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These Soviet scholars and party workers formed a loose network of younger researchers, all informed about the outside world, and all interested in a reformed version of the Soviet model. While they never were a majority in any of the institutions that employed them, they affected and effected both local and national conversations about socialism through years of informal meetings, seminars, conferences and joint work on memos and speeches for political superiors.¹¹⁷

Given how information was organised in these years, this reformist discourse rarely influenced decision-making at the top. But this too began to change slowly over time. Andropov, as CC secretary of the department of relations with socialist countries, recruited heavily from among the reformist cadres who had been in Prague to form his own personal staffofconsultants.[278]But this was uncommon. In the late i970s, for example, it was forbidden to send unsolicited memos directly to the Politburo or CC apparat. They had to be vetted by Chernenko's department, a death sentence for almost all ofthem. But a revolution of sorts occurred when Andropov became General Secretary in November 1982. He commissioned some 110 reports about Soviet domestic affairs from these reformist experts, and Gorbachev was in charge of this task.

The last institutional carrier of reformist discourse was the intelligentsia. They lived all across the Soviet Union and had their own institutions in creative unions, editorialboards of journals and publishing houses, performance spaces and, of course, their own works. They were the mass base for the reformist cadres who were officially placed in research institutes and party and government positions. The intelligentsia was a vast and authoritative terrain on which the discourse of difference was acted out on a daily basis, keeping contestation alive. I say authoritative because even Brezhnev failed to appoint his own favourites to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. And not even Brezhnev dared ask the academy to expel Sakharov from its ranks.[279]

The Soviet identity of difference, unchallenged after Molotov's removal, contradicted the Chinese identity of Stalinist orthodoxy. The discourse between China and the Soviet Union after i957 is almost identical to that between Molotov and Khrushchev the previous four years.[280] The Soviet identification of itself as the centre and apex of the world revolutionary movement was in conflict with China's growing understanding of the Soviet Union as a revisionist, degenerate, bourgeois state. 'Each country defined the image of its partner according to whether or not it corresponded to its own ideas about the criteria of socialism.'[281] The identity conflict with China affected Soviet policy all over the world. Challenged by China for leadership of revolutions in the decolonising world, the Soviet Union redoubled its efforts there to counter these charges and establish its credentials as the true socialist vanguard. Criticised for sacrificing the world revolutionary movement on the altar of detente with the US, Khrushchev was increasingly constrained in making concessions to the West. Moreover, detente with the West increased Soviet interests in supporting NLMs in the developing world, to compensate for the softer line with the imperialists on the issues of Germany and nuclear weapons. The identity conflict with China also had domestic consequences for Soviet identity. If Hungary fixed the limits of difference in 1956, then China in the 1960s empowered Soviet proponents of difference by giving them an example of orthodox Stalinism against which the Soviet Union was officially struggling.[282]

Identity politics helps explain why, as the split reached its climax in the 1960s, it was China, not the Soviet Union, who pushed matters to a complete break. Chinese identity was vulnerable to a reformist understanding of difference, because it had embarked on a neo-Stalinist industrial and cultural revolution. Soviet identity was not threatened, as China's greater orthodoxy was explained away by China's subordinate position on the hierarchy of modernity and revolutionary progress.[283] Soviet deviation could not so easily be explained away by China.

The fact that the Soviet Union never denied China its socialist identity reveals an important discursive bias in Moscow.[284] Difference in the direction of reformism could result in the loss of a socialist identity, as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; difference in the direction of greater orthodoxy could not. This privileging of orthodoxy helps explain the extraordinary leverage Soviet allies in Eastern Europe and the decolonising world had on the Soviet leadership whenever they invoked more orthodox or revolutionary commitments than prevailed in Soviet discourse at home at the time.

In October 1957, the Soviets agreed to give China a model of an atomic bomb. But in January 1958 Mao announced the 'great leap forward', a neo-Stalinist modernisation programme. In March, Mao told his colleagues that the Soviet model was no longer appropriate.[285] In July 1959, Khrushchev declared the great leap forward to be a Leftist error. In August, the Soviet Union remained neutral on the border clashes between Indian and Chinese forces.[286] The same month, the Soviet Union informed China that nuclear co-operation was over because it was inconsistent with Soviet efforts to get a comprehensive ban on testing nuclear weapons with the United States.¹²⁷ A month later, after his trip to the United States, Khrushchev travelled to Beijing where Mao accused him of 'Right opportunism', incidentally, the charge made by Stalin in his purges in the 1930s against Bukharin, Tomskii and Rykov.[287] Suslov, in his report to the December 1959 CC plenum, wrote that Mao had created a cult of personality, parroting Twentieth Party Congress charges against Stalin.[288] In June i960, at the Romanian party congress, Khrushchev publicly declared Mao to be an 'ultra-leftist, ultra-dogmatist, indeed a Left revisionist', echoing the i957 charges against Molotov.[289] He announced, upon returning to Moscow, the withdrawal of all Soviet advisers from China. Khrushchev reported to a i960 CC plenum that 'when he talks to Mao, he gets the impression he is listening to Stalin'.[290]

The change in identity relations with China implied Soviet interests in proving its vanguard identity in the decolonising world.[291] At the December i960 meeting of Communist and workers' parties in Moscow, the Communist parties from Latin America, south-east Asia, and India all sided with China against the Soviet position of appreciating difference, of collaborating with bourgeois nationalists in decolonising countries. The next month, Khrushchev gave a speech at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in which he distinguished between just wars of national liberation and local and colonial wars that were both unjust and fraught with the risk of escalation to nuclear war. Soviet reluctance to arm resistance fighters in Algeria and Laos was overcome by the Chinese threat to supplant Moscow as the revolutionary vanguard.[292] In August i96i, Khrushchev approved an unprecedented level of military aid to NLMs in Latin America and Africa.[293] At a 1964 meeting of Latin American Communist parties in Havana, Moscow agreed to more military aid for local rebels on the condition that none of it ended up with factions enjoying Chinese support.[294] An April 1970 KGB memo to the CCID advocating a more aggressive