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by the disunity within the movement and thought Moscow shared some
blame for it. During 1962, Khrushchev avoided further international commu-
nist conferences that would invite renewed polemical debates. His objective
was to let passions burn out, opening the way to restoration of fraternal ties.^7
Khrushchev also realized that he had acted too rashly when he suspended aid
in 1960. The Soviet leader saw himself as a dedicated Marxist-Leninist revolu-
tionary, heir to Lenin and the leader of the global revolutionary struggle. The
CPSU and the CCP stood on the same side of that global struggle, Khrushchev
believed. It was difficult, therefore, for Khrushchev to understand why Mao
and the CCP objected so strongly to Soviet policies. They must arise from
Chinese misunderstandings of Soviet policy, Khrushchev concluded.
In line with this analysis, starting in August 1962 Moscow sent occasional
messages to Beijing stressing the role of Soviet nuclear forces as a deterrent for
the entire socialist camp, messages intended to address what Soviet leaders
felt must be China’s concerns about the Soviet commitment to China. During
the 1962 Sino-Indian war, Moscow also stood by China against India. The
culmination of Khrushchev’s push for reconciliation came on February 23,
1963, with a carefully drafted letter from the CPSU to the CCP. The letter
took a conciliatory tone. Differences between the two parties had been over-
stated, the Soviet letter said, and could be overcome by comradely discussion.
Differences that existed should be understood as a function of the differing
circumstances of communist parties in various countries, and not as some
sort of ideological apostasy. Open polemics between the two parties should
be ended.
Moscow’s push for reconciliation foundered on Mao’s need for a big fight
against revisionism, international and within China, as part of the struggle
he was waging to revive the push for socialism in China’s countryside. In
January 1962—the month before the Wang-Wu-Liu letter—an unprecedented
conference of 7,000 cadres (virtually China’s entire ruling elite) met in Beijing.
President Liu Shaoqi had criticized the Great Leap Forward and called for
more pragmatic, production-oriented, and humane rural policies. Other
leaders supported Liu. Mao made an unprecedented self-criticism and then
absented himself from the policy-making scene for several months, a ploy
Mao often used to good effect, allowing his rivals to expose themselves. In the
several months after the conference, agricultural policies were laid out that
would have restored family farming. What was at stake, Mao believed, was
whether China’s agricultural sector would be socialist or capitalist—whether
socialist agriculture would fuel rapid socialist industrialization, as Stalin and
his Short Course taught was the correct way, or whether capitalism would
be restored in China’s countryside. Rather than restore capitalism, Mao pro-
posed a Socialist Education Movement to teach China’s peasants that collec-
tive farming was good for them. Rather than capitulate to the petit-bourgeois
mentality of the peasantry, the CCP should, in Mao’s view, remold their