Reviving Revolutionary Momentum } 173
Mao recognized and deeply resented Moscow’s ability to unilaterally
dictate to the international communist movement, but Mao’s revolutionary
romanticism prevented him from understanding, at least up to 1961 or so, that
his ideological challenge was actually a challenge to the global power of the
Soviet state. Up to that point, Mao apparently believed that Khrushchev and
the CPSU would realize their ideological “errors” and embrace Mao’s “cor-
rect” ideas, permitting unity within the international communist movement
to be reestablished on the basis of (Mao’s) correct Marxist-Leninist principles.
What was involved, Mao believed, was a party-to-party dispute over ideology,
which should not and probably would not affect state-to-state relations. Mao
seems to have imagined that Khrushchev would at some point say, “you are
right, I am wrong,” and accept the CCP’s “correct” formulations of ideology.
The leaders of the international communist movement would then sit down
on the basis of complete equality and in deep fraternity and collectively set
the line for their movement. This was a romantic perspective.
There were, of course, considerations of national power and interest under-
lying Mao’s ideological formulations. Mao chafed at Moscow’s use of aid to
pressure China: the linking of submarine assistance to the radio station, the
ending of nuclear weapon assistance in 1959, Khrushchev’s visit to the United
States, Moscow’s alignment in the India-China dispute in 1959, and the ab-
rupt cutoff of aid in 1960. Mao also resented China’s subordinate status within
both the Sino-Soviet alliance and the international communist movement,
and the fact that the CCP was repeatedly presented with CPSU faits accom-
plis such as de-Stalinization, Soviet rapprochement with Yugoslavia, and
pressure on Albania. But Mao viewed even these considerations of national
interest through the prism of Marxist-Leninist theory. Mao saw Moscow’s
various objectionable moves as arising out of “mistakes” in Marxist-Leninist
theory, out of an incorrect understanding of ideology. Mao concluded by 1962
or so that those ideological errors in turn arose out of the new “class char-
acter” of the CPSU. The CPSU had degenerated into a “bourgeois party,” and
its rule represented the “restoration of capitalism” in the USSR. Mao also
chose to respond to the dispute over national interest with the Soviet Union
via ideological polemics against the CPSU. Mao was an idiosyncratic combi-
nation of ideologue and revolutionary realist. He pursued realistic goals of
Chinese power and greatness, but he did this in Marxist-Leninist ways and
via Marxist-Leninist ideology. It is possible to understand the Sino-Soviet
split of 1956–1963 in terms of conflicting power interests. Such an approach
does not, however, put one inside the mental world of China’s leaders, or at
least not Mao Zedong. Mao thought in terms of the Marxist-Leninist ide-
ology to which he had dedicated his life. And it was, Mao believed, a correct
application of that ideology that would establish red, revolutionary China as
the leading power in a red, revolutionary Asia.