In 1963, the Cold War was not the only global conflict bubbling away; the two leading communist powers – the Soviet Union and China – were in a proxy war for leadership of the communist world. The Soviet Union’s previously unchallenged authority was being whittled away by Mao’s China, and the battle for ascendancy was playing out in Cuba and Latin America. Mao’s propaganda set out to show that Nikita Khrushchev, especially in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis the previous year, was not a reliable friend to the continent’s revolutionary movements. They would do better, China suggested, to take their lead from Mao. However, as KS Karol notes bluntly, “The real irony of the Sino-Soviet dispute, of course, is that it is taking place over the possession of something which is already a corpse – the concept of a unified world communist movement.”
For the past fortnight, the Peking papers have been publishing violent attacks on Nikita Krushchev almost daily. The nominal subjects of these articles vary. One is devoted to Thorez, another to Togliatti, a third to the US communists. But in each, one finds the same Public Enemy No 1, the same traitor to the communist cause – the Soviet premier. In Moscow, foreign correspondents predicted a Soviet counter-attack. But suddenly, instead of an aggressive response, Moscow has replied with a series of good-will gestures. Krushchev has accepted, in principle at least, the idea of a “summit” with China. The flirtation with Tito has been broken off. He has promised to restore relations with Albania – has, in fact, admitted his inability to expel even this tiny member from the communist fraternity.
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