Moscow and Peking

Abstract

HE PRESENT Sino-Soviet conflict, with its ominous overtones of military confrontation, is not a conflict between nation-states as conceived by most commentators in the past and still represented today in the pluralist state system of the Free World. Rather it is a conflict between two Communist powers, both sharing basically the same MarxistLeninist ideology and the same domestic and international goals. Domestically, they claim to work toward the self-regulating collective, and internationally toward a Socialist world order brought about by worldwide revolution. These are still the proclaimed goals both in Moscow and Peking. If they mutually accuse each other today of having become capitalist roaders, revisionists, and social-imperialists, or of not ever having fully understood Marxist-Leninist doctrine because of a peasant mentality or petit bourgeois fanaticism, these accusations demonstrate that it is not the goal, but the defections from it, that each side accuses the other of. For both, Marxism-Leninism is the professed framework of all policy. To follow this fraternal fight, let us go back for a moment to the origins of the family relations between the Soviet and Chinese Communists before the conflict started.