68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Chinese Party, like several other fraternal Parties, had reservations, serious difference, cropped up between the two Parties on several vital issues. They assumed such serious proportions that, within half a decade of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, there was an open confrontation between the two Parties. The Chinese Party denounced the Soviet Party externally for its 'collaboration with the most vicious enemy of world revolution5 (American imperialism), and internally for restoring capitalism. The Soviet Party returned the compliment by denouncing the Maoist leadership as being 'a Party of petty bourgeois nationalists rather than that of proletarian revolutionaries'. From this exchange of denunciations in ideological terms, the two Parties went over to open warfare—economic, diplomatic and even military. The unity and cohesion of the Socialist camp and of the international communist movement was broken. The two most powerful socialist powers and their ruling Communist Parties became even more antagonistic to each other than either of them was to any imperialist power. All these developments shocked the communists and their friends throughout the world. Every one of them taken singly was a blow to the faith nurtured in our minds in the international communist movement. All of them taken together completely shattered that faith. The question therefore arises why such developments have taken place. A complete and fully satisfactory answer would, of course, take a long time to arrive at. Here however is one source of information which helps us in unravelling the knot in relation to a particular phase in the history of these world-shaking developments. Edgar Snow, the world renowned author who, for the first time, introduced to the world the great exploits of the Chinese Red Army when it was being hunted on the one hand by the Japanese imperialists and on the other by the Ghiang Kai-shek clique, deals with the developments in China. The author of Red Star Over China who followed it up by other works like The Other Side of the River, shares with us in his posthumously published work The Long Revolution what he learnt on the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution95. Of particular interest in this book are the intimate conversations which he had with Chairman Mao as well as Premier Chou En-lai. Supplemented as these interviews are with firsthand reports of what he saw and learnt from various friends and from his visits to institutions, his new book helps us to have a glimpse of what took place in the Communist Party of China at the very time when every other Communist Party in the world, including that of the Soviet Union, was having its convulsions. The issue on which, or the background against which, the 'Cultural Revolution5 erupted in the Chinese Communist Party is summed up by Snow in the following words: Mao had been effective Head of the Party since 1935 and officially Party Chairman since 1943 when, in 1956, Liu became Mao's first deputy. But by 1964 Mao had lost effective control over much of the