is the fact that in this particular social formation the class character of the state is concealed behind its governmental, administrative function, in that the feudalist is here ‘aggregated’ and acts as an official, as the state. Consequently, class antagonism manifests itself here as a contradiction between rulers and ruled, and not between exploiters and oppressed. This distorted (though formed on a quite real basis) idea of the state entered deeply into the psychology of the masses and of the feudal intelligentsia, and stood firm even when social antagonism showed itself pretty clearly.
In its turn, this ‘distorted idea of the state was the ideological foundation for the reform tendency in the political thinking of the feudal intelligentsia of Vietnam.’129 When we delve deep in our study of the past, we become convinced that history repeats itself. It repeats itself not only as historical experience but also as historical illusions. But understanding the past helps us, in each instance, to become aware of our mistaken ideas and so to overcome them.
We can easily follow the genesis of modern statocracy in the countries of the ‘Third World’ and watch the process of which Russia has already reaped the fruits. When F. Abramov went to Portugal immediately after the fall of the dictatorship there, he said that as a Russian writer he would have liked to understand better what happened in our country between February and October 1917: Portugal might serve as an illustration. Cheshkov and other specialists on the ‘Third World’ help us to understand what happened here after October.
The discussion on the Asiatic mode of production and on present-day bureaucracy has focused on serious Soviet Sinology. In this sphere we can encounter the same problems as when studying Russia, except that they spread more widely and became even more acute. The similarity of the statocratic regimes in the USSR and China means that research in this field is especially productive.
Soviet specialists on China have raised important questions concerning the special problems of ‘building socialism in a “petty-bourgeois country”, without having inherited from the previous society the appropriate material and technological preconditions’.130 There is also the problem of several different economic structures coexisting which is so important for Gefter. Then, we have
the degree of correspondence between the proclaimed rights of the working masses and their actual influence on the formation of the state’s domestic and foreign policies, their actual participation in the work of the state and Party apparatus.131
Furthermore, there is the problem ‘of the character of the socialization of the means of production’.132 Here the question of what constitutes the actual essence of socialism comes up once more.
Interestingly, it was F. Burlatsky who took up the most definite position with regard to the ‘Chinese problem’. He begins his evaluation of the social processes with the correct observation: ‘Socialism has become the banner of the twentieth century just as democracy was the banner of the nineteenth. Nobody is surprised nowadays to hear socialist slogans.’133 For this very reason, groups which are actually very remote from socialism seek to use the slogan of socialism for their own ends: ‘What is left of the socialist idea if people are made victims of the adventuristic experiments of the uncontrolled government of the leaders, who claim to be the creators of a new symbol of belief?’134 The answer to that question can be found in the history of China and in the history of Russia. Under conditions of bureaucratic rule, Burlatsky emphasizes, state property ‘is not automatically socialist.’135 It ‘is socialist not because it belongs to the state but because it is in the hands of a
