The Communist Party of Canada and the Sino-Soviet Dispute

Abstract

THE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTE has, among other things, forced all the Communist parties to take sides. The initial reluctance which most of them displayed in aligning themselves unequivocally with either Moscow or Peking did not extend to the justifications they provided once their leaders took the decisive step. The statements they issued and the literature they distributed on the subject throw an interesting light on the inner workings of the world Communist movement in recent years. Although the Communist Party of Canada lacks influence at home and prestige abroad, both Peking and Moscow courted it assiduously. The pressure to align itself came after almost forty years of agitation in the course of which the Canadian Party succeeded in combining loyalty to the CPSU with propaganda on behalf of the Chinese Communists. This was particularly true of the period between the death of Stalin and 1957 when Communist newspapers in Canada shifted some of their emphasis from the USSR to the achievements of Mao's China. Canadian Communist publications reflected the different stages in the Sino-Soviet dispute. First, there was a noticeable decline in the number of articles devoted to the construction of socialism in China; this was followed by a critique of the Chinese Communist leadership couched in esoteric terms dear to Communists. Finally, the Canadian Communist leaders took a series of steps to dissociate themselves from the Chinese viewpoint which came under increasingly virulent attacks. In the campaign against Mao the booklet Questions for Today' occupies a place of honour. It consists of a series of articles, party resolutions, communiques and reports, among which by far the most illuminating is the lengthy report2 presented by the delegation of the Communist Party of Canada on its return from Moscow and Peking in April i963. In the opinion of Canadian Communist leaders, the publication by the Chinese of the brochures, Long Live Leninism and Under the Banner of Leninism, formed an important episode in the Sino-Soviet controversy. Numerous copies of the English edition of these two brochures graced-and