Stories from the international communist movement: the Chinese front in Europe and the limits of the anti-revisionist struggle

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the political life of two important European communist activists who, in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, decided to support China and Albania against the Soviet Union: Kazimierz Mijal, a Polish communist who, in the mid-1960s, decided to exile himself to Albania, from where he promoted the ‘China way’ of communism; and Jacque Grippa, a Belgian communist who struggled to find space between the Western European left, Beijing, and Moscow. The article analyses how apparently marginal protagonists of the Cold War gained a prominent position and played an important role in the dynamics created within the communist world following the Sino-Soviet split.