Word: khrushchevism
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...time Nikita showed up in Peking in 1959, fresh from his tour of the U.S. and the meeting with Ike at Camp David, he was barely on speaking terms with his hosts. The airport was decorated with huge posters of Stalin; on the way to town, Khrushchev and Mao began an argument that lasted for the next four days. When the Soviet ruler left, not even the niceties of a formal communique were observed...
...early 1960 Mao had clearly given up hope of persuading Khrushchev to change his flexible cold war policy, and began an all-out Chinese offensive designed to topple Khrushchev from power. It was also the start of an endless argument about whether authority for Moscow's "peaceful coexistence" or Peking's "inevitability of war" could be found in the sacred Lenin texts. Actually Lenin, and even Stalin, had argued both ways at various times, depending on conditions-and Moscow pointed out that conditions were certainly different in the nuclear age. When Mao's men carried the attack...
...full-dress summit session of 81 Communist parties in Moscow in November 1960 produced a statement (adopted unanimously, of course) that merely lumped together these diametrically opposed opinions. Then last fall, the Red Chinese invasion of India only served to justify Khrushchev's view that Mao was a reckless fanatic, and Moscow ostentatiously failed to back Peking. As for Khrushchev's withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, the maneuver confirmed Mao's worst fears about vacillating Kremlin leadership, leaning first to "adventurism," then to "capitulationism." Thundered Peking: "It is 100% appeasement. A Munich pure and simple. Imperialism...
Time was when Western skeptics wondered whether the Sino-Soviet split was real. Khrushchev, they figured, might be relatively nice to the West only long enough to wangle some concessions on NATO or nuclear arms control; then Mao would step in and together they would demolish the free world. Today it is inconceivable that the quarrel is merely an act. In fact, there is a growing vision-shared by such disparate prophets as Arnold Toynbee and Charles de Gaulle-of Russia and the West some day standing together as allies against China. Stranger things have happened in history...
This may be only realistic in the nuclear age. But all over the West there is a creeping notion that Khrushchev's kind of Communism can be lived with-that only Peking's is really bad-and this has taken much steam out of the anti-Communist position. Nikita's "reasonable" approach has helped the Italian Reds gain strength, has revived dreams of a new popular front among once solidly anti-Communist French Socialists, has even prompted Belgian Foreign Minister Paul Henri Spaak to say that the removal of U.S. nuclear stockpiles from Western Europe might...