goods, relaxed border laws, and

low-level police surveillance compared to the rest of the Soviet Bloc. Hungarian socialism

during the administration of Janos Kádár and the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party

(HSWP) was dubbed “Goulash Communism,” being described as a “goulash” stew combining

both Soviet-style central planning and Western free-market mechanisms.139 The Hungarian

people possessed (alongside East Germans and Yugoslavs) one of the highest standards of living

138
For the original, see Mao Zedong, "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains" (June 11, 1945),
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. (Peking: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1965) 3:321.
139
Thayer Watkins, “Economic History and the Economy of Hungary,” San José State University
Department of Economics, http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/hungary.htm.
 54

in Eastern Europe for the duration of Goulash Communism, with very little social or political

turmoil.

Nevertheless, a dramatic episode of unrest fueled by the discontent of many youth and

the resentment of some of the old guard of Hungarian communists did in fact cause a stir on the

campuses of Budapest and exposed the Hungarian people to Maoism. Little information is

available in English language sources, although Adam Takacs’ recent 2012 report “The Maoist

Incident: Effects of Political and Ideological Consolidation on Youth Mentality in the Kádár

Regime of the 1960s” has divulged key new information about the Maoist student rebels of 1968

and their connections to broader global social movements of the decade.140 It spins a tale of

fiercely idealistic youth who, inspired by the national liberation struggles in the Third World

(particularly that of Vietnam), sought a vibrant, seemingly anti-authoritarian socialism beyond

their nation’s borders, and the political and intellectual response to the incident. Like their

comrades in Western Europe and the two Germanys, these youth found the anti-authoritarianism

they needed in Maoism.

Like the Kosygin Reforms of 1965 in USSR and the Economic System of Socialism in

the GDR of 1967, the conception of Hungarian Maoism is rooted in economic reforms. Goulash

Communism - known for its use of free market mechanisms and small private enterprises within

a broader state-planned apparatus - was the product of Kádár’s “New Economic Mechanism”

initiated across 1966 to 1968.141 Like the Bulgarian reforms of the early 1960s, Goulash

Communism was also a process of sidelining hardline Stalinists, mainly centered around the first

140
Adam Takacs, “The Maoist Incident: Effects of Political and Ideological Consolidation on Youth Mentality in the
Kádár Regime of the 1960s”, RESOCEA (Regime and Society in Eastern Europe) Report, 2012, 67,
http://www.academia.edu/15233364/The_Maoist_Incident._Effects_of_Political_and_Ideological_Consolidation_on
_Youth_Mentality_in_the_K%C3%A1d%C3%A1r_Regime_in_Hungary_in_the_1960s/
141
Ibid., 21.
 55

postwar Party leader Mátyás Rákosi.142 The dual process of open economic reforms and

sidelining of the authoritarian old guard seems to act, in my own observation, as a formula for

creating bursts of anti-authoritarian anti-revisionism in 1960s Eastern Europe, and the student

study groups found on Budapest university campuses serve as yet another example of this

formula.

The first central figure of Hungarian Maoism was a young Hungarian Communist Youth

League (CYL) activist named Gábor Révai. The son of Joszef Révai , one of the hardline

founders of the Communist Party of Hungary who took part in the establishment of the

Hungarian Soviet of 1919, Révai attended Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest with a double

major in German and philosophy. Like his East German comrades, his beginnings as an

opposition activist lay in his forming of student study circles of Marxist classics outside the

approved CYL study groups in 1964.143 Two years later, Révai became friends with prominent

West German student activist Rudi Dutschke, to whom he was introduced in Budapest in 1966

by Ferenc Jánossy, the stepson of esteemed Marxist philosopher György Lukács, with whom he

maintained a correspondence.144 With such esteemed connections, Révai was seemingly destined

to become a troublemaker for the Kádárist status quo.

Soon Révai linked up with other likeminded intellectuals within the HSWP and CYL.

Among the core circle was György Por and Miklós Haraszti, two other CYL activists at Eötvös

Loránd University,145 György Dalos, an esteemed writer who had graduated from Moscow State

University and member of the HSWP’s Hungarian Writers Association,146 and author Katalin

142
Ibid., 11.
143
Ibid., 24-26.
144
Ibid., 25.
145
Ibid.
146
Ibid., 43.
 56

Imre.147 All had visited the Chinese embassy in Budapest at one point or another to receive Little

Red Books, Maoist pamphlets, and issues of Új Kína (“New China,” a Hungarian-language

magazine which often published articles denouncing Kádár and the HSWP as revisionists)148 or

were in contact with Chinese students and teaching assistants at Eötvös Loránd and University of

Budapest.149 Now armed with Maoist theory, the students began to refer to themselves as

“freethinking communists” and divided themselves into two clubs, known by the secret police as

“the Thinkers” and “the Club.”150

The Hungarian Maoists were particularly vocal and initially not prone to clandestine

organizing. Imre was incendiary in her publications, stating that the HSWP “motivates us to

like a socialism which is in fact a bourgeois one. In our country, right-wing tendencies and

revisionism portray the principal orientation. There is no communism.”151 Dalos published a

work titled “The Revisionist Mask of Humanism,” which said that the amnesty of Kádár’s

regime was promoting “humanism for the enemies of the people” and not “socialist

humanism.”152 Imre and Dalos were arrested but let off with a warning, and Imre lost her

position at the Institute for Literary Studies at the University of Budapest.153

Momentum picked up, however, when the Vietnam War became a central issue for

Hungarian youth. The Hungarian government and the Communist Youth League both expressed

their support of North Vietnam in the conflict, but centered their policy around slogans such as

“Peace for Vietnam!” while the Maoists centered their line around slogans such as “Liberate

147
Ibid., 44.
148
Ibid., 41.
149
Ibid.
150
Ibid., 46.
151
Ibid.
152
Ibid., 46-47.
153
Ibid., 47.
 57

Vietnam!” and “Victory to the NLF!”154 In 1965 the CYL formed the Vietnam Solidarity

Committee (VSC), which was infiltrated and taken over by Maoist students, causing the CYL to

expel the VSC in December of 1966.155 For Hungarian youth - much like other radical youth

around the world - Vietnam was seen as part of a broader anti-imperialist movement and further

radicalized the Maoist students.156

Finally going underground, in 1967 the Maoist clubs joined together to issue a joint

program titled “The Way of the Revolution” under the name “Group of Hungarian Revolutionary

Communists” (GHRC).157 Released on the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, “The

Way of the Revolution” proclaimed “We make no secret of the fact that our political goal can

only be reached by the violent overthrow of this bourgeois-bureaucratic regime masked by

revisionism. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China reveals

the way for us.”158 By 1968, the GHRC coalesced into a central group of around 60 cadres who

were behind the organizing of an increasingly militant antiwar movement.159 One particularly

violent demonstration organized by Por and Harazsti began as a march by 200 Hungarian,

African, and Chinese students on the American embassy in Budapest, but ended with Molotov

cocktails being thrown into the gates of the embassy, fire set to the cars of embassy staff, and

clashes with Hungarian state police holding the students back from storming the embassy.160

With the small but determined group of Maoists now taking part in brazenly illegal

actions, the state police finally decided to act and arrested the key leadership of the GHRC and

its related campus clubs. On 9 June 1968, the HSWP’s official newspaper Népszabadság

154
Ibid., 57.
155
Ibid., 48.
156
Ibid.
157
Ibid., 49.
158
Ibid.
159
Ibid., 52.
160
Ibid. 53.
 58

(“Liberty of the People”), the central organ of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP),

informed its readers about “a recent verdict made by the Central Court of Budapest” in which the

Maoists were found guilty of “a seditious conspiracy” but were given rather light sentences

ranging from a few months in jail to a mere warning.161 The trial gained some national attention,

and while sympathy for Maoism itself did not grow, the trial caused dissatisfaction among

Hungarian students toward the CYL and put pressure against the leadership caused the CYL to

reform its approach toward dissenting opinions within it.162

After the trial, the GHRC dispersed and no further attempts to build a Maoist party were

ever made again. Por, Dalos, and Harazsti continued to work as opposition activists, being

arrested multiple times across the early 1970s but always let off with light sentences or mere

warnings.163 The Maoist movement had never taken root among working-class or peasant

communities, and was consigned merely to the elite universities of the city of Budapest. 164 In an

interview in Rolling Stone magazine in 1990, Harazsti reflected on his activism and

disillusionment, saying “We were the last believers in Marxism in Hungary… When we lost

faith, that was when Marxism died out in this country.”165 While perhaps a bit presumptuous, it

is definitely apparent that the Maoist students put on trial in 1968 saw themselves as the final

heirs of Marx, born to defend communism from the revisionism of the HSWP.

161
Ibid., 4.
162
Ibid., 58.
163
Ibid., 59-62.
164
Robert Gildea, James Mark, and Annette Warring, eds. Europe's 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 99.
165
William Greider, “The Morning After: Inventing Democracy in Hungary,” Rolling Stone, February 22, 1990,
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-morning-after-19900222.
 59

9 CHAPTER 8: THE CURIOUS LIFE OF KAZIMIERZ MIJAL: POLISH MAOISM

IN THE 1960S AND 1970S

“Communists should set an example in being practical as well as farsighted. For only by
being practical can they fulfil the appointed tasks, and only farsightedness can prevent them from
losing their bearings in the march forward.”

Mao Zedong, "The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War" (October 1938), in
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 271.166

The final significant example of Maoism in the Soviet Bloc comes in the form of a

curious and complicated man. Kazimierz Mijal was a man with impressive credentials: born in

1910 in the Polish region of the Russian Empire, he grew up to help found the Polish Workers’

Party and fought the Nazis within the ranks of the communist People’s Guard (Gwardia Ludowa)

and Polish People’s Army (Armia Ludowa) from 1942 until Poland’s liberation in 1945.167 In the

1950s he became mayor of Lodz and then served as Minister of the Communal Economy and

Chief of the Bureau for the Council of Ministers.168 For a man with such an already prestigious

background, Mijal seemed destined to greatness within the newly-formed ruling Polish United

Workers Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, or PZPR).

His career took a downward plunge, however, with the death of his good friend and

political ally Boleslaw Bierut, who had served as President of the Polish People’s Republic and

First Secretary of the PZPR from 1947 until his death in 1956.169 Bierut was succeeded by

Wladyslaw Gomulka, whose economic reforms in October of 1956 (the “Gomulka Thaw”)170

166
For the original, see "The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War" (October 1938), Selected
Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1965), 2:198.
167
Paul Saba and Sam Richards, “Kazimierz Mijal [15 Sep 1910 - 28 Jan 2010],” Marxists Internet Archives,
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/poland/poland-intro.pdf, 1.
168
“Kazimierz Mijal - Dogmatic Diehard or Political Adventurer?” Radio Free Europe, Munich: RFE, Jun 26, 1967,
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/poland/cpp-diehard.pdf, 2.
169
Ibid., 3.
170
Hubert Zawadzki and Jerzy Lukowski, A Concise History of Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 295-296.
 60

were a near lock-and-step emulation of Khrushchev’s own thaw. A transcript of a report by

Radio Free Europe concerning Mijal’s newfound dilemma informs us that “In the beginning, like

his like-minded companions, he did not openly enter into factional struggle. He still acted under

so-called Party democracy, though giving full rein to virulent attacks on more liberal groups. A

few weeks after the Poznan uprising [by Polish workers in June of 1956], the Seventh CC

Plenum met, in the course of which the Natolin [hardline] faction violently attacked the ‘thaw’

tendencies in the Party and tried to push through the view that the Poznan tragedy proved that the

liberalization of rule had led the Party into danger and demanded that a strong-arm policy be

restored. For the first time, clearly demagogical methods were employed, such as antisemitic

allusions, mention of purposely fanned anti-Soviet feelings, etc. The plenum did issue a

compromise resolution, but it was known that it failed to solve the main problem - the deep rift

between the Party factions. After the plenum, the final act in the struggle for power began.”171

In January of 1957, Mijal was removed from the Ministry of Communal Economy and at

the Third Congress of the PZPR in 1959 he was not reelected to the Central Committee.172 Once

more, we see the twin phenomena of economic reform and political sidelining giving birth to

anti-revisionist discontent. After some years of silence, Mijal published in 1963 - with the help

of the Albanians - a pamphlet titled “The Struggle for Victory! Silence and Passivity Mean

Defeat!” which was smuggled into Poland via Chinese ships.173 After 10,000 copies were

distributed across the country, multiple arrests ensued and Mijal was sacked of all political posts

and party membership.174 In December of 1965, a new pamphlet titled “Under the Marxist-

Leninist Banner, Into a Battle for Socialism!” was released and distributed illegally among the

171
“Kizmierz Mijal- Dogmatic Diehard or Political Adventurer?”
172
Ibid., 5.
173
Ibid., 9.
174
Saba and Richards, 3.
 61

Polish public, announcing the formation of the “Communist Party of Poland” (or CPP - also

known as the Communist Party of Poland (Marxist-Leninist) or Communist Party of Poland

(Mijal)).175 The pamphlets initiated another wave of arrests, with estimates between 30 and 300

jailed (although some sources indicate the majority were just detained for questioning),176

demonstrating that the new party was not simply an Albanian-sponsored one-man paper

organization, but a group large enough to cause concern for the Polish authorities.

Mijal and his comrades minced no words in proclaiming which “East” they viewed as

genuinely “red.” Party literature stated that "the center of the revolution has shifted east….

Marxist positions are maintained by Parties such as those of China, Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam,

Albania, and New Zealand."177 Mao was referred to as “the most outstanding theorist of Marxist-

Leninist thought of the time” and that a cultural revolution in Poland was necessary for the

country to reorient itself onto the socialist road.178 Yet the CPP seemed isolated other than some

material aid from Tirana. The Chinese, in fact, maintained complete silence on their Polish

comrades for some three years. It was not until August of 1968 that Beijing finally recognized

the CPP, stating in Peking Review that “Comrade Mao Tse-tung has pointed out that a party is a

revolutionary party if it integrates theory with practice in a revolutionary way, maintains constant

links with the broadest sections of the masses, and adopts a serious attitude towards its own

mistakes. The vanguard of the Polish working class - the Polish Communists - under the banner

of the Communist Party of Poland, is resolved to build such a revolutionary party which will be

faithful to the proletariat forever.” The CCP particularly praised the Poles for allowing only the

175
“Poland’s ‘Chinese’ Faction,” Radio Free Europe, Munich: RFE, June 20, 1964.
176
Ibid.
177
“Kizmierz Mijal- Dogmatic Diehard or Political Adventurer?”
178
Ibid.
 62

most militant and self-sacrificing workers to be members, with anti-Nazi resistance veterans to

act as the backbone of the party179

Across the next two years, the CCP would shower heaps of praise upon the CPP in

Peking Review and Mao continually received Mijal at state functions.180 The Polish Maoists

seem unique in the amount of vocal support given to them by Beijing: coverage of the Poles in

Chinese state press was disproportionately greater than that of Maoists in other Soviet Bloc

countries, most of which were ignored.181 The CPP in return showered praise onto the Chinese

Cultural Revolution182 in its newspaper Red Flag183and declared it as a model applicable to their

own struggles. In reading articles concerning Eastern Europe in Chinese English-language

periodicals, one could infer that the Chinese were using the CPP as their secondary fraternal

party within the Eastern Bloc alongside their Albanian comrades.

The CPP had a particularly problematic approach to analyzing Polish society that was not

shared by the other Maoist organizations in the Soviet Bloc, namely their fierce nationalism. At

times this nationalism manifested in open antisemitism, with the party publishing pamphlets such

as “The Participation of the Zionists in the Destruction of Polish Socialist Movement" and

"Revisionists and Nationalist Jews in the Fight with the Polish Workers." While Mijal asserted

later in life that his remarks were toward Zionists and not Jews in general, rhetoric such as "the

179
“Communist Party of Poland is a Working Class Party,” Peking Review 11, no. 35, (Aug 30, 1968): 15.
180
“Delegation of Communist Party of Poland Concludes Visit in China,” Peking Review 11, no. 47 (Nov 21, 1969):
3 and “Urgent Note Regarding ‘the Visit’ of K. Mijal in Beijing,” January 31, 1975, History and Public Policy
Program Digital Archive, Paweł Machcewicz, ed., Polskie Dokumenty Dyplomatyczne 1975 (Polish Diplomatic
Documents, 1975) (Warszawa: Polski Inst. Spraw Międzynarodowych, 2010), 88-89. Translated by Margaret K.
Gnoinska.
http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117847
181
“Magnificent Victory of China’s Great Cultural Revolution Inspires Polish Working Class,” Peking Review 11,
no. 42, (Oct 18, 1968): 18.
182
“Greetings from Kazimierz Mijal, General Secretary of Communist Party of Poland,” Peking Review 12, no. 21,
(Nov 21, 1969): 28.
183
Saba and Richards, 4.
 63

Zionist-Trotskyite group of Jewish nationalists, which, behind the mask of equality, desires the

establishment of the rule of the Jewish national minority over the thirty-million-strong Polish

nation” permeated the 1967 “Programme of the Communist Party of Poland,” making his

defensive remarks somewhat difficult to believe.184 One must wonder why this was not criticized

by the Chinese or Albanians, who opposed antisemitism and put proletarian internationalism

before nationalism at all times.

Tragically for the CPP, the beaming support from Beijing began to unravel with Mao’s

death in 1976. Interestingly, Mijal was unique in that he continued to support the succession of

Mao by Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping.185 This angered his Albanian friends deeply, and in

1977 he was ejected from Albania for his continued support of Beijing, resulting in a quiet,

inactive exile until 1983 when he returned to Poland. Upon his return to Poland, he attempted to

recommence political work but was arrested for distributing anti-state pamphlets in November of

1984, and the dwindling CPP dissolved three months later.186 While Mijal attempted to revive

the CPP in 1997 on a left-nationalist basis, nothing substantial came of the initiative and Mijal

retired from radical politics to become a journalist until his death at 99 in 2010. After a

tumultuous, controversial, and colorful life, Kazimierz Mijal was laid to rest in the Evangelical-

Reformed Cemetery in Warsaw.187

184
Ibid., 2.
185
Kazimierz Mijal, “The Significance of the Theory of Three Worlds,” Peking Review 20, no. 51 (Dec 16, 1977):
17-18.
186
Michael T. Kaufman, “Arrest In Poland Hints At Party Split,” New York Times (New York, NY), Nov. 19, 1984,
A3.
187
Saba and Richards, 7.
 64

10 CONCLUSION: INTERROGATING HISTORY AND THE MYTH OF

MONOLITHIC MARXISM IN EASTERN EUROPE

History is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual
wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there
are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one
resultant: the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a
whole unconsciously and without volition.

Friedrich Engels, letter to J. Bloch, quoted in Historical Materialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972),
294.

Where do things stand after examining the Maoist experiences in six countries and their

relationship to the both broader Maoist experience in the Global Sixties and mainstream

understanding of dissent in the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War?

Almost all of my findings for this study have been discovered in the margins: in

government statements or documents, compilation texts, small passages within texts concerning

broader aspects of Soviet or Chinese history, recently-published journal articles, and in works

that remain untranslated into the English language. Despite this, a portrait can be painted of

people within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who heard the Chinese anthem “The East is

Red” and, looking at their immediate surroundings, asked “Which ‘East’ is ‘red’: the Soviet Bloc

East or East Asia?” While the majority of citizens of Eastern Bloc nations eked out a passive

existence, oftentimes eschewing politics altogether, a few - spurred by the dual phenomena of

economic reform and sidelining of hardline communists - took a firm, vocal position and said

that their “East” was not red.

Understandings of Marxism in Eastern Europe were not monolithic. Guided most often

by the ruling party’s line, there was significant room nonetheless for other interpretations and

summations all states in the bloc were to officially adhere to. Why is this not discussed more

broadly in Western academic discourse?

 65

Access to the voices of the dramatis personae in the Maoist story is certainly difficult.

Many archives continue to be shuttered to scholars and the majority of those who took part in

these events are either dead or living out quiet, discreet twilight years with no involvement in

politics or historical preservation. Still, as stated in my discussion of anti-revisionism in the

Soviet Union, there is scholarship unfolding out there. Lengthy new articles by scholars such as

Slobodian and Takacs demonstrate that English-language accounts of Eastern European Maoism

are starting to trickle out. German and Russian scholars are starting to compile documents and

periodicals pertaining to these movements and load them onto the internet, where they can be

accessed easily by those who read their languages.

This process needs to pick up speed, however. More scholars must be willing to compile

and translate these works and documents into English, and these efforts must be coordinated into

a more coherent historiography. Mainstream academic discourse in the West concerning dissent

in the USSR and Soviet Bloc concentrates almost entirely on dissidents with pro-Western,

liberal-democratic views on how to fix the ills of their society. The histories accessible to the

general public are the stories of men like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Where is the history of

those that fought so hard, often losing freedom and livelihood, to oppose the regimes within their

respective nations with the message of communism? By publishing new histories of communist

dissent in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, we can better understand the nuances of how

social movements in these countries unfolded on a transnational level and how people in these

countries understood themselves in relation to the rest of the world at an exciting and dynamic

point in history.
 66

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