In the homeland of Ilyich and in the distant Yanan
Let us remind you that on April 22nd, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin will be celebrated. In the Ulyanovsk region, unlike the whole of Russia, they plan to celebrate the anniversary of the person who really turned the whole world. Broadly and informally, with the obligatory participation of foreign delegations, the main of which should be the Chinese one. Unless, of course, coronavirus hysteria and everything connected with it does not interfere.
However, the case may ultimately be limited to just a postponement. The Victory Parade is already being postponed, and, as one might expect, at the request of the veterans.
The governor of the traditionally "red" region Sergey Morozov managed to declare that
Chinese representatives will take part in the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin, which will be held in the Ulyanovsk region. It is planned to hold an international forum of historians, philosophers and publicists dedicated to Lenin with the participation of representatives of the PRC.
In addition, there are a number of events in the anniversary plans, including
an exhibition project of the region about Lenin has been prepared, which is planned to be exhibited from April 22 to December 2020 in different cities of the PRC.
But in China itself, the authorities are also not going to limit themselves to duty meetings and conferences.
The ceremonial events will be held at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and the Ideas of Mao Zedong, the Center for Foreign Language Translation of the Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, the Museum of the History of the Communist Party of China in Yan'an, and the house-museum of the great helmsman Mao in Shaoshan.
But everything planned is just a pale shadow of the project that the leadership of the PRC planned fifty years ago, to mark the 100th anniversary of Lenin's birth. In anticipation of that anniversary, the PRC quite seriously hoped that an alternative Leninist Communist Party would be created in the Soviet Union - of course, a "pro-Chinese" one, especially since in the Celestial Empire they considered themselves winners in border conflicts with their northern neighbor.
There were no real messages for this in the USSR. Competent authorities managed to take control of individual groups and potential leaders long before they gained popularity. The party nomenklatura under Khrushchev and Brezhnev was openly stuck, which helped not to think about the degeneration of both Marxism in the party and socialism in the country.
(see "Acts of Nikita the Wonderworker. Part 3. Khrushchev and the" Non-Aligned ").
The Stalinist underground and the "parallel" CPSU
On the occasion of Lenin's 100th birthday, the Chinese media regularly published articles calling for the re-establishment of "a truly communist party, the foundations of which were laid by Stalin, but were destroyed by degenerates with party membership cards." The examples of such a party were, of course, the Chinese Communist Party and the Albanian Party of Labor. As a signature, the abbreviation "Soviet Communist Bolsheviks" (SKB) was often adorned.
It is characteristic that the first of these publications in Beijing was dated back to the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, and the press campaign dragged on until its 60th anniversary. The KGB at one time estimated the number of the "Maoist" underground in the USSR at no more than 60 thousand people, scattered in 50 cities of the Union, starting with Moscow, Leningrad and Gorky, and ending with distant Sumgait and Chita.
The groups that were immediately called "Trotskyist-Maoist" included both "legal" members of the CPSU, and non-party workers and engineers, as well as young people, somehow incomprehensibly imbued with the ideas of the notorious "Cultural Revolution" in the PRC (1966-1969). These were by no means the children of the "thaw" - almost all of them rejected the anti-Stalinist campaign in the USSR and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These underground workers knew very well that the "cultural revolution" in China is officially called "the continuation of the class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat on the basis of the great teachings of Marx - Engels - Lenin - Stalin - Mao Zedong."
The "Iron Curtain" was gone, and many in the USSR heard the "call" of Marshal Lin Biao, who was then considered the successor of the great Mao:
“None of those who betrayed the October Revolution can escape the punishment of history. Khrushchev has long gone bankrupt. But the Brezhnev-Kosygin clique is pursuing a renegade policy with even greater zeal. The proletariat and working people of the USSR will never forget the behests of the great Lenin and the great Stalin. They will certainly rise up for revolution under the banner of Leninism, overthrow the rule of the reactionary revisionist clique and return the Soviet Union to the path of socialism."
For a while, the Chinese Communists' calculation was based on the fact that a "parallel" CPSU would be created after all. In principle, there were some prerequisites for this in the USSR itself. But it is quite possible to agree with N. Zahariadis about the main reasons why such a party did not take place.
In the context of the political, and most importantly, economic rapprochement between the PRC and the United States and the West in general, the revival of Stalinism in the USSR and, as a result, the restoration of the Soviet-Chinese alliance did not meet Western interests. The economic dependence of the PRC on the West has been growing since the mid-70s by leaps and bounds. In addition, since the events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, there has been a convergence of the geopolitical interests of the PRC and the West, moreover, in almost all regions of the world.
Different coordinate system
It is clear that in such a system of coordinates, the "restalinization" of the USSR and Sino-Soviet relations inevitably transformed into a slogan on duty. Already on November 1, 1977, in the extensive publication of the CPC Central Committee in the Chinese party officialdom "People's Daily", timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of October, not a word was said in support of the creation of the Stalinist CPSU.
It seems that the silence was due to the fact that, firstly, The Brezhnev group, discrediting the teachings and deeds of Lenin-Stalin, strengthens its state machine and in every possible way seeks to firmly tie the Soviet people to its chariot. The KGB has become a sword hanging over the Soviet people and over many countries of the world.
Secondly, "Due to the betrayal of the ruling group of the Soviet Union, the wide spread of the revisionist ideological trend and the split in the ranks of the working class, the revolutionary labor movement abroad cannot but go through a period of reformation."
Therefore, there "is still no revolutionary situation for the direct seizure of power."
Nevertheless, in the USSR, the Stalinist underground did not give up. For example, in 1964-1967 in Moscow and Gorky there was a group headed by a citizen of the People's Republic of China Guo Danqing and a candidate of economic sciences Gennady Ivanov. They distributed propaganda literature from China and Albania, and also formed a document called "Manifesto of Socialism: Program of the Revolutionary Socialist Party of the Soviet Union."
Here is just one call from this program: "… to recreate the party of the Stalinist model", "to overthrow the party bureaucracy" and thereby prevent the final degeneration of socialism."
In February 1967, all members of the group were persecuted, although Guo Danqing was lucky: in 1969 he was exiled to China. In March 1968 in Moscow, workers V. and G. Sudakov created a group called the Union of Struggle Against Revisionism, which already in 1969 neutralized the KGB.
On February 24, 1976, on the opening day of the XXV Congress of the CPSU, in Leningrad on Nevsky Prospekt, four young men scattered and pasted over 100 leaflets of Stalinist-Maoist content with a fair amount of criticism of "Soviet revisionism". They ended with an appeal: “Long live the new revolution! Long live communism!"
Only in the fall of 1977 did the special services manage to figure out the main participants in this speech: they were students of Leningrad universities Arkady Tsurkov, Alexander Skobov, Andrei Reznikov, and a tenth-grader Alexander Fomenkov. Back in 1974, they were co-organizers of the illegal Stalinist-Maoist group "Leningrad School".
In 1977-1978, this "school" organized an illegal commune on the outskirts of the city of Lenin, where Mao's ideas were studied. By 1978, the Leningrad School had established links with sympathetic groups from Moscow, Gorky, Riga, Kharkov, Tbilisi, Gori, Batumi and Sumgait. While trying to organize an illegal youth conference to create a large association, the "Revolutionary Communist Youth Union", members of the "Leningrad School" were repressed.
But on December 5, 1978, an unprecedented event took place in Leningrad. At the Kazan Cathedral, where in 1876 students organized the first mass demonstration in Russia against tsarism, over 150 young men and women gathered to protest against the arrest of the "Leningraders". In the first days of April 1979, during the trial of Arkady Tsurkov, which was open by law, protests and anti-party slogans were also heard. Most of the participants in those pickets were expelled from universities and schools.
Communist impasse and the dictatorship of the proletariat
On the eve of the 100th anniversary of Lenin at the plant. Maslennikov in Kuibyshev, the "Workers Center" group was created with a somewhat vague ideological platform, but unambiguously Marxist and pro-Chinese. Its leaders were the worker Grigory Isaev and the experienced 35-year-old oil engineer Alexei Razlatsky, who also created the Party of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. By 1975, the organization had about 30 members.
In October 1976, the Workers' Center was able to distribute its Manifesto of the Revolutionary Communist Movement:
The counter-revolutionary coup in the USSR shortly after Stalin took place in such an unexpected way that no one noticed it. The administration now dictating in the USSR manages to pass itself off as a Marxist-Leninist leadership, it manages to fool the workers. The Soviet Union has been declared a state of the whole people. But it is clear to Marxists that as long as the victorious proletariat cannot do without the state at all, this state cannot be anything other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."
Further, Beijing's position was briefly explained: "The events associated with the appearance on the political arena of NS Khrushchev made Mao Zedong think about the viability of a system capable of nominating such figures to the top leaders." Therefore, "the" Cultural Revolution "held in China is a direct call for reprisals against the formed and degenerating bureaucracy, it is an attempt to demonstrate to the masses on cruel facts that it is she who is the master of the situation in the country, that in her collective actions she is omnipotent."
Isaev and Razlatsky, of course, were recorded as dissidents, although their views were radically different. But the development of events in the USSR, which after stagnation and perestroika will confidently move towards disintegration, ultimately did not allow Beijing to continue the course of creating a parallel CPSU. Calls for this by Radio Beijing and other Chinese media did not last long, were heard less and less, and with the death of Brezhnev in November 1982, they stopped altogether.
But for many years, huge portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin adorned the legendary Tiananmen Square, surprising not only Josip Broz Tito and representatives of the North Korean Kim family, but also Richard Nixon with Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Margaret Thatcher, and even the bloody dictator Sese Seko.
