Communists: Goulash, Mr. Mao? Revolution, Mr. K

Admirable indeed was the virtue of Hui. With a single dish of rice, a single gourd of drink, he lived in his mean, narrow lane. Yet he enjoyed his life where others suffered. Admirable indeed was the virtue of Hui.

—Confucius

Admirable indeed was the restraint of Nikita Khrushchev. From the mean, narrow lane of Chinese Communism, Mao Tse-tung has not been content to preach heresy. In the past six months he has aimed a rising torrent of abuse at the anointed heir of Marx and Lenin in Moscow. Invoking every filthy word in the canons of Communism, the Red Confucius labeled Khrushchev a revisionist splitter and quitter who has betrayed the faith by eschewing hard, revolutionary action in Africa, Asia and Latin America, espousing peaceful coexistence, and signing the nuclear test-ban treaty.

All of this the Soviet leader took—or was made to take—in the glimmering hope that a final split with China could yet be avoided. Then, last week, Mao called Khrushchev "the greatest capitulationist in history" and summoned Communists everywhere to "repudiate and liquidate" Russia's leader. With that, world Communism ripped brutally and publicly apart.

From Hungary, in the midst of a ten-day visit, Khrushchev grimly ordered into print the "resolute counterattack" he had threatened last September. Next day seven pages of Pravda were devoted to a scalding speech of excommunication prepared privately seven weeks ago by Soviet Ideologist Mikhail Suslov for this very contingency. Suslov, who can be as foulmouthed a Marxist as Mao, damned the Chinese for "apostasy," "petty-bourgeois nationalism," "neo-Trotskyist deviation" and "hysterical" pronouncements that aligned Peking's leadership "with the most aggressive circles of imperialism."

No doubt, sneered Suslov, Mao's tantrum had not been triggered by ideological differences at all but simply by resentment at the Soviet refusal to help China build an Abomb. Suslov even gave Mao bad Marx for putting violent worldwide revolution ahead of feeding and clothing his own people. "Neither Marx nor Lenin," he declared with biting sarcasm, "anywhere even remotely hinted that the rock-bottom task of so cialist construction may be realized by the methods of leaps and cavalry charges [or by] ignoring the tasks of improving the living standards of the people."

Wind from the East. Suslov, a cadaverous, humorless court theoretician who served Stalin long before Khrushchev came to the fore, drove home his attack by disclosing that Old Stalinists Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, Sinophiles all, had been ousted secretly from the Communist Party in 1961. Suslov declared that the "antiparty" trio subscribed to the selfsame heresies as Mao. He singled out Molotov—who had variously been Soviet Premier (in 1930) and first editor of Pravda (1912)—for particular vituperation. Harking back to the murderous Soviet purges of the 1930s, Suslov accused Molotov of attempting to surpass Stalin's brutality—he "tried to be a better Catholic than the Pope." Asked Suslov: "Is it not the restoration of these inhuman customs that the Chinese leaders are seeking?"