The attitude assumed by the Kremlin in face of the May escalation of the U.S. imperialist aggression in Vietnam constitutes one of the most brazen and treacherous betrayals of the world revolution in the entire history of Stalinism. The depth of this betrayal must be grasped by the international revolutionary vanguard and all the friends and supporters of the Vietnamese revolution.
Having proved incapable of throwing back the Vietnamese in their heroic advances on the battlefields of South Vietnam, having been forced to withdraw the bulk of the U.S. ground troops because of the stiffening opposition to the war among the American people, having been unable to maintain the pretense of "Vietnamization" of the war because of the spreading disintegration of the armies of the Saigon puppet regime, Nixon decided in cold blood to escalate the war to a qualitatively higher intensity in order to force the Vietnamese people to bow to an unfavorable compromise despite their resounding military victories. On May 8 Nixon announced that he had ordered all the harbors of North Vietnam to be mined and all transportation lines to be bombed up to the border of China.
In the history of imperialist butchery, the destructive power unleashed on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam since May 8 is of unheard-of proportions. The bomb load released by four squadrons of B-52 bombers is equivalent in destructive blast to a Hiroshima-type atomic bomb. The number of bomb craters in Vietnam was recently estimated at 26,000,000. The cratering of the land destroys it for agricultural production. This loss is on top of the loss of vast areas subjected to defoliation and to crop-destroying chemicals.
Imperialism will not stop at anything in its efforts to drive home its message to the people of Vietnam and of the world: better to destroy a country than to see it break out of the "free world" of capitalist exploitation.
While these colossal crimes were being committed, subjecting one of the most courageous peoples in the world to genocide, the Kremlin chieftains clinked champagne glasses with war criminal Nixon, as if they were toasting his deeds in Vietnam. They pictured their summit conference with Nixon as a "great success," a big step toward "world peace," while Nixon, with the callousness of a professional executioner, continued the most ferocious and barbarous acts of aggression and violence ever to be vented on the workers and peasants of a small country.
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam is part of the so-called socialist camp, whose security and inviolability the masters of the Kremlin have so many times guaranteed in the most solemn terms. Claiming the existence of an imperialist threat against the Czechoslovak workers state (which they never bothered to try to prove), they sent 200,000 troops into that country in August 1968. Their real reason for the invasion, of course, was to suppress the efforts that had been begun there to replace Stalinist police rule with socialist democracy, a change that would have strengthened — not weakened — the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia against any threat of capitalist restoration.
But in face of the unprecedented mass of napalm, antipersonnel bombs, and patterned bombing nearing the nuclear level that are being applied day after day on the cities and towns of North Vietnam, the masters .of the Kremlin limited themselves to a few routine press releases — to be used by pro-Moscow Communist parties for face-saving needs — while they publicly toasted the imperialist aggressors!
It must be brought to the attention of the workers and peasants of the world that Nixon is able to use obsolete B-52 bombers only because the Soviet bureaucrats refuse to arm the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with the modern fighter planes that could wipe the B-52s out of the sky. Yet they have sold such fighter planes to several bourgeois governments in Asia, beginning with the Sadat regime in Egypt.
The same goes for various types of sophisticated weapons. The Soviet bureaucrats deny them to the Vietnamese people but freely distribute them to half a dozen bourgeois governments in various parts of the world.
Even the amount of ordinary weapons is kept down to a trickle by the Soviet bureaucrats. The deliveries made by all the governments of the "socialist camp" do not reach 10 percent of what they send annually to Egypt. The cost of the aid is under 1 percent of the total annual military expenditures made by the U. S. in Vietnam.
This provides an indication on a material level of the betrayal committed by the Stalinist bureaucrats against the Vietnamese revolution.
Brezhnev and his cohorts have even hidden from the Soviet people the fact — revealed by the Hanoi press — that Soviet seamen were killed by U.S. bombs in Haiphong even while Nixon, who ordered the bombing, was being wined and dined in Moscow.
Apologists of the Stalinist bureaucracy argue that the Kremlin had to act this way in order to avoid a dangerous escalation of tension and a confrontation between the U. S. and the Soviet Union that could lead to World War III. This argument is completely mendacious.
History has shown again and again that to concede to an aggressor does not lead to easing the situation in the long run; instead, it encourages the aggressor to engage in escalation. In the United States today the mood is such that the vast majority of the American people would never back the White House in gambling on a nuclear showdown. The American people are sick and tired of the war in Indochina. They would never agree to risk a global conflict for the sake of maintaining a military toehold in Indochina.
By standing firmly and telling Nixon that his new escalation of the war constituted an attack against the entire socialist camp and that persistence in that attack would result in the Vietnamese army, navy, and air force being supplied with all the means necessary to turn it back, the Soviet leaders could have stopped Nixon in his tracks. By refusing to take any concrete steps to halt the aggressor, the Kremlin leaders fall into the position of accomplices in the crimes of imperialism against an allied workers state. They thereby lay the base for a still more explosive situation.
Once again the fatal logic of the policy of "peaceful coexistence," of "socialism in one country" stands out out in the clearest way. In order to save the international status quo from unsettlement by a victorious revolution, the Kremlin bureaucrats cynically acquiesce in the massive bombing and genocidal destruction of North Vietnam. At bottom they consider that they are acting in their own self-interest, for a successful revolution in Vietnam could encourage the growing political opposition inside the Soviet Union and perhaps help detonate a revolutionary process that would sweep them from power and restore the socialist democracy that Lenin and Trotsky stood for.
As for the Maoist bureaucracy, it is unable to do more than issue feeble press releases protesting the bombing of North Vietnam. Having themselves accorded Nixon a royal reception last February, they cannot even take factional advantage of the betrayal committed by the Moscow revisionists. The truth is that by engaging in a "cordial" summit meeting with Nixon they helped make it easier for the Kremlin to abandon all restraint in groveling before the commander in chief of the U.S. war machine.
The complicity of the Chinese and Russian regimes in the Pentagon's crimes in Vietnam can arouse a sharp reaction among the masses of the Soviet Union and China. That would change many things. However, in face of the tight police control over the communications media it is not easy to spread the truth in either land.
Among the rank and file in the Communist parties in the capitalist countries the situation is different. They are not sealed off from the facts or from the influence of the vanguard that has been staging international demonstrations for withdrawal of the U.S. armed forces and free exercise by the Vietnamese people of the right of self-determination.
The Vietnamese are continuing their struggle with unparalleled courage and determination, and are still scoring successes on the battlefields. With the help of the laboring masses in other countries, they can still win their revolution despite all the fury of the imperialist beast.
The Fourth International calls upon all its members and sympathizers, upon all communists and socialists throughout the world, to devote the utmost energy to helping to organize massive protest demonstrations against the imperialist aggression in Vietnam.
Bring the strongest possible pressure to bear on the Communist parties by spreading the truth about the latest Stalinist betrayals. Help pillory the Moscow and Peking regimes! Compel them to provide adequate material support to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam!