The Great Lenin: 150 years without the right to oblivion
In the homeland of Ilyich and in distant Yanan
Forgetful recall that April 22 will mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In the Ulyanovsk region, unlike the whole of Russia, they plan to celebrate the anniversary of the man who really turned the whole world upside down. Broadly and informally, with the obligatory participation of foreign delegations, the main of which should be the Chinese. Unless, of course, coronavirus hysteria and everything connected with it do not interfere.
However, the case may ultimately be limited to just transfer to other terms. After all, the Victory Parade is already being rescheduled, and, as one might expect, at the request of 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. An international forum of historians, philosophers and publicists dedicated to Lenin is scheduled to be held with the participation of representatives of the PRC.
In addition, the anniversary plans include a number of events, including
An exhibition project of the region about Lenin was prepared, which is planned to be exhibited from April 22 to December 2020 in various cities of the PRC.
But even in China itself, the authorities are also not going to limit themselves to on-duty meetings and meetings.
Solemn events will be held at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and the Ideas of Mao Zedong, the Center for Translation into Foreign Languages of the Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, in the Museum stories CCP in Yanan, in the house-museum of the great helmsman Mao in the city of Shaoshan.
But everything planned is just a pale shadow of the project that the PRC leadership planned fifty years ago, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lenin. In anticipation of that anniversary, the PRC quite seriously expected that an alternative Leninist Communist Party would be created in the Soviet Union - of course, “pro-Chinese”, especially since in the Celestial Empire they considered themselves winners in border conflicts with their northern neighbor.
There were no real promises to this in the USSR. Competent authorities managed to control individual groups and potential leaders long before they became popular. The party nomenclature under Khrushchev and Brezhnev openly stuck, which helped not to think about degeneration and Marxism in the party and socialism in the country.
“Ideology, already debauched by the 1973th Congress of the CPSU, began to interfere with a relatively prosperous life,” - this is how the leader of the Greek Communist Party, Nikos Zahariadis, the hero of anti-fascist resistance in Greece and the prisoner Dachau, described the situation. Later, when the “black colonels” came to power in Greece, he was arrested in the USSR, and Zakhariadis committed suicide in Siberian Surgut in XNUMX. (see “The Acts of Nikita the Wonderworker. Part 3. Khrushchev and the “Non-Aligned”).
Nikos Zachariadis
Stalin underground and "parallel" CPSU
On the 100th anniversary of Lenin, 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 cards." Examples of such a party were, of course, called the Communist Party of China and the Albanian Party of Labor. The abbreviation “Soviet Bolshevik Communists” (SKB) often flaunted as a signature.
It is characteristic that the first of these publications in Beijing was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, and the company in the press dragged on until its 60th anniversary. The KGB at one time estimated the number of the "Maoist" underground in the USSR to be no more than 60 thousand people scattered across 50 cities of the Union, starting from Moscow, Leningrad and Gorky, and ending with the distant Sumgait and Chita.
The groups that were immediately called “Trotskyist-Maoist” included both “legal” members of the CPSU, non-partisan workers and engineers, as well as youth, who in some incomprehensible way imbued with the ideas of the notorious “Cultural Revolution” in the PRC (1966-1969 ) These were by no means the “thaw” children — almost all of them rejected the anti-Stalinist campaign in the USSR and the CPSU. These underground members were well aware that the "cultural revolution" in China was officially called the "continuation of the class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat based on the great teachings of Marx - Engels - Lenin - Stalin - Mao Zedong."
There was no longer an Iron Curtain, and many in the USSR heard the “appeal” of Marshal Lin Biao, then considered the successor to 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 pursues a renegade policy with even greater zeal. The proletariat and working people of the USSR will never forget the covenants of the great Lenin and the great Stalin. They will certainly rise to the revolution under the banner of Leninism, overthrow the dominance of the reactionary revisionist clique and return the Soviet Union to the path of socialism. ”
For some time, the calculation of the Chinese Communists was based on the fact that the “parallel” CPSU would be created. In principle, there were some prerequisites in the USSR itself. But it is entirely possible to agree with N. Zakhariadis about the main reasons why such a party did not take place.
In the context of the political, and most importantly, economic rapprochement between China and the United States and the West as a whole, the revival of Stalinism in the USSR and, as a result, the restoration of the Soviet-Chinese union did not meet Western interests. The economic dependence of China on the West has grown since the mid-70s by leaps and bounds. In addition, starting from the Czechoslovak events of 1968, there was a rapprochement of the geopolitical interests of China and the West, and in almost all regions of the world.
Different coordinate system
It is clear that in such a coordinate system the "restalinization" of the USSR and Sino-Soviet relations inevitably transformed into a watch slogan. As early as November 1, 1977, an extensive publication by the Central Committee of the CPC in the Chinese party officialdom, People's Daily, dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution, did not say a word in support of the creation of the Stalinist CPSU.
It seems that the silence was explained by the fact that, firstly,
Brezhnev group, discrediting the teachings and cause of Lenin-Stalin, strengthens its state machine and in every possible way strives to firmly attach the Soviet people to its chariot. The KGB became a sword hanging over the Soviet people and over many countries of the world.
Second, the
“Due to the betrayal of the ruling group of the Soviet Union, the widespread spread of the revisionist ideological movement and the split in the ranks of the working class, the revolutionary labor movement abroad cannot yet survive the period of reform.”
Therefore, there "there is still no revolutionary situation for a 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 led by Guo Danqing, a citizen of China, and Gennady Ivanov, candidate of economic sciences. They distributed propaganda literature from China and Albania, also forming a document called “The manifesto of socialism: the program of the Revolutionary Socialist Party of the Soviet Union”.
Let us cite only one appeal from this program: "... to recreate a 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 repressed, although Guo Danqing was lucky: in 1969 he was sent to China. In March 1968 in Moscow, the workers V. and G. Sudakov created the Union for the Fight against Revisionism group, 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 Stalin-Maoist content with a fair portion of criticism of "Soviet revisionism." They ended with an appeal: “Long live the new revolution! Long live communism! ”
Only in the fall of 1977, the special services managed 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 Stalin-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 established contacts with sympathetic groups from Moscow, Gorky, Riga, Kharkov, Tbilisi, Gori, Batumi, and Sumgait. In an attempt 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. More than 1876 young men and women gathered at the Kazan Cathedral, where as early as 150 students organized the first mass demonstration in Russia against tsarism, who protested against the arrest of "Leningraders". In the early days of April 1979, during the trial on Arkady Tsurkov, according to the law - open, protests and anti-party slogans were also heard. Most of the participants in those pickets were expelled from universities and schools.
Communist impasse and dictatorship of the proletariat
On the eve of the 100th anniversary of Lenin at the plant named after Maslennikov’s office in Kuibyshev created the Work Center group with a somewhat blurred ideological platform, but clearly of a Marxist and pro-Chinese orientation. Its leaders were the worker Grigory Isaev and the experienced 35-year-old oil engineer Aleksey Razlatsky, who also created the "Party of the dictatorship of the proletariat." By 1975, the organization already numbered about 30 members.
In October 1976, the "Work Center" was able to distribute its "Manifesto of the Revolutionary Communist Movement":
The counterrevolutionary coup in the USSR shortly after Stalin took place in such an unexpected way that no one noticed it. The administration dictating now in the USSR manages to impersonate the Marxist-Leninist leadership, manages to fool the workers' head. The Soviet Union is declared a nation-wide state. But it is clear to the Marxists that as long as the victorious proletariat cannot do without a state at all, this state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. ”
Further, Beijing’s position was briefly explained: “The events connected with the emergence of N. S. Khrushchev on the political arena made Mao Zedong think about the viability of a system capable of nominating such figures to senior leaders.” Therefore, the "Cultural Revolution" held in the PRC is a direct call for reprisal against the newly formed and degenerating bureaucracy, it is an attempt to demonstrate to the masses on cruel facts that it is it who is the master of the situation in the country, that it is omnipotent in its collective actions. "
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, as a result did not allow Beijing to continue the policy of creating a parallel CPSU. Appeals to this by Beijing Radio and other Chinese media did not last long, were heard less and less, and with the death of Brezhnev in November 1982, they ceased 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 the representatives of the North Korean family Kim, but Richard Nixon with Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Margaret Thatcher, and even Bloody Dick Sese Seko.
- Alexey Chichkin, Alexey Podymov
- from personal archives of authors
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