This rich and welcome book is less a dual biography as the title announces (Stalin and Mao) than a study of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, following its subtitle (A Comparison of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions). A painstaking study, by a veteran Sinologist who recently devoured (non-Russian language) material on the Soviet Union, it is well translated from the French. Here is a sad and gripping story of strong-man leadership, failed hopes, national triumph, destruction, needless famine, retribution and exaggerations of what politics can deliver.
After a rewarding Foreword by another French scholar, Marie-Claire Bergère, there are two comparative Russia–China chapters, “Laggards” and “Catching up,” to set the scene of pre-revolutionary conditions. The next seven chapter titles have a textbook feel that betrays a limitation within them: on few of these topics (baldly named Politics, Peasants, Famines, Bureaucracy, Culture, Camps, Dictators) is Bianco able to stick to comparative argument.
The author states his key theme: “To get the measure of Mao's thoughts” we go to the “Stalinist model,” codified in the Russian's Short Course of CPSU history (p. 70). Some may doubt whether Stalinism is the full measure of Maoism, since Mao was the Marx–Lenin–Stalin of the Chinese revolution.
Bianco revels in the startling nugget, quick opinion, detour to European literature, and (once) a regrettable insult that a certain Mao biography (not mine) “contains only lies” (p. 406). But much of the book is a casserole of learning, experience and anecdote that is a pleasure to read. Bianco acquaints Sinologists with We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, who wrote to Stalin: “I have a bad habit of not saying what is my interest to say, but what seems to me to be the truth” (p. 240).
It's priceless that “mass movements” so beloved of Mao, were labelled “organized deception” by Bukharin not long before his execution (p. 73). An entire volume could be written on “Mao's organized deceptions.”
One of the author's frequent moral balance sheets salutes Mao for sparing Deng, a “confirmed sinner,” for a second innings. A “Russian Deng” would not have outlived Stalin, as Deng, to China's good fortune, outlived Mao by 21 years. A Chinese Bukharin could have lived, thrived post-Mao, and told his grandchild, hunched over her smart phone, of nasty deaths in the Cultural Revolution (p. 314). Of course, being reversed later seems a perverse way of exonerating Mao for letting Deng survive.
Disappointing that Bianco lacks space to fully analyse the two lives. Did Stalin's theology education – barely mentioned – mean nothing for his mind? How can Mao come alive without his sons, daughters, four marriages and staff who saw realities about the boss that colleagues didn't? Li Min's Wo de fuqin Mao Zedong (My Father Mao Zedong. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2009) could alone have enriched some of Bianco's points.
Mao's journey from his pro-individualism views of May Fourth to Leninism by the late 1920s explains his post-1949 rule, but Bianco squeezes all Mao into Stalin's “older brother” mold, which only fits Mao later; Short Course first appeared in 1938. Had Bianco done his study of Stalin and the Soviet Union not before, but during or after decades of expertise in China, his Mao may have looked less Stalinist and more an eclectic bundle. Careful readers will look in vain for “younger brother” Mao's judgment of his “older brother” after the latter's death: “In my entire life I have three times written in praise of Stalin. In Yan'an on his sixtieth birthday. In Moscow on his seventieth birthday. And when he died. None of this was done willingly – I had to say these things” (in Wu Lengxi, Shinian lunzhan, 1956–1966: Zhong Su guanxi huiyilu [Ten-Year War of Words, 1956–1966, a Memoir of Sino-Soviet Relations]. Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe 1999, 20).
Bianco says his book was written in 2013 (p. 67), before Xi Jinping began his post-Deng era, and critics will say that Xi, leaving both Stalin and Marx in the dust, has shown the centrality of Beijing's ongoing Leninism. Xi's tight rule is matched in Cuba and North Korea. What do Cuba's political system and North Korea's have in common, but Leninism? What did Mao and Stalin have in common: mostly Leninism. The cultures of these four countries are so various that political theory must explain their politics.
Bianco gives us erudite, sharp-tongued, mischievous, meandering and occasionally contradictory asides. Excellent as expected on rural life, with carefully obtained figures and revealing demographic analysis, he seems less sure-footed on Stalin's and Mao's political thought. He mentions the efforts of senior colleagues to get “the revolution back on track” after the GLF, but on the next page says both Stalin's and Mao's revolutions were “enterprises condemned from the start” (pp. 11–12). “On track” is unclear. Bianco never really argues that Marxism–Leninism was mistaken in fundamentals. “Mao did at least dream of equality,” he writes, taking Mao's side for a moment, “whereas Stalin rejected it.” But Mao was at his worst when ordering his dreams implemented. “I have allowed myself to be monopolized by Stalin's influence on Mao,” the author confesses late in the book.
When researchers from a Beijing economic think tank visited Harvard in 2018, I asked the leader if class struggle exists in Xi's China. Vigorously, he declared: “Mao's class struggle talk was utter nonsense from beginning to end.” Bianco never argues in sustained fashion that Mao concocted class struggle for power purposes. But the book often implies it. Other times Bianco takes Mao as utterly cynical and insincere, even “insane,” making “steady” Stalin look good.
The book is important in departing from Fairbank's stress on the CCP's Chineseness. As a graduate student at Harvard, I fell under this Fairbank influence – that Chinese culture made Mao's Communists a different beast from the Soviet's Communists. Bianco's book challenges the China-uniqueness school. At Harvard we also overestimated the importance of Mao and other semi-intellectual Leftists being from farm backgrounds. Bolsheviks had no experience of peasants before 1917; CCP intellectuals did, some for years. Yet this book finds only minor differences in outcome between Stalin's and Mao's throttling of agriculture to speed industrialization.
Bianco pulls fewer punches than in his previous works. The 1930–1934 famine in Kazakhstan killed a third of the Kazak people, he writes. Areas of Ukraine known to be naturally fertile – you could put a stick in the ground and watch it grow – met disaster. “Stalin mercilessly squeezed the peasants and in doing so killed them. Mao killed as many, if not more, by ignorance, arrogance, and insanity.” Passages on science and culture under Stalin and Mao are hardly less dire. Russian scientists secreted American research papers within fake Russian covers. In Moscow zealous parrots died old and covered in medals (p. 231). A Chinese prisoner is eliminated as a “stinking capitalist” because he cooked a rat to eat (p. 283). In both countries, acts of kindness punctuated the horrors.
The poet Maximov cries out: “The whole world, the entire universe, should bless Russia to the end of time, because she has shown, through her atrocious example, what must not be done!” Bianco fires a shot: “What a pity that China did not learn that lesson” (p. 243).
Some readers may find Bianco's moralism edging out calm reasoning. Calling his two protagonists “Monsters” grows limp after twenty-odd outings. Moral balance sheets of Stalin's and Mao's evil yield few conclusions. Perhaps shocked at himself, the author, at regular intervals, reminds us that Mao improved health, education and mortality rates. Alternation of curse and apology does not help readers see broad patterns, but it is honest and shows Bianco's humanism.
Bianco has an engaging way of asking the reader to think along with him as he juggles passion and reason: “No, I'm being unfair”; “I should mention at the very least”; “I was about to say”; “I shall begin the impossible demonstration…”; “I can't be content with the spontaneous sarcasm I have allowed to slip through….” He brings himself in: “To discern what was Marxist and what was Han in Mao, I only need to refer to myself. I could keep repeating the standard clichés about Confucius, but he will always remain less familiar to me than Socrates, Montaigne, Pascal…” (pp. 69–70).
It is at once a charm and a frustration of the book that Lucien Bianco admits to more missteps than he actually makes: “I have endeavored to attach Mao to Stalin, but let us not forget to attach both of them to their common source” (p. 76). An afterthought? Surely much more. Lucien Bianco advises, “If at all possible, it is best to avoid revolutions altogether” (p. 350).
He favours Russia on post-revolutionary post-mortems: “Maoism, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution certainly merited a Shakespeare, a Tolstoy, or a Dostoyevsky… To truly understand totalitarianism in its Communist version, and therefore the 20th century, we will be eternally grateful to the Russians and not, or not yet, to the Chinese, who lived through the same tribulations” (p. 246).
