Divisions within the CPGB had emerged following the Soviet intervention to quell the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the subsequent moves by the Nikita Khrushchev leadership in the USSR to denounce Joseph Stalin. The split within the international communist movement that eventually polarised between the positions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of China was not a major contributing factor and the groups that supported the Chinese position had little support within the CPGB. French remained staunchly loyal to the Soviet Union though privately he opposed the Khrushchev line. What he did have in common with those who eventually left to form their own organisations was a common belief that the CPGB's policy, known as the "British Road to Socialism" (BRS), was a major revision of Marxist-Leninist principles and was essentially a left social democratic and reformist programme.