THE INSTITUTE OF MARXIST-LENINIST STUDIES AT THE CC OF THE PLA
This book comprises the reports and a number of papers read at the
Scientific Session “Soviet Revisionism and the Struggle of the PLA to
Unmask It”, organized by the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies at
the CC of the PLA on 17-18 November 1980. The reports and papers are
published in an abridged form.
Prof. AGIM POPA – The 20th Congress of the CPSU and the evolution of modern revisionism
SEVO TARIFA – Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech at the Moscow Meeting – a work of historic importance
SPIRO DEDE – The stand of the PLA in the Bucharest Meeting – a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist stand
FATOS NANO – Complete integration of the Soviet economy into the world capitalist economy
Prof. HEKURAN MARA – The capitalist mechanism of the Soviet economic machine
VASILLAQ KURETA – Distortions by the Soviet revisionists in the field of philosophy
ISMAIL KADARE – Counter-revolutionary processes in the Soviet revisionist literature
THE OPENING ADDRESS BY PROF. Ndregi Plasari, VICE-DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE OF MARXIST-LENINIST STUDIES AT THE CC OF THE PLA
It is now twenty years since November 16, 1960, when Comrade Enver Hoxha, on behalf of the PLA, made his historic speech at the Meeting of the 81 communist and workers’ parties in Moscow.
This is an historic speech from every point of view.
First and foremost, this is due to its principled, revolutionary and militant content. It is an ardent defence of the Marxist-Leninist principles and a devastating attack on Khrushchevite revisionism, at a time when this revisionism had completely liquidated the revolutionary line of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Stalin and had replaced it with the anti-Marxist counter-revolutionary course of the 20th Congress. The Khrushchevites had long been striving to impose this course on the communist and workers’ parties of various countries. And at the Moscow Meeting of November 1960 their aim was to have it formally sanctioned as the general line of the international communist movement.
In Moscow Comrade Enver Hoxha unmasked the revisionist theses and stands of the Khrushchev group on the fundamental problems of the theory and practice of the revolution and the socialist construction, and the strategy and tactics of the international communist movement, as well as the anti-Marxist methods used by that group to force the other parties to adopt those theses and stands, While expounding the revolutionary views and stands of the PLA on all these questions and defending the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
Comrade Enver Hoxha refuted the counter-revolutionary view about the change in the nature of capitalism and imperialism. He, who does not see that imperialism has not changed either its hide, its coat or its nature, that it is aggressive and will be aggressive while even a single tooth is left in its mouth, “is blind, while he, who sees this but covers it up, is a traitor in the service of imperialism.”
He defended the revolutionary view of the PLA that peace cannot be safeguarded and strengthened by flattering, cajoling and making concessions to the American imperialists, by capitulating to their pressure, as occurred with the Khrushchev group and the other revisionists, but by waging a resolute political and ideological struggle to defeat the aggressive plans of the imperialists.
He described as anti-Marxist the view of the Soviet leadership which presented peaceful coexistence and peaceful competition with the imperialists as the general line of the Soviet Union and the entire socialist camp, the main road for the triumph of socialism over capitalism! Peaceful coexistence between states with different social systems is only one of the aspects of the foreign policy of a socialist country, while the struggle against the imperialist policy and the bourgeois ideology, or the unreserved support for the revolutionary liberation struggle of the proletariat and the peoples against imperialism and the reactionary bourgeoisie, must not be renounced for the sake of it, as it was by Khrushchev and his successors.
The communist party of any capitalist country is truly Marxist-Leninist only if it raises the masses in struggle against imperialism and all its lackeys within the country in order to undermine their rule, and, in the conditions of a revolutionary situation, to destroy their political power, to establish the people’s state power, to consolidate and further develop this power as a dictatorship of the proletariat, and does not wait for socialism to come through the peaceful parliamentary road of Khrushchev and other revisionists.
In particular, Comrade Enver Hoxha criticized the Khrushchev group for its counter-revolutionary stand towards Stalin who dedicated his whole life to the defence and creative implementation of Marxism-Leninism, to the cause of the revolution and socialism. He repeated the unwavering view of the PLA on the revolutionary work of Stalin and stated the issue bluntly: “We all should defend the good and immortal work of Stalin. He who does not defend it is an opportunist and a coward.”
Stalin and the Information Bureau were completely right to denounce and condemn Yugoslav revisionism as an anti-Marxist counter-revolutionary trend, as an agency of imperialism. Time had completely vindicated this assessment, therefore the struggle against Yugoslav revisionism remained an indispensable and constant duty for the communist parties. However, it was not only in Yugoslavia that revisionism existed, Comrade Enver Hoxha has pointed out. It was spreading alarmingly in other countries and parties. For this reason the PLA insisted that the assessment, which the Moscow Meeting of 1957 had made of modern revisionism as the main danger, should not be renounced as demanded by the Khrushchevites who described it as no longer valid, but should be re-emphasized!
In order to bar the way to revisionism it was very important to put an end to the methods of pressure, interference and plots in the relations among the communist parties. In particular, the stand of Khrushchev and his group at Bucharest, where they resorted to such methods with unprecedented brutality, should be condemned. The attempts of the Khrushchevites, acting like great-state chauvinists, to compel the other parties to go to the Moscow Meeting in step with their revisionist views, should also be condemned. In particular, Comrade Enver Hoxha exposed the domineering and huckster-like activities of that group towards our Party and socialist Albania. Addressing Khrushchev he declared at the meeting: “There was a time when Albania was considered a commodity to be traded, when others thought it depended on them whether Albania should or should not exist, but that time came to an end with the triumph of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism in our country.”
No other party made such a courageous defence of Marxism-Leninism and such a penetrating principled exposure of the anti-Marxist course and activity of the Khrushchevites. They could not do so because the other parties were all infected, to a greater or lesser extent, by the disease of revisionism, whereas the heart and mind of the PLA were sound and its line crystal-clear.
The Chinese also spoke against the Khrushchev group. They spoke there not from militant, attacking positions, but from defensive, wait-and-see, opportunist positions. As it became clear later, they did not proceed from the aim of defending Marxism-Leninism and the interests of international communism, but from the aim of defending their own narrow chauvinist and hegemony-seeking interests, just as the Khrushchevites did.
Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech at the Moscow Meeting completely upset the “tranquil” situation of the first six days of the meeting. Khrushchev had deliberately created this situation because he wanted to cover up the deep principled contradictions and disagreements in the international communist movement, so as to avoid criticism and the exposure of his anti-Marxist views and activity and to put the blame on our Party and the Communist Party of China, against which the attacks in a long material, full of accusations and slanders that was distributed prior to the meeting, were aimed. But Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech foiled this diabolical tactic. It set the meeting ablaze forcing the delegations of other parties to express their stand towards the problems under discussion. The savage counter-attacks launched by the Soviet and other revisionists on our Party, in an effort to neutralize the bombshell effect of the voice of our Party, only served to strengthen this effect,, to make this voice stronger, more devastating.
This extraordinary effect of Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech at the Meeting of the 81 parties is one of its important historic aspects.
It is the period after various events which brands them as historic. And time has fully confirmed the great historic importance of Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech in Moscow. It has shown how completely right our Party was to oppose the counter-revolutionary revisionist course of the Khrushchevites and how correct were the views it put forward at that international forum of the communist movement.
At that time Comrade Enver Hoxha warned about the great danger that threatened the Soviet Union, the socialist camp, the entire international communist movement from the anti-Marxist views and stands of the Khrushchev group, if this danger was not faced bravely and measures taken to heal the open wounds. However, those views and stands were not simply mistakes and distortions. As Comrade Enver Hoxha pointed out at the 7th Congress of the PLA, they constituted “a consciously chosen course” to liquidate the dictatorship of the proletariat and restore capitalism, to transform the Soviet Union into an imperialist state. Today we can see clearly where the “theories” and policy of Khrushchev, which have been faithfully followed and further developed by his “worthy” disciples, Brezhnev and company, have led the Soviet Union. Nothing remains there of the former socialist order but the empty shell. The bourgeois-revisionist content pervades every field of life. The internal policy of the present-day Soviet party and state is a fascist policy of oppression and exploitation of the working masses, and of the Russification of the non-Russian nations, while its foreign policy is a fascist-imperialist policy which, like that of the USA, aims at world domination.
Meanwhile the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism have been liquidated in the other former socialist countries, too, which have been turned into satellites of the revisionist Soviet Union. China has set out on the road of its transformation into a social-imperialist superpower, whereas nearly all the former communist parties have turned into bourgeois-revisionist parties.
Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech left its deep imprint upon the international communist movement, which is now on the way to its revival on Marxist-Leninist foundations, and upon the history of the entire world revolutionary and liberation movement.
It is and will remain forever an example of adherence to principle, courage and independence, factors which are indispensable in waging a revolutionary struggle against the internal and external enemies of the proletariat and the people and in achieving the final victory over these enemies.
It will always be an emblem of struggle in the hands of our Party and people, one among the fighting flags of its great victorious battles in the revolution and the socialist construction and in the struggle against imperialism and modem revisionism.
Many party documents and works of Comrade Enver Hoxha prove with scientific arguments how correct and vital the struggle of the PLA against Khrushchevite revisionism, which burst out openly and directly on November 16, 1960 in Moscow, has been and is to the defence of Marxism-Leninism and socialism in our country and to the freedom and national sovereignty of our people. This is brought out again in Comrade Enver Hoxha’s new work “The Khrushchevites”.
This work, which is pervaded by a dialectical Marxist-Leninist iron logic, based on facts and concrete historical events, convincingly demonstrates the anti-Marxist counter-revolutionary and hegemony-seeking character of the aims of the Khrushchevite revisionists and their efforts to achieve these aims, on the one hand and, on the other hand, the principled Marxist-Leninist stands of our Party and its revolutionary struggle against them. It gives a full and clear explanation of the reasons for the defeat of the plans and efforts of the Khrushchevites to force our Party and people to yield and to harness them to their revisionist chariot, and for our victory over them. In essence this was due to the loyalty of the PLA to Marxism-Leninism, its adherence to proletarian principles, its wisdom, vigilance and courage in defence of Marxism-Leninism, its correct line, our people and our socialist Homeland. The steel unity of the Party and its Central Committee with Comrade Enver Hoxha at the head, as well as the Party-people unity, have played a decisive role in the implementation of the principled line of our Party. In the struggle against the Khrushchevites, as well as against all other enemies, our Party has never fought alone but always together with the people. That is why it has always emerged triumphant from this struggle.
With the publication of the new work of Comrade Enver Hoxha “The Khrushchevites” the Albanian communists and people are provided with a new, powerful weapon in the fight against modem revisionism, which, as our Party has laid down, will never cease until socialism and communism triumph on a world scale.
In the context of this struggle, this scientific session has been organized by the Institute of Marxist-Leninist Studies, with the active participation of cadres from the “V.I. Lenin” Higher Party School, the University of Tirana, the Academy of Sciences, the Foreign Ministry, people of the press, the literature and art, etc. The theme of the session is: “Soviet Revisionism and the Struggle of the PLA to Unmask It”. However, the materials to be presented in this session go somewhat beyond these bounds, because the struggle against Soviet revisionism is closely linked with the struggle against modem revisionism, in general, and against all its trends, in particular, because “Khrushchevite revisionism,” as the 7th Congress of the Party has defined, “always stands at the head of the modem revisionist front” and the exposure of that revisionism “also serves the exposure of all the other opportunists”.
On behalf of the Institute of Marxist-Leninist studies I declare the session open.
THE 20th CONGRESS OF THE CPSU AND THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN REVISIONISM
Twenty years ago Comrade Enver Hoxha delivered his historic speech at the Meeting of 81 communist and workers’ parties in Moscow. The experience of these twenty years has completely confirmed how correct and vitally important was the position of the PLA and has proved indisputably that the line of resolute struggle against revisionism is the only correct stand to escape its destructive effects. In his new book “The Khrushchevites” Comrade Enver Hoxha stresses, “To this fight, which demanded and still demands great sacrifices, our small Homeland owes the freedom and independence it prizes so highly and its successful development on the road of socialism. Only thanks to the Marxist-Leninist line of our Party did Albania not become and never will become a protectorate of the Russians or anyone else.”*
With dear and well substantiated arguments Comrade Enver Hoxha exposed the treacherous course of the Khrushchevite revisionists and established the dividing line between Marxism-Leninism and Khrushchevite revisionism.
He devoted special attention to criticism and exposure of the opportunist theses and counter-revolutionary standpoints of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, which formulated the general line of Khrushchevite revisionism, both for the internal problems of the country and for international problems. “Time has proven,” writes Comrade Enver Hoxha, “that the theses of the 20th Congress were neither ‘simple ideological distortions’ nor erroneous assessments of situations. The ‘Khrushchevite theories’ represented a consciously chosen course for the elimination of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the restoration of capitalism, an ideological and political means specifically chosen for the transformation of the Soviet Union into an imperialist state and for the liquidation of obstacles to the implementation of the policy of great-power chauvinism.”*
1) The Struggle Against Modern Revisionism – A struggle for the Defence of the Fundamental Teachings of Marxism-Leninism
At the 20th Congress of the CPSU and after it, the Khrushchevite revisionists made great play with the slogan of “creative developments of Marxism-Leninism and “the struggle against dogmatisms, as all the other modem revisionists have done, using the change in the ratio of forces in the world and the appearance of certain new phenomena in the period following the Second World War as the pretext to spread their opportunist theories and justify their counter-revolutionary actions.
On this basis, they declared the major teachings of Marxism-Leninism about the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism to be obsolete, superceded and unsuitable for our time.
However, their “anti-dogmatism” is nothing but a pragmatic manoeuvre to justify and conceal their revisionism. It is a fact that many of the things which the present-day revisionists preach, about the “peaceful road to socialism”, about “mass workers’ party”, legal and “open” about various ideological and political currents and factions, about “democratic socialism” etc., etc., are revivals, of course with new trappings to adapt them to the new conditions and needs of the old theories of Bernstein and the Mensheviks, and of Kautsky and the Second International, which Lenin denounced in his time and which were buried by the triumph of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
The Khrushchevites’ attacks on Stalin and their discrediting of the Soviet socialist order of the time of Stalin, their rehabilitation of the Yugoslav revisionist leadership and proclaiming Titoite Yugoslavia a socialist country – all these things opened the doors to the revival of revisionist theories about “the separate national roads of transition to socialism”, “specific socialism”, etc. This was the basis on which Togliatti’s “Italian road to socialism”, Marchais’ “socialism with French colours”, Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia and suchlike came into circulation. This, too, is one of the directions of the modern revisionists’ attack on Marxism-Leninism and the theory of scientific socialism. Hence, they advocate a road radically different and quite another “socialism” from that of the time of Lenin and Stalin.
At the 20th Congress of the CPSU and after it, the Khrushchevite revisionists made great play with the false slogan of returning to the teachings of Lenin, allegedly abandoned, distorted and violated by Stalin. Our Party has exposed the aim of the manoeuvre of the so-called return to Lenin. It has shown that the attacks on Stalin were, in reality, attacks on Marxism-Leninism, which Stalin consistently applied and defended in the Soviet Union and the world communist movement.
Life and later development fully confirmed this analysis of the PLA. As Comrade Enver Hoxha pointed out in his book “Eurocommunism Is Anti-communism”, the revisionists who spoke with such great enthusiasm about “liberation from Stalinism” in order, allegedly, to return to Leninism, are now preaching abandonment of Leninism in order to go back to the founders of scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, as the Eurocommunists, the most undisguised revisionists of the present day are doing. “However,” points out Comrade Enver Hoxha, “all revisionists, whether Khrushchevite or Eurocommunist, fight with equal ferocity and cunning both against Stalin and against Lenin and Marx.”*
The preaching of “ideological pluralism” also constitutes one of the most fashionable directions of the modern revisionists’ attack on Marxism-Leninism. The attacks of Nikita Khrushchev and his group on Stalin and Marxism-Leninism, the rehabilitation of Titoism and the Khrushchevites’ rapprochement with social-democracy, gave the “green light” for the spreading of these preachings.
The Titoite thesis that it is allegedly possible to advance to socialism even under the leadership of parties, organizations and forces which do not consider themselves socialist gained respectability and was quickly embraced by the Togliattists and others. The point was reached that in the revisionist press, including the Soviet press, views appeared claiming that it was possible to go over to socialism “holding the Koran in one hand and ‘Capital’ in the other”, or “with the Cross in one hand and the Hammer and Sickle in the other”, etc.
This thesis of “ideological pluralism” pervades the concepts of the modem revisionists about socialist society. The renunciation of Marxism-Leninism as the leading ideology in socialist society, the opening of doors for “the free exchange of ideas and culture”, for the unrestricted inflow of bourgeois ideology, culture and the bourgeois way of life, in other words, the complete spiritual degeneration of the socialist society – this is the essence of the revisionist preachings of “ideological pluralism” in socialism.
Finally, the modem revisionists have extended this “ideological pluralism” even to the ranks of the party of the working class itself, by advocating the coexistence within it of the most widely varied philosophical trends, even including religious trends.
It is clear that without Marxism-Leninism there can be no talk of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and transition to socialism, of the construction of socialism and communism, or of the truly revolutionary party of the working class. As Comrade Enver Hoxha points out, the bourgeois theories and the Khrushchevite, Titoite, Eurocommunist and Chinese revisionist theories, are component parts of the overall strategic plan of imperialism and modern revisionism to strangle the revolution and the liberation struggle, to perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie and imperialism and destroy socialism. Therefore defence of the purity of Marxism-Leninism and its fundamental teachings from the revisionist distortions and attacks, whether disguised or open, constitutes a major revolutionary task.
2) The Modern Revisionists – Sworn Enemies of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
In particular, the 20th Congress of the CPSU, with its notorious “secret report” by Nikita Khrushchev, marked the commencement of a general campaign of modern revisionism against the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the 22nd Congress, the Khrushchevite revisionists declared the dictatorship of the proletariat a thing of the past, claimed that it is contrary to socialist democracy, and replaced it with the so-called “state of the entire people”, which is nothing but a façade for the dictatorship of the new Soviet bourgeoisie.
However, within a few years the so-called “state of the entire people” evolved into a social-fascist state. The unprecedented inflation of the police and military apparatus, the use of violence to suppress the protests of the working masses, the savage oppression and persecution, the widespread use of concentration camps and “psychiatric clinics” against revolutionary elements, the use of the Soviet army to enslave other peoples and countries, are facts which testify to the social-fascist character of the Soviet state today.
The Khrushchevite campaign against the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union and its historical experience served as a major support for the propagation of the anarcho-syndicalist theories of the Yugoslav revisionists about “bureaucratic étatism”. While they advocate renunciation of the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state and the destruction of the oppressive bourgeois state machinery in the capitalist countries, the Yugoslav revisionists denigrate the socialist state and demand its earliest possible liquidation, in order to replace it with “genuine humanitarian socialism”, with their so-called “direct democracy”, etc hence with the Titoite system of “self-administration” which is nothing but a capitalist theory and practice, as Comrade Enver Hoxha has pointed out.
The 8th Congress of the CP of China proclaimed one of the main tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be the securing of the alliance with the national bourgeoisie in the process of the so-called socialist construction of the country, the application of the course of “coexistence for a long time and mutual control” between the Communist Party and the so-called democratic bourgeois parties, etc. The unprincipled struggle for power between revisionist groups and factions, the throwing of the masses into anarchist actions for the destruction of the state organs, of the party itself and of the organizations of the masses, as was done during the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the adoption of the course of Titoite “self-administrative” decentralization of the economy, the opening of the doors of China to the inflow of imperialist monopoly capital, the undertaking of aggression against Vietnam, as well as a series of other anti-Marxist practices and actions, likewise testify clearly that the Chinese revisionists have nothing in common with the teachings of Marxism-Leninism on the dictatorship of the proletariat. In their onslaught against the dictatorship of the proletariat the revisionists have gone so far as the Eurocommunists have compared the dictatorship of the proletariat with the fascist regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Salazar and Franco, as the renegade Marchais did from the tribune of the 22nd Congress of the French CP. This is a significant fact which indicates the extent of the degeneration of the modem revisionists and their descent to the positions of the most rabid and banal anti-communism.
But what do these revisionists put in place of the order of the dictatorship of the proletariat? What is the essence of the so-called democratic socialism” without the dictatorship of the proletariat which they advocate? It is nothing but the present-day bourgeois society, painted in pseudo-socialist colours to conceal its capitalist character, a hybrid capitalist-socialist society which the Eurocommunist revisionists offer the bourgeoisie as a way of escape in their critical situation, in order to retain their domination in the face of the proletarian revolution.
Historical experience, both the revolutionary experience of the times of Lenin and Stalin, and that of the socialist construction in Albania in our days, as well as the experience of the revisionist counter-revolution in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, China and other countries, completely proves the correctness, vitality and the unshaken present-day value of the teachings of Marxism-Leninism on the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Defence of the teaching of Marxism-Leninism on the dictatorship of the proletariat, against which the forces of anti-communism and reaction and the modern revisionists of all hues have risen ferociously in a united front, remains one of the most important duties for the genuine Marxist-Leninists to carry forward the cause of the revolution and socialism.
3) Saboteurs of the Revolution, Defenders of the Capitalist Order
All revisionists, both those of the past and the modem ones, whether they are in power or operating in the countries of classical capitalism, are united by their hostility towards the revolution, their efforts to sabotage and undermine it and to perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie.
However, the theories of the denial of the revolution became widespread in the communist and workers’ movement following the 20th Congress of the CPSU, which rejected as obsolete the Marxist-Leninist theory about the revolution with violence as a universal law of the transition from capitalism to socialism and on the smashing of the bourgeois state machine, and replaced it with the Khrushchevite thesis about the “peaceful road” to socialism using the bourgeois parliament and the bourgeois state apparatus in general.
This thesis became the source and the basis for the “flowering” of all the counter-revolutionary theories of the revisionists today, and especially of the Eurocommunists, who have as their aim the preservation and perpetuation of capitalism and who are a living proof of the total social-democratic degeneration of the revisionist parties.
As Comrade Enver Hoxha points out in his book “Eurocommunism Is Anti-communism”, the present strategy of revolutionaries, according to the renegade Carrillo, is not to overthrow the state power of the bourgeoisie, because the state power no longer belongs to it, neither is it to overthrow the bourgeois relations of production, because they have already changed. Therefore the only thing which must be done is to bring about the gradual transformation of the existing political and ideological institutions through reforms, in order to bring them into conformity with the social reality and change them in favour of the people. In his time, Lenin, exposing such views which were then being spread by Kautsky, wrote: “The general conclusion = socialism without revolution! Or revolution without the destruction of the political power, of ‘the state machine’ of the bourgeoisie!! What a pearl of idiocy!!”* Here, says Lenin, we have the purest and most banal opportunism; we have rejection of the revolution in fact, while it is accepted in words.
The bloody fascist coup in Chile in 1973, which overthrew the Allende government and brought to power the military dictatorship of Pinochet, was a crushing blow to the revisionist theories of “peaceful democratic transition to socialism”. In their efforts to rescue these theories at all costs, the Italian Eurocommunists dished up the so-called strategy of the “historic compromise”, the true name of which is historic betrayal.
The same counter-revolutionary and pragmatic standpoints characterize the Chinese revisionists’ “theory of the three worlds”. They distort and ignore the fundamental contradictions of our epoch, deny the existence of any revolutionary situation and prospect in our days and oppose any revolutionary activity, because, allegedly, the time for them has not yet come. According to the Chinese revisionists, the sole duty of the proletariat and the people of any country, whether in the “third worlds, the “second world” or in the USA, is to unite with the bourgeoisie and the leading circles of their own country, even the most fascist and reactionary ones, allegedly for the defence of the homeland and national independence against the threat which comes only from the Soviet social-imperialism.
The period in which we are living is characterized by a general upsurge of the world revolutionary process. The objective conditions are becoming ever more favourable for the revolution. Now the decisive thing is the preparation of the subjective factor for the revolution. The main obstacle to this is the influence of revisionist views among the masses and the disruptive counter-revolutionary activity of the revisionists. Anarchist, foquist, terrorist, Trotskyite and other preachings and practices in connection with the revolution and the armed struggle have also caused confusion and disillusionment. “Today when this question is put forward for solution,” writes Comrade Enver Hoxha, “it is an imperative duty for the Marxist-Leninists to dispel the fog the revisionists have spread about the revolution, to unmask their manoeuvres and deliberate misrepresentations about this problem, to expose their counter-revolutionary chauvinist hegemonic intentions and to ensure that the teachings of Marxism-Leninism on the revolution are understood and applied correctly.”*
4) The Struggle Against Imperialism and Social-imperialism Is Inseparable from the Struggle Against Revisionism
All the trends of modem revisionism have placed themselves in the service of imperialism and social-imperialism, in order to undermine socialism, the revolution and the people’s liberation struggles. Moreover, in the present period, revisionism in the Soviet Union and in China has evolved into social-imperialism.
Following the betrayal by the Yugoslav revisionists, who became a special agency of American and world imperialism to undermine socialism, to split the socialist camp and the world communist and workers’ movement and to sabotage the revolutionary and liberation struggles, the Khrushchevite revisionists, especially at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, were those who laid the “theoretical” and practical basis for the course of conciliation, rapprochement and counter-revolutionary collaboration with imperialism to the detriment of the revolution and the freedom-loving peoples.
Using as a pretext the creation of weapons of mass extermination and the ideas that “any spark might cause a world conflagration”, “a nuclear catastrophe”, which according to him, would lead to the destruction of human civilization, Nikita Khrushchev declared that Lenin’s teachings on the stand towards just and unjust wars were obsolete and outdated. The teachings of Lenin were completely falsified and the Khrushchevite opportunist theses on peaceful coexistence as “the general line of the foreign policy of socialist countries and international communist movement”, as “4he universal course for the triumph of socialism on a world scale”, and as the most effective means “for the solution of all the vital problems that face present-day society”, etc were served up instead.
However, the Soviet revisionists use the thesis on “peaceful coexistence” not merely to justify the policy of unprincipled concessions to and compromises with American imperialism. “This line,” points out Comrade Enver Hoxha, “also served and is still serving them as a mask to hide the expansionist policy of Soviet social-imperialism in order to lower the vigilance and resistance of the peoples to the imperialist plans of the Soviet revisionist leaders for hegemony. The thesis about ‘peaceful coexistence’ was a call of the Soviet revisionists to the American imperialists to divide up the world and rule it jointly...”*
The fascist type aggression and the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of Afghanistan in 1979, the unrestrained arms race, the transformation of the other countries of the “socialist community” into neo-colonies of Soviet social-imperialism according to the theory and practice of “limited sovereignty” and “socialist integration” the penetration and interference of the Soviet social-imperialists in Africa, in the zones of the Middle and Far East, in the Mediterranean, in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, etc brought to light all the falsity of the preachings and propaganda of the Soviet revisionists about peace and peaceful coexistence, disarmament, security and detente.
The 20th Congress of the CPSU with its course of rapprochement and collaboration with American and world imperialism also serves as a “theoretical basis” of justification for the present foreign policy of China. If, at one time, the Chinese revisionists criticised this course of the Khrushchevite revisionists and the Chinese propaganda attacked American imperialism as the greatest enemy of all the peoples of the world, this was done from a purely pragmatic standpoint at that juncture and was intended to prevent the formation of a Soviet-American alliance against China, or without China. The rapprochement of China with the USA has now been transformed into a typical alliance between imperialist powers, aimed against the revolution, freedom-loving peoples and other countries.
From the motives which inspire it, the aims which it pursues and the dangerous consequences with which it is fraught, China’s present-day policy of opposition to Soviet social-imperialism has nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism. China’s leaders are openly inciting the USA to launch an imperialist atomic war in Europe against the Soviet Union, calculating that its two main rivals will destroy one another far from the borders of China and leave China as the omnipotent ruler of the world. Hence, not the raising of peoples in struggle to prevent imperialist war, not the transformation of imperialist war, if it should break out, into a revolutionary liberation war for the overthrow of imperialism, but the replacement of the revolution with imperialist war – such is the monstrous distortion which the Chinese revisionists have made of Marxism-Leninism.
The Khrushchevite revisionist theses at the 20th Congress of the CPSU for rapprochement, collaboration, and “peaceful competition with imperialism, fostered a series of other revisionist “theories” both of the Yugoslav revisionists and of those who are known today as Eurocommunists.
It is a fact that the Eurocommunists have become supporters of the policy of imperialist blocs, as alleged factors for the preservation of peace. They not only conceal the role of NATO for the suppression of the revolution in the West-European countries, but also ignore the major national problem of the countries and peoples in Western Europe, that of the domination of American imperialism in these countries and the need for liberation from it. At the same time, the Eurocommunists have proclaimed the EEC and United Europe as “a reality which must be accepted”. They conceal the exploiting character of this Europe of capitalist monopolies which is aimed against the West-European peoples and is an organ of the neo-colonialism of European imperialism against the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and they spread false illusions about the “democratisation” of these inter-imperialist organizations, allegedly in favour of the working masses and the peoples. “But,” as Comrade Enver Hoxha writes, “to accept this ‘reality’ means to accept the elimination of the sovereignty, the cultural and spiritual traditions of each individual country of Europe in favour of the interests of the big monopolies, to accept the elimination of the individuality of the European peoples and their transformation into a mass oppressed by the multi-national companies dominated by American big capital.”* Therefore, along with the unmasking of the poisonous propaganda of imperialism, it is essential that the deceptive theories and the dangerous preachings of the modem revisionists on the stand towards imperialism and the struggle against it must be exposed and defeated, too.
5) Rapprochement with Social-Democracy – the Liquidation of the Proletarian Party
The historical experience of the communist and workers’ parties world-wide shows that the revisionists, both old and new of all trends, in their efforts to undermine the revolutionary movement and socialism, have always aimed their first blow against the revolutionary leading staff of the working class, the proletarian party. The Khrushchevite revisionists provided the example for this by proclaiming at the 22nd Congress the liquidation of the proletarian character of their party and its transformation into a so-called “party of the entire people”, a thing which is a great absurdity in theory, while in practice it means the elimination of the leading role of the working class.
However, the Khrushchev group did not restrict itself to the Soviet Union alone. It tried to impose the course of the degeneration of the proletarian parties on the entire international communist and workers’ movement. From this point of view, it is not in the least accidental that, along with the rehabilitation of Titoism, the Khrushchevite revisionists at the 20th Congress of the CPSU launched the slogan of rapprochement with social-democracy. Moreover, at the 22nd Congress, Nikita Khrushchev declared that, “this is not a temporary tactical slogan, but a general line of the communist movement,” propagating the illusion that positive changes are taking place within the ranks of social-democracy. However, as our Party has stressed, the facts prove the opposite: they show that the social-democratic station has not moved in the direction of the revisionist train, but the revisionist train has rushed toward the social-democratic station.
The revisionists have abandoned the fundamental theoretical positions of Marxism-Leninism and the doctrine of scientific socialism, and in fact have adopted the opportunist counter-revolutionary ideological positions of social-democracy. From the viewpoint of their political strategy, the parties of Eurocommunism have completely abandoned any revolutionary activity for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and have changed into parties of social reforms within the framework of bourgeois legality and the bourgeois constitution, zealous defenders of the capitalist order and possible administrators of the affairs of the bourgeoisie, in order to gradually replace the discredited social-democrats in case difficult situations arise. From the organizational viewpoint, the Eurocommunist parties, following in the footsteps of the social-democrats have proclaimed the Leninist norms and teachings on the life of the revolutionary party of the proletariat to be incompatible with the principles of democracy and the conditions of the developed capitalist countries. The revisionists advocate the so-called “mass party” the doors of which are open to anyone who votes for that party, to all kinds of petty-bourgeois elements, from the ranks of the worker aristocracy and bureaucracy, bourgeois liberal intellectuals, etc.
The logical result of this social-democratic degeneration of the revisionist parties is the open trend towards liquidation, of which the banner-bearer has been the Italian revisionist G. Amendola, who in condemning the former division in the socialist movement and the organization of the communists as a separate party, came out with the thesis of the direct amalgamation of the (revisionist) communist party with the social-democrats and socialists, allegedly in order to find “a new road to socialism. However, everyone knows that the “new road” which the revisionists are seeking is nothing but the social-democratic road of the preservation and perpetuation of capitalism.
In our time social-democracy and the revisionists are fighting on the same side of the barricade to undermine and sabotage the cause of the liberation of the working class from bourgeois exploitation and oppression and to rescue capitalism from the revolution which is approaching. Therefore, the struggle against these agents of the bourgeoisie in the workers’ movement, the liberation of the masses from their poisonous influence are decisive conditions for the preparation of the subjective factor for the revolution.
The formation and tempering of the revolutionary party of the working class, a genuine Marxist-Leninist party, is achieved through ceaseless struggle against any revisionist influence and by drawing the necessary lessons from the social-democratic degeneration of the revisionist parties.
As the PLA has continually stressed, the setting of the Soviet Union on the anti-Marxist Khrushchevite course sanctioned at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, led, as it was bound to do, to the complete degeneration of the Soviet Union into a social-fascist capitalist state and a social-imperialist power. In this connection, it is necessary to expose and refute the clamour of the bourgeois, social-democratic, Eurocommunist and other propaganda, that the Soviet leadership after Khrushchev, especially after 1968, has allegedly abandoned the line of the 20th Congress and of Khrushchev, has taken certain steps back towards some “Stalinist methods”, has allegedly evolved into “neo-Stalinism”, etc.
Immediately after the fall of Khrushchev, the Party of Labour of Albania, opposing the vacillations and pressure exerted by the Chinese leadership, exposed the demagogic manoeuvres of the Brezhnev group and described the policy of the new Soviet leadership as a continuation of Khrushchevism without Khrushchev. The PLA stressed that it is essential to carry the struggle against Soviet revisionism, with or without Khrushchev, through to the end unwaveringly.
There is also speculation with the contradictions which exist today amidst different trends of modern revisionism, especially between Soviet revisionism and other trends. The Soviet leadership, in particular, tries to present the matter as if these are contradictions over principles and that it is defending the Marxist-Leninist positions in polemics with certain deviations of the Eurocommunists and in stem struggle with the Chinese revisionists who have betrayed Marxism-Leninism, etc. However, analysis of the facts refutes these claims and shows that these contradictions are not of a principled character, on the part of the Soviet or of the other revisionists, because all of them are enemies of Marxism-Leninism who, regardless of the contradictions which divide them, have a common, counter-revolutionary, opportunist, ideological base.
Let us take the Chinese revisionists who have sought to make political capital from the struggle waged by the CP of China against Khrushchevite revisionism. Now, however, everyone knows that this struggle by the CP of China was conducted with great zigzags and vacillations and that it was never waged from sound, principled Marxist-Leninist internationalist positions, but from pragmatic and chauvinist great-power positions.
In regard to the contradictions between the Soviet revisionists, on the one hand, and the Titoites and Eurocommunists on the other, they are based, from the one side, on the interests of Soviet social-imperialism which is trying to dominate all the revisionist parties and to use them as instruments of its expansionist foreign policy, and from the other side, on the interests of the Western bourgeoisie and Western imperialism, with which both the Eurocommunists and the Yugoslav revisionists, who are seeking to be as independent as possible from Moscow, are closely linked. They want to be independent of any kind of Soviet dictate and free to unite with the local bourgeoisie and Western imperialism, with NATO and the EEC, in order to adapt themselves better to their interests and demands and do not want to have their hands tied by any sort of “common decisions and obligations” which the Soviet social-imperialists wish to impose on them.
The bourgeois, social-democratic, Trotskyite and other propaganda is making a great noise about the “failure” of Marxism-Leninism and the crisis and disintegration of communism. In reality, it is not a crisis of Marxism-Leninism or communism, but of modern revisionism. The unprincipled struggle for power and the disturbances in the revisionist countries, from the overthrow of Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, of Rankovic and others in Yugoslavia, to the frequent ups and downs in China, the fall of Gomulka and now of Gierek in Poland etc the failures of the revisionist countries in their economies and foreign policy, the Soviet and Chinese aggressions in Czechoslovakia, Vietnam and Afghanistan, the contradictions and squabbles in the revisionist camp – all these and other facts are evidence of the deep and insoluble crisis which has gripped revisionism.
The evolution of modern revisionism with all its offshoots and “theories”, its demagogy and dangerous deceptions, show what a colossal task faces the Marxist-Leninists today to unmask it in the eyes of the working class and the peoples. It shows also that it is essential to wage an unceasing principled struggle against all trends of modem revisionism, without underestimating or creating illusions about any of them. The struggle against modern revisionism, for the liberation of the masses from the poisonous revisionist influence, and for the revolutionary tempering of the Marxist-Leninist parties themselves, is not a temporary campaign but a permanent and vital necessity in order to carry the cause of the revolution and socialism forward to total victory.
THE STRUGGLE OF THE PLA AGAINST THE PRESSURE AND INTERFERENCE OF THE KHRUSHCHEVITE REVISIONISTS AGAINST OUR PARTY AND COUNTRY
The struggle of the Party of Labour of Albania against the interference and pressure of the Khrushchevite revisionists is a component part of the whole great principled struggle which it has waged against Soviet revisionism.
The whole world knows that at the Meeting of the 81 communist and workers’ parties, in November 1960, the Party of Labour of Albania took a resolute, open stand against the revisionist course and chauvinist policy of Nikita Khrushchev. In his historic speech, Comrade Enver Hoxha not only exposed the Khrushchevite revisionist platform in general, not only presented the views of our Party on the fundamental questions of the theory and practice of the revolution and the construction of socialism, as well as on the problems of the strategy and tactic of the international communist movement, but at the same time, openly and resolutely exposed the pressure, blackmail and interference of the Khrushchevite revisionists against our Party and country.
The firm and principled stand of our Party at the Moscow Meeting was in no way accidental or unexpected. “Our open and principled attack on Khrushchevite modern revisionism at the Meeting of November 1960,” writes Comrade Enver Hoxha in his work “The Khrushchevites”, “...was the logical continuation of the Marxist-Leninist stand which the Party of Labour of Albania had always maintained, was the transition to a new, higher stage of the struggle which our Party had long been waging for the defence and consistent application of Marxism-Leninism.”*
The first clash was over question of Yugoslav revisionism. Only one year had passed since the death of Stalin when Khrushchev began to alter the accepted Marxist-Leninist course of the international communist movement of the principled struggle against Yugoslav revisionism and to make approaches to Tito. He needed this in order to realize his plans for the elimination of Marxism-Leninism and socialism. Tito was the first who attacked Stalin and rejected Marxism-Leninism. That is why Khrushchev regarded Tito as his ideological ally in his struggle against communism.
The PLA opposed the efforts of the Khrushchevite clique for their rapprochement with the Titoites from the time it received the first letter on the Yugoslav question, in June 1954, which was the first warning of this rapprochement. In particular, it protested sternly against Khrushchev’s visit to Belgrade in May 1955, to fall on his knees before Tito. This action which was undertaken without consulting other parties for their opinion about it, was a flagrant and arbitrary violation of decisions taken unanimously by the communist and workers’ parties and was clear evidence of the opportunist line which Khrushchev had begun to follow.
The Party of Labour of Albania, which knew the true face of the Yugoslav revisionists only too well and which waged a consistent irreconcilable struggle against them, immediately and unhesitatingly expressed its opposition. “The daily experience of our Party in relations with the Yugoslavs...,” the CC of the PLA wrote in its letter, “proves clearly and completely, with many vivid facts, that the principled content of all the resolutions of the Information Bureau in connection with the Yugoslav question is completely correct. The procedure which it is proposed to follow for approval of the abrogation of the resolution of the Meeting of the Information Bureau of November 1949 appears to us to be improper. . In our opinion, such a rapid and hasty decision on a major question of principle, without first making a profound analysis together with all the parties interested in this matter... would not only be premature, but would cause serious harm in the general orientation..”*
Khrushchev went to Belgrade where he fell on his knees to Tito and admitted that “mistakes had been made” in regard to the CP of Yugoslavia and its leadership. He rehabilitated Tito as a “Marxist-Leninist”! Meanwhile time had proved, and proved even more clearly later, that Tito had not undergone any change from an anti-Marxist and Trotskyite (as Stalin and the Information Bureau had described him) to a Marxist-Leninist (as Khrushchev called him). It was Khrushchev who had embraced anti-communism and become like Tito. As Comrade Enver Hoxha says, “Anti-communism remained the foundation of their relations.”* This was the main factor which united them.
The PLA went on to oppose all the later actions of the Soviet revisionist leadership for rapprochement and ideological collaboration with Yugoslav revisionists and never ceased its struggle against this revisionism as Khrushchev insistently demanded. It raised its opposition and waged its struggle on the basis of principle for the defence of Marxism-Leninism and the unity of the international communist movement and the socialist camp, and not from the positions of narrow nationalism or from pig-headedness as the Khrushchevites tried to present our just stands.
The differences over principle and the clashes of our Party and the Khrushchev group increased and became deeper when the latter formulated and adopted its revisionist programme at the 20th Congress of the CPSU while at the same time undertaking the savage campaign against the so-called cult of the individual of Stalin, and when it tried in every way to impose its counterrevolutionary line on the whole world communist movement.
The Khrushchev group exerted especially great pressure on the PLA to have it accept the line of the 20th Congress and consequently to alter its own general line.
The Khrushchevites were aware of our Party’s opposition to them over the Yugoslav question and were also aware of the high assessment which it made of Stalin as a great Marxist-Leninist theoretician and leader. Therefore they doubted that it would be willing to approve the course of the 20th Congress. Nevertheless they hoped that any obstacle would be overcome and that the PLA would not become an exception from the other parties which with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accepted the revisionist course of the 20th Congress describing it, in the terms which the Soviet revisionist leadership used, as a congress “which marked a new stage in the development of the Soviet Union and the international communist and workers’ movement.”
The Khrushchevites made every effort to ensure that the theses of their congress were embodied in the 3rd Congress of the PLA, which had been set for three months later, in May 1956. They had charged their main ideologist, Suslov, with the task of convincing the leadership of our Party of the necessity for re-examination and alteration of its general line in conformity with the course of the 20th Congress. They had also given their agent, Liri Belishova, the task of exerting pressure from within. They utilized the Party Conference of the city of Tirana to attack the Marxist-Leninist line and leadership of our Party. They kept up their efforts to achieve their aim by means of a delegation which they sent to our 3rd Congress. However, our Party did not budge from its positions.
In order to mislead our Party, the revisionists employed the so-called arguments about “new situations” and consequently about “new roads and possibilities for advance”, presenting the counter-revolutionary course of the 20th Congress as a “creative development of Marxism-Leninism” in conformity with these situations and possibilities! “Many were misled by this demagogy of traitors”, writes Comrade Enver Hoxha, “however, the Party of Labour of Albania was not misled.”*
Contrary to the aims of the Khrushchevites, the 3rd Congress of our Party fully approved the political line and the practical activity of the Central Committee and the whole Party. Unanimously and without hesitation, it decided that the Marxist-Leninist course which our Party had pursued from the day of its foundation should be continued.
In the concrete circumstances, the 3rd Congress of the PLA could not openly denounce the anti-Marxist course of the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Nevertheless, in essence the revolutionary and Marxist-Leninist content of all the decisions and conclusions of the 3rd Congress was opposed to that course.
On all the revisionist theses of the 20th Congress, on all the problems of principle which were concerning the communist international movement, the Party of Labour of Albania had its own revolutionary views and its reservations, which it had not only made known to the Soviet leadership, but which it also expressed publicly in the press and all its propaganda.
At that time, our Party did not speak openly about the differences over ideological principles which had arisen between it and the Soviet leadership, but it defended the Soviet Union, at a time when the imperialists and the various revisionists were attacking the Soviet Union in order to discredit communism. Our Party could not come out openly at that time against Khrushchevites, also, because it needed time to gain a complete knowledge of them, knowledge which was not achieved all at once. The actions of the Khrushchevites were camouflaged, they manoeuvred with Marxist-Leninist slogans, advanced in zigzags which, along with doubts, sometimes aroused hopes that the Soviet leadership might understand the catastrophe to which the course which they had adopted was leading the Communist Party and the socialist order and that they might take a course of correcting their erroneous stands.
Therefore, as Comrade Enver Hoxha explains, our Party was cautious in the stand it took, and it kept its eyes open. It followed every action and stand of Khrushchev’s with the greatest care, proceeding from the desire to preserve and strengthen the friendship with the Soviet Union but at the same time it did not leave unanswered, in one way or another, the erroneous stands and actions, the deviations of the Khrushchevites and the pressures which they exerted upon it.
The Khrushchevites exerted pressure for the rehabilitation of our traitors, demanding that our Party act in regard to Koçi Xoxe, Tuk Jakova and others as was done under the pressure of Khrushchev and Tito with Rajk, Kadar and Nagy in Hungary, with Kostov in Bulgaria, with Gomulka in Poland, etc. The terse reply of our Party in the face of this pressure was: “We have never accused and condemned anyone for nothing...” *
In particular, the Khrushchevites strove to liquidate the main leaders of our Party and state and to replace them with rehabilitated traitors as it succeeded in doing in many other parties and former socialist countries.
The Khrushchevites’ pressure was intended also to place our army, economy and culture under their control by means of the Soviet advisers and specialists, as well as by means of their Albanian agents. “All the parties of the socialist countries fell into this Khrushchevite trap, with the exception of the Party of Labour of Albania.”*
The Khrushchevites also continued the pressure which they had begun to exert immediately after the death of Stalin to give the people’s economy and our country a one-sided, agricultural development, mainly growing fruit. They were opposed to the setting up and development of socialist industry in Albania and especially opposed to the creation of the processing and machine-building industry. They raised all sorts of pretexts for this and left no stone unturned to hinder the implementation of the revolutionary economic policy of our Party of the industrialization of the country, the building of the material-technical basis of socialism and achieving self-sufficiency in bread grain. Proceeding from the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, the PLA regarded the construction and defence of socialism as impossible without a modem, multi-branched industry, without an advanced mechanized agriculture to ensure the economic independence, without which there could be no political independence. However, the Khrushchevites wanted Albania to be a country economically dependent on the Soviet Union, and, consequently, it would be dependent upon it politically, too.
Meanwhile, modern revisionism was spreading rapidly and gaining control of almost all the communist and workers’ parties and all the socialist countries (with the exception of our country and Party) turning into a very great danger for the international communist movement and the socialist camp. The PLA had no doubt at all that the unprecedented invigoration of the Yugoslav revisionism, its very extensive diversionist activity, the appearance of Togliatti’s theory of “poli-centrism” “the Italian road to socialism”, “unlimited democracy”, etc the liquidation of leaders of many parties, the rehabilitation of many traitors in different parties, the counter-revolutionary manifestations in Poland, the counter-revolution in Hungary, etc all had their source in the 20th Congress and that the main culprits for all these things were Khrushchev and company.
Our Party watched these developments with great concern. While maintaining its principled stand on all questions and events, its suspicions were becoming ever stronger and the opinion was crystallizing that the Khrushchevite leadership of the Soviet Union was abandoning Marxism-Leninism and the road to socialism. The crystallization of this opinion was influenced especially by the filthy role which Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Suslov, Andropov, etc played in Hungary, by removing Rakosi, supporting Nagy, bringing down the former Central Committee of the Hungarian party and forming another in the Crimea, where Khrushchev was on holiday and where he had invited Kadar for this purpose, while collaborating and striking secret bargains over these things with Tito, etc.
The Soviet leadership sent the letters exchanged between Khrushchev and Tito over the Hungarian question in November 1956 to the Central Committee of our Party for its information, with the aim of receiving its approval of the bargain struck and to show the way which our Party ought to follow, too!
Presenting these letters for discussion in the Political Bureau of the Central Committee, Comrade Enver Hoxha said: “... the question before us is whether to breach our principles, to keep silent or to march forward, not reconciling ourselves to incorrect stands?... I insist that we proceed on the basis of principles which we have defined... We should not publicize these differences of opinion, for this is to the detriment of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp. On the other hand, it is my opinion that we must not make concessions of the kind that the leadership of the CPSU wants us to make, for this is a markedly opportunist stand... Nowhere will we yield the slightest concession on principles, not even a millimetre... We shall uphold the issues of principle even if we remain alone. We shall certainly not remain alone for long if we wage a just struggle in defence of principles.”*
In December 19”6, Comrade Enver Hoxha put forward our opposition over a series of wrong actions and our concern about the great danger which the spread of revisionism constituted, directly to the Soviet leaders. Two months later, in February 1957, the Plenum of the CC of the PLA, while denouncing the revisionists as the culprits for the events in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere, defended the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism about the leading role of the revolutionary party of the working class in the revolution and socialist construction, about the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat during the whole period of transition from capitalism to communism and about the class struggle in this period, principles which the Khrushchev group and its followers had trampled upon. The violation of these principles in Hungary and Poland was testimony to the catastrophe which was threatening the revolution and socialism. The Central Committee also defended Stalin and exposed the so-called “Stalin’s cult of the individual”. Thus, in fact, the plenum of the Central Committee of our Party rejected the revisionist theses of the 20th Congress.
The Khrushchevites were aware of the principled stand of the PLA and its opposition to many of their actions. However, as Comrade Enver Hoxha says, they did not want to exacerbate the contradictions with us. With their logic of counter-revolutionaries and great-state chauvinists, they thought that we, as a small Party of a small country, would have nowhere to turn to. If not today, tomorrow, we would fall on our knees to them. However, the publication in “Zeri i popullit” of Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech at the plenum of the CC in February 1957 alarmed the Khrushchevites. Therefore, they demanded that a top-level delegation of the Party of Labour of Albania should go urgently to Moscow. As Comrade Enver Hoxha writes in his work “The Khrushchevites”, the Khrushchev group used “the carrot” and “the stick” in an attempt to subjugate the leadership of our Party. “The carrot” was the promises of greater economic aid, the conversion of old credits to grants and the formal approval of some revolutionary stand of our Party. “The stick” was their insistence, backed by threats, that our Party should change its revolutionary stands towards Stalin, towards Titoism, towards internal enemies of our Party, and likewise change the policy of ensuring economic independence.
The first direct clash with the Khrushchevite revisionists occurred in April 1957, when Khrushchev, powerless to overcome the refusal of Comrade Enver Hoxha and other members of our delegation to accept these changes, said to them with uncontrolled anger: “We cannot reach agreement with you Albanians! We shall break off the talk!” However, he did not dare break them off, because he still hoped to achieve his aim.
Besides these pressures, activity was undertaken. to sabotage the construction and defence of socialism by means of their advisers, specialists and diplomats in Albania, and also to prepare their agency for this purpose within our Party, so that they could take the fortress from within.
The aim of the Khrushchevites was to break the resistance of the PLA and compel it to change its course. “But,” as Comrade Enver Hoxha writes, “they broke their heads.”*
The revolutionary stand of the PLA on all the questions which had given rise to differences after the 20th Congress, was also expressed at the first Meeting of communist and workers’ parties in Moscow, in November 1957, as well as on the occasion of the announcement of the counter-revolutionary program of the Communist League of Yugoslavia in 1958. A series of articles, published on this occasion in our press, unmasked not only the theses of that program, but also the theses of the 20th Congress. In vain the Soviet leadership nurtured hopes that things would change after the signing of the agreement on the granting of a new credit to Albania for the 3rd Five-year Plan, especially after Khrushchev’s visit to our country, in May 1959, As is known, he came to carry out a “recon-naissance” before commencing decisive operations for the implementation of his military and political plans in Albania. With the discovery and smashing of the counter-revolutionary plot of Teme Sejko in 1960, Khrushchev’s hopes of exploiting this for his own aims were wiped out too.
While resolutely continuing its revolutionary course, through clashes with the Khrushchevite, Titoite and other revisionists, the Party had become thoroughly aware of what they were and about the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960, it had reached the conclusion: “For us the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was finished. Khrushchev and the Khrushchevites were revisionists, traitors.”*
In June 1960, with this conviction the delegation of the PLA, headed by Comrade Hysni Kapo, went to Bucharest where, as is known, the Khrushchev group tried to deliver a decisive stab in the back to the socialist camp and the international communist movement.
As Comrade Enver Hoxha tells us, when the CC of the PLA sent the delegation to Bucharest it knew nothing of Khrushchev’s aim, but after receiving Comrade Hysni Kapo’s radiograms, it very rapidly formed the complete conviction that Khrushchev had concocted a plot “... one of the most perfidious and savage...”* and therefore, everything possible had to be done to defeat this plot.
In Bucharest the delegation of the PLA carried out the instructions of the CC, openly opposed the destructive activity of the Khrushchevite group and attacked Khrushchev over his anti-Marxist aim and the conspiratorial methods that he employed. In his book “The Khrushchevites” Comrade Enver Hoxha says, “Hence in Bucharest and Moscow we did not defend China, as a big country from which we might get aid, but we defended the Leninist norms, Marxism-Leninism. 3We did not defend the Communist Party of China because it was a big party, but we defended our principles, we defended Marxist-Leninist justice. At Bucharest and Moscow we would have defended any party or country, be it big or small numerically, provided only that it was with Marxism-Leninism.”* As a result of the principled stand of the PLA the Khrushchev group did not achieve its diabolical aims. This stand was a logical result of the whole revolutionary line which our Party had followed.
The Bucharest Meeting marked an immediate turn in the relations between the Party of Labour of Albania and the Soviet leadership. “The Albanian rebellion” had to be crushed with all the means of compulsion and pressure. For Albania and the Party of Labour of Albania the period of the great test began.
In the first place, the Khrushchevites strove to split and subdue the Central Committee of the Party in order to force it to condemn its own stand in Bucharest. They used their agent prepared in Moscow, Liri Belishova, to this aim. However, they ran up against the steel unity of the Central Committee.
The Khrushchev group had pinned great hopes on the cadres who had graduated from schools in the Soviet Union. However, the Khrushchevites were unable to find or to cause any breach in the ranks, either of the Party or of the people. Faced with the unity of the Party and unity of the Party with the people, their plans came to nought.
In particular, the Soviet revisionists employed pressure and sabotage in the economic field, by delaying and, in many cases, stopping the dispatch of goods and industrial equipment on the basis of agreements concluded. They went so far as to bring into action the weapon of starvation, by refusing the delivery of a quantity of grain to ensure bread supplies of which there was a shortage because of the exceptional draught of 1980. They made threats to our Government that they would cut off deliveries of any kind of armaments and military equipment for our People’s Army.
The Party of Labour of Albania did not bend the knee to them. It appealed to the heroism and patriotism of the people, to their spirit of struggle and sacrifice. Our people closed their ranks even more tightly around the Party in the struggle to cope with the difficulties, pressure and interference by the Khrushchevites.
In August, the Soviet leadership sent the CC of our Party a letter in which it demanded that they should go to the Meeting to be held in Moscow, in November 1960, “with complete unity of opinions.” This would have meant our Party’s abandoning its principled stands in Bucharest and its Marxist-Leninist line. However, our Party was determined not to make any concessions, but to defend its principles to the end. Its reply to this demand from the Khrushchev group was: “Even if we Albanians have to go without bread, we do not violate our principles, do not betray Marxism-Leninism. Everybody, friends and enemies, should be clear about this.”*
Meanwhile the Central Committee of our Party instructed its delegation to the commission of 26 parties which was drafting the declaration of the Moscow Meeting, to fight persistently for the rejection of the revisionist theses which the Soviet leadership and others wanted to embody in it: “We are for taking the matter through to the end,” Comrade Enver Hoxha wrote to the delegation. “...A determined revisionist does not change course... Compromise with them does not serve our cause.”*
The historic speech which Comrade Enver Hoxha delivered on behalf of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania at the Meeting of the 81 parties in Moscow is known to all. This speech defeated Khrushchev’s cunning tactic to cover up the profound differences over principles, the existence of two opposing lines in the international communist movement and to avoid criticism of the revisionist line and splitting activity of the Soviet leadership. With this tactic he aimed to saddle our Party and the CP of China with the blame and. to this end, a Soviet document distributed before the meeting launched filthy attacks and slanders against them, while he himself was to emerge as the banner-bearer of Marxism-Leninism and unity!
In reply to Khrushchev’s attempts to make deals over Albania, Comrade Enver Hoxha told him at the meeting: “There was a time when Albania was considered as something to be bought and sold, while others thought that it depended on them whether Albania would exist or not, but that time came to an end with the triumph of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism in our country... The fact that Albania is advancing on the road to socialism and takes part in the socialist camp is not decided by you.... this does not depend on your wishes. The Albanian people, with the Party of Labour at the head, have decided this with their struggle and there is no force that can divert them from this course.”*
After the Moscow Meeting, at which the ideological conflict reached its culmination, the Khrushchevites’ pressures and attacks against our Party and country assumed harsher and more aggressive forms. Thinking that he had all the necessary means in his hands Khrushchev raised his fist to wreak vengeance on the Party, the people and a small socialist country, by organizing an all-round political, economic and military blockade against Albania, unprecedented in its ferocity.
They unilaterally annulled all the agreements concluded between the two countries, stopped all credits and economic aid and broke off all commercial relations, withdrew all their specialists from Albania in a threatening way and expelled all the Albanian cadres and students who were studying in Soviet educational institutions. These hostile actions were accompanied with a letter to our Government in April 1961, which said: “From now on, Albania cannot hope that the Soviet Union will assist it on the former basis,” that “from now on the Soviet Union considers it necessary to build its relations with Albania on a new basis.” Immediately after this, in May, they arbitrarily annulled the bilateral agreements about the obligations they had assumed, on the basis of the Warsaw Treaty, to supply our People’s Army with armaments and military equipment. They robbed Albania of 8 submarines, as well as the Albanian warships which were in the port of Sevastopol at that time. They demonstratively withdrew the ships from the military base of Vlora.
At no time had the history of relations between socialist countries known such pressure against a small socialist country and a small people. “Even the imperialists have not imposed such a complete blockade against a socialist country...”,* wrote Comrade Enver Hoxha.
The Soviet revisionists were also ready to undertake military intervention in Albania, using as a pretext the question of the military base at Vlora. However, these plans failed, thanks to the heroic resistance of our Party, our army and our armed people.
Finally, in October 1961, from the tribune of the 22nd Congress Nikita Khrushchev openly launched a public attack against our Party, calling on communists and our people for counter-revolution, and followed this up with another hostile act, the breaking off of diplomatic relations with Albania.
All these things testified to the failure of every effort to subjugate our Party and force it to take a revisionist course, as the other parties did, to compel our people to abandon the road of socialism and to enter the road of capitalism, like the other former socialist countries. The Party of Labour of Albania had scored a big victory over Khrushchevite revisionism.
In these conditions it could remain silent no longer. It not only had the right, but felt it to be a duty to make publicly known the Khrushchevites’ betrayal of Marxism-Leninism and socialism and all their hostile activity and crimes against our Party of Labour and socialist Albania. The Party of Labour of Albania declared stern and irreconcilable war on Khrushchevite revisionism, being fully convinced that through this struggle it was defending the great cause of Marxism-Leninism and socialism. “The struggle which is being imposed on our Party and people,” declared the Central Committee of the Party, “will be protracted and difficult. But our Party and people have never been afraid of difficulties.”*
The Khrushchevites were greatly mistaken when they thought that Albania would not be able to take a single step forward without the aid of the Soviet Union and that, in the end, it would be obliged to return to the “socialist family” which would mean to become dependent on the Soviet Union like the revisionist countries of Eastern Europe, or to sell itself to imperialism for 30 pieces of silver!
As Comrade Enver Hoxha says, the PLA “... did not sell out and never will sell out to imperialism or anyone else because... a genuine Marxist-Leninist party, ...whatever the conditions and situations it is in, never allows itself to be bought or sold, but resolutely pursues its course, the course of uncompromising struggle against imperialism, revisionism and reaction.”*
Socialist Albania did not mark time, but advanced very rapidly without the aid of the Soviet social-imperialists, vigorously developed its economy and culture, and all fields of the life of the country on the road of socialism and strengthened its defence. With its far-sighted revolutionary policy in the political economic, cultural and military fields, the PLA had ensured all the conditions for such an advance. The achievements marked in 1961-1980 testify to the gigantic creative force of a people which is led by a revolutionary party of the working class. They refute the predictions and imperialist logic of the Soviet revisionists.
The Khrushchevite revisionist clique was gravely mistaken when it thought that it could isolate Albania. Albania was not isolated and never will be isolated, because throughout the world there are Marxist-Leninists, genuine revolutionaries and internationalists and there are friendly peoples and countries who understood and continue to understand ever more profoundly the revolutionary line and the principled struggle of the PLA in defence of freedom, independence and socialism in Albania, in defence of the interests and ideals of the proletariat and peoples of the whole world.
Although they suffered defeat in their encounter with the PLA, the Khrushchevites did not relinquish their efforts to subjugate it and the Albanian people. They had great hopes of achieving the submission of our Party after the fall of Khrushchev, when they tried to lay all the blame on him for the “quarrels and disagreements” for which, according to them, there is no objective basis or ideological reason. However, the Party of Labour of Albania had no illusions at all about the aims of Khrushchev’s successors who merely carried out “a change of horses” in the leadership while retaining Khrushchevism quite unaltered.
Our Party also rejected the “advice” of the Chinese leadership to follow their example in making approaches to and reaching conciliation with the Khrushchevites. There was a strong smell of opportunism and pragmatism about the judgements of the Chinese leadership that “we should offer our hand to the dear Soviet comrades”, “we should forget the past”, and “we should understand the difficulties of the comrades of the Soviet Union”. “The exclusion of Khrushchev from the leadership of the Soviet party and state,” wrote Comrade Enver Hoxha, “did not mean the end of Khrushchevite revisionism, or the liquidation of its ideology and policy, which were expressed in the political line of the 20th and 22nd Congress of the CPSU... We must not create and foster illusions, we must not be deceived by demagogy and disguises,... for the Marxist-Leninists, the struggle against Khrushchevite revisionism ends when its course is liquidated politically and ideologically, when the spirit, practices and stands from Khrushchevite revisionist positions have been liquidated...”*
After the break with the Chinese, the Soviet revisionists hoped once again that we would offer them the hand of friendship, because they thought that in these conditions the “appropriate time” had come to settle matters with Albania. Even to this day the revisionist press is openly hinting that, left without Chinese aid, the Albanians will return to the “socialist family” and the allies of the Soviet revisionists are intervening to sound out our reaction to this.
However, their hopes will never be realized. Comrade Enver Hoxha has said: “Our enemies are mistaken when they think that our country is... ‘abandoned on the streets’ that ‘it will hold out its hand to somebody who will pull it out of the mire’, etc. The People’s Socialist Republic of Albania... is advancing confidently, relying on its own strength, building, creating, training and defending itself fearlessly, and with its heroic example, it is inspiring and will continue to inspire the oppressed masses of the world.”*
Looking back at the road traversed during the past twenty years or so, we can define those causes, the political-moral factors which ensured the great victory of our Party over the Khrushchevites and their ignominious defeat:
1. Our Party fought and successfully defeated the interference, pressure, blackmail and blockade of the Khrushchevites, because it has always remained loyal to Marxism-Leninism and has pursued a consistent principled line. The struggle of our Party against Soviet revisionism is a just, profoundly principled struggle. Our differences with the Khrushchevites did not have to do simply with the relations between two parties and two countries. They were of a general character before they assumed a bilateral character; they were principled ideological differences, differences between two opposing lines, before they were inter-state contradictions. The Soviet revisionist leadership carried out ugly hostile activities against our people and country, because the PLA defended Marxism-Leninism, whereas it had betrayed Marxism-Leninism. Consequently, the struggle of the PLA against Khrushchevite revisionism was not aimed simply against the hostile anti-Albanian actions of the Khrushchevite clique against our Party and country, but above all, against the revisionist betrayal, in order to defend Marxism-Leninism and the cause of revolution and socialism. Comrade Enver Hoxha has said that we condemned the Soviet revisionists’ betrayal of Marxism-Leninism, just as we condemned the betrayal of the Titoite and Chinese revisionists for “... profound ideological and political reasons and not for trifles. They were not of a national character only, because they affected not only Albania’s economic interests, no, they had and have more of an international character, because they violated the great principles for which the peoples, the world proletariat and progressive mankind are fighting.”*
2. The Party of Labour of Albania successfully smashed the pressure, blackmail and hostile blockades of the Khrushchevites, because it had the support of the broad working masses of the country, the powerful backing of the people. In steel unity with the Party, the people fought together with it against the savage hostile activity with a high level of political consciousness. Precisely “In this unity,” stresses Comrade Enver Hoxha, “lies the invincible strength of the Party and our people, the sound guarantee of all the past, present and future victories of the people. This unity is the heaviest blow against all enemies of our Party and people, imperialists and revisionists of every description.”*
3. The Party of Labour of Albania overcame the Khrushchevite blockade because it has always remained loyal to the great revolutionary principle of self-reliance. No one brought us our freedom, independence and the great victories of the revolution and the socialist construction as a gift, they were achieved by shedding rivers of blood and sweat.
When the Soviet leadership cut off all the credits and economic aid, our Party and people did not capitulate, our economy did not come to a standstill, but on the contrary, developed with rapid rates on the road of socialism. The correct policy of the Party for the socialist industrialization of the country, the development and modernization of agriculture, the building of the material-technical base of socialism, and an independent economy, ensured that our socialist economy would not experience any kind of crisis or stagnation, but would go ahead vigorously.
In the West there are politicians and historians who distort and falsify the great truth about the conflict of the PLA with the Khrushchevites, motivating the victories and resistance of our Party with unreal causes and factors. Among these we can mention the “Chinese aid”, and the “geographical remoteness from the Soviet Union”. It is not difficult to refute these arguments. Our Party began and successfully waged the struggle against the Khrushchev group, not for the interests of the Chinese, or because that it had their support and aid, but for major national and international ideological and political motives, and relying on its own strength. In regard to the danger of Soviet military aggression, this existed twenty years ago, just as it does today. If the Soviet social-imperialists or any other aggressor have not dared to undertake military adventures against socialist Albania, this cannot be explained by geographical remoteness, or by the lack of the desire on their part.
They know that socialist Albania is not a mouthful that can be easily swallowed, that the traditionally patriotic and freedom-loving people of Albania, linked in steel unity with their fearless Party of Labour are prepared from every aspect and determined to fight to the end to defend the freedom and independence of their Homeland. Any aggressor who would dare to attack it, would encounter a terrain ablaze with people’s war from which he would not manage to extricate himself.
4. Another factor in the triumph over the Khrushchevites is the fact that our Party has persistently implemented the revolutionary principle that foreigners (whether allies or enemies) must not meddle in the internal affairs of our country. Remaining constantly vigilant and not permitting any external interference, it has worked out and applied its revolutionary line in a completely independent way and has fought hard to defend our independence from anybody.
5. In the struggle against the Khrushchevite revisionist betrayal the Party of Labour of Albania had the aid and the resolute support of the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist forces. The resolute support which these forces gave our Party added to its strength, determination and confidence in the great battle with the enemies and betrayers of the revolution.
The struggle of the Party of Labour of Albania against Soviet revisionism is an experience of great value. It shows clearly that even a small party of a small country can successfully face up to any enemy, however big and powerful, do battle with it and emerge triumphant, provided it faithfully adheres to Marxist-Leninist principles, provided it pursues a correct line and has sound unity in its ranks, has close links with the people, and provided it proves to be resolute and courageous in the struggle and is confident of victory.
On the basis of a penetrating all-sided analysis, which they made from the beginning of the betrayal by the Khrushchevite revisionists, the PLA and Comrade Enver Hoxha, among other things, predicted that if revisionism were not prevented from coming to the head of the Soviet party and state, this would have fatal consequences for the Bolshevik Party and for the destiny of revolution and socialism in the Soviet Union. Time has proved that the Khrushchevite betrayal caused the socialist order in the Soviet Union to degenerate into a capitalist order. At the 7th Congress of the PLA Comrade Enver Hoxha pointed out: “The Soviet society has become bourgeois down to its tiniest cells, and capitalism has been re-established in all fields.”*
The counter-revolutionary process of the degeneration of socialism and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union began with the usurpation of the leadership of the party and the state of the Soviet Union by the Khrushchevite revisionists, who gradually brought about their degeneration into a bourgeois party and state. The alteration of the character of the party and the state, the counter-revolutionary transformation in the field of the political and ideological superstructure, could not fail to lead to the alteration of the character of the structure also, because the new Soviet bourgeoisie could not exist and rule politically and ideologically, without also creating its economic base.
While preserving the external forms of the former socialist property, the Khrushchevite revisionists changed its essence, turned it into capitalist property, both in town and countryside. The economic reforms which they applied in conformity with their capitalist anti-Marxist ideological concepts, for “the perfection of the management and planning of the economy”, for “the primary role of material stimuli”, as well as other later measures, in fact, made profit the main objective of production, and this, as Karl Marx pointed out, constitutes the absolute law of capitalist relations of production.
With the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, the state socialist property was not fragmented, but degenerated into state monopoly property. This kind of property is the dominant form of property in that country today. State monopoly capitalism extends to all the branches of the economy and services, to industry, agriculture, construction, transport, trade, communications, the financial and credit system, the banks, etc.
Hiding behind Marxist terminology, the Soviet revisionists continue to speak about the planned and centralized management of the economy. However, in the economy of the Soviet Union today, there is only a bureaucratized centralism which is made possible by the specific conditions of the Soviet capitalist order in which state monopoly property is dominant. This gives the Soviet bourgeois state the possibility to centralize the production and distribution of a portion of the commodities and to set their prices, especially of those commodities which have importance for the militarization of the economy. While preserving some of the forms of organization and management of the former socialist economy, the Soviet bourgeoisie, whose aim is to secure maximum profits, has at the same time implemented new forms of organization and management, which are suitable to state monopoly capitalism. The “industrial complexes”, “agrarian-industrial complexes”, various “multi-national companies”, etc come within this heading. The Soviet bourgeoisie uses these “new” forms to increase the oppression and exploitation of the Soviet working masses and other peoples of the world, to overcome the difficulties of the crisis which has gripped the Soviet economy, and also because they are more adaptable to the integration of the Soviet economy into the world capitalist economy and the integration of the economies of other revisionist countries into the Soviet economy.
In order to secure maximum profits, the Soviet bourgeoisie, within the framework of bureaucratic centralism has granted the managers of economic enterprises and combines extensive freedoms and competences covering the volume of production, the range of products, prices, the structure of the organization and management, the establishment of links with the market and trade enterprises, engagement and dismissal of workers, etc. These managers, by misusing the competences they have been given, alter even the aim of production, change the range of commodities, direct production towards those goods which are most profitable, and raise the prices of commodities under various pretexts and masked ways, with the main aim of securing the greatest profits possible for themselves and for the entire Soviet bourgeoisie.
Having profit as their loftiest aim, the directors of these economic enterprises and combines organize production in such a manner as to increase the degree of intensification of work, to bring about the reduction of labour force, while a considerable part of the fund of wages “saved” from these “reductions” and dismissals of workers is appropriated by these managers in the form of supplementary bonuses. Thus, the economic enterprises and combines which constitute the main form of state monopoly capitalism in the Soviet economy, are the source of all those laws which operate with all their impact in the Soviet economy today, such as the law of profit, value, anarchy and competition, etc which are specific laws on which the economy of every capitalist country is based and developed.
The present-day Soviet economy is characterized by such problems of the capitalist economy as the inharmonious development of its branches, non-utilization of productive capacities, decline in the rates of production, rising prices and cost of living increases, growing inflation, shortages of mass consumer goods on the market, etc. Such phenomena are neither accidental nor temporary, or the difficulties allegedly of the growth of “socialism”, as the Soviet revisionists try to present them. They are phenomena which have their roots in the very capitalist nature of the economic order which prevails in the Soviet Union and which, like the whole world capitalist economy, is wallowing in a profound all-round crisis.
In order to disguise the exploiting character of their socio-economic order, the Soviet revisionists in recent years have been making a great demagogic clamour about the rights and competences of the so-called “workers’ collectives”. According to them the “workers’ collectives” have state and economic rights to discuss and solve problems of production and the management of enterprises and institutions, problems of the distribution of cadres, material rewards for the working people, etc.
However, the fact that on such vital problems of the workers as pay, engagement and dismissal from work, etc it is the managers of enterprises who decide, shows that the rights of the “workers’ collectives” are completely formal and they serve as a demagogic cover to hide from the eyes of the workers their oppression by the revisionist bourgeoisie. The so-called rights and competences of the “workers’ councils” have been propagated simply to create illusions among the Soviet working people that they are allegedly masters of their own fate, at a time when the Soviet revisionist bourgeoisie decides everything in conformity with its own interests and against the interests of the working people.
In the countryside, as a result of the degeneration of the former collective farm socialist property, he capitalist property of the group has been created, and this represents the second most widespread form of capitalist property in the Soviet Union. The breaking up of the machine and tractor stations, and the selling of their means to the individual agricultural economies, the creation in place of them of so-called regional centres for the repair of agricultural machinery, brought as a consequence that all the means of production in the Soviet agriculture became subject to sale and purchase. The establishment of profit and the material stimulus as the basis of all the activity of the collective farms, the organization in them of piecework, the extension of the collective farmer’s private plot and its transformation into pure private property in the countryside, as well as other measures of this kind, have led to the total all-round degeneration of collective farm socialist property into capitalist group property and the re-establishment of capitalist relations in the whole of Soviet agriculture. On this basis, such phenomena as the absorption and exploitation by the more powerful collective farms of the labour power of the weaker collective farms, economic differentiation among their members, the mass departure of collective farm members for the cities, etc have become rampant.
It is a known fact that the Soviet agriculture of the revisionist Soviet Union has for years been immersed in a grave and deep crisis. It has become the most backward branch of the Soviet capitalist economy. This has forced the Soviet Union to import, among other things, large quantities of grain every year from 1963 onward. And this is explained by the fact that the Soviet revisionist bourgeoisie, guided by the law of maximum profit, is interested in investing most of its capital in those branches of the economy inside or outside the Soviet Union which bring greater profits, rather than in agriculture, to extract it from its backwardness.
As Lenin has stressed, in the conditions of capitalism, small-scale private property exists as a fellow-traveller with large-scale property. This property exists and is now widespread in the Soviet Union, both in town and in countryside. It constitutes one of the forms of capitalist property in that country, which the Soviet bourgeoisie has permitted and encouraged to develop. To this end, the right to carry out private activity in the skilled trades, agriculture and services, as well as the right of Soviet citizens to have land, livestock and poultry for their personal use, has been legalized in the Soviet revisionist constitution. As a result, a special sector of small-scale private property has been created in the Soviet Union.
To bring out the class nature of the economic order of the Soviet Union it is important to analyze the relations of distribution, the capitalist character of which is more obvious and tangible, so the Soviet revisionists have great difficulty in disguising this.
It is known that these relations depend on and are determined by the property relations. But, as Engels says, “The economic relations of a given society present themselves in first place as interests.”* Analysis of the property -relations from this point of view, i.e. in whose interest is property used in the Soviet Union, whom does it serve, reveals its capitalist essence.
The Soviet bourgeoisie uses various ways for the appropriation of surplus value. The biggest part of it is achieved in the form of charges on the funds which the Soviet state receives from the various economic enterprises and combines. It achieves another part of it from the taxes which the Soviet capitalist state extracts from the working masses of town and countryside and which are also sanctioned in the new constitution of the Soviet revisionists. Various kinds of funds have been created in the economic enterprises and combines, such as the “fund of profit”, the “fund of material stimuli”, etc the overwhelming bulk of which is appropriated by that part of the bourgeoisie which is at the head of these economic enterprises and combines. The Soviet bourgeoisie transforms part of this surplus value into functioning capital in order to ensure even greater surplus value in the future, while using a part of it to maintain and finance the large military and bureaucratic apparatus and distributing the remainder amongst its members in the form of high salaries, various bonuses and honoraria.
The ratio of the pay of workers to that of various members of Soviet bourgeoisie varies from 1:10 to 1:30. This means that, regardless of the fact that “the whole people is formally proclaimed to be the owner of the property, its real, de facto, owner is only a handful of people, who just like the capitalist owners in the other bourgeois countries, appropriate the unpaid labour of workers through high salaries, bonuses and other material privileges.
In order to open the way to the degeneration of the socialist relations in production and to conceal the bourgeois class character of the large differences in pay and rewards, the Soviet revisionists proclaimed the priority of material stimuli in socialism, presenting this as allegedly a Leninist idea. However, everyone knows about the struggle Lenin waged against high salaries and other material privileges in socialist society, which carry the danger of the corruption of cadres and the birth of new bourgeois elements. Speaking about the tasks of the proletarian state in 1918, Lenin forcibly stressed the problem of “creating conditions in which it will be impossible for the bourgeoisie to exist, or for a new bourgeoisie to arise.”* Lenin considered that one of the main factors to achieve this was precisely the struggle against high salaries and the elimination of any material privilege in socialist society. Lenin called high salaries “a bourgeois way” of the treatment of specialists and functionaries, “... a departure from the principles of the Paris Commune and every proletarian state”.** However, in the Soviet Union, as a result of the restoration of capitalism, high salaries, material stimuli, bonuses, favours, privileges, etc have been raised to a whole institution in order to appropriate the surplus value extracted from the sweat of working people.
The present-day Soviet economy has been integrated into the world capitalist system. “While American, German, Japanese and other capital has penetrated deeply into the Soviet Union, Soviet capital is being exported to other countries and. in various forms, is merging with local capital.”* This integration has assumed extensive proportions and is being carried out in the most varied forms.
The Soviet Union has become one of the countries to which more and more of the capital of Western countries is being exported. Its debts to these countries are calculated at 19 billion dollars. About 500 of the biggest trusts of the Western countries have invested their capital in the form of credit for the construction of industrial projects in the Soviet Union or for the financing of the trade which it carries on with these countries. More than 75 American, West-German, British, Japanese, etc multinational companies have offices in the Soviet Union. (It is precisely this inflow of monopoly capital from other capitalist countries which has brought them into partnership with the Soviet bourgeoisie for the exploitation of Soviet working people.)
Evidence of the capitalist nature of the economy in the whole Soviet social order can be seen also in the practice of economic relations which the Soviet Union carries on with the other countries of the world, both with the countries of the “socialist community” and with the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In this practice we see that the Soviet Union makes extensive use of enslaving credits, unequal exchanges, the creation of “multi-national companies” and banks in the other countries of the world, for the exploitation of peoples. This is a typical neo-colonialist practice which stems from and has its base in the capitalist nature of the economic order of the Soviet Union.
Marxism-Leninism teaches us that politics is the concentrated expression of the economy. The policy of each country is an inevitable consequence and direct product of its economic order, while the character of this policy cannot fail to express the class nature of this order, its physiognomy. Looked at with a Marxist-Leninist eye, the aggressive, war-mongering, hegemonic and expansionist policy which the Soviet Union pursues for the redivision of the world, for the extension of its spheres of influence, to gain possession of sources of raw materials, for the oppression and enslavement of peoples, shows that the economic order on which this imperialist policy is based, cannot be other than the capitalist order, because, as Lenin argues, an aggressive war-mongering external policy is an inevitable product only of the capitalist order.
The radical transformations in the economic structure of the Soviet Union were bound to lead, as they did, to radical changes in the class structure of present-day Soviet society.
On this question, too, in order to conceal the existence in the Soviet Union of a new bourgeois class, the Soviet revisionists, in general, still preserve the external appearance of the erstwhile class structure of socialist society. To bring to light the real nature of this structure one must start from the Leninist teachings, according to which the nature of classes and, consequently, that of the class structure of any society, can be determined correctly only by analysing the real relations of classes to the means of production, their place and role in the management and organization of production and the economy, as well as the size of the share they receive from the social wealth.
The fact that the former state and cooperativist socialist property has been turned into capitalist property, the fact that the working masses of town and countryside have been stripped of the right to take any real part in. the organization and management of production, the fact that a small section of the population such as the bureaucrats, technocrats, the top-level of the military caste and the upper part of the creative intelligentsia, appropriate the greater part of the income of society m various ways, leading a parasitic life, all these things taken together show that in present-day Soviet society there are classes with fundamental opposite economic interests, proletarians and bourgeois. The strata of bureaucrats and apparatchiki, who usurped the leadership of the party and the state, who carried out the “peaceful” counter-revolution, and who seized real possession of the means of production, have now changed into a new bourgeois class. Whereas the working class, which lost its party and political power and which was stripped of the means of production, has been transformed into a simple producing class, an oppressed and exploited class, which lives by selling the commodity labour power.
In order to conceal the capitalist reality of the class structure of present-day Soviet society, the Soviet revisionists spread all kinds of allegedly new “theoretical” theses. This is the aim of their theorizing about the transition of “developed socialist society” towards “social homogeneity” by means of which they claim that in the Soviet Union the distinctions between the working class, the collective farm peasantry and the intelligentsia are allegedly disappearing and being replaced only with working people with common features, thus creating a classless society.
As the classics of Marxism-Leninism have argued, during the revolutionary transformation of socialism into communism, the process of the gradual dying out of class distinctions and classes themselves will certainly occur and, as a consequence, communist society will be created in which, as Marx says, all will be working people. But this can be achieved only by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the leadership of the proletarian party, through consistently waging the class struggle and applying the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, through the development of the productive forces in a centralized and planned way and the transformation of socialist property into communist property. However, after the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union there can be no more talk of these revolutionary processes.
The Khrushchevites claim that the so-called collective farm peasantry “is being integrated into the working class,” “becoming identical” with this class. This process has nothing in common with socialism and communism, because it is a result of the operation of capitalist laws in Soviet society. The purpose of these claims is to justify the fact of the class disintegration of the Soviet peasantry, which as a result of the capitalist laws, is filling the ranks of the proletariat in town and countryside. It is precisely the process of the polarization of the present-day Soviet capitalist society that the Soviet revisionists try to present as the alleged transition of this society to “social homogeneity”.
Likewise, the claims about “the integration of various detachments of the intelligentsia into the ranks of the working class”, about the creation of the “worker intellectual”, “worker-collective farmer”, “worker-collective farmer-intellectual” social groups, are intended to deny the hegemonic role of the working class and to justify the creation of privileged bourgeois strata in the ranks of the working class, the collective farm peasantry and the intelligentsia.
Analysis of the class structure of present-day Soviet society brings out that, fundamentally, it is identical with the class structure of bourgeois capitalist society. Two main classes exist in it –-the new bourgeoisie which is the ruling class and the working class which is an oppressed and exploited class. Besides them, there is the peasantry. also an oppressed class, which is subject to the process of disintegration, a new stratum of intellectuals as well as a new petty-bourgeois stratum comprised of private owners, such as skilled tradesmen, blackmarketeers and other dealers.
With the degeneration of the proletarian party, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist economic order in the Soviet Union, those factors which, for the first time in history, made it-possible to achieve a radical solution on a new basis of the national question, were wiped out. Now this question has again become one of the most acute problems of Soviet society, because in the Soviet Union “Great-Russian chauvinism has been set up as the dominant ideology, national oppression has become part and parcel of the bourgeois class policy pursued by the ruling clique.”*
To conceal this policy from the eyes of the working people within the country and from public opinion abroad, the Soviet revisionists have also worked out their “theory” and practice about “the new historical community of men,” or “the unified Soviet people”. While unfurling the banner of such a “theory”, they claim that the national problem has allegedly been completely solved in the Soviet Union and such a problem no longer exists. In essence, this “theory “, which the Soviet revisionists present as a Leninist idea, is a nationalist and chauvinist view intended to justify the Russification of non-Russian nations and nationalities and to deny their sovereignty and national identity. If those negative phenomena and processes which are occurring, in fact, in the relations between nations and nationalities in the present-day Soviet Union are analyzed from the positions of Marxism-Leninism, these chauvinist aims emerge clearly.
For the denationalization of various nations, the imperialist bourgeoisie has always striven to eliminate their mother tongue and their culture. This is what the Soviet social-imperialists are doing with the non-Russian nations and nationalities. Through the slogan of the creation of “a unified Soviet culture”, and “the international culture”, the Soviet revisionists are making similar efforts also for the Russification of the culture of other nations and nationalities of the Soviet Union.
The alteration of the national structures of the nations and nationalities is another of the main directions in the great-Russian chauvinist policy which the Soviet revisionists pursue and are applying under the slogan of the internationalization of their whole life. In the Republic of Kazakhstan for example, there are 5.5 million Russians, while the 4.5 million Kazakhs are left as a minority and represent only 34 per cent of the population of Kazakhstan. This is a clear example of the great-Russian chauvinist policy pursued by the Soviet revisionists.
The process of the Russification of the population in the other Soviet republics is being carried out ever more extensively. Other factors such as “internal emigration” also assist this process. By means of mechanical movement, the Soviet revisionists displace the populations of other nations en masse from their birthplaces, turning the populations of various nations into what they call a “multi-national collective”.
Analysis of these phenomena from the Marxist-Leninist standpoint also reveals the demagogic character of the Soviet revisionists’ claims about their so-called enrichment of Lenin’s idea about the creation of a “new historical community of people of a higher level than the nation”. Although they formally enjoy the right of state sovereignty and equality, the Soviet Federal Republics are being transformed simply into administrative territories without real state rights, with completely formal sovereignty. In this bourgeois federation, the Russian Republic occupies a hegemonic position. Irrespective of the demagogic slogans about “equality” of nations, between it and the other republics there is a marked dislevel of the whole economic and social development which is growing wider. In the conditions of the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, the Khrushchevite revisionists utilize Russia’s great human and material potential in order to realize their great Russian chauvinist policy.
In the conditions of imperialism, the existence and extraordinary strengthening of a bureaucratic-military apparatus and other organs of oppression and aggression is characteristic of the states in which a savage dictatorial regime exists and which pursue a hegemonic foreign policy. Such an apparatus exists in the revisionist Soviet Union. The bureaucratic apparatus of the present-day Soviet state is comprised of a whole many-millions strong army of officials and bureaucrats, of the armed forces which amount to more than 3.5 million men and of the other extremely inflated organs of oppression such as the KGB, the courts, the prisons, the concentration camps, the psychiatric hospitals, etc. The militarization of the Soviet state has assumed unprecedented proportions. The annual military budget of the Soviet Union amounts to about 160 billion dollars. This reality shows that the Soviet state is by no means a “socialist”, “humanitarian” state of “the entire people”, as the Soviet revisionists present it, but is, as Comrade Enver Hoxha described it at the 7th Congress of the PLA “a capitalist fascist dictatorship”.*
The Soviet revisionists try to disguise the real nature and functions of their bourgeois-fascist state. After they proclaimed the replacement of the dictatorship of the proletariat with “the state of the entire people”, at the beginning of the 1960’s, now, to justify the policy of fascist terror and violence which they exert over the working masses, they claim that “the state of the entire people”, in essence, is allegedly a direct continuation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. For these same demagogic purposes, the Soviet revisionists spread illusions that the Soviet state “of the entire people”, “is not a machine for the oppression of one class by the other class”, “is not an organ of the rule of one class over the other class”, because the violence which it employs is allegedly directed only against individual persons, against vagabonds, murderers, thieves and all those who breach the norms of society. The Soviet state may take and does take measures against people of this category, of course not to defend the working masses, but to protect the class interests of the revisionist bourgeoisie. However, the existence of an extremely large bureaucratic-military machine in the Soviet Union shows that it was not set up, and that there was no need for it to ‘be set up, to suppress individual persons, but it is maintained precisely to oppress and exploit the working class and the working masses as well as to undertake aggressions against the peoples of other countries.
Although for demagogic purposes the Khrushchevite revisionists have not changed the name of the party of the Soviet Union, it has been turned into a bourgeois, fascist party, a carrier of the ideology and policy of oppression and exploitation. It has elaborated the most complete theory and practice of the revisionist counterrevolution for the degeneration of socialism and the restoration of capitalism, tries to find theoretical justification for the policy of social and national oppression within the country and the hegemonic, chauvinistic, aggressive and expansionist policy which the Soviet bourgeoisie pursues towards other countries and peoples of the world. With demagogic slogans about the alleged strengthening of national pride and internationalist aid, the Soviet bourgeois party is trying to implant in the hearts and minds of the Soviet people and nations an aggressive nationalism, the chauvinist spirit of megalomania and omnipotence in order to realize the hegemonic aims of Soviet social-imperialism.
In conformity with their aims and policy of oppression, the Soviet revisionists radically changed the political essence of their party, too, turning it into an organization of oppression just like the army, the KGB, the militia and the other organs of oppression of the present-day Soviet fascist bourgeois state. By enlarging and inflating the basic organizations of the party, by filling their ranks with bureaucrats and technocrats, they have turned them into inactive and completely formal organizations. At the same time the Soviet revisionists use the leading organs of the party, which, not only at the centre but also at the base, are made up mostly of bureaucrats and technocrats, as repressive organs against all those who oppose and do not obey the revisionist chiefs by organizing big campaigns of purges and condemnation against them, such as that of the years 1973-1974. On the international level, this organization, which bears the name of the communist party, corrupts the chiefs of other revisionist parties as well as chiefs of the bourgeoisie in various countries, employs them in the service of the Soviet bourgeoisie, using them as cat’s paws for interference in those countries. This is what was done in Czechoslovakia and the other former countries of people’s democracy; this is what was done in Angola and recently in Afghanistan, too. Analysis of the activity of the CPSU leads to the unavoidable conclusion that this party has become a bearer of the ideology and policy of oppression and exploitation and has become a regressive organization.
The retrogressive change which occurred in the course of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin constitutes one of the most important aspects of the capitalist degeneration of that country.
In order to grasp the full dimensions of the thoroughly harmful work carried out by the Khrushchevite revisionists in the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, we need only mention that they brutally put an end to a majestic historical phenomenon, such as the emergence for the first time in the history of mankind of a socialist foreign policy, not just as an idea but as a practical application.
Almost a century and a half ago Marx and Engels forcefully raised the imperative need for the working class, even without being in power, to have an international policy of its own. According to Marx’s lapidary definition, the new principles of the foreign policy of the working class ought to be the “simple laws of morality and justice”.
At the beginning of the 20th century what had seemed like an unattainable ideal, a utopian dream, in the face of the capitalist jungle, inflamed by the fury of destruction and mass murder, found its realization for the first time with the triumph of the socialist revolution in Russia.
The confrontation between capitalism and socialism has been a constant factor of all the international life of our century. The clash between them along the whole front of the foreign policy has had consequences of exceptional importance in the whole of contemporary history. Fascism did not pass. Socialism overcame its isolation and emerged as an international community. The omnipotence of the big imperialist powers went into crisis. The colonial system disintegrated. A large number of peoples and nations gained consciousness of their ethnical identity, as well as their state independence, and international relations went through unprecedented envigoration and enrichment. All these things occurred under the sign of the superiority of socialism which found full expression in the field of foreign policy, especially after the Second World War.
Socialism passed into the second half of the 20th century giving indisputable proof of its vitality, not only as a socio-economic system within individual societies divided by state borders, but also as an international community built on the foundations of an internationalism which only the working class in power could affirm.
The continuity of this development was interrupted at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Codifying all the opportunist theories of the past, which it took care to adapt to and link with the major problems of contemporary development, the 20th Congress of the CPSU made a synthesis: that of modem revisionism, as a strategy and tactic for the anti-historical turning back from socialism to capitalism.
A very important component of the policy inaugurated at the 20th Congress of the CPSU was that which had to do with the socialist states. At the end of the Second World War, in the practice of the construction of socialism, a new problem arose which was closely linked precisely with the growth of socialism to international proportions: instead of a single socialist country in the period between the two wars, now we have a series of countries which set out on the road of socialism.
“A people that oppresses other peoples cannot be free,” said Marx more than a hundred years ago, proclaiming with this a whole program of striving by the working class to bring about the revolutionary change in the field of international relations too. But there is more than this to the program of socialism in the field of foreign policy: it also includes direct action and constructive contribution to its fullest possible realization in the relations between states. It is self-evident that its most complete realization can and must be achieved in the relations between socialist states, and then proletarian internationalism constitutes the foundation of these relations. The socialist camp provided the model of these relations, which was applied for nearly a decade after the Second World War and which of course was expected to be carried further. However, a step towards the destruction of the basis of relations between socialist states was especially taken immediately after the 20th Congress which created real ideological confusion in the ranks of the communist parties and anti-imperialist forces on the most important problems of strategy and tactics. The campaign against Stalin cast a black shadow over the historic experience of the October Revolution and the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union and over its foreign policy.
It was Khrushchev’s aim to subjugate the socialist countries and the communist parties, so that they would become obedient instruments bound hand and foot to the Soviet chariot, and his dictate and arbitrary will would be turned into obligatory norms.
The revisionist group of Khrushchev and his successors found ready-to-hand the international juridical instruments to facilitate the implementation of such a policy in practice. We mean the degeneration and the counterrevolutionary transformation of the Warsaw Treaty and the Council of Mutual Economic Aid – Comecon, which today are identical in form and content with the political and economic blocs of the capitalist states of Western Europe, NATO and the Common Market.
When speaking of the Warsaw Treaty and Comecon today, they cannot be judged on the basis of their origin which dates back to more than a quarter of a century ago. Originally created as organs of the political and economic alliance of the former socialist camp to cope with the aggressive strategy of NATO, as well as to carry forward and deepen the new experience of the fraternal collaboration between socialist countries, the Warsaw Treaty and Comecon were transformed into instruments of Soviet hegemony, both within the countries of Eastern Europe and on a European and world scale. In this way, from counterweights to the counter-revolutionary front of the capitalist West they became counter-parts of the savage, declared and undeclared war for the division of spheres of influence and the preservation of the “balance of power”. Comrade Enver Hoxha has described NATO and the Warsaw Treaty as “...the main pillars on which all the hegemonistic and expansionist policy of the superpowers is based and carried out, the principal shield protecting their imperialist systems, the fundamental weapons for their rivalry and war preparations...,”* while in regard to Comecon and the Common Market, he has pointed out their complementary role “to serve this aggressive, oppressive and exploiting policy.”**
It is self-evident that the burden of this policy weighs, first of all and especially, on the backs of the satellite countries.
In order to prettify a practice of international links which have all the capitalist features, various slogans and “theories” have been put into circulation which, although heavily loaded with Marxist phraseology, are obviously clumsy misrepresentations which cannot withstand any criticism.
From this viewpoint, the first which comes into consideration, is the “theory” of “limited sovereignty” which has enriched the arsenal of propaganda means whereby the reactionary bourgeoisie attacks the basic principles of international relations. Everyone knows that this theory was spread by the revisionist clique of the Kremlin, precisely in connection with the aggression against Czechoslovakia in 1968. This fact alone is sufficient to demonstrate that the aim of theories of this nature is to ensure that ideological and juridical platform on which the policy of aggression, dictate and brutal naked violence can be based. This theory tries to prove that the interests of the “socialist community” constitute “the supreme sovereign right”, and therefore they must take priority. As to the interests of this or that individual state, the ordinary members of this “community”, they are described as “narrow and individual” and as such are dependent on and conditioned by the higher general interests.
The fraudulent character of the “theory” of “limited sovereignty” becomes immediately obvious if one bears in mind that it is precisely the leadership of the Kremlin which is the “supreme instance”, which has the absolute, exclusive right to determine the restriction of the sovereignty of each member state under the pretext that this sovereignty is contrary to “the major interests of the socialist family”. The best illustration of the mechanism of such an action can be found in Czechoslovakia in 1968. In this way the “collective” aggression of the Warsaw Treaty against one of the member states assumed the force of a precedent, not only for relations within the bloc but eventually outside it, too. Thus the case of Afghanistan is added to that of Czechoslovakia, on the basis of an extremely broad social-imperialist interpretation of “proletarian internationalism”. With this, the sphere of action of the “theory” of “limited sovereignty” extended its bounds: it is no longer restricted to the “socialist” countries of Eastern Europe which are “cove-red” by the Warsaw Treaty, but is extended more broadly, taking in other countries and geographical zones.
The “theory” of “limited sovereignty” marks a definite stage, a new step in the elaboration of the platform of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. On the one hand, this (theory) is a vivid expression of the deepening of the hegemonic social-imperialist course of Soviet foreign policy which finds its primary sphere and most complete application in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, it is linked with the ever more obvious change in the relationship of the countries of Eastern Europe with the Soviet Union in the direction of increasing their dependence to the point of the loss of the main attributes of state sovereignty.
At the 25th Congress of the CPSU Leonid Brezhnev declared openly that “the process of gradual unification of socialist countries is now operating as an objective law which requires that states of the socialist community must combat isolation and national exclusiveness.”
The -theoretical” elaboration of this process of the concentration in the hands of the Kremlin of the attributes of state sovereignty within the framework of the “socialist community” has not come to an end with this. From this point of view, a significant development a year or two ago is what was called the “theory of the socialist nation”, which was dealt with especially in the Czechoslovak press.
In itself, this marks a very advanced step in the theoretical mystification in connection with the “socialist community”. It is claimed that this is the harbinger of a more profound union of the countries of Eastern Europe on a federal basis, a union which would have no other role but that of extending the borders of the existing Soviet federation. Thus, directly or indirectly, it is claimed that the “objective conditions” exist today for the creation of “the socialist people in the countries of the socialist community.” It is claimed that the experience of the Soviet Union over many years has indicated the road of “coming together”, of “overcoming contradictions”, of “the blending”, or “alignment of specific national peculiarities”, which must lead finally to the creation of “a socialist people”. To this end, of course the notions of “socialist patriotism” and “proletarian internationalism” are distorted. “Pravda” of Bratislava some time ago quoted a member of the Presidium of the CP of Czechoslovakia, Bylak, who demanded that “socialist patriotism must be understood as a stand towards the whole socialist community, in which the Soviet Union has a decisive role”. This of course is a jeer at what they call “the harmful consequences of a narrow and one-sided concept of independence, sovereignty, equality and non-interference” in the relations between countries of the community.
Brezhnev’s “proletarian internationalisms is likewise undergoing transformations to adapt it to the aims of the Soviet expansionism. It has to serve as “the foundation on which the integration of all fields of life of the countries of socialist community is based.” And in order to ensure that this does not remain an empty slogan, an extensive program for the “complex integration” of the economy, culture, art, education and all other sections has been worked out, a program which the Soviet revisionists are trying to implement “through the now institutionalized military-political and ideological joint actions” on the scale of the “community”.
From all this it is not difficult to reach the conclusion that the objective of Soviet policy in relations with the satellite countries of Eastern Europe is to consolidate the domination of the Soviet Union and to extend the border of the empire, which may change its name but not its content.
In the whole framework of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union after the 20th Congress, the evolution of relations with the capitalist states and especially with the USA, as the main imperialist power, assumes particular importance. Immediately after the death of Stalin, but more obviously after the 20th Congress, the tendency can be clearly seen to build a new relationship with the capitalist world in general, and first of all with American imperialism, over the whole front of foreign policy. Consequently the confrontation with the capitalist states, with American imperialism in particular, would be done from standpoints different from those of the period of the emergence of the Soviet Union as e great socialist power. Now the Soviet Union has emerged on the stage of world politics as a partner and, at the same time, as a rival in the great struggle for markets and spheres of influence. “.. .Soviet social-imperialism is no longer satisfied with the domination it exercises over the satellite states” of Eastern Europe, points out Comrade Enver Hoxha. “Like the other imperialist states the Soviet Union is now fighting for new markets, for spheres of influence, to invest its capital in various countries, to monopolize sources of raw materials...”*
In other words, the Soviet Union has changed from a factor of innovation in foreign relations into one of the main protagonists in the great imperialist contest for the division of the booty and the “balance of power”. This is the reason that these last twenty years have been characterized by a great about-turn in the whole structure of international relations in the contemporary period, in which collaboration and alliance, on the one hand, and competition and rivalry, on the other, between the two superpowers are the two sides of the same medal. In the final analysis, this is something very well known, especially in the history of Europe at the end of the last century and the beginning of this century: the great imperialist powers of Europe have acted “in concert” as a “supreme instance”, as “directorate” on an international level, going through phases of agreement, conciliation, pacifist euphoria, as well as clashes of antagonistic interests, up to major crises which have ended in the outbreak of imperialist wars. The special feature here is, first, that the Soviet Union, a former socialist power, has joined this “company”, and second, that the circle has been narrowed and reduced to a minimum, to the pair USA-SU. The other capitalist states, to which the superpowers allocate the role of “secondary powers”, cannot be in agreement with this reduction of the circle of “the mighty”. It is true that the United Nations Charter proclaims five great powers, to which certain prerogatives and special responsibilities on an international scale are recognized, but in practice this has long been a thing of the past. Both in Washington and Moscow claims are now made openly that the fate of the whole of mankind is in the hands of the two superpowers, that both “fine weather” and “storms” in the relations between states depend on them and them alone.
The monopoly which the two superpowers want to impose in the “settlement” of problems of world policy, comes within this contest. Comrade Enver Hoxha says, “...On all the major international problems they try to come out with a co-ordinated policy and with a common stand towards third parties...”* “Their aim”, continues Comrade Enver Hoxha is “...to compel the other states to entrust their fate to the two superpowers, so that they become arbiters, not only of the foreign affairs of the other countries but also of their internal affairs. The two superpowers want acceptance of their will and dictate to be raised to a law and norm of international life.”**
Both the ‘bourgeois and the revisionist propaganda are in unison in their efforts to prove that the Soviet-American agreement is the only guarantee for securing peace in the present-day conditions. This is neither new nor original. In every historical period pacifist labels have been stuck on the dictate of the mighty.
This process of the concentration in the topmost spheres of world politics, the transition from the “powers in concert” to the two superpowers, in reality, has not reduced but, on the contrary, has added to the dangers, both for the individual countries and for peace and collaboration amongst the peoples.
Despite the efforts of the bourgeois and revisionist propaganda to present the Soviet-American agreement, the “balance of powers” between the two superpowers, as the only basis for international security and peace, the reality of relations between the USA and the Soviet Union demonstrates clearly that the secret or public agreements between them are not able to put an end to their quarrels and disagreements. They have only a temporary importance, are “ceasefires” in the protracted, never-ending, merciless struggle which puts the two superpowers eyeball to eyeball.
The experience of these recent years demonstrates very clearly that the Soviet Union is irrevocably committed to the expansionist policy, that it has completely adopted the imperialist logic in the field of foreign policy. It has conformed completely to the rule of “filling the vacuums”. Thus the partial withdrawal of American imperialism from Southeast Asia, because of its defeat in Vietnam, corresponds to the general advance of Soviet social-imperialism in many regions of the world, especially in Asia and Africa. The events in Angola and Ethiopia, and now the recent military occupation of Afghanistan, are clear evidence of the great drive of the Soviet Union on its course for world hegemony.
On the other hand, it would be wrong to claim that the world political scene today looks like a confrontation of the two superpowers alone. In reality, the situation is much more complicated and is an extraordinary tangle of contradictions. In his work “Imperialism and the Revolution”, Comrade Enver Hoxha dwells especially on this aspect of the present world situation. “A very complex situation has been created in the world at present,” says Comrade Enver Hoxha. “Operating in the international arena today are various imperialist and various social-imperialist forces, which, on the one hand, are fighting in unison against the revolution and the freedom of the peoples and, on the other hand, are contesting and clashing with one another over markets, spheres of influence and hegemony. Now, in addition to the Soviet-American rivalry for world domination, there are the expansionist claims of Chinese social-imperialism, the predatory ambitions of Japanese militarism, the strivings of West-German imperialism for living space, the fierce competition of the European Common Market which has turned its eyes towards the old colonies.”*
Especially prominent among these groups of large and medium powers which likewise want to occupy the place “which belongs to them” in the arena of the clash of interests is the imperialist China of the present day. What was said about Italy last century could be said about China today, that “it is developing its appetite before its teeth”. The chronic backwardness of China in every field, its lack of economic industrial potential, on the one hand, and on the other hand, all the twists and turns on the course which it has been following for decades on end, the lack of a clearly defined political program, all the “Chinese puzzles” in policy, have brought about that present-day China does not have sufficient wind to keep pace with the biggest powers. However, the revisionist clique in Beijing is no less determined to join the “superpower club” as a third partner. At present, China is caught up completely in the great diplomatic game, not only on the regional Asiatic scale, but on the world scale, and this it does openly from the positions of a great power which intends to enter the ranks of the superpowers. To achieve this aim the revisionist leadership in Beijing has made a strategic choice which it thinks conforms best to the current circumstances; it has chosen total confrontation with the Soviet Union in alliance with the American superpower. Soviet social-imperialism has accepted the challenge and today we are witnesses to the rivalry of the two great “communist” powers, especially in the Far East. From this the bourgeois propaganda is hastening to prove that capitalism is not the only source of evil, that “‘communism’ has brought no alterations”, “has not made any radical change” in “traditional” international relations. However, today it has become ever more clear that this is one of the usual falsifications of the bourgeois propaganda, because the international activity of both the Soviet Union and China is completely identical with the imperialist policy and it has fully consummated its break with the ideals of socialism in the field of foreign policy.
The stands and actions of the Soviet Union in regard to the countries and peoples who have achieved or aspire to a state existence of their own, after the disintegration of the old colonial empires, comprise a very important characteristic of the foreign policy in the Soviet Union. Here the social-imperialist course of Soviet foreign policy finds a field in which it is expressed especially clearly.
The process of affirmation and consolidation of a large number of nations and nationalities of different continents after centuries of bondage runs through new efforts, no less difficult and requiring, no less commitment than the anti-colonial liberation armed struggle. The present world reality is dominated also by the contrast between the big “wealthy”, so-called “civilized”, industrial countries and the poor, former colonial or “developing” countries as they are often called. This contrast is referred to in geographical terms, the “North-South relationships, no doubt in an attempt to justify the present flagrant injustice as an accident of fate determined by natural conditions. This great confrontation, which constitutes one of the most significant expressions of the class struggle on the international scale at the present time, finds the revisionist Soviet Union lined up completely on the same side of the barricade as “the wealthy” and the exploiters, beside the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Of course it would be an idle illusion to think of the world of undeveloped countries as something homogeneous, either from the viewpoint of their socio-economic order, or from their political orientations. In particular, the Chinese revisionist scheme about the division of the present-day world in three and about the so-called “third worlds as the main motive force of the historical development of the epoch, which Lenin recognized as belonging to the proletarian revolution, must be rejected as baseless and misleading. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the “sub~ continents” of Asia, Africa and Latin America are regarded to this day globally, as a sphere for the extension of interests, for the all-round activities of the bigger and wealthier powers and the only relationship which the capitalist and revisionist powers wish to build and perpetuate in regard to these countries is that of their subjugation and exploitation.
The Soviet Union has now joined in this dance, therefore these last two decades are characterized by increasing aggressiveness in its foreign policy, with special aims in the direction of the former colonial countries. The division of “the booty” had been made, but its redivision goes on permanently and step by step, systematically and persistently, the Soviet superpower is smoothing out the obstacles and opening paths in order to take the place “which belongs to it” in the great imperialist partnership.
In the application of this policy a definite role has been allocated to the revisionist parties which have become the bearers of the interests of Soviet social-imperialism, simple instruments of Soviet foreign policy. In open contradiction to the former practices of the time of the Communist International, when the communist parties everywhere, but especially in the oppressed colonial and semi-colonial countries, acted as advanced detachments which were united by a single cause under the banner of revolutionary national-liberation ideals, today these parties have turned into conspiratorial agencies, into a fifth column, which carry out allocated “missions” on account of the revisionist leading centre, in order to smooth the way to the hegemony of the Soviet Union in the respective countries. However, the bonds of “loyalty” of these parties and groups towards Moscow are now known to all, and they frequently expose the game of the Soviet leadership prematurely. That is why Moscow frequently operates outside the “solidarity” with the “sister” parties, takes the course of “pragmatism”, and enters into agreement with the most reactionary anti-communist regimes. The revisionists of Moscow, points out Comrade Enver Hoxha “...according to the occasion and circumstances, also try to corrupt and bribe the ruling cliques in the undeveloped countries, offer enslaving economic ‘aid’ in order to get a foothold in these countries, stir up armed conflicts among the different cliques siding with one or the other, and organize plots and putsches to bring pro-Soviet regimes to power.”*
The Soviet social-imperialists also have “specific socialist labels, ready-made to stick on “new spheres of influence” which they manage to secure in various ways. Provided only that these countries link themselves with the expansionist policy of the Soviet Union, they are declared to be “bearers of the non-capitalist road to development”, of “the socialist orientation”, of new “original, intermediate” forms of the transition to socialism. However, the great powers’ game is a “gamble”, as Lenin said at the beginning of the century. Luck changes: Soviet social-imperialism has successes, but also has defeats. In conformity with this, the list of countries “of the socialist orientation” and “the non-capitalist road” is subject to continual correction in Moscow. The only criterion is to what extent this or that country is ready to open its doors to the penetration of Soviet influence.
In the present-day policy of the Soviet Union towards the undeveloped countries today there are ever more powerful expressions of the militarist tendency, that of playing with fire, of brandishing arms, which is fraught with very dangerous consequences not only for the peoples of these countries, but also for world peace. This tendency has two aspects: first, the trade in arms, and second, direct military intervention.
The Soviet Union, along with the United States, is one of the two biggest arms dealers at the present time. If the traffic in the means of war has reached the flourishing level it has today, one of the reasons is that the Soviet Union is fully involved in this activity which is doubly profitable: as a means of securing certain political positions and as a business operation which brings great profits. Here politics is mixed with business in order to serve a single aim, that of realizing the hegemonic ideas of the Soviet superpower.
On the other hand, the reality has shown in many cases that the trade in arms is the prelude to open military intervention and this, in particular, expresses the strengthening of the military tendency in Soviet foreign policy. Soviet expansion demands new horizons. Europe does not provide all the necessary space. Now Africa, Asia, the undeveloped countries are the focus of its aims. Angola, Ethiopia, and following them, Afghanistan are typical instances of intervention by force of arms and, undoubtedly, from the two former examples to the third, Afghanistan, we have an extension of the commitment of Soviet power, in which the Kremlin threw its own military forces directly into the field of battle.
The policy of the Soviet Union towards the “third world” has now assumed all the fundamental features which are characteristic of the imperialism of our time. As such, it constantly brings up new elements of tension and contrast, which give rise to great heat in the current international relations and greatly increase the danger of war.
Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech at the Moscow Meeting of the 81 parties 20 years ago was not only an act of unrivalled political courage. It marked a very important stage in the struggle against modern revisionism, as the most refined form of bourgeois opportunism and the most dangerous trend which has ever threatened Marxism-Leninism and the revolutionary movement of the working class in the second half of the 20th century.
When Comrade Enver Hoxha, twenty years ago, denounced the violation of the Leninist principles of foreign policy by the Khrushchevite revisionists, especially in regard to Albania, there were many who described this as almost a sacrilege and heresy, but the development of events proved that our Party was right, showed that its act in Moscow that November was not the fruit of “haste” or “hot-headedness”, as Khrushchev and company claimed, but was a correct assessment of the situation and an accurate prediction of what would occur later.
Today it can be seen clearly that the Soviet Union is emerging more and more as a second “international gendarme” Especially in the countries of Eastern Europe, but also within more remote limits which are included within the social-imperialist concept of “the sphere of the most direct interests”, the danger of brutal Soviet intervention is hanging over the heads of the peoples.
Another great merit of our Party is that it never ceased its struggle against the pacifist illusions about which the bourgeois and revisionist propaganda make such a clamour. Making a correct assessment of the real factors in the international life of the world today, our Party has continually stressed that the different slogans about “reduction of tension” and the “guarantee of peaces in Europe and the world, about the “limitation of armaments” and the “world without wars and without weapons” are products of bourgeois and revisionist concepts which pave the way to war precisely when there is most talk about peace.
All the activity of our Party and state in the field of foreign policy
has been carried out under the emblem of the principled struggle for
complete equality in international relations, for the full right which
belongs to every state, regardless of its potential or size, to take
part actively in international life and to have its say on the major
problems of world policy. By exercising this right extensively in
practice, either to defend the interests of the homeland, or to express
its own views with courage and dignity, without sparing profound
principled criticism in the field of foreign policy, our Party and
socialist state have made and are making a valuable contribution to the
development of the historic process of the emancipation of the smaller
states from the dictate and tutelage of the bigger ones. Indeed, one of
the distinctive features which give a real, concrete character of the
independence of the foreign policy of the People’s Socialist Republic
of Albania is precisely its active role in the struggle of world
historic importance, in which an ever greater number of states are
joining, to oppose the hegemonic policy of capitalist and revisionist
states, and especially of the two superpowers.
The Moscow Meeting of November 1960 was a stem ideological battle. Its proceedings can be divided into two separate phases:
The first phase is that of the beginning of the meeting, which was characterized by unreal calm. Khrushchev tried to create the impression that the meeting would proceed quietly, peacefully, without open attacks, but it was he who began the attack, of course, without mentioning anyone by name. With this tactic, writes Comrade Enver Hoxha in his book “The Khrushchevites”. Khrushchev “wanted to warn us: ‘Take your pick, either general attacks without any names, but with everybody understanding for whom they are intended, or if you don’t like it that way, we shall attack you openly’.”* Meanwhile, outside the conference hall, in the corridors, intrigues and backstage deals were hatched up, pressures, threats, blackmail and working on delegates in the Khrushchevite style continued.
The second phase is that of the open discussion and the exposure of Khrushchev and his group. The aim and tactics of our Party were: “We do not accept peace for the sake of peace in the communist movement; we do not permit errors to be covered up. We cannot allow the Moscow Meeting be a “meeting of revisionists” and right-wing pacifists: we shall fight to make it a militant, constructive, Marxist meeting. There is no other way.”* And the turning point in the Moscow Meeting was reached when Comrade Enver Hoxha made his historic speech.
This speech was a sharp sword aimed against the distortions of Marxism-Leninism by Khrushchev and his group. Defence of Marxism-Leninism, profoundly in the party spirit and with adherence to lofty proletarian class principles, was its essence.
Our Party had pledged: “We shall go to Moscow not with ten flags, but with only one, with the banner of Marxism-Leninism”. Therefore, the central idea of the speech at the Moscow Meeting was: “We must make no concessions over principles”: “He who puts his trust in the enemy will sooner or later be the loser.” Proceeding from these positions, this speech deals scientifically with problems of the revolutionary theory and practice, of the strategy and tactics in the international communist movement. Hitting right on the mark. Comrade Enver Hoxha showed that the origin of the evil in the ranks of international communism lay in the anti-Marxist theses of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And he fearlessly declared to the Moscow Meeting: “If anyone considers our struggle against revisionism, dogmatism or sectarianism, we say to him: take off your revisionist spectacles and you will see more clearly.”*
In his speech at the Moscow Meeting, Comrade Enver Hoxha consistently defended proletarian internationalism. To the revisionist pressure that by fighting against Khrushchev we were allegedly against the Soviet Union, he replied: “Our Party nuts the problem in this way: shall we pat the back of Khrushchev, this arch enemy of the Soviet Union, or should we say to the Soviet people: there is your enemy! We are sure that it is better to tell the Soviet people the reality, because in this way we carry out our internationalist duty.”* The time was past when the stand towards the Soviet Union, as the centre of the world revolution, was the criterion of the proletarian internationalism. With the advent to power of the Khrushchev group this criterion had to be applied in the opposite way: he who fought the Soviet revisionists and exposed their betrayal was an internationalist and a revolutionary. That is precisely what our Party did at the Moscow Meeting.
In this speech, the struggle for the defence of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism and the struggle for the defence of the lofty interests of our people and Homeland are combined in a single whole. At those critical moments of great importance for the fate of socialism and the international communist movement, our Party had to choose between two roads: first, the road of refusal to submit to the revisionist Soviet leadership, which was a rough road but the only one leading to victory; or second, the road of submission to the Khrushchevite traitors, a road strewn with flowers and laurels, but which led to disaster.
Our Party chose wisely and resolutely followed the former road. The latter road meant we would lose the independence of the Homeland. Therefore, at the Moscow Meeting Comrade Enver Hoxha said: “May we be cursed by our mother’s milk, may we be cursed ‘by the bread with which the Party and the people nurture us if we fail to defend the interests of our people.”*Under the motto, “by defending Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism we defend the interests of our people and Homelands he courageously and consistently unmasked the hostile intentions of the Khrushchevites towards the Party of Labour of Albania and its leadership which were: to “convince” the leadership of our Party of the “correctness” of the line which the Soviet Union followed in all directions; to discredit our Party, to present it as if it had left the rails of Marxism-Leninism and was not a socialist country; to force the Party of Labour of Albania to change the correct stand it maintained at Bucharest, to undermine its unity, to split and overthrow its leadership.
The exposure of these anti-Albanian aims and methods by our Party was not done with kid gloves, but with open criticism and ideological courage. The time had come to put the finger on the sore spot. “We could not call ourselves communists,” Comrade Enver Hoxha declared, “if we were to close our mouth in the face of distortions of Marxism-Leninism..., regardless of the fact that the violators and the deviators, in the concrete case, are the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”* And with his characteristic great courage he told Khrushchev at the Moscow Meeting: “It is not we who are acting like the Yugoslavs, but you who are using methods alien to Marxism-Leninism against our Party.”**
While Comrade Enver Hoxha, with great courage and iron logic waged a principled struggle and fearlessly unmasked the opportunist views and actions of the modem revisionists, Mao Zedong had long been currying favour with Khrushchev, while allegedly criticizing him in a figurative way: “You, Comrade Khrushchev, are like a beautiful lotus, nevertheless, you need the support of green leaves...” (From the speech to the Moscow Meeting, November 18, 1957, p. 11, CPA.)
The principled stand of our Party at the Moscow Meeting speaks of its great strength. It found this strength in Marxism-Leninism, in the steel unity of its ranks about which Comrade Enver Hoxha says: “We must safeguard our Party, safeguard it with love, tenderness, vigilance, because the arrows of the enemy are aimed against it.”*
Comrade Enver Hoxha’s speech at the Moscow Meeting was a stem Indictment against modem revisionism, in general, and against Khrushchevite revisionism, in particular. The revisionists were wrong in their calculations. The stone they picked up to throw at our Party fell on their own heads. In his letter to the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of our Party, Comrade Hysni Kapo wrote: “...When Comrade Enver Hoxha began to mention the facts, especially about what Khrushchev had done, all of them (Khrushchev and the other members of the Presidium of the CPSU – S.T.) turned red with anger, seemed revolted and bursting with indignation... The members of the other delegations listened with such fixed attention that there was not the slightest movement of their heads or hands.”*
These were long-range ideological “bombs”. The speech which Comrade Enver Hoxha delivered in Moscow became the talk of the day everywhere. When it was published it had great international repercussions. Many well-wishers expressed themselves in terms such as: “The temperament of the Albanian leadership in Moscow was necessary and indispensable”; “Your line is correct and we have great respect for your leadership”, “Stand firm, because if any danger threatens you, everyone will rise on his feet to defend Albania.” Articles in the world press had such titles: “Indictment by Mr. Enver Hoxha”; “An important document in the international communist movement”; “Invaluable aid from the Party of Labour of Albania”; “A document of great ideological, political and historical value”; “Every phrase of this speech carries the Marxist-Leninist truth, testifies to the indomitable courage of the Party and of the small Albanian people, who are so great in the history of the international communist and workers’ movement and before the entire world”; “We thank the glorious Albanian people, their heroic Party of Labour and the outstanding leader Enver Hoxha.” Our Party’s speech in Moscow was called “a bomb and a banner”: a bomb for the imperialists and the revisionists and a banner for the peoples and the proletariat. Its content remains so to this day.
Following this speech, the Khrushchevites hoped that the Albanian communists and the Albanian people would rise against their leadership. But the opposite occurred. The unity of the ranks of the Party and the Party-people unity were steeled as never before. A new revolutionary impetus to carry out the tasks burst out everywhere in our country. The historic speech delivered at the Moscow Meeting raised the reputation of our Party even higher.
Time has proved the correctness of this speech and the far-sightedness of Comrade Enver Hoxha. Khrushchev degenerated and was pushed off the political stage. His successors, Brezhnev and company, have suffered continual defeats. This is the fate of all revisionists of every hue. Their end is inglorious. Glory belongs only to Marxism-Leninism.
“Judging from the aims which the Khrushchevites sought to achieve,” says Comrade Enver Hoxha, “politically, ideologically and organizationally, the Bucharest Meeting was a Trotskyite, anti-Marxist, revisionist putsch. From the form of its organization, too, this meeting was a plot from start to finish.”*
The great merit of the leadership of the PLA is that it detected this anti-Marxist plot hatched up by Khrushchev and his henchmen from the very beginning, that it strongly opposed it, unmasked it and condemned it in the face of the plotters themselves.
There are many concrete reasons why the PLA was able to discover and oppose this revisionist plot, but they can be summed up as the imbuing of our Party with the principles and norms of Marxism-Leninism, its loyalty to these principles and norms, and its revolutionary courage to defend them at any time, before anyone.
The Soviet leadership unilaterally changed the purpose of the Bucharest Meeting, on which the participating parties had previously agreed, and arbitrarily replaced it with another purpose, that of attacking the CP of China, (we say arbitrarily, because the opinion of the PLA on this change was not sought and it was not told whether or not the other parties, which were to participate in the Meeting, had been consulted.)
This was followed by other equally arbitrary actions and methods: the material of only one side, the Soviet side, was handed out before the Meeting, when it is recognized that in order to pass judgement on a conflict, it is necessary to know the opinions of both sides; solidarity with the Soviet material was demanded there and then, when it is known that before a party can express its opinion it must have the necessary time to examine the problem, to discuss it in its leadership and then pronounce itself in a joint party meeting; impermissible pressure was exerted and unscrupulous attempts were made to ensure that the delegations participating in the meeting danced to the Soviet tune; the party facing the accusations was not asked to present its material and even when it wanted to speak, its time to do so was restricted to the minimum, because, as Khrushchev blissfully remarked: “We are communists but even God does not give us the strength to stand up to very long meetings. Besides, as a trade unionist, I ask the comrades to respect the working hours.” (Minutes of the Bucharest Meeting, CPA.)
Without going into the content of the problems raised at the meeting, just these actions and methods of the Soviet leadership at the Bucharest Meeting constituted a complete departure from the most elementary principles and norms of Leninist relations between parties. Therefore, for a party which considers and respects itself as a genuine Marxist-Leninist party, there was only one stand which it was possible to take towards such violations: strong and open opposition to those actions, regardless of who committed them. And this is exactly what the Party of Labour of Albania did in Bucharest: it did not allow the violation of the norms and rules of Marxism-Leninism, but rose in their defence, with heroism and courage.
In Bucharest, Khrushchev and his henchmen violated the Leninist principles and norms deliberately, consistently, and persistently in order to achieve a definite aim: to subjugate all the communist and workers’ parties of the world, and harness them firmly to their revisionist chariot, especially the most “disobedient” two, the Party of Labour of Albania and the Communist Party of China which, at that time, for different motives and reasons, had come out in opposition to the Khrushchevite leadership.
Judging the aim of the Khrushchevites and the ways they followed to achieve it, after the Bucharest Meeting, the PLA drew the only possible correct conclusion: what the Soviet leadership did in Bucharest was an anti-Marxist plot hatched up behind the scenes. Having reached this correct conclusion, the leadership of the PLA immediately defined the correct stand it had to maintain: no conciliation with the plot and the plotters, struggle to defend Marxism-Leninism and the correct line of our Party.
Another great merit of the PLA is that not just when the plot was put into operation, but even beforehand, it had sensed that the leadership of the CPSU might hatch up something dangerous and anti-Marxist in Bucharest, therefore it took all precautions to avoid slipping into any mistaken stand.
The first suspicions about the plot arose on June 4, 1960, when the ambassador of the Soviet Union in Albania, Ivanov, handed to Comrade Enver Hoxha the letter of the Soviet leadership of June 2. As is known, in this letter, Khrushchev suggested that a joint meeting of the sister parties be organized “for exchange of opinions on the problems of the present international situation” which had emerged “after the failure of the summit conference in Paris.” (Letter of the CC of the CPSU to the CC of the PLA, June 2, CPA.)
Comrade Enver Hoxha asked Ivanov two questions: “Will all the parties or only the parties of the socialist countries attend the meeting?” and “Have the Yugoslavs been invited to the meeting?” (Minutes of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the CC of the PLA, June 6, 1960, CPA.) As usual, the Khrushchevite ambassador did not reply, but with these two questions Comrade Enver Hoxha wanted to clarify the main question: Could it be that, through the Bucharest Meeting, under cover of discussion of the “international situation”, Khrushchev wanted to settle accounts with the parties which were not obedient to his line? Two days later, Comrade Enver Hoxha expressed this doubt again in a meeting of the Political Bureau and on that same day, June 6, 1960, he wrote in his diary; “Khrushchev’s aim is to deal with the serious Soviet-Chinese disagreements quickly and superficially in Bucharest, and by so doing he wants to prevent if he can, or diminish the value of the forthcoming Moscow Meeting. This is a sly and unacceptable manoeuvre on the part of Khrushchev.” Just 15 days later, this prediction was proved correct.
When the letter of the Soviet leadership of June 7 arrived, it became even clearer that Khrushchev was hatching up something sinister in Bucharest. In order to conceal any trace of the plot and to eliminate any doubts that might have arisen, Khrushchev, in this letter proposed, on the one hand, that the discussion in Bucharest should be only “to set the time for the Moscow Meeting” while on the other hand, as if in passing, he added that “the possibility of exchange of opinions is not ruled out.” The far-sighted and mature stand which the leadership of the PLA took in this new situation is well known: it was decided that Comrade Enver Hoxha should not go co Bucharest but the delegation would be headed by Comrade Hysni Kapo; he was to take part in the meeting and on behalf of the Political Bureau of the CC decide only on what had been agreed on, i.e., discussion of the place and time of the forthcoming meeting. If Khrushchev made any attempt to open up discussion on the major political and ideological problems which were worrying the communist movement and which had been manifested in various ways between the CP of the Soviet Union and the CP of China, our delegation would not only refuse to pronounce on them, but must also refuse to agree that these problems should be discussed at all. They would be dealt with at the coming meeting. The Bucharest Meeting should discuss only the place and time of that meeting. Our delegation, headed by Comrade Hysni Kapo, acted precisely as instructed and carried out the duty with which the Party had charged it with honour and glory.
What is the truth about the defence which the PLA made of the CP of China in Bucharest (and later in Moscow), or more precisely, what did our Party of Labour defend there?
In Bucharest and Moscow, the Party of Labour of Albania did not come out in defence of the Communist Party of China proceeding a priori from the fact that the Communist Party of China was being attacked. No, the reasons go much deeper, they have to do with principles.
First, as was stressed above, the ways and methods which the Soviet leadership used to attack a sister party (in this case it happened to be the Communist Party of China, just as it might well have been any other communist party of the former socialist camp or of any capitalist country), were wrong, improper, anti-Marxist. The PLA could not reconcile itself to these anti-Marxist ways and methods and this was precisely the essence of the PLA’s objections in Bucharest.
Second, the accusations of the Soviet leadership against the CP of China over the way it interpreted and dealt in practice with a series of fundamental issues of the international communist movement and the international situation were, at the same time, accusations directed against the PLA, and above all, were a rejection of Marxism-Leninism. The stand of the PLA over these fundamental problems was identical with the stand that the CP of China seemed to maintain at that time. (As to how and why it came about that the CP of China at that period had to maintain such stands, which in many instances appeared to be correct and Marxist-Leninist is another matter.) What must be stressed in the period under discussion, is the main fact that in connection with the stand which it maintained towards the problems which were discussed, the Party of Labour of Albania proceeded solely from the fact that this was what Marxism-Leninism taught it, this was how Marxism-Leninism, and consequently, any party which came out in defence of Marxism-Leninism, should be defended.
Time has fully confirmed all these things.
Another question might be asked: Why did the PLA refrain from pronouncing itself in Bucharest on the content of the problems under discussion?
The strength and ability of a party is displayed not only when it opposes an evil, but also when it clearly defines when, where and how this evil must be opposed, when it launches its attack, not at random, in a haphazard way, but at the right time and place, on the basis of a clear revolutionary tactic and strategy.
And this strength and ability of our Party was manifested in Bucharest.
It did not pronounce itself on the major problems there, because it correctly considered the Bucharest Meeting completely out of order, and to pronounce itself there, meant to fall into the trap set by Khrushchev, who wanted to get away with a superficial treatment of the major problems, whereas the traitor had to be attacked, not just by tripping him up, but with an earthquake which would crush him.
Not all the communist and workers’ parties were present at the Bucharest Meeting and the majority of the participating parties were not prepared for the problems which were put forward for discussion, were not represented by top-level delegations and were not authorized by their leaderships to discuss and take decisions on the major problems of the communist movement.
Likewise, the leadership of our Party could not pronounce itself at Bucharest without first examining, discussing and approving the speech in the Political Bureau and in the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party.
The Bucharest Meeting was to decide only the place and time of the coming meeting of all the parties. To alter this objective, even from the opposite standpoint, would mean to do what Khrushchev did from the positions of the counter-revolution. The leadership of the PLA did not make this mistake either.
Therefore, in Bucharest, the PLA defended the Leninist norms which regulate relations between parties, defended Marxism-Leninism and its correct line, and uncovered and exposed forcefully the Khrushchevite revisionist plot. In short, the Party of Labour of Albania only did its duty in Bucharest.
To achieve their political-strategic aims in regard to our country, the Soviet revisionists engaged in wide-ranging hostile activity in the military field, too. The struggle of our Party against this activity during the period 1956-1961 passed through three stages.
The first stage begins with the 20th Congress which replaced the Marxist-Leninist course with the revisionist course, and continues to the middle of 1960.
Although it appears at first glance as if everything was proceeding normally, as if the military aid to our country was not inadequate but, on the contrary, was provided correctly, deeper analysis shows that even then the aims and stands of the Soviet revisionists were not Marxist-Leninist.
On the one hand, the military aid accorded under the agreements signed after the Khrushchevite group came to power, was minimal, less than what we sought. And this was at a time when our Party had always kept its requests to the minimum, because it took account both of the needs of the Soviet Union itself and of its obligations on an international scale. On the other hand, during this period, the Khrushchevites did their utmost to introduce their revisionist spirit into our army in all fields, in its organization, structure and political-military training; In the life of the Party organs and organizations, in the character of the army cadres, etc.
The second stage begins with the ill-famed Bucharest Meeting and extends to the end of 1960. The delays and interruptions in supplying military materials, as well as the failure to carry out certain agreements for military constructions on time, began in July 1960.
The aim of the Soviet revisionists in taking these actions was to compel our Party to renounce its principled Marxist-Leninist stand and go to the Moscow Meeting “with complete unity of opinion”, as they said.
The third stage, the stage of the most ferocious attacks of the Khrushchevites and the heroic struggle of our Party to withstand these attacks, began after the Moscow Meeting, especially after the 4th Congress of the PLA. Losing all hope of inducing the PLA to depart from its correct Marxist-Leninist road and of bringing it to its knees, the Moscow chiefs went over to open hostile activity: they stopped all military supplies, committed provocations and tried to rob us of our military equipment. This stage ends with the departure of the Soviet armymen from our country and the breaking off of all contacts with them in the military field.
The events at and struggle over the Vlora naval base are vivid evidence of the social-imperialist policy of the Soviet revisionists in the military field and the fearless revolutionary stand of our Party.
The Vlora naval base was set up under a joint agreement reached between our Government and the Soviet Government in September 1957. This was followed by another agreement in May 1959, which envisaged the further extension and strengthening of the base. The Vlora base was set up to strengthen the defence capacity of our country, as well as to serve the common interests of the socialist camp.
Up till June 1960, the Soviet side honoured its obligations in the main, but immediately after the Bucharest Meeting it began to delay implementation of the agreement to hand over all the ships to our crews.
When they saw they could achieve nothing in this way, the Soviet revisionists tried to deny that our state owned the ships. “The submarines are not yours,” they declared. “They’re flying the Albanian flag... was only a political act on our part.”
What is the truth? The Albanian-Soviet agreements, signed in September 1957 and May 1959, stipulated clearly that on their arrival in Albania the ships would become the property of the PR of Albania and would be taken over by the Albanian crews, while the Soviet crews would remain merely as instructors, until the training of our crews was completed. And this was done in practice: the ships were taken over by our crews with official documents signed by both sides and all of them sailed under the flag of our Naval Fleet. A good number of the ships were handed over completely in the period 1957-1960 while in the remainder, training continued to enable their gradual transfer to the full control of our crews.
That was the situation. However, the Soviets deliberately confused the taking over of the ships according to the official agreements and documents with the taking over of the ships for autonomous navigation by our crews. The Soviets not only persisted in this stand, but also used various tactics and tricks to rob us of our ships. But they did not get away with any of these things because our Party and our navy men were very vigilant.
Having failed in all these attempts, the Soviet revisionists made their last move: they demanded that the Vlora base should be placed completely under their command.
In order to give this proposal the colour of a joint decision, they used the meeting of the Consultative Political Committee of the Warsaw Treaty held on the 28th and 29th of March that year, at which the decision was taken that “...only Soviet crews should serve in the warships of the fleet stationed at Vlora Bay, solely under a Soviet command which would be subordinate to the Commander-in-chief of the Joint Armed Forces of the Warsaw Treaty.” Thus, not only was the fact that the warships belonged to the PRA disregarded but, as Comrade Enver Hoxha has explained, it was demanded “that we agree to give up the Vlora base and its hinterland and allow it to be placed under the control of the Soviets.”*
The stand of our Party towards this decision was curt: the agreements signed by the two parties must be applied, otherwise all the Soviet military personnel must be withdrawn from Vlora. The Soviet revisionist, Admiral Kasatonov who came to Albania with the intention to take all the ships with him, was compelled to leave with the submarines in which Soviet crews served, robbing Albania of them and two other warships which were being refitted in Sevastopol.
Thus the events at the Vlora base came to an end. This was one of the most typical examples of brutal interference by the Soviet revisionists in the internal affairs of our country in the military field.
From analysis of the hostile activity of the Soviet revisionists in the military field certain conclusions emerge:
The relations of the Khrushchevites with us, the agreements signed and the military aid accorded to our country had hegemonic and expansionist ulterior motives. They regarded and dealt with our army and our country as a whole from the angle of the Soviet social-imperialist interests and strategy. As early as December 1956, Khrushchev openly expressed this aim when he declared to our Party delegation: “Albania is a small country but it has an important strategic position. If we were to build a submarine and missile base there, we could control the whole Mediterranean.”* Later, during his visit to Albania in 1959, this renegade concretized his idea in terms of the Vlora Bay, where he was struck by its strategic importance rather than its beauty. Meanwhile, in regard to Lake Butrint, he supported Malinovsky’s idea that “if an outlet to the sea were cut, a marvellous submarine base could be built here and Greece would be ours.”** Hence the aim of the Soviet revisionists was clear: to turn our country into a military base, into a bridgehead for aggression against other countries and peoples.
At the same time, the Khrushchevites tried to use their relations with us, and especially their military aid, as means of pressure and blackmail to impose their revisionist line on our Party. The alternative Khrushchev placed before the leadership of our Party on the eve of the Moscow Meeting, “either submit or we shall dismantle the Vlora base”. The pressure and declarations about expelling us from the Warsaw Treaty, the threats about the dangers which would allegedly threaten us if we broke with the Soviet Union, etc were the culmination of these pressures.
Their attempts to introduce the revisionist spirit in the ranks of our army showed that one of the Khrushchevites’ main aims was to turn it into a counter-revolutionary weapon to take the castle from within. However, our Party which had sensed the impending danger, long ago did not allow the ugly features which were flourishing in the Soviet army to develop in our army.
The Khrushchevites employed every kind of manoeuvre to achieve their aim. They came out in open support of the American-Soviet double agent, Teme Sejko, and his group which comprised the internal link in the plot against socialist Albania, which was discovered in 1960. As it came out later, the Khrushchevite revisionists had been working for a long time to prepare their agency within the ranks of our army, to support them in their hostile activity. The discovery of this agency, especially of the putschist group headed by Beqir Balluku, shows clearly what great danger threatened our independence and the cause of socialism in Albania.
With its characteristic foresight, our Party had taken timely measures to ensure the defence capacity of the country. As in every other field, on this issue, too, our Party did not base its hopes on foreign aid, but always relied on the internal forces. The breaking off of all relations with the revisionists did not weaken the defence of our country at all, but on the contrary strengthened it, increased the mobilization of the people and gave a new impulse to the development of scientific military thought. In this field, too, we solved and are solving all the problems ourselves. This is why today, 20 years after the break with the Soviet revisionists, we feel ourselves much stronger, politically, economically and militarily.
At the beginning of the 60’s, while waging a stern and relentless struggle against modem revisionism, selflessly exposing itself to the heat of its fire and its all-round pressure, the PLA also watched with concern and combated the opportunist, eclectic and contradictory stands and narrow nationalist interests of the Chinese leadership in regard to the Khrushchevite revisionists.
These stands had become apparent after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, when the Chinese leadership publicly supported Khrushchev in the campaign to denigrate Stalin, and moreover threw mud at Stalin’s work by declaring that “the Chinese communists have long and bitter experience of some of Stalin’s mistakes” (“Debat sur la ligne generale du Mouvement Communiste International” p. 132. Pekin 1965), when it unreservedly supported the condemnation of the “anti-party” group of Molotov, when it called the Yugoslav revisionists “good Marxists”, and was the first and only party leadership to invite them to its congress, the 8th, at which it put forward wrong anti-Marxist, revisionist theses, etc.
However, during and after the 60’s these stands became even more pronounced. We shall dwell briefly on some of these stands in the years 1960-1964.
1. The stand of the CP of China at the Bucharest and Moscow Meetings of the year 1960, was characterized by cowardice and marked vacillations; it did not reply to the Khrushchevite attack in the same tone but conducted a passive struggle; it denied the accusations but did not attack. At this meeting the Chinese delegation applied the tactic of “withdrawing the charges”.
This tactic was especially apparent at the sessions of the commission of 26 parties to draft and edit the joint declaration. Despite the fact that the struggle between the two opposing lines in the ranks of the communist and workers’ movement had become inevitable, the Chinese delegate insisted: “We must not start the polemics” (From the minutes of the meeting of the delegation of the PLA with the Chinese delegation, Moscow, October 1, 1960, CPA), “let them take the first step and we shall reply to them.”
Analysing these stands attentively, Comrade Enver Hoxha came to the conclusion that “the Chinese are not for taking the issue through to the end” and he put forward the immediate task of waging a persistent fight against the revisionist theses.
The stands of the Chinese were in the interests of the Khrushchevite revisionists, because, after the first unexpected setback in Bucharest, they wanted to gain time, to pull themselves together and consolidate their positions. But the militant stand of the PLA ruined their plans. At the Moscow Meeting modem revisionism was dealt a shattering blow. Nevertheless, the Chinese delegation displayed opportunist attitudes towards the mistaken assessments which remained in the Declaration, such as the assessment of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, about which the Chinese “argued” that “if we do not accept this we will come out before all the others as those responsible for the split,”* or towards the pacifist theses on the colonial system, about which the Chinese advised “we should not speak at all,” under the pretext that “we should not put ourselves in opposition to some parties of the newly liberated countries”. (From the minutes of the meeting of the delegation of the PLA with the Chinese delegation, Moscow, October 1, 1960, CPA).
2. The Meeting of 81 parties in Moscow marked the final break between the Marxist-Leninists and the Khrushchevite revisionists. After this the international communist and workers’ movement entered a new stage in which the struggle to destroy Soviet revisionism and the open polemics with it became historically necessary duties.
At the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev attacked the Party of Labour of Albania publicly and very viciously. The opportunist stand of the Chinese leadership also emerged there openly and publicly. Zhou Enlai, the head of the Chinese delegation, did not reply to the attack with attack but contented himself with one criticism, describing as incorrect only the public display of the contradictions between the two parties, and from the rostrum of that congress he called for stopping the polemics!
The tendency to hush things up, the “advice” and calls for stopping the open polemics, constitute the main characteristic of the Chinese stands at this stage. It was becoming clear that the Chinese leadership did not favour a resolute and principled struggle against the Khrushchevite revisionists. It justified this with its alleged aim of “avoiding a breach of unity” and not allowing Khrushchev to go over to the imperialists and “capitulate to them, because the Soviet peoples are involved”! In reply to the opportunist Chinese stand, the PLA launched the revolutionary slogan: “In no way should the polemics cease. Fire to the end against the Soviet revisionists!”
3. After the Chinese leadership failed in its open attempt to stop the polemics, its demands for reconciliation with the Khrushchevites became very insistent, especially during 1963. Although the time called for finding the most effective methods of stern struggle against revisionism, Mao Zedong and company plunged deeper and deeper into the opportunist quagmire. Their stands assumed an accentuated eclectic character and were expressed in out-and-out conciliatory and demagogic slogans.
Behind such slogans as “we must take the initiative,” “keep the banner of unity in our hands”, etc the Chinese leadership, behind the back of the PLA and without consulting it, went so far as to propose to the chiefs of the Kremlin a meeting “to iron out the differences”! Juggling with the Maoist philosophy, such as “We have two hands to deal with a man who has made mistakes, one to fight him, the other to unite with him” (Mao Zedong, Selected Works, vol.5. p. 515, Engl. ed., Beijing 1977), the Chinese leadership went even further down its opportunist road. It launched the slogan of the creation of “an anti-imperialist front including the revisionists”. This was the direction in which the CP of China was heading. “To form an ‘anti-imperialist front with the modern revisionists’,” wrote Comrade Enver Hoxha at that time, “means that the Marxist-Leninists must turn into Don Quixotes and wage a ‘stern struggle against windmills’..., a ‘struggle’ against imperialism which has no Marxist-Leninist flavour either politically or ideologically.”*
4. Manoeuvres to divert attention from the struggle against modern revisionism and political short-sightedness constitute another characteristic of the Chinese stands of that period.
In the summer of 1964, at the moment when the communists and the revolutionaries should have been concentrating the fire of their heavy artillery on the great betrayal by the Khrushchevite revisionists, Mao Zedong suddenly raised territorial claims against the Soviet Union, thus openly displaying his great-state chauvinism. Moreover, with this action China, which posed as a socialist country, incited war in Europe, neutralized the ideological struggle against the Khrushchevite betrayal, and unjustly attacked Stalin.
5. Pragmatism runs right through the stands of the Chinese leadership: everything had to be subordinated to its policy, though this might be in opposition to Marxism-Leninism and to the detriment of socialism. This became manifest especially after the downfall of Khrushchev. While Moscow advertised this as a measure proceeding from “strict adherence to Leninist principles”, Beijing described it as a “radical change in the policy of the Soviet leadership”. In fact it was more a tactic of the revisionists to avoid being totally discredited. The Chinese leadership attempted to exploit the fall of Khrushchev for its own ends. Deluding himself that the new chiefs in Moscow would become his vassals, Mao Zedong not only hailed their advent to power, but hastened to send Zhou Enlai as the “victor” to talk with them “about the struggle against the common enemy – imperialism”.
Impelled by their petty-bourgeois megalomania and their spirit of great-state and great-party chauvinism, the Chinese leadership tried to impose this stand on our Party, too, since this was allegedly a “favourable occasion to extend the hand of friendship” to the Soviets! The PLA not only did not go to “Canossa”, but in a comradely way, it advised the Chinese leaders not to take such a mistaken step and called on them to continue the principled struggle “until revisionism is finally buried as an ideology”. (Letter of the CC of the PLA addressed to the CC of the CP of China, November 5, 1964, CPA.) Nevertheless, Zhou Enlai went to Moscow where he suffered utter defeat.
In the conditions of that time, Mao Zedong’s China could not come out openly with its objectives, because it was impeded by a number of factors.
First, it had put on the cloak of a “socialist” country. The Chinese leadership needed time to make the change. It had to work on the ordinary people in order to weaken and eliminate their support for socialism.
Second, as a result of Mao Zedong’s long-nurtured opportunist vacillations, the internal situation in China had still not been stabilized. As is known, during and after the 60’s there were many upheavals in China. The traditional struggle for power among the different clans had become more acute. Thus, the Chinese leadership had to involve itself more with the in-fighting in its ranks than with the concrete implementation of its strategic plan.
Third, with the closed-door policy it followed, it had still not managed to break through the diplomatic encirclement. The capitalist states had isolated it and this isolation continued until they were convinced that China was not “communist” and “red”, as it claimed to be.
Fourth, the Chinese leadership had not created its political and economic reserve, had not yet penetrated into the Asian, African and Latin-American countries. Without such a reserve, it could not strengthen itself. Taking the share “due to it” in this field was the main objective of the Chinese “theory” of “three worlds”, which was to be noisily publicized in later years.
Fifth, it had not yet created and consolidated its alliance with the USA. The exacerbation of its relations with the Soviet Union, or the break with it, under these conditions, would have resulted in China’s being deprived of the aid of which it was in great need. This accounts for the Chinese tactics of “sitting on the fence” in the relations with the Soviet revisionists.
At that time, the PLA had not yet reached the conclusion that these stands were the result of the general line of the CP of China, therefore, in a comradely way, through party channels, and when necessary, even in the press, but without mentioning names, it criticized these mistakes and drew the attention of the Chinese leadership to them.
Later, however, when the Chinese leaders came out openly with their policy of rapprochement and collaboration with imperialism, the PLA became fully convinced that even in their former stands they had not proceeded from the revolutionary objective of defending Marxism-Leninism and world communism, but from their narrow nationalist, chauvinistic and hegemony-seeking interests. It was not long after this that the PLA unmasked and sternly combated this other variant of revisionism, just as it did the Soviet variant.
COMPLETE INTEGRATION OF THE SOVIET ECONOMY INTO THE WORLD CAPITALIST ECONOMY
The Khrushchevites have established extensive links of all-round integration with the world capitalist economy. They include reciprocal movements of commodity-capital, money-capital and productive capital. In this two-way process, “while American, German, Japanese and other capital has penetrated deeply into the Soviet Union, Soviet capital is being exported to other countries and, in various forms, in merging with the local capital”.* Here we dwell on analysing these two aspects of the process of the complete integration of the Soviet Union into the world capitalist economy.
1. The deep and massive penetration of Western finance capital, in the form of credits, capital investments and technology, into the economy of the Soviet Union and its Comecon dominions.
This process, with all its negative consequences, is the materialization of the capitalist degeneration of the socio-economic order in the Soviet Union, of the flirtation of the Khrushchevites with imperialism, of the so-called policy of detente and Khrushchevite peaceful co-existence with imperialism, serving the implementation of a counter-revolutionary joint strategy. This policy and the processes of bourgeois-revisionist integration are founded on a definite economic base and, both the alliances and rivalries of the superpowers reflect their common and opposing material interests in the economic and territorial re-division of the world between them. Comrade Enver Hoxha points out, “the capitalist interests of the two sides are so great that in particular situations they override all their frictions, rivalries and clashes.”*
On the economic plane, these capitalist interests aimed at maximum profit express, on the one hand, the economic needs of the capitalist West to lighten the burden of the crisis by unloading its consequences on the markets and peoples of the revisionist East. On the other hand, these interests are expressions of the economic needs of the Soviet Union in order to build up and modernize its economic-military potential as a superpower without loss of time, by taking advantage of the more advanced equipment and technology and the available financial and material means of the monopolies and the older imperialist states.
The Soviet revisionists present their undisguised integration with world capitalism as a “creative application of the Leninist teachings about relations between states with different social systems. Marxism-Leninism does not rule out foreign economic relations nor does it advocate autarchy and self-isolation. However, it is against the application of capitalist principles and methods in these relations and. moreover, cannot be reconciled with the integration of a country, which poses as socialist, into the world capitalist economy.
The integration of the Comecon member countries into the world capitalist economy includes the whole system of economic relations between private and state monopolies of the capitalist West and the state monopolies of the revisionist countries, from simple purchase-and-sale operations to the setting up of joint enterprises in the spheres of production, services and circulation. The Soviet revisionist press admits that half of the 800 biggest multi-national monopolies of the West have regular relations with the countries of the so-called socialist family (Myezhdunarodnaya Zhiznj, No. 9, 1979, p. 33). The developed capitalist countries control 30 per cent of the foreign trade of the Soviet Union which in the past five years has incurred a deficit in trade with them in excess of 10 billion rubles.
The strengthening of the links of the Soviet economy with the West is accompanied with an ever greater extension of non-mercantile relations, aimed at getting credits and technology from the West in return for raw materials and finished products. These relations, ranging from the so-called compensatory agreements and productive cooperation to the setting up of capitalist-revisionist joint enterprises, result in the merging of the cycles of the reproduction of the capital of both sides in a single complex movement, important elements of which already cannot function independently. These new links which assumed large-scale development especially in the 70’s, completed the integration of the economy of the Soviet Union and its satellites into the world capitalist system. The Soviet press admits that there are now 400 East-West joint enterprises and that more than 1,300 “compensatory agreements” are in operation in Europe alone (“Myezhdunarodnaya Zhiznj”, No. 4, 1979, p. 12).
At the beginning of 1979, more than 600 major economic complexes of the gas, chemical, petro-chemical, coal, iron, paper and cellulose, ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgical industries in the Soviet Union were working to provide the West with “compensation”, amounting to 30 to 60 per cent of their annual production, in return for technology and credits received. Such agreements, involving colossal amounts of reciprocal supplies, will be in force until the end of the century (Myezhdunarodnaya Zhiznj, No. 7, 1979, p. 15).
As a result, the revisionist Comecon member countries are in debt to Western imperialism to the tune of 75 billion dollars, and the Soviet Union, owing 19 billion dollars, is one of the biggest debtors.
2. The expansion of the Soviet imperialist bourgeoisie in the world capitalist economy and the merging of its capital with international finance capital.
The Khrushchevites became partners of the Western financial oligarchy in the exploitation of the peoples of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, because in this way they were able to pursue their ambitions to compete with imperialism in the exploitation of all the peoples of the world.
This aggressive expansionist activity has made the Soviet Union one of the neo-colonialist superpowers of our time, has resulted in the flow of capital from the Soviet monopoly state, into the channels of international finance capital, its integration into the movement of the latter, the creation of separate and joint organisms of expansion towards the developing countries and the merging of Soviet capital with the capital of the compradore bourgeoisie of the countries which have fallen under the influence of Moscow.
As early as the mid-fifties the Khrushchevites began to apply their enslaving “program of economic aid” to the former colonial countries, the strategic objective of which was to free the new states from their “ties of exploitation by the Western metropolises” and place them in the orbit of the new Soviet metropolis which was rising. Brezhnev and his associates carried this program of neo-colonialist “aid” even further, adapting it better to the needs and productive capacities of the “socialist community” and the deficits and surpluses of the economy of the Soviet Union.
In this context the problems of the “internationalization of Soviet economy”, the development and encouragement of the process of the integration of the undeveloped countries into the “socialist community” and opposition to the monopoly positions of the Western imperialist powers in those countries from the positions of a new superpower, became ever more pressing in the aggressive economic foreign policy of the Soviet Union. In this policy the stress is quite openly placed on the need for “perfecting organisms and practices to ensure raw materials in short supply and hard currency from the developing countries”, for “the powerful stimulus which these countries give the development of the Soviet economy”, and “strengthening of the potentials of Soviet social-imperialism, which is extending the sphere of its claims to “legitimates and “vital” imperialist interests further and further beyond its own national borders and those of Eastern Europe.
The fundamental concept of this revisionist policy is the thesis of a “single, inter-dependent world economy”, in which, allegedly as a consequence of the scientific and technical revolution, the “global problems” which affect “vital interests” of every state, have become particularly acute and can be solved only in the context of a new system of “tri-partite relations”: of the Soviet Union, the West and the “third worlds. In essence, these “global problems” which are linked with the “objective need” of the undeveloped countries for the “assistance” of industrialized countries, are nothing but the global interests of world imperialism in its drive for new markets and spheres of investment, to plunder the natural assets of other countries, to maintain the neo-colonialist laws in world trade, etc in which Soviet social-imperialism is demanding its share as a superpower. The Soviet propaganda admits this when it points out that in finding a solution to these “global problems” no country, including the Soviet Union, can remain “non-aligned”.
Day by day Comecon is being manipulated by Moscow for the needs of the integration and “internationalization” of the Soviet economy. The Soviet press writes that the division of labour within Comecon “is being carried out in the context of plans for a division of labour on a world scale... That is why the links between Comecon and the ‘third world’ assume great importance in an international economy in which the big economic unions play a role of first-rate importance.” (Vnjeshnyaya Targovlya, No. 10, 1978 and Voprosy Ekonomiki, No. 9, 1977.) In the enslaving agreements which the Soviet Union has concluded so far with 64 undeveloped countries, there are stringent stipulations about the burden of material and financial obligations the other members of Comecon have to shoulder in order to implement the expansionist plans of the Kremlin, in conformity with the narrow specialization of each of them according to the “socialist division of labour” within Comecon.
However, Soviet social-imperialism is more and more carrying out its expansion in the undeveloped countries outside the framework and structures of Comecon, This is clearly apparent from the increasing number of joint ventures of the Soviet and Western monopoly enterprises in the world economy. As the 1978 agreement concluded between the Soviet Union and German imperialism proves, the setting up of joint companies in third countries is one of the principal clauses of the agreements on inter-state cooperation between Moscow and the Western countries. At the beginning of 1977, Soviet state monopolies were participating in 84 international monopolies or partnerships with the West, 15 of which were operating in the undeveloped countries.
The picture of the complete integration of the Soviet Union into the
world capitalist system is made more complete if account is taken of
the presence and activity of the financial, economic and
technical-administrative organisms of Soviet state monopoly capitalism
in all the business centres of world imperialism, in all the key points
of the web of the neo-colonialist spider which sucks the blood of the
peoples, in the money-markets and stock-exchanges of New York. London,
Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, Zurich, Singapore, Johannesburg, Brasilia, in
the dollar and Eurocurrency markets, etc. To this picture should be
added the inter-state agreements and the “gentlemen’s agreements”
between the financial oligarchies of East and West on the basis of
personal union. Suffice it to mention the links between Brezhnev and
Hammer (chief of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation) which are only a
small part of the vast system of connections which the Khrushchevites
have built up on the Khrushchev-Agnelli model.
The transformation of the Soviet Union into an imperialist power, and the implementation by it of an aggressive, expansionist, hegemonic and predatory policy towards the other peoples, inevitably brought changes in the nature and aims of the Council of Mutual Economic Aid (Comecon). Exposing the capitalist nature and the exploiting, predatory character of the Soviet Union in Comecon, Comrade Enver Hoxha has said: “Comecon has been transformed into a revisionist organization for the cooperation of the industry and many other branches of the economy of its member countries. This organization is ruled by the Soviet revisionists, who, by means of it, aim to exploit and control the economies of the other member countries in their own hegemonic interests, to force them to develop in the direction they want, to tie up their economies in such a way that, together with this false socialist cooperation, they dominate these states politically too.”*
This is the concrete implementation of Brezhnev’s fascist theory of “limited sovereignty” in the economic field too. The Moscow revisionists try to camouflage this exploiting practice with their unscrupulous demagogy about the “struggle against autarchy” and make a big noise about the alleged necessity of “economic integration”, specialization, cooperation, etc the basis of which is the subordination of national interests to “internationalist” interests, i.e. the interests of the Soviet Union.
“Co-ordination” of economic policy through all the phases of the cycle of reproduction has been made the central point of the neo-colonialist program, described as a “complex program of socialist integration” of the Comecon member countries. In the framework of Comecon the Soviet revisionists have created supra-state organs such as the executive council and various commissions and committees for the coordination of activities in the main economic and financial fields, which operate according to the interests of the Soviet Union. In order to justify their open violation of the sovereignty of other countries, they clamour about the so-called international socialist property”, which they present as the highest form of socialist property, taking no account at all of the national and state distinctions created during a long historical process.
Lenin pointed out that, “National and state distinctions exist among peoples and countries – and these will continue to exist for a very long time to come, even after the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established on a world-wide scale.”* Therefore, the theorizings of the Soviet revisionists about their alleged socialist integration, or the internationalization of socialist property, are in flagrant opposition to the teachings of the classics of Marxism-Leninism.
In practice, the typically neo-colonialist policy of the Soviet revisionists has led, step by step, to changes in the structure of the economies of the Comecon member countries in the direction of increasing their dependence on the social-imperialist Soviet Union. Under the pretext of “eliminating parallelisms”, “utilizing only rich resources”, etc the Soviet revisionists have deprived the vassal countries of the possibility of producing many products and have created a situation in which they are dependent on the Soviet Union, not only for raw materials, but also for semi-processed and finished products, equipment and technology. As a result, the economies of the other Comecon member countries have developed one-sidedly. For example, through “reconstructions”, such big trusts as SKODA, CKD, TESLA, etc of Czechoslovakia, renowned for the production of heavy machinery, automobiles, electric equipment, etc have been forced to work mainly to meet the demands of the market of the Russian metropolis. Likewise, allegedly in the context of “specialization”, Hungary has been compelled to gear its “Red Star” plant in Budapest mainly to the production of tractor brakes, although it had long been producing complete tractors. Now the needs of Hungarian agriculture for tractors are fulfilled with imports from the Soviet Union. It is understandable that such restrictions imposed on the structure of the economies of the Comecon countries can only result in slowing down the all-round development of these countries and creating many difficulties and anomalies for them.
The aim of the Soviet revisionists to impose a course of one-sided development on the Comecon countries, is also apparent from their efforts to hinder the full-cycle development of the new branches which these countries are allowed to establish. A typical instance of this is the prohibition of the development of the aluminium industry in Hungary, although it is rich in bauxite. Under the plans of “cooperation and specializations which the Soviet revisionists have imposed on Comecon, this industry must be developed in the Soviet Union which secures the raw materials from Hungary, while the latter must meet its needs for aluminium products by importing them from the Soviet Union! This year, 330,000 tons of bauxite (1.5 times more than 6 years ago) will be transported thousands of kilometres to the smelting plants in the Soviet Union. In the same way, Poland’s metallurgical plants are completely dependent on raw materials and energy imported from the Russian metropolis. It is estimated that this revisionist country does not cover even half the cycle of production in this branch from its internal resources. On the other hand, under Comecon agreements Poland is obliged to deliver the overwhelming bulk of what it produces from Soviet raw materials or in the plants constructed on Soviet credits, to the Soviet Union. (Apart from other things, Poland has delivered to the Soviet Union tens of complete plants for the production of sulphuric acid, over 110.000 rail wagons etc, etc.) A typical example of complete dependence on Soviet social-imperialism and integration into the Soviet capitalist economy is Bulgaria, whose industry has been set up, either on the basis of Soviet raw materials, or as part of the industry of the Russian metropolis, to which it is obliged to send a considerable proportion of its products for finishing. As a result of this dependence, Bulgaria is indebted to the Soviet Union to the tune of 2 billion rubles!
According to the so-called complex program of economic integration, nearly all the Comecon member countries will jointly finance the construction of various projects in the Soviet Union. During the current five-year plan, for example, according to figures published by the Soviet revisionists themselves, on the basis of “coordination” within Comecon. or bilateral agreements, more than 1,000 complete sets of equipment for industrial projects, including equipment for six urea plants with an annual capacity of 6 million tons, and 21 sulphuric acid plants with a total capacity of 10 million tons a year, 46 plants for the food processing industry, etc, etc, will be delivered to the Soviet Union. According to Comecon decisions, these plants and combines become the property of the country in which they are built, hence the immense benefits to the Soviet social-imperialists from such exploiting relations with the other revisionist countries dependent on them are very clear.
The investments or credits from the Soviet revisionists within the framework of the Comecon, for the other countries of this capitalist grouping, also mainly serve their one-sided development, are intended to achieve the best possible adaptation of the economies of the vassal countries to the Soviet economy. These credits are accorded by the International Bank of Investments, through which, amongst other things, the Soviet revisionists deepen the economic dependence of the vassal countries and their enslavement by the Russian metropolis.
The new Soviet bourgeoisie also exploits the Comecon member countries and makes colossal profits from non-equivalent exchanges, by exercising its dictate over prices, etc. For example, the prices at which the Soviet revisionists sell iron ore to the revisionist countries of Eastern Europe are 10-15 per cent higher than world market prices, those for Soviet machinery are 1.4 to 2.1 times higher, etc. However, the machinery imported from the German Democratic Republic is priced by the Soviet revisionists 25-30 per cent below world market prices. This non-equivalent exchange is even more apparent in the agricultural products which the Russian metropolis imports from its Comecon vassals. As a result of this unscrupulous robbery, during the 8th Five-year Plan alone, the Soviet bourgeoisie secured a supplementary profit of 3 billion 500 million rubles.
Whereas in the past the Soviet revisionists clamoured that within an organization such as Comecon, which represents “the model of equal internationalist relations among socialist countries”, the price fluctuations on the capitalist market must not influence the price policy, as soon as the effect of the energy crisis became apparent on this market, they dropped this thesis and went over to concrete actions. Thus, beginning from January 1975, the Soviet Union raised the price of oil to the Comecon member countries although it was always higher than the price at which the Soviet revisionists sold oil to the capitalist countries, and despite the fact that the revisionist countries of Comecon have invested their own capital for the development of the oil and gas industry in the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Soviet revisionists began to reduce the quantities of oil delivered to those countries, with the aim of increasing the amount sold on the capitalist markets for convertible currency. According to figures published by the revisionists themselves, the Soviet Union’s oil deliveries to the Comecon member countries in 1980, were 5 million tons less than in 1979.
Such a predatory practice has grave consequences for the economies and finances of the member countries of the Comecon. Solely because of the rise in the price of Soviet oil in 1975, which of course, was not accompanied by increased prices for the commodities the Soviet revisionists buy from the other revisionist countries, the Comecon member countries had to pay the social-imperialist Soviet Union an additional one billion rubles.
The neo-colonialist policy of the new Tzars of the Kremlin is the cause of ever more open contradictions in the ranks of this capitalist grouping. Faced with this savage plunder and unable to maintain some sort of internal balance to stop the outburst of the anger of their working masses against this double capitalist plunder and exploitation, the cliques of the revisionist countries are forced, from time to time, to express their discontent, their disapproval, or even open opposition to their Moscow patrons. Time after time Soviet magazines such as “Voprosy Filosofii”, “Voprosy Ekonomiki”, “Mezhdunarodnaja Zhiznj”, “Ekonomicheskaja Gazeta”, etc have pointed out: “there are acknowledged difficulties... in the process of economic integration and cooperation)”, “the process of economic integration in the framework of Comecon is linked with a series of objective difficulties”, or even more openly, that “a certain discrepancy of interests”, as well as “objective contradictions”, etc exist among the Comecon member countries.
One of the main factors aggravating the international situation today is the rivalry and collaboration between the two biggest imperialist powers of our time – the United States of America and the Soviet Union. The present international situation is complicated and fraught with insecurity, political and military tensions, armed intervention and conflicts, because of the deepening of all aspects of the general crisis of capitalism and the exacerbation of contradictions between the imperialist powers, in the first place, between the United States and the Soviet Union. In these conditions, when these two superpowers are being hit by the crisis, the revolutionary and liberation struggles of the peoples and the efforts of newly independent countries to strengthen their national independence and sovereignty, when their alliances and political-military groupings are being eroded by many contradictions and differences and shaken to their very foundations, their hegemony is becoming weaker and weaker and their spheres of neo-colonialist domination are constantly shrinking. This, undoubtedly, further exacerbates the contradictions, the rivalry and the squabbling between them over spheres of influence and the efforts of each of them to weaken the other’s positions and strengthen its own. The Soviet Union misses no opportunity to fill the eventual vacuum, temporary breaches created in the spheres of the hegemony and influence of the United States of America, as a result of the revolutions and peoples’ liberation struggles.
To this end, it is striving to exploit the liberation movements or efforts of these countries for independence, national sovereignty and democratic transformations, in order to put them under its control, as it did in Angola; it is trying to extend its influence by supporting regimes with progressive and socialist labels, or by stirring up disturbances in a country through pro-Soviet forces and then intervening militarily to place that country under its control, as it did in Afghanistan.
However, this does not mean in the least that the United States is constantly on the retreat, abandoning important strategic positions under the pressure of Soviet expansion, as the Chinese revisionists and others claim. On the one hand, the United States is endeavouring to repair the breaches, to regain its lost positions and capture new ones, while on the other hand, it is employing all ways and means to curb the expansion of the Soviet Union and undermine its positions wherever they are weak and unstable.
It is these irreconcilable imperialist interests and contradictions, this fierce struggle for spheres of influence, this unprecedented contest to extend their hegemony and domination over the whole world, which bring the superpowers into confrontation and collision with each other. They have made their military, political and diplomatic interference, economic, ideological and cultural aggression one of the means most frequently employed, not only to extend their expansion and hegemony, but also to re-establish the “balance of power” between them, when it is upset or to prevent its being upset in those zones about which they have already reached agreement.
In Europe, through mutual concessions and compensations, they have tried to preserve a so-called “territorial status quo”, the unalterability of the borders between European countries, or more precisely, of the borders of their spheres of influence on this continent, through the use of force. However, this agreement on the status quo in Europe, like any other imperialist agreement, is only temporary and by no means puts an end to their rivalry. At present the United States and the NATO bloc are striving to weaken the positions of the Soviet Union within its bloc, by encouraging the processes of pro-Western liberalization and a gradual, evolutionary “down-grading” of its hegemony, as they are doing in Poland and elsewhere. For its part, along with the military measures it is taking to strengthen its domination over its own satellites, the Soviet Union misses no opportunity to weaken the hegemony of the United States in NATO, by stirring up contradictions and disagreements with its allies over a number of questions – ranging from economic, financial and political issues up to that of the stationing of US medium-range nuclear rockets, etc. In the context of their rivalry for domination in Europe, both superpowers are stepping up their military and political pressure there. This struggle to weaken each other’s hegemonic positions in their alliances, political, economic and military blocs and groupings, this constant military and political confrontation, is accompanied with the build-up of their troops and new armaments, with the stepping up of military manoeuvres and all-round preparations for war. It is steadily raising the tension and insecurity in Europe, adding to the threats to the freedom and independence of the European peoples and increasing the danger of war on this continent.
Since 1975, the two superpowers have been engaged in particularly fierce rivalry for domination and hegemony, for a redivision of their spheres of influence in the so-called “third worlds, especially in Africa. On that continent the two superpowers are locked in a relentless struggle for hegemony. They hatch up intrigues and create very grave situations for the peoples and countries of Africa, situations which they then exploit in order to intervene and establish their influence in this or that country. The present objective of the Soviet Union in Africa is to restrict the domination of the USA there, to take from it important positions and bases in those countries where there is an upsurge in the resistance to American neo-colonialist economic, political and cultural domination.
In the Middle East, the two superpowers are locked in one of the fiercest struggles ever waged for domination in that region, in order to gain control of the oil resources and the routes over which the oil is transported. This is most obvious today in the many political and diplomatic machinations and pressures resorted to by the USA in order to regain the neo-colonialist positions it has lost in Iran, and by the Soviet Union in order to increase its influence and gain positions in that country. The Soviet attack in Afghanistan is synchronized and coordinated with the events in Iran. Likewise, the conflict which broke out recently between Iraq and Iran is the result of the fierce rivalry, plots and intrigues of the two superpowers vying for spheres of influence in the Middle East. The grave situation created in that region shows clearly that the two superpowers are still far from the establishment of a “balance of power and interests” in the Middle East, therefore, the struggle between them for hegemony will be ever fiercer and may even lead to a more wide-spread war.
These recent facts are further proof of the correctness of the thesis of the 7th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania, that “...both when the superpowers work together and when they quarrel, it is others who pay the bill. The collusion and rivalry between the superpowers are the two sides of a contradictory reality, important expressions of the same imperialist strategy to rob the peoples of their freedom and to dominate the world.”*
Today, the rivalry and contest for hegemony between the Soviet Union and the United States have obviously taken priority over their collaboration and are becoming ever more implacable and aggressive also, due to the emergence of new aspirants to expansion and hegemony. In his book “Imperialism and the Revolution” Comrade Enver Hoxha says, “now in addition to the Soviet-American rivalry for world domination, there are the expansionist claims of Chinese social-imperialism, the predatory ambitions of Japanese militarism, the strivings of West-German imperialism for vital space, the fierce competition of the European Common Market, which has turned its eyes towards the old colonies.”*
There is no doubt that, in their struggle for world domination, the Soviet Union and the United States will try, on the one hand, to exclude the new imperialist aspirants to a redivision of the world from the contest, while endeavouring, on the other hand, to use them against each other. This is what the United States is currently doing with China and Japan with which it is setting up a militarist type axis, to be used as a barrier to restrain and weaken the expansion of the Soviet Union in Asia and Oceania.
This position of the superpowers, which is expressed in their efforts to predominate over all the other imperialist aspirants to a redivision of the world and also to predominate over each other, sets the one against the other and also imposes on them the need to collaborate and reach accord in certain fields, when this is in conformity with their interests and strategic aims. Therefore, no matter how circumscribed the sphere of collaboration between them, the two superpowers will strive to find “new forms of collaboration in divergence”. Such is the attempt to maintain a “balance of military power”, especially to prevent one from achieving superiority over the other in the field of strategic weapons. The keeping open of this channel for collaboration, the SALT talks, imposes on them the need to seek ways and possibilities to held a dialogue and reach agreement on other problems, too.
In the present world situation, when the crisis of imperialism is becoming ever more profound, making all its contradictions more acute, the rivalry over spheres of influence and the fierce contest for hegemony between the two superpowers continually gives rise to local frictions and armed conflicts which are fraught with the danger of gradually turning into a general war. “When the superpowers fail to achieve their predatory interests through economic, ideological and diplomatic means, when the contradictions become exacerbated to the most acute level, when the agreements and “reforms” prove unable to resolve these contradictions then the war between them begins. Therefore, the peoples, whose blood will be shed in this war, must strive with might and main not to be caught unawares, to sabotage the predatory inter-imperialist war so that it does not assume world-wide proportions, and if they are unable to achieve this, to turn it into a liberation war and win.”*
This is a great Leninist teaching which shows the only way to oppose imperialist alliances, blocs and axes and the wars which they prepare, in order to make their counter-revolutionary, warmongering aims and strategy unrealisable, to avert the dangers which are threatening mankind, including the outbreak of a new world war.
The Warsaw Treaty plays a prime role in the implementation of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, just as NATO serves the implementation of the strategy of American imperialism. The historical facts and the practical political and military activity of the military pacts of the two imperialist superpowers have fully confirmed the correctness of the analysis and assessment of the Party of Labour of Albania that “NATO and the Warsaw Treaty, together with the bourgeois and revisionist armies of the member countries, provide the main protection for the capitalist and revisionist systems and the greatest armed force to attack the revolution and socialism and the freedom and independence of the peoples.. . NATO and the Warsaw Treaty have been and still are instruments for the preparation and unleashing of war.”*
As is known, the Warsaw Treaty was concluded in May 1955. At that time it was considered necessary for the socialist camp and especially for its European member countries, to conclude a joint defence treaty to face the real threat posed by the aggressive NATO bloc, headed by American imperialism.
The correct stands which the Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian Government have maintained towards the Khrushchevite betrayal are known worldwide. The well-founded doubts of our Party about the real aims of the Soviets in the Warsaw Treaty were confirmed within a relatively short time. While all the other member countries of the Warsaw Treaty followed the revisionist road of Khrushchev and fell into the trap he set, our country did not fall prey to the Khrushchevites. On the contrary, at the right time and place, it continually exposed the anti-Marxist, counter-revolutionary activity of the Soviet leadership until it freed itself from all the obligations it had undertaken when it signed the Warsaw Treaty, which never fulfilled the mission for which it was created.
The counter-revolutionary transformation of the Soviet Union into an imperialist superpower could not but be followed by a radical change in the character of the Warsaw Treaty, and as our Party has pointed out, the causes of this change... must be conceived as being primarily of an ideological character and not merely of a procedural or organizational character. The source of the degeneration of the Warsaw Treaty is the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”*
As a result of the policy pursued by the Soviet Union in the Warsaw Treaty, it assumed new features and functions, quite the opposite of those it had when it was formed. Its defensive function completely changed in content: today it defends the interests of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, in the countries which are members of the Treaty. This was fully confirmed in Czechoslovakia in August 1968. However, for a long time, the Warsaw Treaty has had another function, that of supporting the Soviet policy of open aggression and invasion of other countries in Europe and elsewhere. It is a fact that all the allies of the Soviet Union in the Treaty supported the open fascist occupation of Afghanistan just as they have supported the Soviet policy in the Middle East and the Gulf Area, in Africa, Asia, etc. In all its political and military activity, the Warsaw Treaty implements the global strategy of Soviet social-imperialism and its aim is to fight the revolution and socialism, to undermine and sabotage them by every means, to put down the revolution with fire and sword. The Soviet press itself openly admits the role of this Treaty in the service of the foreign imperialist policy of the Soviet Union: “The Warsaw Treaty Organization is the main centre for the coordination of the activity of fraternal countries in the field of foreign policy... In essence, we can speak today of a common strategy of the socialist community in foreign policy.” (The History of the International Relations and Foreign Policy of the USSR (1968-1978). Russian edition, Moscow, 1979, p.21.)
The Soviet iron fist rules in the Warsaw Treaty today. Moving swiftly, the Kremlin consolidated its dominant positions in this alliance, step by step. In his book “The Khrushchevites”, Comrade Enver Hoxha writes, “The Soviet Khrushchevites replaced Marxist-Leninist trust and friendship with the domination of the great ‘socialist’ state, in order to create the ‘socialist family’ the ‘socialist community’, in which Brezhnev and the Soviet marshals rule today with the iron fist, by threatening any ‘wayward son’ of the family with the bludgeon of the Warsaw Treaty.”*
The Warsaw Treaty is at the disposal of Moscow at all times. The Soviet generals, who occupy all the positions of command are omnipotent there. The entire system of the organization of this alliance serves the interests of the Soviet Union. The military integration which the Soviet social-imperialists long ago imposed in the relations with their partners, together with the economic integration in Comecon, has turned these countries into political, economic and military appendages to the Soviet empire. Through the unification of armaments, the Soviet Union has also made its allies completely dependent on it for the supply of arms and military equipment. These relations of dictate and submission are covered with the cloak of the “standardization of armaments”, “cooperation”, “specialization”, etc.
On the other hand the Soviet Union keeps large contingents of Soviet troops, which in fact are occupation forces, in the territories of the member countries of the Treaty, ready for action whenever the Kremlin needs them. This is a long-standing reality and a fresh example was when they were put on a state of alert during the recent events in Poland. The many military exercises of the Warsaw Treaty also serve the interests of the Soviet policy, because by this means, Soviet social-imperialism blackmails the peoples of the countries in which they take place and those of the neighbouring countries, keeps the vassal cliques under subjection and fear so that they remain under Soviet tutelage, and shifts its troops from one place to another, sometimes to make it appear that it is “reducing” the number of troops in a certain country and sometimes to exert pressure on NATO and the United States. But above all, through military exercises, the Soviet Union keeps the aggressive Warsaw Treaty, which it has effectively turned into an important appendage to its own aggressive army, ready for war.
As is known, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union is aimed at the extension of its hegemony and domination through the world. This finds expression in the different kinds of political and military pressures exerted on other countries, and in the intensive military preparations, not only to launch aggressions and occupy individual countries, but also to carry out large-scale attacks covering whole regions and several states simultaneously, when the moment and the circumstances seem appropriate. From this angle the Warsaw Treaty plays a major role. It is an important instrument in the hands of the Soviet social-imperialists in their rivalry with American imperialism and NATO. While in the political field the Warsaw Treaty serves to impose and protect the domination of the Soviet Union in the vassal states of Eastern Europe and to ensure their approval of and support for the imperialist foreign policy of the Soviet Union, in the military field this Treaty serves to put this policy into practice.
The Warsaw Treaty is not only the guardian of Soviet interests in the countries which are being squeezed and impoverished by Moscow’, but is also a threat to the freedom and independence of the other countries of Europe and to the regions around it. The Soviet Union clamours about “European security” at a time when its has occupied Afghanistan, it swears it is for “disarmament”, “peace” and “reduction of tension” while simultaneously making intensive war preparations. On the other hand, it uses the Warsaw Treaty as a means of blackmail and threats. The Soviet Union has set up a whole of military bases and built high-ways and oil supply pipelines in its satellite countries. Besides this, time after time, the Soviet chiefs of the Warsaw Treaty have reorganized the structures of its commands and altered the direction of their activity in accordance with the aggressive strategy and policy of the Kremlin. Operating at present, along with the others, is the Soviet Command of the southern flank, which directs its activity towards the Balkans and the western seas around it. While continuously increasing its own war budget, which according to the news agencies amounts to about 160 billion dollars, the Soviet Union is also encouraging its vassals to increase their military expenditure. In this way, the Warsaw Treaty is rushing ahead with aggressive military preparations.
In those conditions, the fraudulent nature of the notorious talks on “the reduction of troops and armaments in Europe” that the Soviet social-imperialists, in the context of the Warsaw Treaty, have been conducting for nearly a decade with the American imperialists and their NATO allies is quite obvious. The purpose of such demagogical talks is to cover up the reality of the armaments race and rivalry between the two superpowers and their preparations for a new world war.
The strategy of Soviet social-imperialism has nothing in common with socialism and Leninism and any description such as “internationalist”, “peaceful” and “defensive” that the Soviet propaganda applies to the Warsaw Treaty is false. The Warsaw Treaty is the twin sister of NATO, and the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, as the Party of Labour of Albania has made clear, is a policy of violence, oppression and imperialist aggression.
On this question, the stand of the Chinese revisionists should be noted. Claiming that Soviet social-imperialism is the only enemy of the peoples, the Chinese revisionists present only the Warsaw Treaty as dangerous, while they defend NATO.
On the other hand, in regard to the peoples of those countries who are suffering under the double oppression of the local and Soviet bourgeoisie, China is silent and takes no account of them at all, in this way telling them to keep their mouths shut, to submit and become cannon-fodder for the blood-thirsty clique of the Kremlin.
Consistent in their Marxist-Leninist stand, the Party of Labour of Albania and the Albanian people, will continue to fight against the hegemonic and expansionist imperialist policy of the Soviet Union and its instrument of war, the Warsaw Treaty, with the same determination and force as they fight American imperialism, NATO and all world reaction. This is the only correct, revolutionary road, which guarantees freedom and independence, defends the Homeland and ensures the construction of socialism; it is the internationalist road which supports and defends the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the oppressed peoples for national and social liberation.
Between the Soviet Union and China, today an extensive complex confrontation which includes almost every field has developed. Their great-power ambitions led these two countries to frictions, contradictions and conflicts, which grew greater, deeper and more acute during the 60’s and 70’s until they reached the point of armed clashes.
After they usurped state power and put the Soviet Union on the road of capitalist development, the Khrushchevites set themselves the objective of building the Russian revisionist empire. Whereas the Maoists, stuffed with the sentiments of old Chinese nationalism and chauvinism, came out with plans for the transformation of their country into a new imperialist superpower, with ambitions to hegemony and domination, along with the United States of America and the Soviet Union.
There is practically no field of international relations today in which the disagreements and contradictions between Soviet social-imperialism and Chinese social-imperialism are not manifested in harsh forms. The disagreements and contradictions between these two new imperialisms are, first of all, over the place and role of each of them in the world and over the spheres of influence which they claim and strive to secure.
The Soviet Union, as an established superpower, with greater economic and military potential, with the military and economic blocs it manipulates, such as the Warsaw Treaty and Comecon, with vassal parties in the East and West in the service of its policy, and with a wide sphere of influence and domination, such as the so-called socialist community, wants to make the law and to be the undisputed ruler of many parts of the world, not only today, but also in the future.
Although for the time being China is still far from the objectives it has set itself and in a state of chaos, with its pretentions of becoming a superpower, with its expansionist and warmongering policy and its aggressive imperialist alliances with the United States of America and Japan, it cannot but be regarded by the Soviet social-imperialists as a danger which threatens to restrict the area of their domination, especially on the continent of Asia. Therefore, having greater economic and military potential and a relatively more consolidated position than China, which is in the process of becoming a superpower, the Soviet Union is doing everything possible to further its plans for the isolation and subjugation of China. It is keeping up the pressure and threats by stationing large, heavily armed forces on its long common border with China, as well as by means of other countries which are its allies.
For its part, China also keeps millions of soldiers on the border with the Soviet Union and spends a considerable part of its fund for the aims of its chauvinist policy. The Chinese revisionists’ ambitions and efforts for expansion and domination are known and date back to early times.
Despite these ambitious aims, however, China’s strength is still insufficient for it to seriously challenge either of the imperialist superpowers, though towards small peoples it adopts the brutal and arrogant stand of a big power, in these circumstances the Chinese revisionists, basing themselves on the intensive exploitation of the colossal population of China, are bent on turning their country, within the shortest possible time – by the year 2000 at the latest – into an imperialist superpower, with a powerful war industry and a large army, equipped with the most sophisticated weapons. Meanwhile, they have orientated their foreign policy towards alliances with American imperialism and the other imperialist powers, from which they hope to get the assistance they are seeking in order to modernize the country from the economic and military aspects.
On this course they have begun, the Chinese social-imperialists see that, in order to achieve their great political, economic and military ambitions, they must first eliminate any resistance to their expansion in the surrounding territories. But they will have to clash with a more powerful opponent, Soviet social-imperialism, in order to take Siberia and the Far East and to evict it from those zones and countries of Central and Southeast Asia in which they plan to expand and establish their colonies. Then they envisage further conflicts with the other imperialists for more distant markets and spheres of influence in Africa, Latin America and Oceania. Therefore, in order to achieve its hegemonic aims, China today has made the foundation stone of its foreign policy the alliance with American imperialism from which it is begging more and more credits, armaments and technology.
In order to create a strong China of continental dimensions, the Chinese social-imperialists are also pinning great hopes on the diabolical strategy they have worked out, on the basis of which they advocate and encourage the outbreak of a new inter-imperialist war. Since it is still too weak to wage war itself on Soviet social-imperialism, which is stronger, Chinese social-imperialism is trying to urge American imperialism and the other imperialist powers to go to war against it, and calling on them openly for the creation of a “holy alliance”. The Chinese social-imperialists would like this war to break out in Europe, far from their borders, so that the United States of America, the Soviet Union and Europe itself are devastated with fire and sword, while China is left the only dominant power in the world.
However, this playing with fire cannot fail to drive China itself to a real catastrophe. Neither the United States of America, nor its allies and other friends are going to embroil themselves in a war in the interests of China. On the contrary, they are interested and acting to make China a political mercenary and instrument of war in their hands, in order to realize their own plans and strategy for the weakening and destruction of the power of Soviet social-imperialism which is their chief rival in the contest for world domination.
Today the contest between Soviet social-imperialism and Chinese social-imperialism for hegemony can be seen in all the most important zones and the hot spots of the world, especially of Asia, where their interests for expansion and domination collide more heavily than anywhere else. It begins in the Far East, continues to Southeast Asia which today is one of the zones most exposed to and hard hit by the Soviet-Chinese imperialist rivalry, to the Indian sub-continent, and extends as far as the Middle East to which the smell of oil has attracted not only the Soviet Union, but also China.
The reasons for the fierce and deep contradictions between the Soviet Union and China must be sought in the imperialist ideology and chauvinist policies which these two countries and their revisionist parties pursue. It is precisely this ideology and these policies, formulated and implemented by the Khrushchevites and the Maoists about the “great states”, the “great people” and the “great party”, that led the Soviet Union and China into an armed clash even over a tiny island in the middle of a river which is constantly changing its course.
The contradictions between the Khrushchevites and the Maoists have nothing to do with stands of principle, as they try to present them in order to deceive the proletariat and the peoples and to conceal their hegemonic and aggressive course. The essence of the problem is that each of these two anti-Marxist parties in power wants to be the “big shot” and to hold the banner of modern revision” ism in its own hands in order to use it according to the interests and plans of the imperialist policy it pursues.
The Soviet revisionists are doing their utmost to maintain their predominant positions over the revisionist allies and to use all the revisionist parties as instruments of their hegemonic foreign policy, while the Chinese revisionists want to torpedo these positions and take their place. Therefore, wherever they can they set up Maoist parties and groups and strengthen the ties of friendship, especially with those revisionist parties of the West which oppose the Soviet revisionists and have tendencies to escape from Moscow’s control. The Chinese revisionists reckon they will use these forces to set up a new revisionist bloc to oppose the Soviet one.
On the surface it looks as if Soviet revisionism and Chinese revisionism have nothing in common, except disagreements and contradictions. The imperialist policies they pursue according to the interests of the bourgeoisie of their respective countries, of course, divide them and lead them to conflict and war. But their identical aims in the struggle they are waging today against Marxism--Leninism, the revolution and socialism, unite them and place them on the same side of the barricade as the most ferocious and dangerous enemies of the peoples.
Therefore, since their ideological basis is the same, regardless of their mutual opposition and threats, the possibility of compromises and agreements between them, in conformity with their interests, cannot be ruled out. Zhou Enlai’s compromises in the spirit of unexpected, unprincipled and secret talks and meetings with the Khrushchevites in Moscow and Beijing are neither the first nor the last. They are part and parcel of the political line of the Chinese revisionist leaders, which changes according to the changing international circumstances and the pragmatic interests of China.
As a conclusion, we can say that the Soviet-Chinese imperialist contradictions stem from the capitalist system of oppression and exploitation, which exists in the Soviet Union and China and are fostered by the hegemonic and expansionist interests and ambitions of the ruling classes of these two countries.
International imperialism and reaction add fuel to the flames in order to make gains from the aggravation of these contradictions. At the same time, by treating the imperialist contradictions between the Soviet Union and China as a conflict between two “communist giants”, they aim to befuddle the peoples and discredit socialism and communism.
The Party of Labour of Albania long ago predicted clearly and warned most seriously of the dangers which result from the hegemonic and chauvinist course of the Khrushchevites and the Maoists. The profound analyses and the accurate Marxist-Leninist assessments, which Comrade Enver Hoxha has made of this course in his works of fundamental importance, “Imperialism and the Revolution”, “Reflections on China”, and “The Khrushchevites”, have been fully confirmed over and over again.
At the same time, along with these warnings, our Party has always maintained a principled position; it has resolutely and courageously exposed the hegemonic and aggressive policies of Soviet and Chinese social-imperialism and has laid bare their hostile plans in regard to our country. This has special vital importance both for the fate of our people and for the cause of the revolution and socialism in the world.
In his major work “Imperialism and the Revolution”, Comrade Enver Hoxha writes: “The strategy of the Soviet social-imperialists.., is the strategy of a predatory imperialist state which wants to extend its hegemony and domination to all countries on all continents.”*
The political, economic and military activity of the Soviet Union in the Mediterranean and the Balkans occupies an important place in the whole expansionist foreign policy of the Soviet Union in various regions of the world. This is because the imperialist ambitions of the Soviet Union are not just continuation of the dreams of the Tzars of old Russia, who considered the Balkans “a pro-Russian Slav territory”, but also because Moscow’s present expansionist ambitions in the Balkans are linked with expansion in the whole strategic basin of the Mediterranean.
In order to increase its political-military presence in the Mediterranean, the social-imperialist Soviet Union has taken advantage of the tense situations created in this region, which it has further exacerbated, in order to create permanent hotbeds of tension, and consequently, to have a permanent pretext for its military presence, has striven to set up groups of pro-Soviet states, to conclude separate agreements and treaties with the countries of the Middle East and North Africa and so on. Soviet social-imperialism has exploited the imperialist-zionist aggressions in the Middle East in 1967 and 1973, the crises in Cyprus and, for a certain time, the crisis in Malta, the tense situations in Lebanon, the Horn of Africa and elsewhere, to increase the size of its aggressive fleet and renew its political activity in that region. All this political-military activity has always been conducted in fierce rivalry with the United States of America to capture the most important strategic positions in the Mediterranean.
Finding itself in positions less favourable than those of American imperialism, which has numerous naval and air bases in this region, the Soviet Union tries to exploit the various situations that arise in the context of the rivalry between the two superpowers in the Mediterranean, in order to establish its own military -bases; it incites quarrels among the Arab countries while posing as their “friend” and “protector” and offering them “aid”, it demonstrates its military strength through the “friendly” visits of its navy and so on. Despite all these efforts, the Soviet Union has not yet been able to secure any powerful permanent base, a thing which is essential for its aggressive navy. After the United States ousted it from Egypt in 1972 and deprived it of its base in Alexandria, Moscow has managed, by exploiting the quarrels among the Arab countries, to gain access to port facilities in a few Mediterranean countries, as well as to the use of some military air bases. By means of support ships the Soviet Union also tries to use the shallows of the Mediterranean to repair and supply its warships.
With its “physical” presence in the Mediterranean, the political aim of the Soviet Union is to exert its dictate and hegemony in the countries of this region-The domination of North Africa and the extension of its influence to large areas of Southern Europe, and especially the Balkans, has great importance for the Soviet Union, In this way, it aims to weaken the military positions of its rival, American imperialism, on the southern flank of NATO and to control the sea routes of the Western countries, especially the narrows. Meanwhile in the economic field, the Soviet Union aims to extend its expansion and all-round economic control to the whole of this basin.
The social-imperialist Soviet Union pursues the same strategic, political and economic aims towards the Balkans. Here there is a special feature – in the past the Balkans has always been the “powder keg of Europe”, an area in which the interests of the great capitalist powers of Europe, and later, those of the superpowers, have been entangled. Proceeding from the strategic position of the Balkan Peninsula, this rivalry has become even fiercer today. The superpowers are trying to interfere in the Balkan countries in every way, to strengthen their influence in the countries which they have under their control or linked with their alliances. Likewise, each tries to elbow the other out whenever it sees the positions of its rival shaken in this or that country of the region. In the plans of the two superpowers, the Balkan Peninsula remains an important base in case of an attack on Europe, the “key” to control the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The Soviet social-imperialists have transformed Bulgaria into a major outpost for the aggressive activities of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty directed against the other Balkan countries. In that country the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty have scores of land, air and naval bases, depots of armaments, etc. In order to facilitate military operations in the direction of the Balkans, the Soviet Union has set up a ferry-boat system between Iliychovsk and Varna, which is among the biggest in the world, capable of transporting troops and military material from the Soviet Union to Bulgaria. In Hungary, too, there is a concentration of Soviet troops destined for the Balkan countries. Inseparable from all this are the frequent military exercises of the Warsaw Treaty forces, with ever increasing participation of troops and means, the creation of headquarters, commands and other strategic-military objects in the Balkan countries and the surrounding states, the persistent efforts of the Soviet Union to secure bases in the Balkans for its aggressive Mediterranean fleet, etc.
The Soviet Union had the same aims towards our country, too, when, as Comrade Enver Hoxha writes in his book “The Khrushchevites”, Khrushchev intended to build a big submarine base in the south of Albania to realize his expansionist ambitions over the whole Mediterranean, “from the Bosporus to Gibraltar”.
The Soviet activity and interference in this region are favoured by the complicated state of relations between the Balkan countries, where the Soviet Union, sometimes on its own and sometimes using Bulgaria as its cat’s paw, according to the occasion, stirs up disagreements between the Balkan states on various pretexts. In the context of its rivalry with the United States in the Balkans, the Soviet Union is trying to torpedo the American positions in Greece and Turkey. The purpose of this dangerous activity by both the Soviet Union and the USA is to threaten, intimidate and demoralize the peoples of the Balkans, in order to create situations which, in certain favourable circumstances, could be exploited by the superpowers to justify their military intervention or aggression in this or that Balkan country.
In the analysis which he made of the political activity of the Soviet revisionists, at the 7th Congress of the PLA, Comrade Enver Hoxha points out that “The Soviet Union is in pursuit of openly expansionist aims, especially in the Balkans and the Mediterranean” and that “it is seeking to achieve these ambitions through aggression or subversion.”* The Soviet Union employs the aggressive Warsaw Treaty and Comecon – both basic instruments of its social-imperialist policy, to serve these aims.
The aggressive foreign policy of the Soviet Union in the Mediterranean and the Balkans reveals that:
First, the Soviet policy is a policy of force and dictate, a policy of blackmail and military pressure. The presence of the Soviet fleet in the Mediterranean is intended as a means of pressure and blackmail on the countries of this basin to back up the diplomatic activity of the Soviet social-imperialists.
In the realization of the hegemonic aims of the Soviet Union, a twofold process, political and military, can be seen. On the one hand, we have the feverish political activity of Soviet diplomacy, which is trying to open the way for the realization of the strategic aims of the Soviet Union in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, while on the other hand, we have the Soviet military presence and the build-up and qualitative strengthening of the striking force, through which the Soviet social-imperialists back up their political activity in the region.
Second, in order to realize its hegemonic ambitions, the Soviet Union, as an imperialist power, practises a policy of economic expansion towards the countries of these regions, as a precursor to and base for its political and military expansion, setting in motion the neo-colonialist organization, Comecon, to this end.
Third, the Soviet policy towards the states of these regions is characterized by interference in their internal affairs, which is carried out according to the widely-known tactic of “eroding the base from within”,* through underhand political deals, factions, coups d’états and espionage activity or by means of pro-Soviet revisionist parties.
The hostile intentions of the Soviet Union towards the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania are included in the whole complex of the Soviet social-imperialists’ political activity in the Mediterranean and the Balkans. The Soviet foreign policy towards Albania, unlike that towards other countries, is linked not only with the realization of the current military and strategic plans of the Soviet Union, but also with the liquidation of the only state of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its Marxist-Leninist Party which has always been in the forefront of the struggle against Khrushchevite revisionism and revisionism of every hue.
Our country has always made it clear that anyone who allows himself to be drawn into the game of the superpowers, i.e. of the Soviet Union, too, damages the interests of his own people and, at the same time, creates dangers for the other peoples. In exposing the revisionist theses about European or Balkan security, the Party of Labour and the Government of Albania have forcefully pointed out that the Balkan peoples are in a position to act resolutely to bar the way to any interference or intrigues of the imperialist superpowers. As a Mediterranean country, Albania has opposed the presence of the naval fleets of the United States and the Soviet Union in the Mediterranean and has raised its voice against allowing the setting up of American or Soviet bases in the territories of these countries, against providing port facilities for their warships or allowing their military aircraft to fly through their territorial air space.
The Party of Labour of Albania and the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania long ago exposed the foreign policy of the Soviet Union as a profoundly aggressive social-imperialist policy, a direct expression of the ideological platform of Khrushchevite revisionism. They have fought equally hard against Soviet social-imperialism as against the ambitions of American imperialism in the Mediterranean, the Balkans and everywhere else, and against the sinister aims of the Chinese social-imperia-lists in these regions.
As Comrade Enver Hoxha emphasizes in his book “The Khrushchevites”, “...our struggle against the treacherous, fascist, social-imperialist activity of the Khrushchevite and Brezhnev revisionists did not cease and will not cease. We have attacked them and will go on attacking them until they are wiped from the face of the earth.”*
The political, economic and military aims of the Soviet social-imperialists in the Middle East are a component part of and inseparate from the whole predatory and hegemony-seeking foreign policy of the Soviet Union today. They began with the usurping of power by the Khrushchevite revisionist group, when radical changes were made in both the internal and the foreign policies of the Soviet Union, when the principles of proletarian internationalism of non-interference in the internal affairs of other peoples and countries, which had triumphed with the Great October Revolution, and which V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin had consistently defended and implemented, were rejected and trampled underfoot. Comrade Enver Hoxha writes: “The policy of the Soviet revisionists is a typically aggressive colonialist and neo-colonialist policy which is based on the power of capital and force of arms. The struggle that the Soviet Union is waging today to occupy strategic positions in the Middle East, its expansion to the Mediterranean, to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, its interference in Africa and Latin America, its pressure on Europe and its meddling in the affairs of Asia, all these actions bear the stamp of this policy.”*
The political, economic and military aims of Soviet social-imperialism in the Middle East have a strategic character.
First, they are directed towards the rich natural re” sources and the huge reserves of relatively cheap oil and natural gas of this region.
Although the Soviet Union is one of the biggest producers of oil and natural gas in the world, it has continuously imported oil and gas in very large quantities from the countries of the Middle East: a) in order to resell them at inflated current prices to its East-European vassals and some West-European countries; b) in order to ensure that the oil and gas reserves of these countries, which are extremely important, indeed vital, not only to the economies of its rivals – the United States and the other Western countries, but also to their military machines, are not left under the control of the Americans alone.
Second, the Soviet social-imperialists take into consideration the extremely favourable geographical situation of these countries as the shortest land, air and sea links between Europe and the other continents. The Middle East is the gateway between East and West.
From the military and strategic standpoint, the Suez Canal, the short cut from Europe to the Indian Ocean, has great importance for the Soviet Black Sea Fleet.
Third, they take account of the fact that at present the Middle East is the largest and most profitable market for the sale of Soviet armaments and the best testing ground for new weapons.
Besides this, the countries of the Middle East also comprise one of the largest markets in which the Soviet Union unloads its stocks of unsold industrial goods, and makes investments which are highly profitable to itself but utterly unnecessary for the peoples of these countries.
Fourth, in the past two decades, the anti-imperialist and anti-social-imperialist struggles of the Arab peoples in the Middle East and in North Africa, of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iran, etc in defence of their freedom and independence, their national assets, and especially, their oil, have created a very worrying situation for the two superpowers. Sabotage of the progressive and revolutionary people’s movements, of the liberation struggles of these peoples is also one of the fundamental objectives of the counter-revolutionary aims of both the American imperialists and the Soviet social-imperialists.
The policy of the Soviet social-imperialists towards the Middle East is covered up with slogans about “the security of the borders and the defence of the supreme interests of the Soviet Union “, the “socialist community”, and even about the Soviet Union’s “friendships and “de-termination” to “respect its solemn pledges-to the “allied” peoples and countries! But the falsity of the Soviet Union’s “friendship-and “determination to respect its pledges-to the “allied-peoples and countries, in this case, the Arab peoples and, in particular, the Palestinian people, has become clear from the various aggressive and expansionist wars waged by Israel against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, etc in the years 1956, 1967 and 1973. On all three occasions the Soviet social-imperialist leaders have issued “threats-against the Israeli aggressors and their American patrons, but when it has come to taking a concrete and open stand in favour of the just struggle of the Arab peoples, that is, of fulfilling their political, technical-military and other commitments, they have backed down, have played the role of mediator allegedly in order to “calm things down” and “prevent” a major world war.
...While they pose as supporters of the just struggle of the Arab peoples and the Palestinian people, in particular, the Soviet social-imperialists are, in fact, the main suppliers of military and scientific cadres to Israel, thus increasing the attack capability of the aggressive Israeli army, and the main suppliers of refugees to populate the kibbutzes set up on the occupied Arab territories. The Soviet Union has never broken off its “unofficial” links with the aggressor state of Israel. The Soviet social-imperialists, like the American imperialists, are for the existence and consolidation of a great Israel, politically, economically and militarily powerful. They need this Israeli state in order to keep the Middle East in a state of permanent tension and to use it as a means of diversion and blackmail against the Arab countries. On this plane, the Soviet Union supports the imperialist Israeli policy of Secure borders” for Israel and the establishment of a dismembered Palestinian state, although it does not do so openly.
Everything indicates that in order to further its political and military aims in the Middle East, the social-imperialist Soviet Union, on the basis of its global strategy, has applied a definite tactic: each time the Arab-Israeli conflict has reached a delicate point, Moscow has addressed itself to Washington through the means of open diplomacy and the red teletype, in order to avoid jeopardizing its own objectives and conspiratorial plans. This is how the Soviet Union and the United States have arrived at the Rogers-Gromyko plan, policy of “neither peace no war”, the Geneva Conference (of which the Soviet Union and the United States are co-chairmen), at the meetings of the Security Council at which Israel has been dealt with as a state involved in the war and not as an aggressor state, etc. Hence, the Soviet social-imperialists have in no way committed themselves, as they continue to claim, to defend the interests of the Arab peoples, the victims of the Zionist-imperialist aggression, but have worked so as not to miss any opportunity or possibility to entrench themselves deeper and deeper in the Middle East zone and to strengthen their positions in the Mediterranean.
The present and long-term objectives of the Soviet social-imperialists in the Middle East may be summed up as follows:
1. To maintain the political and military influence of the Soviet Union wherever it already exists (in Syria, Iraq, South Yemen, Libya, etc), and if possible, to extend it to other countries to the detriment of its rival – the United States of America;
2. To restore Soviet influence wherever it has been lost (especially in Egypt);
3. To put the oil and natural gas resources of the countries of the Persian Gulf under Soviet control in order to get a stranglehold on the United States of America and the West-European countries which import most of their oil from this region;
4. To avoid at all costs losing its markets for the sale of armaments and stocks of shoddy goods;
5. To sabotage and destroy the strategic-military superiority of the United States of America and, in this context, to ensure the free passage of the Soviet naval fleet through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean, and vice-versa, at all costs;
6. To sabotage and undermine the national liberation wars and revolutionary movements of the Arab, African and Asian peoples of that area.
The Middle East crisis is caused, incited and manipulated by the two imperialist superpowers. On several occasions, this crisis has endangered the security of other peoples and threatened to develop into a major destructive war. This danger has not been eliminated, or even reduced, because its causes have not been removed or reduced. Because of the fierce rivalry between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, each bent on ensuring for itself control of the strategic positions and the sea, land and air routes, and on plundering the huge resources of oil and natural gas of the Middle East, it could be transformed into a world conflict at any moment.
The recent conflict between Iraq and Iran is also a direct consequence of this rivalry. By this means, the superpowers want to strike at and sabotage the bourgeois-democratic revolution of the Iranian people, to strike at and sabotage the national liberation struggles of the Arab peoples, and each of them hopes to strengthen its dominant positions in the oil-and-gas rich basin of the Middle East. This conflict runs counter to the immediate and long-term interests of the Iraqi people, the Iranian people and all the other Arab peoples. That is why the Middle East crisis and its developments pose a very grave and continuous danger to the peoples of the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Africa and also of other countries.
In many of its documents, our Party has made a profound scientific. Marxist-Leninist analysis of the imperialist policy and aims of the present-day Soviet Union and the United States of America in the Middle East and their consequences, pointing out long ago that the “Middle East crisis” is a result of the global plans and policies of the imperialist superpowers for hegemony.
Today the authority of the Soviet social-imperialists In the Middle East has fallen very low because of their hostile neo-colonialist policy. Regardless of its continuing attempts to pose as a “socialist states which follows a “Leninist foreign policy” and “intervenes only to prevent the hostile acts of world imperialism”, etc, the social-imperialist Soviet Union is considered and treated by the peoples of the Middle East as an imperialist superpower, just as arrogant and aggressive as the United States of America.
The Arab peoples and all the Moslem peoples of the Middle East have awakened and thrown themselves into the struggle against foreign imperialists and the local feudal-bourgeois oppressors. The patriotic and revolutionary movement of the terribly oppressed and impoverished broad working masses is extending. Evidence of this can be seen in the bourgeois-democratic, anti-imperialist revolution of the Iranian people who overthrew the fanatical regime of the Pahlavis and put an end to the interference and plunder by American imperialism, without becoming trapped in the web of Soviet social-imperialism, in the dauntless struggle of the Afghan people against the Russian invaders, and the opposition of the Arab and other peoples of the Middle East to the insidious predatory policies of American imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism.
The process of the ideological and political transformation of the CPSU into a revisionist party, was also accompanied by the replacement of Marxist-Leninist norms and principles with bourgeois-revisionist norms and principles. Thus Lenin’s teaching that “Opportunism in program is naturally connected with opportunism in tactics and opportunism in organization,”* was confirmed in practice.
Despite all the disguise, the organizational principles and norms became anti-Leninist, bourgeois, reactionary, fascist. Although presented as communist, “they are used as levers for the subjugation of the party and the implementation of the will of the revisionist clique in power.”* The turn from Leninist norms to revisionist-fascist norms, was the greatest evil and the most terrible weapon for the degeneration and corruption, the development of bureaucracy and technocracy and one of the main sources of that great tragedy which occurred in the CPSU.
Let us touch on some of the main problems of the process of the organizational transformation of the CPSU into e bourgeois-revisionist party.
The revolutionary class struggle within the proletarian party, to safeguard its proletarian line and its Marxist-Leninist ideological and organizational unity is a law, a fundamental principle. Immediately after the death of Stalin, this struggle degenerated into a struggle for power amongst individuals and groups in the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, just as occurs in every bourgeois party. This struggle for power led to the elimination of the revolutionary policy, norms and methods of the election of leading organs, the election or appointment of leading cadres and their replacement with the policy, norms and methods of putsches and plots, of factionalism and nepotism, of servility and careerism.
Behind the scenes, Khrushchev and Co. had prepared the terrain for such a policy when Stalin was alive and were awaiting the appropriate moment to put it into practice.
This is the only possible explanation for the fact that the very next day after Stalin’s death, when all the Party and the peoples of the Soviet Union, as well as all the communists, the proletariat and the peoples of the world were weeping over this immense loss, within the leadership of the CPSU, the infighting, the struggle for power began, the struggle to divide up the positions and roles, to carry out far-reaching reorganizations in the top organs of the party and state, while intrigues, quarrels started to emerge, and plots and putsches were hatched up.*
In order to achieve complete domination in the CC and in the government, Khrushchev needed the two main weapons of the dictatorship, the security organs and the army. By eliminating Beria, on one hand Khrushchev got rid of one of his most powerful rivals on his way to emerge at the top of the party and state, while on the other hand, he gained control of the organs of internal affairs, which were to serve as a main weapon in his struggle for power.
With the army he followed another tactic. He found the way to win over the main military cadres who had distinguished themselves in the Great Patriotic War, but who had become bourgeois in peace-time. In particular, Khrushchev exploited the ambitions of Marshal Zhukov, whom he made Minister of Defence and a member of the Presidium of the CC of the CPSU thus winning him over. By means of Zhukov, at the head of the army, he organized the plot and putsch against the “anti-Party group” of Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich in 1957.
Having the leadership of the security organs and the army on its side, the Khrushchev clique liquidated the Leninist policy on cadres and replaced it with the personal policy of the clique in power.
However, Khrushchev was afraid of Zhukov’s pronounced ambitions for power, and so he eliminated him from the leadership by means of plots and putsches. In the end Khrushchev himself was toppled in the same manner, in 1964, by Brezhnev and his clique, in the process of struggle for power, which is still going on in the Soviet leadership.
The elimination of the Marxist-Leninist principles and norms in the structure and the internal life of the party led to the transformation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from a leading party of the working class, which realized the hegemony of this class in the socialist state and in the entire life of the country, into an appendage of the revisionist Soviet state. The Soviet state became a fascist and social-imperialist state, therefore the party, too, became fascist and bureaucratic, being transformed into a tool of the fascist social-imperialist state. As Comrade Enver Hoxha has stressed in his book “Imperialism and the Revolution”: “The party was stripped of its attributes as the vanguard of the working class, as the sole political leading force of the state and society, and was transformed into a party dominated by the apparatchiki and the KGB.”*
The thesis of “the party of the entire people” is also linked with the combining of the function of the first (general) secretary of the party, with the function of head of state, the concentration of both these main leading functions in the hands of a single person. Brezhnev.
The liquidation of the Marxist-Leninist principles and norms, led to the deproletarianization of the composition of the Bolshevik Party.
The bourgeois policy on admissions to the party, brought a gradual decrease in the number of workers in the party. Thus according to figures published by the revisionist Soviet press, in the period 1966-1971, while admissions of workers and peasants represented 40.1 per cent, and 15.1 per cent respectively of the total, those from the ranks of the intelligentsia were 44.8 per cent.
The percentage of workers in the party dropped from 55 per cent in ly71, to 41.6 per cent in 1976, at a time when the working class made up 61.2 per cent of the total population.
The Soviet revisionists try to justify the priority given to admissions from the intelligentsia, with technical progress, which they claim determines the development of society and in which the main role is played not by the working class, but by specialists of production. Therefore, according to the revisionist logic, the ranks of the party should be filled with intellectuals. In 1976, one out of every four to five specialists was a party member, whereas only one out of every 12 workers was a party member.
In that party the Leninist norms which must be applied in the process of admissions have long been abandoned. Admissions to the party are not decided by the collective leading organs and organizations of the party, but by the apparatuses, by the revisionist bourgeoisie according to its ideology and norms.
The revisionist Soviet clique used the purging of the party, which is one of the laws of the development of the party of the working class and a class weapon in its hands, to attack its enemies with police methods. This purging of a bourgeois-revisionist character started from the top leading organs and was extended downwards to include the entire party. Within just ten years (1954-1964), Khrushchev and his clique expelled over 70 per cent of the members of the CC of the party who had been elected at the 19th Congress (1952).
Even more severe purges were carried out in the lower organs of the party. At the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, under the pretext of the “systematic regeneration of the party” over 40 per cent of the members of leading forums were replaced. Again in 1963 under the slogan of “reorganization of the party” more than half the members of these forums were replaced. The Soviet revisionist press itself, admitted in 1967, that people of the bureaucratic stratum make up about 66 per cent of the members of all the leading organs of the party and from 91.1-97.6 per cent of the party secretaries of all levels. (The magazine “Kommunist”, No. 15, 1967.) At the 7th Congress of the PLA in 1976, Comrade Enver Hoxha pointed out that in the revisionist Soviet party “...the members of party committees of different levels are bureaucratic officials, while the secretaries of these committees are almost one hundred per cent intellectuals and technocrats.”*
Along with purges in the revisionist Soviet party under the slogan of the “flowering of democracy, legality and freedom”, a wave of rehabilitations of traitors and enemies punished by the Bolshevik Party in the time of Lenin and Stalin began. Such people as Tukachevsky, Zinoviev, Kameniev, Bukharin and Co. were rehabilitated although it is known they were traitors, agents and spies of imperialism and that their theories and viewpoints had been severely criticized not only by Stalin, but also by Lenin, when he was alive. The process of rehabilitations began on the eve of the 20th Congress of the CPSU and continued in the following years.
The transformation of the basic organization of the party from an organization for leadership into a purely formal organization which is used only to approve the revisionist political line of the party, is another consequence of the bourgeois-revisionist policy. The increase of the size of the basic organization confirms its formal character. According to the Soviet revisionists, in 1977, 40.9 per cent of the basic organizations had up to 49 members, 12.1 per cent 50-100 members and 6.6 per cent over 100 members. Hence the increase in size of the basic organization, as well as its disorganized life, not in the least proletarian, speak clearly of the formal character of the democracy of the basic organization and its role.
If the process of the transformation of the CPSU into a bourgeois-revisionist fascist party is divided into periods, it can be said that this process has gone through three main stages: The period from Stalin’s death up to the 20th Congress (February 1956) is the preparatory stage to gain control of the key positions to then go over to radical actions for the liquidation of the policy, principles and norms of the Marxist-Leninist party. The period from the 20th Congress to the 22nd Congress (October 1961) is the stage when the process of the elimination of this policy and these norms and principles is virtually completed. The third period is from the 22nd Congress on, in which only the bourgeois-revisionist policy, principles and norms exist in the Soviet party.
Our Party has the historic merit that it was the first to uncover the Khrushchevite betrayal, and begin an irreconcilable struggle, firmly based on Marxism-Leninism against Soviet revisionism which is the most dangerous current of modem revisionism. This struggle will continue until modern revisionism is completely routed. The political and organizational line and the revolutionary activity of our Party, constitute a powerful weapon to this end. They testify to the vitality of Marxism-Leninism, to the irreplaceable and decisive role which the party of the working class plays in the revolution and socialist construction, when it is guided by correct principles, and when it faithfully implements these principles in a creative way in its political line and in the structure of its internal life.
In his work “Imperialism and the Revolution” Comrade Enver Hoxha has said that, state monopoly capitalism, which represents the highest stage of the concentration of production and capital and is the main form of property prevailing today in the Soviet Union, is the main expression of the capitalism re-established in the Soviet Union.
From the standpoint of its essence, this capitalism is similar to the state monopoly capitalism prevailing in the other bourgeois countries. They .have in common the subjection of the state apparatus to the monopolies, the complete economic and political domination of the bourgeoisie in the whole life of the country, the exploitation of the broad working masses and the strangling of revolutions and peoples’ liberation struggles.
However, there are some special features which distinguish Soviet state monopoly capitalism from that of the other bourgeois countries. Those features have to do with the peculiarities of the birth, the forms of expression and the economic mechanism with the aid of which the right of ownership is exercised in the Soviet Union, etc. Seen from this angle, the capitalism restored in the Soviet Union is different from the capitalism of the West because it manifests itself as revisionist centralized bureaucratic capitalism.
1. State monopoly capitalism emerged in the Soviet Union during the process of the degeneration of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the party of the working class into a dictatorship and party of the new revisionist bourgeoisie, a process which began with the advent to power of the Khrushchevites. This degeneration could not fail to lead to changes in the economic base, to the divesting of the working class of the means of production and the transformation of labour power into a commodity like all other commodities. And according to Marxism-Leninism, the society in which labour power is turned into a commodity and bought and sold freely on the labour market is nothing but a pure capitalist society.
After usurping the leadership of the party and the state, the Khrushchevites applied such forms and methods of organization and management that gradually led to alteration of the essence of the socialist relations of production, established in the time of Lenin and Stalin, and introduced into the Soviet economy an economic mechanism whereby capitalist profit became the aim of production. Consequently, the former common property began to lose its socialist features and to be transformed into the property of the new revisionist bourgeoisie, the property of a new capitalist class.
Thus, the correctness of the Marxist-Leninist thesis that the socialist social character of property depends on the class nature of the state, on the class in the interests of which it is used, was confirmed. “In all cases when the working class led by its genuine Marxist-Leninist party is not in power,” points out Comrade Enver Hoxha, “in the big nationalized enterprises, the only alternative to socialism is capitalism, the only alternative to socialist state property is capitalist state property.”*
There is not and cannot be a middle or third road in this cardinal question. The very character of modem large-scale production excludes this. Consequently, the revisionist pseudo-theories which try to present the present-day state property in the Soviet Union as socialist state property, in fact are meant to defend and publicize the strategy of world imperialism which, in its search of a hybrid “new society”, to prop up the rotten capitalist system, has mobilized its hack writers to provide the form to this “society”. And as Comrade Enver Hoxha says, “At present they have this ‘new’ form in the capitalist-revisionist society of the Soviet Union, which is nothing but a degenerate society”* bourgeois down to its tiniest pores.
2. Soviet state monopoly capital is distinguished from that of the other imperialist countries by its very high level of concentration of production and capital in the hands of the state, by its being the prevailing form of property in the Soviet capitalist economy.
In the Soviet Union, state monopoly capitalism includes almost the entire economy. It extends everywhere and runs everything, while in the countries of classical capitalism it is not so widespread. In the various imperialist countries of the West the state monopoly sector accounts for 20-30 percent of the total national production, while in the Soviet Union industrial, agricultural, construction, and transport enterprises, finance and banking, trading enterprises, the fund of houses, the land and its resources, etc belong to the state monopoly sector.
Underlining the fact that the main form of capitalism in the Soviet Union is state monopoly capitalism does not mean that other forms of capitalist property are not encountered there. On the contrary, in the Soviet capitalist economy, just as in the economies of the other capitalist countries, there are other forms of capitalist property such as capitalist collective property and petty and middle private capitalist property, etc.
3. The state monopoly capitalism in the Soviet Union is presented as “socialist”, as “developed socialism” and, to some extent retains the old forms of the economic structure and the political superstructure.
By formally retaining bureaucratic centralism in the economy and in the state and taking measures “to strengthen it within the bounds allowed by the intrinsic laws of the market economy, the Soviet bourgeoisie tries to present the Soviet capitalist economy as a “regulated and planned” economy. This enables it to cloak its actions as “socialist”, to cover everything with the slogan of the estate of the entire people”, to use a number of laws and norms of its fascist dictatorship in its own interests, squeeze the maximum benefits for as long as possible from those indisputable superiorities which stemmed from the Soviet order created by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union.
The high rate of exploitation of wage labour, the high level of accumulation and capitalization of the surplus value, the distribution of the value newly created in necessary and surplus labour, which is appropriated without payment by the revisionist bourgeoisie and, in general, all the economic processes in the Soviet Union are not realized simply by individual capitalists, but first of all by the organisms of state monopoly capitalism.
4. As a consequence of the fact that Soviet state monopoly capitalism has created its own financial oligarch, there are special characteristics in the field of the appropriation and distribution of the surplus value created through the merciless exploitation of the working class and the other working masses. In this connection Comrade Enver Hoxha points out in his work, “Imperialism and the Revolution”, that “Unlike the countries of classical capitalism, where this surplus value is appropriated in proportion to the amount of capital of each capitalist, in the Soviet Union and the other revisionist countries it is distributed according to the position people of the higher bourgeois stratum occupy in the state, economic, scientific and cultural hierarchy, etc.”*
To the proletariat it is of no importance at all whether the surplus value it creates is appropriated by individual capitalists, or by the bourgeois class as a whole, as a “collective capitalists, and then redivided among them in various forms, either according to the capital invested, or according to position in the hierarchy established in the state, economic, military, scientific, cultural or other apparatus. In either case, exploitation remains exploitation. Consequently, in the Soviet Union, too, we have to do with the same relations as those which are created in the other capitalist countries by the struggle to ensure maximum profit, and which in essence, express the antagonistic contradiction between the working class and the capitalist class. This means that in the revisionist countries, too, the bourgeois class as a whole is opposed to the working class. Therefore, the working class, for its part, is interested in countering the united bourgeois front with the united proletarian front.
5. The economic integration of the capitalism re-established in the Soviet Union into the capitalist world system is done through the organisms of state monopoly capitalism which represent and defend the imperialist interests of the Soviet revisionist bourgeoisie in the international arena.
In this context the Soviet revisionist bourgeoisie carries out the export of capital from the Soviet Union to other countries and the attraction of foreign capital into the Soviet Union, conducts its competition and struggle for markets, for spheres of investment, for the plunder of raw materials and the preservation of neo-colonialist laws in world trade, through the direct participation of the organisms of state monopoly capitalism, at a time when in the other imperialist countries these processes are carried out with the aid of private and state capital.
However, this does not mean that social-imperialist expansion is different in essence from imperialist expansion, because just like any other capitalist country, the Soviet Union, too, with its so-called credits and aid, investments of capital, exports of technology, etc is struggling for the redivision of the world, the capture of new markets and the subjugation of peoples, through the economic exploitation, first of all, of the vassal countries, as well as other countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, especially the countries of the so-called socialist orientation. In these international capitalist economic relations the Soviet social-imperialist state struggles to squeeze out the maximum profits in the interests of its own bourgeoisie, by exploiting the working class and the working masses of other countries.
By restoring capitalism in the Soviet Union, the Khrushchevite revisionists destroyed socialism to its foundations and opened up fields for the operation of the intrinsic laws of capitalism. Thirsting for maximum profits and the realization of its hegemonic aims in rivalry and alliance with its counterpart in the West, the revisionist bourgeoisie is intensifying its oppression and exploitation of the ordinary Soviet people who, in order to escape from this situation, must rise in struggle to overthrow the supreme power of the new tsars and re-establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, through revolution.
When the question is raised of bringing out the class essence of the mechanism of the functioning of a given economic system, its fundamental feature should be analyzed first, because this is what distinguishes one mechanism from another; then comes analysis of the economic categories of this system, and finally of its socio-economic consequences.
Following this course of analysis, it turns out that the fundamental feature, on which the present mechanism of the functioning of the Soviet economy is founded, is its development and management, not on the basis of a unified general state plan, but on the basis of the laws of the market. This regulating mechanism is applied by using such economic categories as commodity, labour power, capital, profit, production price, competition, supply and demand, the free play of prices in the market, percentage on capital, etc. It is also inevitably accompanied by such social-economic phenomena as anarchy, spontaneity, unemployment, inflation, price rises, increased cost of living, economic crises, etc. These are also the most important guidelines which characterize the mechanism of the functioning of the capitalist economy of every bourgeois country today.
In conformity with the capitalist mechanism of the functioning of the economy of the Soviet Union, the Soviet enterprises have gone over to the so-called complete financial self-sufficiency, i.e. to complete economic independence. An inevitable corollary to this is that their economic-financial activity is no longer subject to centralized planning. Now they are entirely free to choose to produce those goods, in that quantity and with that range which, in the conditions of the free play of the market, will bring them the highest profits and enable them to withstand the fierce competition. The independence of Soviet enterprises has reached such a point that speculation and the black market have become a normal phenomenon of their economic and financial activity. If we add to this general framework, in which the Soviet enterprises operate, the creation of branch and inter-branch combines of the monopoly type also with complete economic independence, we can see the mechanism of the functioning of the Soviet economy as a whole, which is a typically capitalist mechanism which the Soviet revisionists try to disguise with socialist phrases.
The Soviet revisionists still assert that their economy is guided by a state plan, that there is planning and, consequently, centralism in their economy. But the state plan, as the Soviet revisionists conceive it, is by no means a socialist plan; it does not contain specific targets for each economic enterprise, and consequently, enterprises are no longer obliged to apply it. As independent commodity producers, the Soviet enterprises recognize and submit to only one economic power – the power of profit, of the market and its spontaneous laws. Thus, even that centralism which exists in the Soviet economy is a bureaucratic centralism of the monopoly type.
The lack of a truly socialist plan in the Soviet economy, is brought out and confirmed by other facts, too. The so-called plan of the Soviet enterprises contains only indices in value such as profit, the norm of profitability, the percentage on capital and distribution of profits between the state and the respective group of the revisionist bourgeoisie. This so-called plan contains no indices of the quantities and range of concrete products to be turned out, about the fundamental funds or the funds of circulation, or any indices to do with the size of the labour force and wages, the distribution of the products, fundamental investments, etc. It is obvious that such indices cannot be laid dawn for the Soviet enterprises, since the aim of their production is profit, since the labour power and the means of production are commodities, since everything these enterprises turn out passes through the “devil’s mill”, i.e. through competition and the market. In these conditions, to speak about centralism, plans and planning is just like trying to convince people that, even when all eyes are turned on profit, the market and the capitalist mechanism of the functioning of the economy, this economy can still be called and actually be a socialist economy. This scandalous assertion is clear proof of the anti-Marxist logic of the Soviet revisionists.
Marxist-Leninist theoretical thought and our experience in the construction of socialism have proved that a truly socialist economy must be an economy which functions, is regulated and managed in a planned way; it is an economy in which the main problems – those which represent the fundamental needs of the society and those which represent the main proportions of the extended reproduction, are decided and safeguarded in a conscious, centralized way, by a single centre – the socialist state. This is the only regulating mechanism of a genuine socialist economy, a mechanism based on the economic laws of socialism and the very opposite of the regulating mechanism of the market and the law of the value, characteristic of the capitalist economy. Even the market of mass consumer goods in the socialist economy is regulated within the context of the plan, is subject to and serves this plan. In this market the working people of town and countryside can spend the money earned by their work, choosing among the goods they find on the market according to their tastes and needs. On the other hand, the labour market, the market for capital and means of productions do not exist in the socialist economy.
In order to give the capitalist practices of the functioning of the economy they have established in the Soviet Union the most attractive, credible and allegedly Marxist-Leninist “theoretical-appearance, the Soviet revisionists grasp at the question of the use of commodity and money relations in the socialist economy.
It is a known fact that Marx and Engels did not envisage commodity production in socialism, so they did not put forward for solution the question of commodity production, or the utilization of commodity and money relations in the socialist economy. On this basis, before the triumph of the October Socialist Revolution the opinion was widespread that socialism was incompatible with commodity production, that they are mutually exclusive. At that time it was accepted as an axiom that commodity production did not exist in socialism. It is an historical fact, also, that in the period of war communism in the Soviet Union attempts were made to abolish commodity and money relations. However, the mechanism of the functioning of the Soviet economy of that time, proved convincingly that it was impossible to build socialism without using commodity production and the economic categories resulting from it. Basing himself on the experience gained during the period of war communism, Lenin unhesitatingly and definitively discarded the dogma of the incompatibility of socialism and the socialist economy with commodity production. Lenin linked the abolition of commodity production and money relations with the triumph of communism on a world scale.
Meanwhile, it has been proved, both in theory and in the practice of the construction of socialism in our country, that commodity production and commodity and money relations in the socialist economy do not present themselves with the same features and nature as in the conditions where capitalist ownership over the means of production prevails, but undergo modification. To bring out this difference Stalin proved that in socialism there is a commodity production of a special kind. It is precisely this thesis of Stalin’s that the Soviet revisionists furiously attack and reject, with the aim of gaining acceptance for their bourgeois thesis that the socialist economy, too, is allegedly an economy of commodity production, a market economy.
Hiding behind the “argument” that the socialist economy, too, is allegedly a commodity production economy, a market economy, the Soviet revisionists extend commodity and money relations to the whole social product, including the means of production and labour power. Therefore, the combination of the means of production with labour power, as the fundamental economic relationship on which the objective of production depends, is not carried out directly, through the mechanism of the centralized planning of the economy, but through the act of sale and purchase, in the interest of the revisionist bourgeoisie which, as the owner of the means of production, appropriates the surplus value created by the Soviet workers and peasants. It is on this basis that the mechanism of the functioning of the Soviet economy operates in the spheres of production, distribution and exchange.
Since the direct aim on which social production is based is the securing of profit and not the fulfilment of the needs of the working masses, since it is based on commodity production and not on the direct social product, the mechanism of the functioning of this production can be no other than that of the market with its inherent laws. No economic system, including the economic system which operates in the Soviet economy today, can escape this combination, this objective conditioning.
The revisionist “theory” of the “unified Soviet people”, which, according to the Soviet revisionist leadership, is a result of the “creative development of Marxism-Leninism”, occupies an important place in the arsenal of ideological and political mechanisms specially selected for the implementation of the great-Russian chauvinist policy.
After profound study the classics of Marxism-Leninism elaborated the scientific theory on the nation and the national question. Likewise, they provided accurate and fully corroborated answers to the following two questions: What is the future of nations? Will they exist for ever, or will they disappear as a social phenomenon with the passage of time? The great teachers of the proletariat have pointed out that national distinctions will gradually die out and be replaced by the world-wide communist community of mankind. This process will take a very long time. Before this stage is reached, it is necessary to go through a relatively long period of the growth and all-round economic, socio-political and cultural-spiritual flowering of nations of the socialist type, the development of their national languages and literature and the assertion of their national individuality and character. By resolutely putting these lessons into practice under the leadership of J.V. Stalin, the Soviet Union set a brilliant example as the country in which, for the first time in history, the national question had been solved in a radical, new way and where there was monolithic unity, fraternity and very close, militant collaboration between the nations.
The Soviet modem revisionists acted quite differently. Trampling roughshod over the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, they re-established national oppression in the Soviet Union. They identified Lenin’s thesis about the coming together of nations with that of the assimilation of nations in socialism, which is an utterly chauvinist, standpoint.
For more than two decades, the new Russian revisionist bourgeoisie, which is following the “traditions-of the Russian bourgeoisie of the time of tzars: has been putting into practice its plans for the Russification of the other Soviet republics, under the pretext of creating “a multi-national collective-, its plans for the economic exploitation and plunder and unequal political, economic and cultural-educational development of non-Russian peoples and nationalities. A result of the Russification policy is the displacement of the non-Russian population from their ancestral territories, which is being carried out in the name of the “internal emigration-and “fraternization” of the “unified Soviet people”. This process is becoming more and more intensive. The percentage of the non-Russian population in the Soviet Republics is decreasing day by day. Thus, in Kazakhstan the indigenous population is less than 33 per cent of the total, while in Kirghizia less than 50 per cent. The proportion of the Letts and Estonians in Latvia and Estonia has dropped to 57 per cent (“Zeri i popullit”, November 1, 1977). The same thing is occurring in the other non-Russian republics, too. With their “theory” of the “unified Soviet people”, the Soviet revisionists are also trying to justify the major disproportions in the national composition of their party. The following facts are clear proof of the bourgeois and great-Russian nationalist ambitions: out of every 1,000 Russian inhabitants 74 are party members, while out of every 1,000 Uzbeks, Kirghizs, Turkomen and Tajiks – 35, 34, 32 and 30 respectively, members. Of every two secretaries of the party organizations of the non-Russian republics, one is Russian. Irrespective of the percentage of Russians in these republics, of every two deputy ministers of each republic, one is Russian. Facts show clearly that party members of Russian nationality hold key positions everywhere, in the party, economy, army, culture, state power, etc.
How reactionary the national policy of the Soviet revisionists can be judged also from the great disproportions in the economic development of the Soviet republics. A characteristic of these republics today, in contrast to the time of Stalin, is their one-sided, monocultural development. The Soviet revisionist leaders take no account of the needs and the economic peculiarities of each region, nation and nationality. A disproportionate development of the productive forces – a typical capitalist phenomenon, is evident in the various republics of the Soviet Union. For example, the productive forces of such republics as Azerbaijan, Tajikistan. Kirghizia, Uzbekistan, etc have lagged far behind. Their industrial development is anaemic, one-sided and mainly in the branches of light industry. In order to justify this situation, the revisionist ideologists have come out with the “argument” that “the principal cause of their backwardness is the great increase in the populations of these republics and not the low rates of increase of social production and labour productivity there, in comparison with the Russian Republic.” Let us take the level of sales of commodities per capita. What is the situation? In the republics of Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, the level of sales of commodities per capita is 2 to 3 times lower than in the Russian Republic. Under the revisionist labels of “specialization” and “social division of labour”, the backward republics in the Soviet Union converted into mere suppliers of raw materials for the industry of the Russian Republic. For example, half the arable land in Uzbekistan is sown to cotton and other industrial crops.
In the Soviet Union, the Russian bourgeoisie of our days is trying to deprive the non-Russian peoples and minorities of their native languages, under the pretext of the creation of a “unified Soviet people”. Through various political, economic, ideological and cultural means, the non-Russian populations are being compelled to give up their mother languages and use Russian instead.
In an attempt to justify or cover up the great-Russian chauvinist policy, the ideologists of Soviet social-imperialism are noisily publicizing their concepts about the “inter-nationalization of all aspects of social life”, the development of the international consciousness, of the masses”, the “unification” and “levelling” of the cultures of the various nationalities of the Soviet Union. Under the cloak the “unification” and “levelling” of the cultures of the new Russian bourgeoisie aims to impose the great-Russian cultural norms and standards on the non-Russian nations of the Soviet Union, to denigrate and wipe out their cultural traditions, the national spirit of their culture and art. All the activity of the Soviet ruling clique indicates this very clearly. The concepts of the “inter-national culture” or the “inter-nationalization of culture”, of the “pan-national socialist culture”, by means of which the Soviet social-imperialists are trying to disguise their denationalizing practices, gained acceptance long ago in contemporary revisionist literature. The great-Russian theorists and ideologists go so far as to declare that “there is no clear dividing line between national and international pride” in the Soviet Union, and go even further when they talk about the “inter-nationalization even of national sentiments”.
The classics of Marxism-Leninism have sternly condemned the cosmopolitan theories and views which are intended to smother the sound national spirit of the art and culture of the various peoples and justify the assimilation of nations. Lenin has said, “International culture is not non-national. Nobody said that it was. Nobody has proclaimed a ‘pure’, culture, either Polish, Jewish, or Russian, etc.”*
The demagogic claims that in the Soviet Union the “national question has been solved finally and definitively” (L. Brezhnev, “On the Occasion of, the 50th Anniversary of the USSR”), that the problems arising on this question in the conditions of developed socialism “cannot be called national questions”, cannot conceal the bitter reality of the Soviet state. What is left of all this lustre when the Muscovite revisionist leaders themselves complain about the existence of “national prejudices” and “nationalist manifestations”, as an “extremely dangerous phenomenon which is preserved in the mentality of people insufficiently developed from the political standpoint”? In the light of this widely-known reality, such statements as these prejudices still linger on even in the conditions in which the objective circumstances, conducive to any kind of antagonism in the relations between nations, have long been “eliminated” and the bourgeois politicians and propagandists, who “encourage national prejudices in the most varied forms from abroad”, are allegedly to blame for this, are obviously false. In fact, the source of this state of affairs must be sought in the treacherous general political course followed by the Moscow renegade clique since the counter-revolutionary seizure of power, and in bourgeois capitalist economic, political and ideological basis of the Soviet Union today. In order to perpetuate their domination over the other revisionist countries, the Soviet social-imperialists have also come out with chauvinist doctrines and concepts on the “pan-national socialist culture”, the “-man with universal socialist nationality”, etc. With these chauvinist concepts they “...want to erase the national identity of ancient and famous countries of Europe that have contributed so much to its culture and history”.*
In the service of their aggressive, oppressive and exploiting policy
the modem revisionists have always done their utmost to subjugate these
countries economically. The Soviet Union is blowing its trumpets that e
“community of free equal socialist states” has been created. The
revisionist propaganda does not fail to add that this “Community has
been created not as an arithmetic sum of states but as a unified social
organism”. But the revisionist clique of Moscow reigns in this
alliance, and through the Comecon and the Warsaw Treaty, tools in its
hands for the enslavement of the member countries, it is carrying out
its neo-colonialist policy in the vassal countries, plundering their
assets and realizing their economic integration into the Soviet
social-imperialist state. The Soviet Union has impoverished its allied
countries economically, has tied them up after its chariot and is
forcing them to “dance” to the Soviet drum.
During the years 1928-1936, under the leadership of J.V. Stalin and in conformity with the teachings of V.I. Lenin, the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union was completed with overall success. The completion of this important process, the transformation of the small private economies into large collective economies, marked the triumph of socialism in the countryside, too. Thus the economy of the Soviet Union was established with both feet on socialist ground, as Lenin instructed.
“In 1937 the collective farms accounted for 93 per cent of the total number of peasant households, while the grain crop area of the collective farms amounted to 99 per cent of the total grain crop area sown by the peasantry” (History of the CPSU (b). a brief course, 1945, p. 347).
The collectivization of agriculture overturned the old relations of production, barred the way to the development of capitalism in the countryside and of the exploitation of peasants, established new relations of solidarity and mutual help in the countryside, as well as between town and countryside, between the working class and the peasantry, thus further strengthening the alliance of these friendly classes.
It provided the Soviet state with its socialist base in the broadest and most vital, but also the most backward sector of the people’s economy.
After the death of J.V. Stalin, with the coming to power of the Khrushchev group, and especially following the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the restoration of capitalism began to extend to the countryside as well. Thus “Soviet society turned bourgeois down to its tiniest pores, capitalism was restored in all fields.”*
With the degeneration of the character of the ownership of collective farms, the relations of distribution in the Soviet Union also degenerated. In fact, today, the labour power of the collective farmer has been transformed into a commodity. The collective farmer is paid for only a very small part of the work he does, while most of the results of his labour are appropriated without payment by the new bourgeoisie through channels of the realization of the collective capitalist ownership and the state monopoly ownership. Mere juridical proclamation does not define the character of ownership. What is important is its real aspect, the economic aspect. From the economic aspect,, the important thing is, first who decides how property is used; second, what mechanisms are used for the administration of this property; third, who profits from this property. The present-day capitalist collective farms in the Soviet Union are collective only in name, while their content has changed in all directions. Although formally the main means of production are not directly the property of the bourgeoisie, as they are in classical capitalist society, the new rural bourgeoisie which runs these farms appropriates the labour of others and the profits which are drawn from this property and this capitalist distribution. Hence, the collective farm property has been transformed into capitalist property of a specific group of the new rural bourgeoisie and production in the collective farms is now based on profit and the enrichment of this bourgeoisie. With the re-establishment of capitalist relations, the economic laws of capitalism operate in the Soviet countryside, too.
The revisionists’ action of breaking up the MTS and selling the tractors and other farm machinery to the collective farms was one of the anti-Marxist acts which destroyed the socialist system established in the Soviet countryside. This capitalist measure accelerated the bourgeois degeneration of the collective farm order.
With the breaking up of the MTS, the Soviet revisionists placed large quantities of the main means of production in the sphere of the circulation of commodities, thus reviving the market mechanism and departing from the socialist road. Engels condemned the existence of the circulation of commodities in the so-called economic communes of Diihring, regarding this as an element which inevitably gives birth to capitalism.
The abandonment of the socialist principle of distribution according to the quantity and quality of work done, the establishment of forms of remuneration contrary to this principle, have created marked differences in the incomes distributed among the collective farmers, and especially, between their incomes and those of the managers and administrative personnel who comprise the new bourgeoisie. All this has led to alteration of the social class structure of the Soviet countryside, where there are now the class of exploiters and the class of the exploited, regardless of the fact that amongst them there are strata of different economic levels according to the place they occupy in the production and distribution of the surplus value.
Consistently adhering to the Marxist-Leninist principles in the field of distribution, the PLA has never allowed the creation of great disproportions in incomes between town and countryside, or within them.
The Soviet revisionists tried in vain to cover up and disguise their capitalist practices in the field of distribution, through anti-scientific and anti-Marxist theorizing, such as the so-called revolution in the field of incomes, the social differentiation of labour, etc which, in fact, create the terrain for the new bourgeoisie of town and countryside to increase the exploitation and use any means to enrich itself in every way.
According to the Marxist-Leninist theory, the private plot of the cooperativist, as an economic phenomenon, comes into being with the collectivization of agriculture. It has a transitory and temporary character and represents an auxiliary economy which serves to fulfil certain requirements of the families of cooperative members, but is not an economy producing for market production. It was treated as such in the Soviet Union as long as Stalin was alive and the CPSU stood on Marxist position.
At the November 1978 Plenum of the CC of the Soviet revisionist party, it was stressed that “... it is essential that a climate of warm encouragement is created for the individual (read: private) agricultural economies... for they do useful work for the state. This is an extremely important issue...” (Ekonomicheskaya gazeta, No. 12. p. 16, 1979). The decision of June 6, 1979, of the CC of the Soviet revisionist party and the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union on encouraging private production is a continuation and deepening of this line and has enthused the observers in the capitalist countries who notice with pleasure that “the Soviet party and government hope to stop the downhill course of private production” AT A. Foreign News, July 3, 1979, p. 10)). As a result of this, the private sector as a whole, accounts for more than 25 per cent of total agricultural production, and frequently the amount of agricultural and livestock products from the individual plots sold on the private market is greater for some products than the amount of the .same products which the state capitalist sector (the state farms) sells. Prices for these goods on this market are two to three times higher than on the state capitalist market. In the Soviet Union today, about 600,000 collective farmers and other private producers sell agricultural and livestock products on the peasant market. Twenty-eight peasant markets with 20.000 stalls have been opened for this purpose in Moscow alone. (ATA, Foreign News. November 12, 1980.)
The capitalist system is incapable of ensuring stability in agricultural production. In the world today about one billion people suffer from hunger and 450 million others live on the verge of starvation. (ATA, Foreign News, June 9, 1980, p. 5.) Albania is among the European countries with least arable land per head of population. Nevertheless, by relying on the cooperativist order, the ever increasing needs of consumption, industry and export for bread grain and other agricultural and livestock products are ever better fulfilled in conformity with the requirements of the socio-economic development of the country. “The collectivization of agriculture, carried out over a period, step by step, as well as the unceasing strengthening of the common property, are proving the superiority and vitality of the socialist cooperativist order right now, when all over the world, not only in the backward countries, but even in the so-called advanced countries, there is a great shortage of agricultural products.”* Thanks to the correct Marxist-Leninist line of our Party, “We are able to produce 5 times more bread grain than before Liberation, while in 1979, as compared with 1960, agricultural production was about 3 times greater.”**
Analysis of the experience gained by the PLA during these 36 years of socialist construction shows that the safeguarding and strengthening of socialist ownership in its two forms, as well as the constant improvement of the relations of distribution in a revolutionary way, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, have decisive importance. Through the dictatorship of the proletariat, the PLA has constantly strengthened and developed both forms of socialist property, has ensured that this property is really owned by the working class, the cooperativist peasantry and all the other working people and used in the interests of the whole society, allowing no individual person or stratum to profit and enrich themselves from it.
The capitalist degeneration of the collective farm order in the Soviet
Union, and the transformation of the socialist collective economies
into capitalist collective economies wiped out one of the most hard-won
historic victories of the proletarian revolution after the seizure of
power under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin.
The imperialist and social-imperialist superpowers have placed all their scientific potential in the service of their counter-revolutionary and hegemonic strategy on the internal and external plane. “As the capitalist and revisionist states they are,” said Comrade Enver Hoxha at the 8th Plenum of the CC, “they use science and technology, too, to oppress and exploit the broad working masses, to achieve their predatory imperialist aims.”
At the time when the Soviet revisionist leadership usurped power the Soviet Union was a first-rate scientific power. With the correct, principled and far-sighted policy of Lenin and Stalin, not only had the great backwardness in science of the past been overcome within three and a half decades, but, in many fields of scientific research, an unquestionable superiority had been achieved over the other countries.
Today, in the process of the total degeneration of the Soviet system, science has been placed completely in the service of the revisionist social-imperialist course. For example, the works of Soviet authors in the fields of social, economic and other sciences prepared public opinion for the future actions of the revisionists in power. Here we may mention that, on the internal plane, many of the revisionist “reforms” and measures, which set the Soviet Union totally on the course of capitalist development, have usually been preceded by “studies” which have described these measures as imperative demands imposed by the objective laws of the society of “developed socialism”.
On the external plane, the main preoccupation of Soviet social sciences is how to prettify the typically neo-colonialist exploitation of the countries within the Soviet orbit with socialist labels. Thus, repeated studies are made of the international division of labour, the “internationalist character of the Soviet aid”, the economic “integration”, etc. etc.
For its expansionist purposes, Soviet social-imperialism displays special interest in studies dealing with problems concerning broad zones of the world, especially those in which it intends to extend its influence. Historical studies of this nature intend to show that, over the centuries, the limit of vital Russian interests has been extended thousands of kilometres beyond the state borders, as “the exigencies of a great nation and people” require.
In this respect, they display a special interest in the Balkan countries, always emphasizing the allegedly friendly and benevolent stand of Russia towards these countries. To this end, in the past 20 years, the participation of Soviet scholars in international congresses and symposiums has been extended, as has the scope of their studies on the problems of the history and culture of the countries of the Balkans, the Near East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. In nearly all fields of Albanology, the Soviets have created nuclei of cadres who try to justify Soviet aims by distorting the scientific facts.
In regard to the natural and technical sciences and the other applied sciences, distortion and falsification cannot be employed as in the social sciences, nevertheless, this does not mean that the revisionist ideology and policy is powerless to impose itself on the development of these sciences; however, to achieve these aims it must employ other, more appropriate means. On the one hand, efforts are made in the theoretical-philosophical field to set the fundamental sciences along the course of idealism, and on the other hand, the applied sciences have been placed totally in the service of expansionist, social-imperialist interests and aims.
The revisionist leadership of the Soviet Union aims to achieve the development of these sciences so as to use them as a means of ensuring increased profits within the country, and greater competitive ability on the international plane, and what is more important, to build up its military potential in order to strengthen its positions in the inter-imperialist rivalry.
In order to achieve these aims it imposes a heavy-handed policy in the orientation of scientific research (through the allocation of finance and appointment of scientific cadres, its own strict check-up, etc), setting Soviet science on the course of ever more pronounced militarization, as can be seen in the special interest and the priority given to research in the fields directly or indirectly linked with war.
The institutes, which work for the system of the military technology and new weapons, also have big centres of fundamental education in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Of course, studies in aerospace and nuclear physics, etc are linked with a complex of sciences and require development of them, to a greater or lesser extent, in all directions. However, the level of this development is dependent mainly on the degree to which these sciences are used for military equipment. Special care has been devoted to long distance communications, the detection of extremely weak signals in the background of big noises, telecommand systems, the coding and decoding of information, the miniaturization of electronic devices, etc which are linked with the equipment of missiles, espionage, spy satellites, etc.
For these purposes the Soviet Union employs not only its own scientific potential, but also that of the other countries of the “socialist community”. Through cooperation, it employs the most highly trained scientists of revisionist Eastern Europe on particular problems, in the framework of comprehensive complex studies.
This working together with the member countries of the Comecon, of the “socialist community”, on common problems and themes is evidence not of aid and collaboration, but of the exercise of Soviet control, of the fact that the scientists and scientific institutions of those countries, too, are placed in the service of Soviet social-imperialism. According to the revisionist press, in the years 1971-1975, the members of Comecon worked on 193 problems, including 306 themes on the basis of the coordination of plans, as well as on 102 independent themes. In 1976-1980, they worked on 264 problems, which included 862 themes, and on 17 independent themes. Thus the independent themes were reduced from 102 to 17.
Another aspect of the revisionist policy is the underlining of the idea that modem science, especially the fundamental and technical sciences, cannot be developed in small countries, but only in the big countries which have a large potential, highly skilled personnel and sophisticated laboratories. This echoes the superpowers’ “policy of the umbrella” from a new direction, because it is intended to implant the opinion that the small countries should carry out their scientific development, too, under the shadow of the “mighty” and with the help of the “experts” of the latter. One aim of this, among others, is to get information about many problems of the country that receives this “aid”, information which in the past was obtained by the risky methods of traditional espionage. The fact that science penetrates all the activities of a country allows the Soviet “experts” to get full information which will eventually serve Soviet expansionist aims. In 1977, one of the Soviet scientific magazines (“Izvestia Akademii Nauk SSR”, Geological Series, No. 2) wrote: “For ten years on end. Soviet and Afghan geologists have worked to compile the geological map of Afghanistan on the scale of 1 to 500,000, and in special zones on the scale of 1 to 200,000. As a result, a great deal of material has been gained on its stratigraphy, magmatism, tectonics and useful minerals.” There is no doubt that, in the course of these studies, the Soviet social-imperialists have had the possibility to gather strategic data which they used in their aggression against that country.
On the ideological plane, Soviet science long ago abandoned the positions of militant materialism which Lenin and Stalin defended and developed. Now the Soviet scientists accept many idealist theses as “reasonable hypotheses”; however, the revisionist leadership is still interested in maintaining a “dialectical materialist” pose in the treatment of philosophical problems in science. While describing the guidance of science and scientists by the Marxist-Leninist philosophy as dogmatic” and absolutizing certain features of the development of science today, they have reached the point of making such neo-positivist assertions as that today each science has its own philosophy. Thus, in essence, the role of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy, as the science which lights the way for all other sciences, is negated.
For example, through the words of their best-known representatives they have begun to consider it their “honourable” duty to declare that the natural and technical sciences are freed from the influence of the materialist philosophy, while “proving” the inhibiting role of the latter. “If we are going to speak of the history of philosophy as a whole (i e without making any differentiation between materialism and idealism), we cannot but admit that the ‘laboratory tests’ of philosophers, in the overwhelming majority of cases, have not been to the benefit of science, and indeed, have sometimes done it great harm”, writes the academician Ginsburg, striving to “ prove” the harm that the Soviet philosophers did to Soviet science, in the past decades of Soviet state power, and more over, that the philosophers “in general” have done to science “in general” throughout the history of philosophy.
These facts show how correct and well-based is the conclusion of our
Party that the Soviet revisionists have placed science and technology
in the service of their revisionist and social-imperialist policy.
The 20th Congress of the CPSU officially sanctioned a revisionist, anti-Marxist course. This political and ideological fact is the source and base of all the activity of the Soviet philosophers in the distortion of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy. The Khrushchevites had to disguise their new political course in order to present their revisionist line, inside and outside of the Soviet Union, as a “Marxist-Leninist” line, a “creative development of Marxism-Leninism. They had to distort the Marxist-Leninist philosophy in order to make the revisionist line acceptable to those who did not constitute the social base of revisionism at that time, and later to the entire mass of the communists and the people. The 20th Congress was the first to attack and distort such fundamental theses and principles of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy as those on classes and the class struggle, the role of the masses and the individual, the proletarian revolution, war, peace and peaceful coexistence, the fundamental contradictions of the epoch, etc. The subsequent revisionist congresses distorted other principles such as those on the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Marxist-Leninist party and its leading role in the revolution and socialist construction, etc. The attack on the Marxist-Leninist philosophy was a frontal attack on all the principles and laws of dialectical and historical materialism. The revisionist theses which the 20th and subsequent congresses sanctioned became the official philosophical theses. Thus, the revisionists began their attempts to turn the Marxist-Leninist theory into ontology and gnoseology, to turn back to Hegel, to neo-positivist, pragmatic, idealist and metaphysical currents and tendencies. Despite their hiding behind Marxist-Leninist disguises and phrases, and their organising of “criticisms” of certain blatant deviations from the Marxist-Leninist philosophy, the Soviet revisionist philosophers have attacked and distorted all the principles and laws of dialectical and historical materialism.
One of the main aspects of the retrogressive process of distortion of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy is represented by the attempts of the Soviet revisionist philosophers to fragment the dialectical materialist world outlook, to strip philosophy of its ideological role, of its social function and its proletarian partisanship. This was the context in which their attempts to alter the structure of Marxist philosophy were carried out. And, according to them, this was necessary in order “to raise the Marxist-Leninist philosophy to the level of the requirements of the epochs Deliberately misusing and distorting Engels’ thesis that after every great discovery materialism must alter its appearance, the Soviet revisionist philosophers claim that “the time has come for the ‘dialectics of nature’ (which they consider as the ontology of Marxism) to be created.” They have even defined the content of the “dialectics of nature” – the study of the universal laws of nature, matter and the forms of its existence. They are applying the concepts of neo-positivism when they split up the Marxist-Leninist philosophy and want to create as many dialectics as there are concrete sciences! The fundamental aim of these efforts is to liquidate the fundamental principles of dialectical materialism, to liquidate the role of philosophy as a world outlook. As Lenin said, these hirelings of the bourgeoisie try to disguise this philosophical debasement of science with the argument that Engels wrote the work “The Dialectics of Nature”. In fact, in this work Engels makes philosophical generalizations from discoveries in the natural sciences, formulates the general laws of dialectics, and neither in this, nor in any other book has he ever set himself the task of creating a “dialectics of nature”.
From 1956 up to date, the Soviet revisionist philosophers have engaged in a great deal of “theorizing” and “polemics” about the relationship between dialectics, logic and the theory of knowledge. From this theorizing has emerged the opinion that regards these sciences as independent, thus reducing Marxist philosophy to a gnoseology, a science dealing only with the laws of thought and isolated from objective reality. This attempt to reduce Marxist philosophy merely to the confines of logic is intended to eliminate Marxism-Leninism as a leadership science.
The concepts of the Soviet revisionist philosophers, who conceal the distinction of principle between Hegelian dialectics and Marxist dialectics, and place Hegel on almost equal footing with the classics of Marxism, serve these aims. For them it is Hegel who provides the key to know Marx and Marxism, and not Marxism-Leninism which assists a critical appreciation of Hegel’s philosophy and all the other philosophical systems. Further, speculating with Lenin’s assertion that he who has not read Hegel’s logic cannot understand “Capital”, the Soviet philosophers claim that “this idea can and must be extended to the other works of Marxism, too, including the works of Lenin himself” (F. Kostandinov, “Hegel’s Philosophy and Modern Times”, pp. 6-7). As Comrade Enver Hoxha stresses, in this way, these enemies of Marxism “...try to turn Marx’s dialectics upside down and to place it on a new, transformed pedestal, that of the neo-Hegelians.”* It is not accidental that they turn their eyes towards Hegel and demand a return to him. Their political aim is to deny the revolution, and Hegelian philosophy, which is not the philosophy of the revolution, supplies the philosophical basis of this aim. But Hegelian dialectics is abstract, idealist and limited.
The profoundly scientific and revolutionary character of Marxist dialectics, its critical, proletarian class spirit has always terrified and angered the enemies of Marxism-Leninism, because, as Marx says: “It does not bow in obeisance to anything and its revolutionary and critical in its essence.”*
In their attempts to distort Marxist dialectics, the revisionist philosophers resorted to various tactics. First, misuse of the thesis of the creative development of Marxist-Leninist philosophy became their favourite method. Under this emblem, they raised the question of changing the content, concepts and fundamental laws of Marxist dialectics and presented this revisionism as an “enrichment”. The “enrichment” which these pseudo-Marxists have made, in fact, is an accumulation of distortions which deny the fundamental ideas of Marxist dialectics. This is what they have done with the concepts of matter, space, time, dialectics, the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, etc. The Soviet revisionists have gone so-far in their distortion of the thesis of the creative character of Marxist philosophy that now they speak of the existence of a “dialectics of capitalism and all other antagonistic formations”, and of a qualitatively new dialectics of the communist formation” (I. A. Moroz, “Dialectics of the Development of Socialism”, 1978, pp.17-18). Hence it turns out that, there is not one Marxist dialectics but two, one of capitalism and another of socialism. According to these “Marxist” inventors, Marx and Lenin created the dialectics of capitalism, while “it devolves upon us to create” the dialectics of socialism, which is qualitatively different. The so-called “dialectics of socialism”, preached by the Soviet revisionists is, in fact, a collection of all the distortions which the Soviet philosophers have made of Marxist dialectics since the official sanctioning of the revisionist line in the Soviet Union.
Second, a favourite tactic is that of side attacks on the fundamental principles and theses of Marxist philosophy while preserving the external appearance of formulations of the Marxist-Leninist theory. This is done in order to be able to continue the distortion of the fundamental theses and principles of Marxist-Leninist dialectics from behind this disguise, to strip them of their revolutionary essence “with the aim of fighting socialism and communism.”* The Khrushchevites have acted in this way with all the fundamental principles and laws of Marxist-Leninist philosophy.
Third, the Khrushchevites also followed the course of allowing the propagation of ideas, which are in blatant opposition to Marxist dialectics about matter, contradictions, development, etc by organizing “criticisms” of them. These “criticisms”, which were made from revisionist positions, served as a basis to dish up and spread their new anti-dialectical ideas. Public opinion was worked on in this way, and consequently, these revisionist ideas gained acceptance and were described as a contribution to Marxist dialectics”. Both the fact that, idealist and metaphysical ideas and viewpoints which distort and openly negate the fundamental principles and laws of Marxist-Leninist dialectics are allowed to be launched, and the fact that the “-criticism” of them is organized from revisionist positions, reveal the anti-Marxist, hostile position which the Soviet revisionists maintain towards the Marxist-Leninist philosophy and their intentions and actions to combat the revolutionary philosophy, dialectical and historical materialism. The picture becomes more complete if we take into account how their political slogans, the assessment of the epoch and its main contradictions, the justification of military invasions, the concept of limited sovereignty, the “theory” of -developed socialism”, etc are built up on the basis of metaphysical concepts of historical idealism and pragmatism.
The problem of distorting the Marxist theory on contradictions has been at the centre of attention of the Soviet modern revisionists. This is connected with the fact that the dialectical theory on contradictions demonstrates the objective necessity of overthrowing the bourgeois order through the violent proletarian revolution and the inevitable triumph of communism.
The distortions of the Soviet revisionists also involve problems of the content of the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and the specific character of its operation in socialism. While absolutizing and distorting the specific character of the operation of this law in socialism, in order to cover up the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, the Soviet revisionist philosophers deny the existence of antagonistic contradictions after the construction of the economic base of socialism. By means of such demagogy they try to conceal the capitalist reality of the Soviet Union, which is characterized by the existence of private property, exploiting classes and fierce class contradictions. The abolition of private property and the exploiting classes becomes a reality only after the construction of the economic base of socialism in a genuinely socialist society such as ours. But again, besides non-antagonistic contradictions which are typical of socialism, antagonistic contradictions still exist during the entire period of transition to communism. The antagonistic contradictions in socialist society have their peculiarities and are resolved in the context of the existing socialist order. Proceeding from their opportunist, anti-Marxist concepts, the Soviet revisionist philosophers deny the class struggle as the main means to resolve antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions in socialism. ‘
According to the Soviet revisionists, in socialist society class
struggle quits the stage and is replaced by unity which is considered
“the most important condition for the successful resolution of
contradictions”. Apart from the fact that they try to sell capitalism
as socialism, they absolutize unity and conceive it in an abstract
manner. This abstract character has its source in their negation of the
class struggle. Our Party has accumulated rich experience in the
solution of class contradictions. It applies the Marxist-Leninist
philosophy and theory in practice to the letter. At the same time it
has waged a ceaseless and resolute struggle against the metaphysical
and anti-Marxist deviations from and distortions of the
Marxist-Leninist theory by all the enemies of Marxism-Leninism and the
revolution.
At the end of 1960, at the time when the Meeting of 81 communist and workers’ parties was being held in the Kremlin, important changes had already taken place in Soviet literature. The change of course by the Khrushchevites had made itself felt in all aspects of the life of the country, but the repercussions of this deviation were especially evident in Soviet literature. And this is fully understandable. As an active part of the ideological superstructure, literature and the arts were bound to be among the spheres most susceptible to Khrushchevism. Once again life was proving Lenin’s thesis that there can be no literature and art outside politics.
Soviet literature at the beginning of the 60’s had nothing in common with that great revolutionary literature which was born in the flames of the October Revolution, the Civil War and later, in the years of socialism in the Soviet Union. For decades this literature and art had been a spiritual nourishment and source of inspiration for the workers and progressive people throughout the world. Breaking through the walls of prejudice and silence, raised by the international bourgeoisie the names of Gorky, Mayakovsky, Ostrovsky and Fadeyev, Soviet music and films, had spread the truth about the revolution, communism and the new proletarian world which was emerging, all over the world.
At the beginning of the 60’s, at the time of the consolidation of revisionism, not even the shadow of the great revolutionary Soviet literature was left in the Soviet Union. The Khrushchevites had succeeded in distorting it, reducing it to an amorphous literature, rotten in content and form, a miserable means of illustrating their anti-Marxist theses. It was a typical conformist literature adapted to their anti-communist course, colourless, spiritually barren, with no authority among the international audience.
In his report to the 7th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania, Comrade Enver Hoxha says about the Soviet revisionist writers and artists that “they have turned into a caste in the service of the counter-revolution and the chauvinist and expansionist policy of Soviet social-imperialism.”
There is an opinion that one of the main reasons for the degradation of Soviet literature is the existence in the Soviet Union since the 20’s and 30’s of regressive or decadent writers such as Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Zhoshchenko, Pasternak, etc some of them surviving from the time of the Tzar, and others emerging in opposition to the Soviet power later. It is true that some of them continued to write, mostly translations, but their literary activity was extremely restricted, and they themselves were isolated from Soviet cultural life. They were rightly called “internal emigrees”, and it is unimaginable that they could play an important role in the development of Soviet literature, much less set the tone for it. Other writers set this tone and another literature dominated in Soviet life, the true literature of socialist realism.
In his speeches, instructions and correspondence with outstanding Soviet writers, Stalin had made clear the stand of the party towards the development of the internal life of Soviet literature. The emergence of writers like Bulgakov or Pasternak was an aspect of the class struggle in the Soviet literature and art, and by no means a phenomenon allegedly caused by mistakes in Stalin’s stand, as the Trotskyites and Maoists try to present it.
The change in the political course of the Soviet Union the state of stability of Soviet literary life, which existed in Stalin’s time, was replaced by the most unpredictable oscillations; the principled class struggle, as a normal manifestation of literary life, was replaced by unprincipled stands, ranging from flattery of a few writers to sensational scenes, reminiscent of western movies, like the expulsion from Soviet territory of Solzhenitsyn, whom the Khrushchevite revisionists themselves had brought to the limelight as a tool to attack and denigrate Stalin and the dictatorship of the proletariat, but who later became too much of an embarrassment to them. This whole Khrushchevite business of the Khrushchevites struck a mortal blow to the development of Soviet literature. Its appearance changed completely. Such writers as Ehrenburg, Tvardovsky, Sholokhov with their works “The Thaw”, “Vasil Tyorkin in the Other World”, “The Fate of a Man”, followed by Simonov and Katayev, and new writers of the type of Yevtushenko, a direct offspring of the Khrushchevite 20th Congress, began their infamous crusade against socialism, disguised behind the struggle against the alleged cult of the individual.
In order to dominate the great mass of Soviet writers more completely and, on the other hand, to create the illusion of a vigorous literary life, the revisionist chiefs encouraged the creation of different groups and trends in the Soviet Union, which are allegedly engaged in polemics with one another. Thus, there are the groups of writers labelled “pro-peasant”, of “pro-Western liberals”, of “Slavophil conservatives”, etc. These groups are polarized around different literary organs, the influence of which in Soviet literary life increases or diminishes as the changing circumstances require. The revisionist leadership supports them for its own interests. It especially supports the opposition between the two main groups: the pro-Western liberals and the Slavophils, otherwise known as the “pro-Russians”. Both these groups were utilized by Khrushchev, as they continue to be utilized by Brezhnev, preference for one or the other being determined by the current policy. When the revisionists are engaged in some flirtation with the West, they encourage and bring to the forefront the liberal group, which is for the elimination of the last vestiges of any, even formal, distinction between Soviet literature and bourgeois literature. However, in their insatiable desire to carve up the world, the revisionists come into collision with the West, so they shove the liberals behind the scenes and bring on stage the chauvinist “pro-Russians”, who are only the other side of the same medal. This occurred at the time of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and recently again, with the occupation of Afghanistan.
When they want to sabotage social struggles and to put down revolutions, the revisionists encourage pacifism, supraclass humanism, the literature of the horrors of war, but when they want to send their tanks into Prague or Kabul, they turn over the page there and then, and replace pacifism with militarism, gentleness with savagery, the plough with the sword.
This ambiguity of Soviet literature is its main characteristic, and it could not be otherwise with an unprincipled literature placed in the service of the counterrevolution and social-imperialism. Apart from the variations in emphasis on pacifism or militarism, the ambiguity is also clearly expressed in a series of other problems which the Soviet literature presents or solves in that way and with that variant which interests the revisionist chiefs of the Kremlin at given moments or in given circumstances. Take for example, the treatment by Soviet writers of the national and the cosmopolitan in literature, a treatment which undergoes chameleon-like changes at different times and in different environments. Whereas the “pro-Russians” chime all the bells of great-Russian chauvinism. When writing of Russian literature, the Russian language and Russian traditions, they change their tune completely in regard to other, non-Russian peoples. In this case they espouse another set of principles, the national character is roundly condemned, proclaimed harmful, labelled “bourgeois nationalism”, and instead, there are calls for the internationalization of culture, for the “common culture of the socialist peoples”, etc, which are simply open calls for the denationalization of national cultures.
In their struggle to dominate the motley scene in present-day revisionist literature, that great market in which every kind of rotten literature is bought and sold, the present revisionist chiefs have mobilized and sent into action a new detachment, apart from the various modem groupings, and the remnants of yesterday’s decadent writers, known as the “internal emigrees”, a very effective and active detachment called the “dissident Soviet writers”, “external emigrees”.
Despite the contention implied in their label, despite the differences, disagreements, anger-rancour which they have with the centre, the dissident Soviet writers, whether within the country or abroad are in essence flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood of the present-day Soviet revisionist literature.
The “dissidents” are the spawn of Khrushchevism. It was Khrushchev personally who ordered the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s books in the Soviet Union and it was the Khrushchevites who called on the Soviet literary scum to rise against socialism. It was only when the masters came into conflict with their apprentices, only when these so-called dissident writers, with their insistence on pushing ahead, did not respect the laws of demagogy, that is, no longer obeyed their masters on the question of the speed with which the betrayal should proceed and ware becoming a danger to the revisionist chiefs who feared exposure, that the latter, after trying in vain to discipline them, attempted to get rid of them.
However, it is immediately evident that the struggle against the “dissidents” was half-hearted, only for the sake of appearances. Was not Boris Pasternak the chief dissident of the Soviet Union some years ago? Nevertheless, it did not take long for Pasternak’s blemishes to be forgotten, and now his books are published and he is honoured in the Soviet Union the same as the others. Without doubt this is what will occur eventually with Solzhenitsyn and all the others who will be reunited with the body from which they broke away.
One of the tasks of the Soviet literary “dissidence”, with its clamour against the present Soviet regime, is to present this regime and its leaders to the world as allegedly “leftist”. These facts reveal the naked truth, that despite all its noise against the “dissidents” the Soviet government is still encouraging them today, just as in the past, creating possibilities for them to work and even issuing them with passports for travel abroad. Sometimes the dissidents’ words reveal some truth which exposes the present revisionist leaders, such as the statement made by the “dissident” writer Alexander Zinoviev to the French newspaper “Nouvelles Litteraires”, in which he lamented that: “The pressure of communism is so strong in the world today that even the leaders of the Kremlin themselves can hardly cope with it.”
In regard to the relations between the present-day revisionist literature and bourgeois literature, they are nothing but a reflection of political relations. Despite the fact that, from the strategic standpoint, they are component parts of a united reactionary world front, bourgeois literature and revisionist literature have contradictions and disagreements which result from the contradictions between the group of bourgeois states headed by the USA and the group of revisionist states headed by the USSR.
When our Party challenged Khrushchevite revisionism right in its
centre, Moscow, in 1960, along with the struggle for the defence of the
principles of Marxism-Leninism, for the defence of the freedom and
independence of the peoples, and following its example, the struggle
commenced for the denunciation of revisionist art and the defence of
socialist realism, the banner of which the Khrushchevite revisionists
have abandoned.