The Dissenting Ally

The Dissenting Alley

In the Communist lexicon, Nikita Khrushchev is clearly the apostle and chief promoter of peaceful coexistence and the calculated thaw. On the 90th anniversary of Lenin's birth last week, when "the Lenin of today" was off vacationing on the Black Sea coast, the official mouthpiece was Finnish-born Presidium Member Otto Kuusinen, 78, the hardbitten old Bolshevik who was one of Lenin's commissars in the revolution's early days. Kuusinen told an audience of some 20,000 at Moscow's Lenin Central Stadium that "war would be insane" with mankind's new destructive weapons. In Europe, the Communist satellites dutifully echo the line from "the leader of the socialist camp."

But last week there was emphatic evidence that the soft line does not suit aggressive, bumptious Red China, either in theory or practice. In Peking, Mao Tse-tung's editorialists took advantage of the Lenin celebration to take issue with Khrushchev. With the approaching summit meeting obviously in view, newspapers chorused that coexistence with capitalism is "impossible" for good Leninists. "The imperialist system will not crumble by itself," said the authoritative journal Red Flag. "It will be pushed over by the proletarian revolution."

Rejecting Khrushchev's preaching that "socialism" can triumph peacefully, Red Flag called on Communists to "stick to the principles of Marxism-Leninism" and prepare for "a just war to end the unjust war" for which "Eisenhower and his ilk are actively making ready." Nuclear war is not something for Communists to fear, said Red Flag, for "on the debris of a dead imperialism, the victorious people would create with extreme rapidity a civilization thousands of times higher than the capitalist system."

Clearly, Theoretician Khrushchev had a challenger.

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