COMMUNIST INTENTIONS
221
new, world-wide, international, indeed anti-national, communist
society, nor on the other hand has she been a mere nation-state like
another without any particular ideological and international ties,
duties, or responsibilities. For I believe that even when she has most
ruthlessly sacrificed the apparent and immediate interests of com–
munist parties in the rest of the world, as she so often has, she has
done so in the fairly sincere belief that, by preserving herself at all
costs, she was in the long run furthering the interests of communism
all over the world.
The next question is, to what extent
is
the Russia of the 1960's
still a nation-state of this special character? The proceedings of the
meeting of the eighty-one communist parties in the autumn of 1960
and of the Twenty-second Party Congress of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1961 should throw light on
this question. To .a certain extent they do. They make it perfectly
clear that there
is
now a sharp difference of opinion between the
Russian and the Chinese communist leaders upon precisely this issue
of the extent to which communist nations should be nation-states–
with-a-mission. No one can any longer doubt that the Chinese
believe that the mission to spread communism through the world
should be pursued much more militantly than do the Russians. But
of course the Russian communist leaders still believe in that mission
to a certain extent. The question is, to what extent? And here the
interpretations which can be put, and which have been put, on Mr.
Khruschev's pronouncements at these conferences, of those of other
Russian spokesmen, of the statement of the eighty-one parties in
1960 and the new program of the C.P.S.U. in 1961 differ widely.
How widely may be judged by the following contrast. Professor
Merle Fainsod (the eminent American sociologist) writing in a spe–
cial supplement of
Problems of Communism
(published by the Infor–
mation Agency of the U.S. Government) speaks of "the ambiguous
formula of peaceful co-existence which Khruschev has chosen as his
springboard to world power . .." On the other hand the Albanian
leaders, speaking it may be surmised on behalf of their Chinese
patrons, characterize the same pronouncements as "bourgeois pacif–
ism" (quoted in
The Guardian
January 11th, 1962.) Again accord–
ing to Satyukov speaking at the Twenty-Second Congress, Molotov
in his letter to the Central Committee protesting the new draft pro-
