Continuity of Communist Strategic Doctrine Since the Twentieth Party Congress

Abstract

The Soviet leaders have not broken as abruptly with Stalinist doctrine as the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union attempted to suggest. Yet the post-Stalinist modifications of doctrine concern ing the inevitability of war and the status of the colonial and former colonial areas are directly related to the more flexible conduct of foreign relations by the Khrushchevite leadership. The course of events, themselves, rather than any premeditated doctrinal revisions was responsible for the crisis between Moscow and the national Communist parties and has given some substance, notably in Poland, to the doctrine of "national roads to socialism."