A Policy of Provocation and Expansion

Not a book so much as a brief for the prosecution: a dossier of documents and articles from the Soviet press, assembled by the Novosti Press Agency Publishing House and shipped abroad in English to make one case against one defendant.

The defendant is Maoist China; the charge is that its foreign policy is expansionist, chauvinist and in league with imperialism. There is no single author. The introduction is signed B. Pavlov; the contents are unsigned editorials from Pravda, Izvestia and the digest weekly Za rubezhom, official notes and statements of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and signed articles by Soviet journalists and area specialists - Kostikov on Peking's border policy, Apalin on the Maoist conception of geography, Galimarski on the conquerors' footsteps - with the writer Konstantin Simonov contributing an eyewitness report from the frontier. Polish and Mongolian contributors supply the multinational veneer the genre always wants: the quarrel is to look like the verdict of a camp rather than of a single capital.

Its documentary value is real and specific. It prints the Soviet government statements of March and June 1969 on the Ussuri clashes, the diplomatic notes, and the materials on the disputed border in full, alongside the Pravda editorial of 2 September 1964 answering Mao's talk with a group of Japanese socialists.

The theory it sets out to demolish is not the theory of the three worlds, which was barely a year old when this went to press, but its ancestor - the theory of the intermediate zone, dated to 1946 and traced through Mao's 1964 revision.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.