It all began with the debunking of Stalin's "personality cult". This undertaking by Khrushchev, designed primarily to whitewash him and his closest associates, immediately scared away those who were not going to abandon this inheritance, no matter how terrible it may be. The communists were the first to leave, followed by those who had little to do with Moscow.
Today, few people remember that it was the West that was the first to support the Non-Aligned Movement, a project put forward at that time by the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito. The idea was to protect the young post-colonial countries from the influence not so much of the United States and NATO as of the USSR and its allies.
Soon, in November 1959, US President John F. Kennedy went on a short "vacation" to the shores of Croatian Istria - to the Brijuni Islands, directly to the residence of Marshal Tito, after which Yugoslavia, together with India and Indonesia, initiated the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in the status of a multilateral interstate structure …
By that time, Khrushchev, even having officially apologized to Yugoslavia for the “Stalinist excesses” in relation to the country and personally to its leader I. B. Tito, was never able to involve it in the pro-Soviet socialist camp. At the same time, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia continued to participate in the NATO-sponsored "Balkan Security Pact", moreover, together with NATO members Greece and Turkey.
Khrushchev and Brezhnev, it seemed to them, managed to establish a very friendly personal relationship with Tito, but this did not help either.
Belgrade did not join either the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) or the Warsaw Pact Organization. In addition, the marshal regularly stubbornly refused Moscow's requests to temporarily provide the USSR and the Warsaw Pact with naval bases in Split, Bar or Zadar. This happened during the Suez (1956) and Caribbean (1962) crises, as well as during the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars.
Yugoslavia went further when it condemned the incursions of Soviet and Allied troops into Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979). Belgrade did not hesitate to provoke military excesses on the border with Bulgaria, accusing it of maintaining the "Great Bulgarian" claims to Yugoslav Macedonia.
It got to the point that the leadership of the FPRY was not at all embarrassed by the maintenance of diplomatic relations and close economic ties with the Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea-Cambodia. Finally, Tito personally defended the need to maintain a kind of "cold peace" with the Pinochet regime in Chile because he did not want to break the treaty with the United States. It was signed back in 1951 and was called very characteristic: "On mutual security."
Meanwhile, the Belgrade Intergovernmental Conference of Yugoslavia, India, Egypt, Indonesia and Ghana in September 1961 proclaimed the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement. Over the next 25 years, the vast majority of developing countries joined it, including many countries that had just ceased to be colonies. For obvious reasons, many decisions made within the Movement were not easy to implement. But in financial terms, due to special concessional loans from states or financial structures of the West, many developing countries were often provided with significant financial assistance.
Officially, the first roles in terms of aid were Yugoslavia, India and Egypt, to which the United States and European countries turned to face immediately after the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser. At the same time, those countries that at any time were in confrontation with the USSR, the PRC and their allies were especially kindly - for example, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, the Dominican Republic, Thailand, the Philippines and Oman.
In fact, it was the Soviet leader Khrushchev who provoked the organizational design of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. During that period, the party publications of the USSR actively, even aggressively, criticized the new "revisionist" program of the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia. And Khrushchev, clearly dissatisfied with Belgrade's refusals from the CMEA and the Warsaw Pact, ordered to include the Stalinist anti-Yugoslav thesis of 1948 in the CPSU Program approved by the 22nd Congress of the CPSU.
Let us recall that this clause of the CPSU program read: “The revisionists are actually carrying out the role of peddlers of bourgeois reformist ideology in the communist movement. The revisionists deny the historical necessity of the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leading role of the Marxist-Leninist party, undermine the foundations of proletarian internationalism, and slide towards nationalism. The ideology of revisionism found its fullest embodiment in the Program of the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia."
It is noteworthy that the Yugoslav communists updated the program in 1958, that is, 10 years after the "Stalinist" thesis, but this did not bother Khrushchev at all.
The creation of the Non-Aligned Movement was largely due to the two-faced position that Khrushchev took in relation to Patrice Lumumba in the early 60s. He was one of the most influential political figures in Africa, the first president of the former Belgian Congo - the main pan-African resource "box" and geographically the largest country in Africa.
In September 1960, in view of the intervention of NATO countries in the Congo, P. Lumumba turned to the USSR with a request to send Soviet military advisers and military-technical assistance to the country. However, Moscow delayed the response, which soon resulted in a coup in Kinshasa. Patrice Lumumba was arrested by foreign mercenaries and shot on January 17, 1961. from the movie, you can't twist it back.
Belgian historian and political scientist Lude de Witte is convinced that “the USSR imitated a confrontation with the West in the Congo, was indifferent to the fate of Lumumba and other left-wing nationalists of the Congo. The Kremlin did not want to unconditionally support Lumumba, because he would not agree to "replace" the Belgian concessions with Soviet ones. But the defeat of the Congolese anti-Western movement was a devastating blow to the geopolitical and ideological positions of the USSR, but not to the conservative bureaucrats from the Kremlin, lacking a vision of the future. Because they treated Lumumba and his supporters as junk, opportunistic things."
An equally crushing blow for Moscow was the split in the international communist movement at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. As noted by the head of the anti-fascist resistance, long-term leader of the Greek Communist Party Nikos Zachariadis, “Tito’s domestic and foreign policy proved the validity of Stalin’s position in relation to Tito’s revisionism, because the overwhelming majority of the Communist parties did not follow the Titoites. But sweeping criticism and then defamation of Stalin by the majority of his comrades-in-arms, headed by Khrushchev, which, in addition, was not coordinated with foreign socialist countries and communist parties, split the international communist movement. National liberation organizations were also ideologically disarmed, and post-colonial countries were discouraged as well.
The consequences of such a policy, according to N. Zachariadis, were capable of undermining the foundations of socialism and the ruling communist parties themselves in the USSR and other socialist countries. Therefore, "public criticism of the Khrushchev anti-Stalinist line from China, Albania and an increasing number of foreign communist parties, on the one hand, is correct, but on the other hand, it is beneficial to the imperialists, colonialists and revisionists." Is it any wonder that the Kremlin will not forgive such a Zachariadis? Under pressure from Khrushchev in April 1956, he was removed from the post of head of the Greek Communist Party and soon exiled to Surgut. He remained there during the Brezhnev period, and committed suicide there in 1973 …
In the course of a protracted polemic between the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the Communist Parties of China and Albania on the same issues, Mao Zedong predicted to Khrushchev back in 1962: "You started by debunking Stalin, and finish the matter with the destruction of the CPSU and the USSR." And so it happened … The head of the then Albanian Council of Ministers, Mehmet Shehu, announced in May 1961 about the formation, together with China, of a bloc of communist parties rejecting anti-Stalinism. Khrushchev reported this at the XXII Congress of the CPSU in an insulting manner: "… what Shehu recently blurted out about the bloc of anti-Soviet Communist Parties shows that Albania is working off 30 pieces of silver from the imperialists."
On March 2, 1964, in the Albanian capital Tirana, the first meeting of the leaders of 50 foreign communist parties was held, which severed ties with the CPSU after the anti-Stalinist XX and XXII Congresses of the CPSU. The participants in the meeting immediately reoriented themselves to the PRC and Albania. It is significant that by 1979 the number of such communist parties exceeded 60. That is, the split of the world communist and national liberation movements, provoked by those congresses, continued to deepen. And this undoubtedly weakened the geopolitical positions of the USSR, which was fully used in the West. It is characteristic that the majority of pro-Chinese communist parties still exist today, unlike those "post-Stalinist" ones that were created at the behest of Moscow, but by the end of Gorbachev's "perestroika" together, with a few exceptions, they disappeared into oblivion.
In the mid-1960s, despite the fact that Khrushchev had already been removed from all posts, the situation "reached" the breakdown of Soviet-Albanian relations, attempts at a coup in Albania, as well as the scandalous recall of Soviet specialists from the PRC. And then, as you know, there were military conflicts on the Soviet-Chinese border near Damansky Island and on Lake Zhalanashkol. Meanwhile, in the PRC or Albania, meetings of the Stalinist-Maoist communist parties and national liberation movements began to be held regularly, once every two to three years. Twice, on the eve of the 90th anniversary and the 100th anniversary of his birth of Stalin, these meetings were held in the southern Albanian city of Stalin, which twice "historically" was renamed Kuchova.
At Marxist forums, there was usually no stone unturned from the condemnation of Moscow's anti-Stalinist policies, but Belgrade also got criticism. And in the documents of these forums, it was repeatedly noted, directly or indirectly, that the policy of Khrushchev and his "successors" was coordinated with the imperialists, being aimed at a gradual degeneration and then destruction of socialism and communist parties, and not only in the USSR.
It is well known that since the late 1980s, Beijing, for a number of economic and geopolitical reasons, has been pursuing a "super-cautious" policy towards foreign Stalinist-Maoist communist parties and national liberation movements. Thus, the latest official information about a similar meeting described above dates back to April 1992. Prepared by Deng Xiaoping and Kim Il Sung, it took place in Korean Pyongyang. The final document of the forum, based on the speech there by Kim Il Sung, aims at "the inevitability of the restoration of genuine socialism in countries where it suffered a temporary defeat due to the degeneration of the party and state structures from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s."
In early November 2017, a conference was held in Beijing with the participation of representatives of the CPC, as well as nearly forty foreign Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Judging by the published materials, not a word was said about Khrushchev on it.
