The year of 1956 was the watershed of post-Stalin ideological change in the U.S.S.R. In the Central Committee's report to the Twenieth Party Congress-the first congress held after Stalin's death-Nikita Khrushchev announced a series of doctrinal innova...
The year of 1956 was the watershed of post-Stalin ideological change in the U.S.S.R. In the Central Committee's report to the Twenieth Party Congress-the first congress held after Stalin's death-Nikita Khrushchev announced a series of doctrinal innovations affecting particularly the line of Communist Marxism on international relations and the further development of the world communist revolution.
These doctrinal changes was centered in the general idea that communism can spread in the world by peaceful means, without "export of revolution" (i, e., the use of armed force to impose communist revolutions from without) or internal civil war. From this time, the "peaceful" communist revolutionary ideas was used to an important take-over tactics among the communist nations.
In the wake of the Russian revolution of February 1917, which over-threw the Tsar, Lenin's party attempts to enact the violent revolutionary scenario. After they took power in October, however, their efforts to raise revolts in other countries had little success, the revolutionary outbreaks in Hungary and Germany were abortive, and the venture in revolutionary war in Poland in 1920 ended in failure. Therefore, it was not surprising that the theory of the world communist revolution underwent significant modification in the movement of thought from classical to communist Marxism.
Indeed, patterns of non-violent change have assumd ever greater importance in communist theory and practice, particularly when we deal with the fairly centemporary scene, they are given commensurate attention. Even in the optimal situtation of co-existence as defined by the communist, however, violence plays a crucial, if de-emphasized, role. We fell that the option of violence continious to be of major importance to communist strategy.
In short, we must remind that peaceful coexistence and peaceful revolution can never embrace "ideological co-existence," i.e., that the ideological gulf between communist and noncom munist societies remains unbridged and unbridgeable.