Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

arisen, and in January this year proposed the cessation ofopen polemics in the communist movement, so that the issuesbe discussed calmly and in a businesslike manner, and solvedon a principled Marxist-Leninist basis. This proposal of theCPSU met with the warm support of all the fraternal parties.Agreement was subsequently reached on a meeting betweenrepresentatives of the CPSU and the CPC, which is now takingplace in Moscow.The CPSU Central Committee hoped that the Chinesecomrades would, like ourselves, display good will and wouldfacilitate the success of the meeting in the interests of ourpeoples, in the interests of strengthening the unity of thecommunist movement. To our regret, when agreement wasreached on the Moscow meeting of representatives of theCPSU and CPC, when the delegations were appointed andthe date of the meeting set, the Chinese comrades, insteadof submitting the divergencies for discussion at this meeting,unexpectedly found it possible not only to state the old differencesopenly, before the entire world, but also to advancenew charges against the CPSU and other Communist parties.This found expression in the publication of the June 14 letterof the CPC Central Committee, which gives an arbitrary interpretationof the Declaration and Statement of the Moscowmeetings of representatives of the Communist and Workers’parties, and distorts the basic principles of these historic documents.The CPC Central Committee letter contains groundless,slanderous attacks on our party and on other Communistparties, on the decisions of the 20th, 21st, and 22nd Congressesof the CPSU and on the CPSU Programme.As you know from the statement of the CPSU Central Committeepublished in Pravda on June 19, the Presidium of theCPSU Central Committee, having studied the June 14 letterof the CPC Central Committee, arrived at the conclusion thatits publication in the Soviet press at that time would havebeen inadvisable. Publication of the letter would, naturally,have required a public reply on our part; this would have527