A Destructive Policy is not a book anyone sat down to write. It is a folder of seventeen articles lifted out of the Soviet press of a single year and bound between covers by the Novosti Press Agency Publishing House in Moscow — not, despite the catalogue, by Progress; the word "Novosti" appears once in the volume, on the colophon, and "Progress Publishers" not at all. Every article keeps its origin printed at the foot of its last page, and the habit lets a reader do the one thing the collection did not intend, which is to date it exactly. The pieces come from Pravda, Kommunist, New Times, International Affairs (Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn), Voprosy filosofii and Voprosy istorii, and they are dated across 1971: the Pravda survey of 1 July on the fiftieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, the Kommunist essays of that summer, a Pravda piece of 5 December, and the closing foreign-policy study from International Affairs No. 12. The spine says 1972, and for once the spine is nearly honest. This is a fresh dossier assembled hot, in the last months of 1971 and shipped abroad early the next year — no reprint, no lag, none of the ten- and twenty-year gaps that separate so many volumes in this series from the moment they claim to describe. Its own companion in the anti-Maoist cluster, Maoism Unmasked, went to press the same year on articles two and three years old and could not name the events that had overtaken it. This one is current, and its currency is the point of it.
That currency also fixes what the book is for. The philosophical volumes of the cluster argue about dialectics and the theory of contradiction; this is the foreign-policy volley. Its subject is not Mao's epistemology but Peking's conduct in the world — "great-power chauvinism," "claims for world hegemony," the splitting of the international movement, and above all the opening to Washington. Its occasion is a cluster of 1969–71 events: the Ninth Congress of the Chinese party in 1969, the armed clashes on the Soviet–Chinese frontier that spring and summer, the CPC's fiftieth anniversary, and — the thing that gives the whole collection its urgency — Henry Kissinger's secret flight to Peking in July 1971 and the announcement that Richard Nixon would follow. The contributors are the Soviet establishment at close to full strength. P. Fedoseyev, an Academician and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences, supplies the keynote on Maoism's "ideological and political essence." G. Arbatov, the Soviet Union's foremost specialist on the United States, writes on the Nixon opening. And the volume's most authoritative pieces — the anniversary statement and three of the foreign-policy chapters — carry the byline "I. Alexandrov," which is not a man but a house signature, the name Pravda reserved for a statement meant to be read as carrying official weight. There is no scholar working under constraint here to rescue. This is the apparatus speaking in its own voice, and the register never wavers.
The collection was put together across the exact weeks in which its own story changed, and it shows. Lin Piao — Minister of Defence, written into the Party Rules at the Ninth Congress as Mao's anointed heir — died on 13 September 1971 in a plane crash while fleeing China, reportedly toward the Soviet Union. Several of the articles here were composed before that event and still present him as the successor-apparent; they quote the new Rules naming "Comrade Lin Piao" as "the closest comrade-in-arms of Comrade Mao Tse-tung and the continuer of his cause," and one contributor mocks the arrangement precisely — Mao "has appointed Lin Piao … his official successor, as if Mao were a monarch," so that in the Party statutes "not only is the emperor named, but his successor also." Then the last and latest article, written after the crash, quietly registers the reversal: Mao "struck a blow at the army leadership, so that now Lin Piao no longer figures as Mao's 'successor,' as had been announced at the Ninth Congress of the CPC. The reason for this manoeuvre of Mao's is quite clear, although Peking prefers to keep silent about it." What the book cannot say is what the manoeuvre was, because in late 1971 Moscow could infer the fall but not report the aircraft. So the volume mocks the naming of an heir in the party rules, and prints, a hundred pages later, the news that the heir had just vanished into a crater in Mongolia — and connects the two not at all. It is a document caught mid-turn.
None of which would matter if the reporting were worthless, and it is important to say plainly that much of it is not. A good deal of the dossier holds up, and this series has now said so three times over about three different Soviet volumes on China. The destruction of the Chinese party and of the workers' own organisations was real; the personality cult was real; the substitution of appointed committees for elected bodies was real. The book's central diagnosis — that the Cultural Revolution had produced, in its own words, a state in which "a military-bureaucratic dictatorship came into being in China," the working class removed from the organs of power and Mao's thought put in the place of Marxism — looked prescient within a year, when the Minister of Defence died fleeing the country he was supposed to inherit. The foreign-policy charges land too, and some of them land hard. The book is right that Peking was turning toward Washington; the Nixon visit it could only announce did take place, in February 1972, and the strategic alignment it forecast did follow. It is right that China was abandoning forces it had once backed — it notes the desertion of the Ceylonese ultra-left in 1971 — and it is right, three years early, about the sharpest case of all. "Peking maintains particularly close ties," it records, "with the National Union for the Complete Independence of Angola," the movement led by Jonas Savimbi. In 1975–76 that movement, UNITA, would fight the Angolan revolution in open alliance with the CIA and the invading army of apartheid South Africa; and the Fourth International's own African review, Africa in Struggle, documented exactly that in 1975–76, denouncing China for supplying an organisation backed by Pretoria. A Soviet dossier of 1972 had the tie flagged before it became notorious. Where the book documents a real crime or a real realignment, the honest course — the one our own tradition took, through Livio Maitan on the Cultural Revolution — is to say so.
What fails is the frame, and it fails in the one way a Soviet attack on China was always going to fail: every charge in the indictment has a second address, and the book can see only one of the two capitals to which it applies.
Begin with the cleanest instance, because it is a matter of arithmetic and not of interpretation. The book denounces the Maoist "personality cult" — a "grotesquely inflated personality cult which serves to suppress the democratic relations and norms of the party and public life," a cult the new Party Rules "officially propagate," in defiance of the Eighth Congress's own promise that the party "rejects the deification of a personality." The phrase recurs a dozen times. In the entire volume, the name Stalin does not appear once — not as comparison, not as admission, not even as an insult flung at Peking, which was the easy move and the one the Chinese were making in the other direction. Nor does Khrushchev. I have checked the whole text, and its de-hyphenated form, for every spelling either name takes in this literature; both are simply absent. The instrument the book wields against Mao — the very phrase "personality cult" — was minted in Moscow in 1956, at the Twentieth Congress, for one man, and by 1971 it had been quietly retired from that use at home under Brezhnev. The vocabulary of de-Stalinisation is fully operational in these pages and its referent has been surgically removed. And the asymmetry is not only in the silence but in the grammar. When Moscow discussed its own cult it spoke of mistakes and of violations of Leninist norms of party life — accidents that befell an otherwise healthy body. Mao's cult, by contrast, is diagnosed here as "a fully-developed system of anti-Leninist views and a betrayal." The category turns outward and only outward. This is the discriminator that matters, and it is sharper than any count of a word: a Bolshevik may be wrong about a vote or a policy, and the book will say so, but the classification never turns inward. Nobody who stayed inside is ever an opportunist, a chauvinist, or a cultist.
The same structure governs the book's title charge. "Great-power chauvinism" and "claims for world hegemony" are pinned on Peking eight times over — the exact accusation that the Fourth International, and the whole anti-Stalinist left, had been levelling at Moscow since the 1920s and would go on levelling after the tanks reached Prague in 1968 and Kabul in 1979. The book even reaches for the Chinese party's own better self as a stick: it quotes the resolution of the CPC's Eighth Congress of 1956 warning the party to "resolutely combat all manifestations of great-power chauvinism," and its self-admonition not to "display conceit and complacency, fancy ourselves infallible." Chinese self-criticism, turned into a Soviet weapon — and at no point does the possibility arise that the warning might have a reader in Moscow. The charge of "militarisation of society," of substituting "a military-bureaucratic dictatorship … for the people's democratic social system," is delivered by the state whose own foreign policy the same decade would be written in the language of tanks.
The reflexive blindness reaches its most exquisite pitch on Trotsky, because there the book is arguing against its own analysis without noticing. Fourteen times it invokes Trotsky and Trotskyism, always as the twin of the thing it hates: "an anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist concept of the world revolutionary process is a feature common to both Maoism and Trotskyism," and Maoism, it complains, "resuscitates Trotskyite 'ideas' about 'bourgeois degeneration of Soviet power.'" But the "bourgeois degeneration of Soviet power" is not a Maoist slogan; it is the argument of The Revolution Betrayed — Trotsky's account of the bureaucracy as a privileged stratum ruling over an expropriated working class. And the book's own verdict on China — a "military-bureaucratic dictatorship" in which the workers have been stripped of power and one man's writings substituted for theory — is that argument, borrowed whole and pointed at Peking. The volume convicts China with Trotsky's diagnosis of the USSR in one chapter and anathematises Trotsky's name to protect the USSR in the next. It also performs the house trick of gluing "the export of revolution" and world war onto Trotsky, when it was the Maoists, with their doctrine of the world countryside encircling the world city, who held it. The reply is on the shelf: Trotsky's The Third International After Lenin (1928) devotes its third section to China of 1925–27 and shows where the "peasant Marxism" this book deplores was actually authored — in Stalin's formula of "two-class workers' and peasants' parties" for the East, and in the subordination of the Chinese communists to the Kuomintang that ended in the Shanghai massacre of April 1927, out of which the peasant party these authors despise was made. The genre itself — the theoretical journal of the CPSU turning its apparatus on a heresy — was being read in the West as it appeared: George Saunders traced a whole season of it in "Moscow Still Haunted by Trotskyism," Intercontinental Press vol. 7 no. 33, 13 October 1969.
Two of the book's factual manoeuvres deserve naming precisely, because they are not silences but claims, and a claim is easier to refute than an omission. The first concerns the rupture of Soviet aid. The book is expansive about what Moscow gave — the ten thousand specialists sent between 1950 and 1960, the enterprises built, the students trained — and then it accounts for the ending of all this in a single re-agented sentence: "The rupture of the PRC's cooperation with socialist states did irreparable damage to the country." What actually happened in the summer of 1960 is that the Soviet Union recalled its specialists and cancelled its contracts, unilaterally and at short notice, in the middle of the worst agricultural crisis in the history of the People's Republic. The book renders a Soviet act as a Chinese one — China "ruptured" the cooperation Moscow withdrew — and the sleight is the more brazen for being falsifiable. The Fourth International, no friend of Peking, put the matter the other way at its Ninth World Congress: the rupture was "a stab in the back of the Chinese revolution and the Chinese people, at the very moment when they were confronted with near-famine at home," and "the historic responsibility for breaking up the Sino-Soviet alliance … lie at the door of the Kremlin" (Resolution on the "Cultural Revolution" in China, Intercontinental Press vol. 7 no. 26, 14 July 1969).
The second manoeuvre concerns the frontier itself, which was very probably the whole collection's occasion. The book gives the Soviet version and only the Soviet version: from "the middle of 1960," it says, Peking "began systematically to organise provocations on the Soviet-Chinese border, developing them into armed clashes in the spring and summer of 1969." The rivers are not named; the Ussuri does not appear, nor does Damansky, nor Zhenbao — the island the fighting was over. The historiography has moved since. The ambush of 2 March 1969 at Zhenbao/Damansky is now generally attributed to a Chinese plan; the far heavier engagement of 15 March was a Soviet counter-blow with armour and artillery; and the clash at Tielieketi in Xinjiang that August was initiated from the Soviet side. What the book cannot mention at all is what Moscow was privately weighing that summer — in September 1969 the Soviet journalist Victor Louis, a man used for unattributable messages, floated in the London Evening News the idea of extending the "Brezhnev Doctrine" invoked over Czechoslovakia to China, and of a strike on the nuclear installations at Lop Nor. Pierre Frank set that beside the Czechoslovak precedent at the time, in "Concerning 'Limited Sovereignty,'" Intercontinental Press vol. 7 no. 38, 17 November 1969 — the reply that this book's readers in Turin and Tokyo were not offered.
On the Great Leap Forward the volume keeps the cluster's largest silence. The catastrophe is present as an economic charge — a "voluntarist" experiment, the 1959 Lushan Plenum, the plunge into "great leaps" — but the word "famine" is spent only on the old China the revolution abolished and on the civil-war wreckage the party inherited, never on 1959–61, and nobody in the book dies of hunger. Be exact about what this does and does not convict them of. Nobody outside China knew the scale of the deaths until the 1982 census was released and the demographers went to work, and the anti-Stalinist left was no better placed: the Fourth International's own resolution got no further than "the near-famine period at the beginning of the sixties." The charge is not that the book failed to supply a number nobody had. It is that its authors chose to render mass death by forced collectivisation entirely in tonnages and plan-figures — and that the reason is not hard to find, since the same event, described plainly, is a photograph of the Soviet countryside in 1932–33, which could not be printed in the USSR until 1987.
All of this converges on the book's real occasion and its blindest spot, the opening to Washington. I. Alexandrov's "Regarding Peking-Washington Contacts" reports the Kissinger visit and Nixon's accepted invitation and treats them as the culmination of the whole indictment: "Peking has endeavoured to normalise its relations with pro-imperialist forces," it charges, striking a bargain with the class enemy behind the back of the socialist camp. Every word of that could be true and the book would still be a monument to what its authors could not see, because in the last months of 1971, as these pages went to press, the Soviet Union was itself some six months from receiving Nixon in Moscow, signing the SALT I agreements, and toasting the same détente with the same president — while American bombers were mining Haiphong harbour. The Fourth International said both halves at once, and said them in the same weeks. The United Secretariat's statement of 31 May 1972 called the Kremlin's conduct at the Moscow summit, in the face of the May escalation in Vietnam, "one of the most brazen and treacherous betrayals of the world revolution in the entire history of Stalinism" (Intercontinental Press vol. 10 no. 23, 12 June 1972). Two bureaucracies were courting the same man in the same year; the book could see the crime only when Peking committed it.
There is one further silence, and it is the most specific and the most damning, because it has a name and a date the book itself supplies. Cataloguing the errors of the Chinese party, the volume mentions "Cheng Chaolin, subsequently expelled from the Party for his Trotskyite views," and files him, in a clause, among the heretics who deviated and were rightly cast out. In that same year, 1972, the Fourth International was publishing that man's name for a very different reason. Chen Chao-lin — a founding member of both the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Trotskyist movement, a man who had worked in Paris with Chou En-lai — had been arrested in the round-up of December 1952 and held without trial ever since. "Chen has lived as a political prisoner for twenty-seven years," the United Secretariat noted in a statement of 16 April 1972, "seven years under Chiang, twenty years under Mao. He is now about seventy-two" ("No Word of Chinese Trotskyists Held in Mao's Jails," Intercontinental Press vol. 10 no. 18, 8 May 1972). These were the one set of Mao's prisoners about whom Moscow had, precisely, no word — because the charge that had put them in a Chinese cell was drafted in Moscow twenty years before and had already killed their Soviet counterparts. The book that files Cheng Chaolin as a deviationist cannot say that he was, as it printed the sentence, in his twentieth year behind Chinese bars for the crime of being what Moscow had taught China to shoot.
Read A Destructive Policy, then, for what it is: a dossier, a good deal of which holds up. The destruction of the Chinese party and its trade unions, the cult of one man, the arrival of the army at the centre of the state, the drift toward Washington, the abandonment of clients like UNITA to the imperialism they would soon serve — these are real, and the book had them early. What it could not have, and what no product of Novosti in 1971 could have been permitted, was the second half of every sentence. Great-power chauvinism, a personality cult, the splitting of the world movement, a military-bureaucratic dictatorship over a silenced working class, a deal with the American president over the heads of the revolution — each charge had two addresses, and the book knew only one city. It has answered a question about Mao by demonstrating, line for line, something about Moscow.