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Anti-revisionism is a position withinMarxism–Leninism which emerged in the mid-1950s in opposition to thereforms ofSoviet leaderNikita Khrushchev.
When Khrushchev pursued an interpretation that differed from his predecessor,Joseph Stalin, anti-revisionists within the international communist movement remained dedicated to Stalin's ideological legacy and criticized theSoviet Union under Khrushchev and his successors asstate capitalist andsocial imperialist. During theSino-Soviet split, theCommunist Party of China, led byMao Zedong; theParty of Labour of Albania, led byEnver Hoxha;[1] and some other communist parties and organizations around the world denounced the Khrushchev line asrevisionist.
Mao Zedong first denounced the Soviet Union as revisionist at a meeting in January 1962.[2] In early 1963, Mao returned to Beijing after a prolonged visit toWuhan andHangzhou, and issued a call to combat domestic revisionism in China.[3] A 'central anti-revisionist drafting group' was formally constituted, led byKang Sheng, which drafted anti-revisionist polemics, which were later personally reviewed by Mao before publication.[3] The 'Nine Articles' emerged as the centre-piece of anti-Soviet polemics.[4] Anti-revisionism would emerge as a key theme in Chinese foreign and domestic policies, reaching a peak during the 1966Cultural Revolution.[2] China friendship associations turned into anti-revisionist organizations, and Western Europe anti-revisionist splinter groups began to emerge (such as theMarxist-Leninist Communist Party of France [fr], theGrippa group in Belgium [fr], and theLenin Centre in Switzerland).[5] In Beijing, the street where the Soviet embassy was located was symbolically renamed as 'Anti-Revisionism Street'.[4] In the wake of the1964 split in the Communist Party of India, theCommunist Party of India (Marxist) would reject Soviet positions as revisionist, but the party did not fully adopt a pro-Chinese line.[6]
DuringDeng Xiaoping's reign in the late 1970s, anti-revisionist themes began to be downplayed in official Chinese discourse.[2] TheChinese Academy of Sciences stated that the 'Nine Articles' had been wrong in focusing on the revisionism of the Soviet Union, rather than the threats ofSoviet hegemonism and expansionism.[4]
