Scintilla, Issue 157, February, 2026;
Organization for the Communist Party of the Proletariat (of
Italy)
In February 1956, three years after Stalin's death, modern revisionism was proclaimed and officially installed at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. At this Congress Khrushchev's group launched a virulent attack against the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism and against the general line followed by the CPSU under Stalin's leadership.
The main theses advanced by the Khrushchevites, which deviated from Marxism-Leninism, distorting it in every respect, were the following:
- The reduction of the general line of the foreign policy of the USSR and of all socialist countries to "peaceful coexistence between the two systems". This abandoned the principle of proletarian internationalism and affirmed the replacement of the revolutionary class struggle and the struggle for liberation of the peoples oppressed by imperialism with the policy of improving relations between states with different social systems. Thus also the aid, which the socialist countries and the international workers' and communist movement had to render by all means to the freedom-loving peoples of the world, ceased.
This line made the solution of the problems of peace and freedom of peoples conditional on the "establishment of friendly relations between the two great world powers — the Soviet Union and the United States of America."
In this way, the illusion was spread that U.S. imperialism, the worst and most ferocious enemy of peace and freedom, had renounced or could renounce its aims of robbery and aggression, that socialism should triumph on a world scale through the coexistence and peaceful competition of the two systems: the capitalist and the socialist systems.
- Peaceful coexistence and economic collaboration with the USA and other imperialist countries had as a corollary the thesis of the "peaceful transition" to socialism, to be achieved through "parliamentary paths" and reforms, characterizing the path of the October Revolution as "correct only in those particular historical conditions". With this thesis the revolutionary struggle for the seizure of political power was rejected.
From these positions it was possible to theorize in the XXII Congress (1961)
- The extinction of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its transformation into the "state of the whole people", without a class character. The Khrushchevites proclaimed that socialist democracy had reached such high levels that it was possible for the reactionary classes of the past to accept it and decide to live with it, that the proletariat had to trust the overthrown reactionary classes, that it had to invite them to co-govern, to "build" socialism together, as a guarantee for international peace.
- The transformation of the class nature of the Communist Party, which became "the party of the whole people", above classes, in which, the entrepreneurs and the personalities well-regarded by the bourgeoisie, the apparatchiks, coexisted together with the workers.
The Party was thus reduced to such conditions that it was no longer the party of the working class, capable of developing the class struggle up to communism, but that of the new Soviet bourgeoisie.
On the final day of the 20th Congress a still more severe blow was dealt to the Party and to Marxism-Leninism, to the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the "Khrushchev’s secret" speech "On the Cult of the Person and Its Consequences," which was based on falsifications and calumnies from top to bottom. The specious attack on the figure and work of Stalin was launched to justify the repudiation of the Marxist-Leninist line of the CPSU developed at its previous congresses.
The conclusions of the 20th Congress became ideological nourishment for revisionists in all countries.
They constituted a very important weapon placed in the hands of the imperialists and all reactionaries to fight the socialist countries, communism, the revolutionary movement for the liberation of the peoples.
The counter-revolutionary line that was imposed following the 20th Congress of the CPSU interrupted socialist construction, opened the way to the rapid restoration of capitalism, replaced the struggle against imperialism, the bourgeoisie and all kinds of opportunist currents with class conciliation, opened the doors to bourgeois propaganda and provoked a split in the international communist movement.
The deviationist line adopted by the 20th Congress of the CPSU was one of the main factors that contributed to the creation of conditions favorable to the spread of modern revisionism among many communist parties, which transformed into economist, reformist and parliamentarian parties and led the workers' movement into a period of defeat and decline.
Khrushchev and his group of renegades and traitors resorted to blackmail and threats in order to force all the communist and workers' parties to fall in line.
This transformation also influenced the movements of the oppressed peoples which were increasingly penetrated by the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and nationalist and collaborationist currents.
Khrushchevite revisionism was the product of the political, ideological and military pressure of imperialism, with the United States in the lead, and of the acceptance of bourgeois influence by privileged groups and strata, represented by leading cadres of the party, government, state and companies of the USSR, by intellectuals separated from the working class.
The main objective of the revisionists was to attack and destroy the greatest achievement of the working class and peoples, the crowning achievement of the work of the communists: the October Socialist Revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the country of socialism.
In the USSR, the revisionists restored capitalism through the destruction of centralized planning, the expansion of commodity circulation, the reintroduction of corporate profit, etc. In a few years they transformed the Soviet Union into a country with a social- imperialist foreign policy that contended for world domination with US imperialism. The Bolshevik Party, the Party of Lenin and Stalin, was subverted, attacked by opportunists and bureaucrats, transformed into a party of class conciliation, of subordination to capitalism.
Under the leadership of the revisionists, the Soviet Union sank into a serious economic and social crisis. The counter-revolutionary process culminated with its dissolution in 1991, with Russia once again being fully integrated into the capitalist system.
The theses and line adopted by modern revisionism have caused very serious damage to Marxism-Leninism, to the communist movement and all the communist parties of the world, to the revolutionary movement of the working class and peoples, the trade union movement, the organization and struggle of the peasants and other popular sectors, the mobilization of the younger generations.
The damage caused by Khrushchevism to the international communist and workers' movement, to the national liberation movement of the peoples has been far-reaching and its effects have continued to this day, fueling ideological confusion and organizational fragmentation.
For the (Marxist-Leninists) communists who have always
rejected and fought revisionism, understanding the defeats and
learning the hard lessons of the class struggle is indispensable
to strengthen ourselves theoretically and advance in the
struggle for the revolutionary party of the proletariat.
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