Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 32
August 3 – The long letter which the leadership of the Albanian party addressed to the Chinese CP and government on July 29 has just arrived in this country. Brief excerpts from it appeared in the capitalist press. It indicates a definitive and deep-going split on both party-to-party and state-to-state levels. The relationship seems to have gone full circle, so profound are the political differences as outline in this letter.
The letter, which has been published by Albania as a 56-page pamphlet, is worthy of a great deal of searching analysis and much further study and needs additional documentation. We have only been able to avail ourselves of a cursory examination at this time and will try to give it further attention at a later date.
One emerges from reading it with an overwhelming sense of sadness at the deterioration of relations between and among some of the socialist states. This is especially true if one reads the Albania letter against the background of the tragic developments arising out of the Vietnam-Kampuchea struggle.
For example, the Albanian letter says, “Under the hoax of defense of national independence from Soviet social imperialism which it regards as the only danger and threat today, China requires the peoples to give up their struggle for national, economic, and social liberation, to submit to U.S. imperialism and the other capitalist powers of the West, the former colonialists. It presses for the strengthening of the Common Market and the European Union, organisms set up to keep the proletariat of Europe in capitalist bondage and to oppress and exploit the peoples of other countries. By fanning up the armaments race of the superpowers and relying on such instruments of war of U.S. imperialism as NATO and other military blocs, the theory of ‘three worlds’ instigates imperialist world war.”
Reading this Albania report can only confirm Vietnam’s most recent allegation that the Chinese leaders are the basic factor and fundamental cause of the conflict among the Indochinese people, even though nothing is alluded to in this letter concerning that particular struggle.
One thing is clear after reading this indictment of the Chinese CP leaders. Then Chinese CP leaders, including Mao, never really took the Albanian CP leadership very seriously, either as an ideological co-thinker or as a significant socialist ally, even while Mao was alive. Nor have the Albanian leaders ever regarded themselves as followers of Mao or accorded him the same political stature as the Maoist followers have.
In the eyes of the Albanian leadership, consultation and give-and-take (especially criticism and self-criticism) in formulating common strategy in the ideological and political field were not only necessary but obligatory. This ought to be so, according to the Albanian leaders, irrespective of the fact that the CCP leadership was leading a country of over 800 million and the Albanian 2 or 3 million.
But this was not at all the case as far as the Chinese CP was concerned.
The Albanians regard the ideological struggle as the most important element for collaboration between their party and the Chinese leadership. State-to-state relations they view as very important but secondary.
It should of course be borne in mind that the Albanian CP leaders are strong adherents and promoters of Stalin’s policies as they envision them.
So far as advice or consultation on significant political and ideological issues was concerned, the document reveals that the Chinese CP leadership not only turned a deaf ear to the Albanians but in at least one important area of dispute even declined to answer a detailed Albanian letter. The issue is an important one as it concerns the border dispute between the Soviet Union and China – a dispute which has plagued the two socialist countries and cause incalculable damage to the anti-imperialist struggle as well as world socialism. It is one to which we have devoted considerable attention over the years.
“In summer 1964,” the Albanian letter to the CCP say, “Chinese propaganda took up the Sino-Soviet border problem. Referring to a talk of Mao Tse-tung with a group of Japanese socialist parliamentarians, it claims that China had been dispossessed by the Russian Czars of vast territories of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, that in Europe, too, the Soviet Union had territorial problems which had emerged as a result of the Second World War.”
The Albanian leaders didn’t approve of Mao raising the problem of the rectification of borders.
“According to the view of our Party,” the letter says, “the Chinese leadership was making two gross mistakes. In the first place, the raising of the border problem at that moment did not assist the ideological struggle against Khrushchevism. On the contrary, it provided the Soviet leadership with a powerful weapon against China ... in order to neutralize the effect of the ideological struggle they were waging to expose the Khrushchevite betrayal and to present our struggle as a border dispute or territorial claims.”
The second error, thought the Albanians, was that Mao himself unjustly attacked Stalin because the border issues in Europe to which Mao alluded were of course agreed upon between Stalin and the imperialist countries.
It is what the Albanian leaders are saying about the first mistake that is the most important. They are saying that it was unprincipled and opportunist for the Chinese CP leadership to have introduced a national issue, a border dispute, in the midst of a fierce and profound ideological struggle which the Albanians were the most concerned about and thought the Chinese CP was too.
We could not agree more with the Albanians on this point!
It is as though I were engaged in a hot polemical dispute with the reader on a grave political issue and in the midst of it I reminded you that the bicycle you were riding on actually belonged to me and I wanted it back right away. Regardless of the validity of my claim to it or how urgently I needed the bicycle, it would be totally irrelevant to the questions of revisionism, the abandonment of the class struggle, raising peaceful coexistence to a dogma, and making accommodationist plans with U.S. imperialism at the expense of the liberation struggle.
We felt precisely this way when the question of the border dispute was raised. However, under the circumstances we urged the USSR as the socialist country which was far more economically and industrially developed to settle the border issue and return the border lands because these were obtained during the period when the Czarist autocracy took advantage over the weaker Chinese feudal rulers at the time. But more importantly and regardless of who the border lands really belonged to, it was the kind of issue which would poison the relationship between the two socialist countries and convert the ideological struggle into an out-and-out nationalist rivalry which would only end up in further deterioration between the two socialist countries.
It was not wrong for Mao to have raised the question formally to Khrushchev in 1955 for purposes of discussion and negotiation in the normal course of straightening out border relations between the two countries. But to do it in the midst of a worldwide ideological struggle was most harmful.
As the Albanians said in a Sept. 10, 1964, letter to the CCP (quoted in the current document), and here again we could not agree with them more, by raising the border issue in the face of Khrushchev’s revisionist attacks, “the masses of the Soviet people will not understand why People’s China is now putting forth territorial claims to the Soviet Union, they will not accept this, and Soviet propaganda is working to make them revolt against you. But we think that even true Soviet communists will not understand it, nor will they accept it. This would be a colossal loss for our struggle.
“... We think that we must not open old wounds, if any, we must not start a controversy and polemics over whether or not the Soviet Union has appropriated other countries’ land, but our only concentrated struggle should be spearheaded against the great ulcer, against the great betrayal represented by imperialism and modern revisionism, the traitor groups of Khrushchev, Tito and all their henchmen.”
One may not altogether agree with the way this is posed, but in essence it is absolutely correct.
The border dispute, as all the world now knows, finally culminated in a dangerous military conflict in 1969. But fortunately it came to a halt when both the Soviet and China leaders saw where it was leading to.
At that time, during the military struggle, we urged a peaceful solution of the problem. In effect we asked: how can one call for peaceful coexistence between capitalist and socialist states if we cannot attain peaceful coexistence even between socialist states? We called upon the Chinese CP as the banner bearer of the revolutionary side of the controversy in the ideological struggle to live up to its revolutionary responsibility and work for a peaceable solution to the dispute, even though we acknowledged that China had a legal right to the disputed border area. (“WWP calls for peaceful solution of Sino-Soviet dispute,” March 20, 1969, issue of WW.)
We pointed to the great damage the military conflict was doing by diverting socialist energy and the attention of millions upon millions of workers and progressives away from the anti-imperialist struggles raging right at the door of the People’s Republic of China, where the U.S. was trying to bomb Vietnam into submission, “back into the Stone Age,” as one of the fascist generals put it.
The Albanians were correct also in recognizing that the overthrow of Khrushchev did not herald a turn to the left by the new Soviet leaders, although they were wrong in not wanting to test it out. The Chinese leadership and particularly Chou En-lai were all elated that Khrushchev’s downfall offered an opportunity for a political accommodation with the USSR. For this the CCP leadership should not be blamed. On the contrary, it may have been a sign that they were more concerned with socialist solidarity in the anti-imperialist struggle and that if a new leadership and more revolutionary policies were now in charge, then perhaps a new effort at confining the political conflict, without conciliating on principled differences, should be made.
Practically the entire left in the communist movement internationally had the same evaluation of Khrushchev’s ouster. However, Workers World in an article pointed out that the hopes that this was a left turn on the part of the new leadership were unfounded. (Workers world, Oct. 29, 1964, “Social roots of the new Soviet leaders.”) (The rightist sweep in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev era made it virtually impossible for the new leadership to make a sudden sharp turn, even if they had wanted to. It would take several years and a great deal of hostile pressure from imperialism before they would come to grips with the so-called broad dissident movement, which was a strong current at the time, and defeat the economic “liberalizers,” really reactionaries.)
But both in the case of the Albanians as well as the Chinese, their mistakes were in judgment and were not crucial. The major point is that the new leadership in the Soviet Union was in no position at the time to move to the left or bring a reversal of some of the rightist positions of Khrushchev either in the international field or in domestic politics.
An interesting point regarding the current leadership in China is that in the course of conversations between the Albanian and Chinese CP leaders in 1962, the present Deputy Prime Minister Teng Hsiao-ping “declared to the delegation of the Central Committee of our [Albanian] Party: ‘It is impossible for Khrushchev to change and become like Tito. ... As a socialist country, the Soviet Union will never change.’ (From minutes of talks, June 11, 1962.)”
Not only Teng and Liu Shao-chi, but also Mao in a speech on Jan. 30, 1962, just now published by the Peking Review, at the time held the view that the Soviet Union was still a socialist country. It was only after “the signing of the Anglo-American-Soviet Treaty of August 1963” which, according to the Albanians “reflected the uniting of the efforts of the two superpowers for the establishment of their domination over the world,” that this view was changed. The Chinese leaders then introduced the false theory that the Soviet Union had become a capitalist state pursuing an imperialist policy. The contention that a full-scale bourgeois counter-revolution had taken place in the USSR was suddenly and without any theoretical discussion whatsoever propounded and accepted, to the great detriment of the world movement.
In reality, the Anglo-American-Soviet Treaty, as they call it (the Test Ban Treaty, as it is called here), was a minor diplomatic matter on the scale of many of the other diplomatic and political activities of a detrimental character which the Khrushchev leadership had carried out and which the passage of time showed were not nearly as significant as the envenoming of relations between the USSR and China over the damnable border dispute.
The struggle against revisionist policies was one thing. Casting the Soviet Union as a whole in role of an imperialist state laid the basis for going over to an alliance with the camp of the real imperialists, which is precisely what the Chinese CP leaders have been doing for a period of time.
There is much more in the Albanian pamphlet which lends itself to discussion. Moreover, an important and conspicuous omission from this letter is any discussion of the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia. The failure to mention it here indicates to us that the Albanian leaders were as much taken by surprise at the position formulated by the CCP leaders and shoved down the throats of the pro-China followers as they were by the announcement of the Kissinger visit to Peking and the rapprochement with the U.S. All this was down without consultation with the Albanians.
However, whereas the Albanians were forced into the position of accepting the CCP version condemning the Warsaw Pact intervention, they wisely rebelled against the accommodation with U.S. imperialism which the Nixon visit heralded.
Last updated: 11 May 2026