Reflecting the author's profound knowledge of the two revolutionary transformations, their horrors, and their human costs, this rich comparative study builds on scholarship concerning the rise to power of the Chinese communists and Mao's regime and overturns some of its cornerstones. First, Lucien Bianco in Stalin and Mao stresses the Soviet pedigree of Mao's agrarian policies. (Indeed, ubiquitous early Comintern policy suggestions regarding peasant organizing in China corroborate this insight.) In its Soviet context, Mao's unique peasant revolution thus appears to be more a development of than a departure from the Soviet model. Second, Bianco argues that after Mao voiced disappointment with the Soviet model in 1957, his regime increasingly resembled the Stalinist model. Mao's so-called innovations were exaggerations of Stalinist trends (pp. 53, 63), and the Great Leap Forward was a “disastrous replica of the negative aspects of the First Soviet Plan,” albeit with an East Asian dimension (pp. 33, 52). Thus, accelerated industrialization produced famines in both China and the Soviet Union (p. 165).

Analytically rigorous are the chapters “Peasants” and “Catching Up,” which contain insights in a comparison of the agricultural collectivization and industrialization policies of the People's Republic of China (PRC) (1949–) with those of the Bolsheviks after 1917. A similar comparison of the Soviet period of 1917–53 with China of 1949–76 can be found in “Politics” and “Bureaucracy.” In the chapter “Laggards,” the preconditions underlying the communist rise to power in China and Russia are discussed, as are the goals of the modernization and Westernization of backward countries, situations in Russia under czarism in 1917 and in China under the Guomindang in 1949. “Dictators” examines two cataclysms, the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and the Cultural Revolution in China (pp. 325–35), as well as the roles that World War I and World War II played in the communist rise to power in Russia and China, respectively. Following the temporal logic of this comparison, counting from the time the communists took power, the American threat to the young PRC during the Korean War is compared with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (p. 53) rather than with foreign military interventions during the Russian Civil War of 1917–22—a comparison that is not so persuasive. Also discussed are the familiar topics of Mao's Yan'an's talks, the PRC's political campaigns, Lysenkoism, Zhdanovschina, and repressions against artists and musicians in the Soviet Union and China.

Indeed, this passionate and rich work not only produces fresh insights but also raises questions: Curious is the emphasis on the Ukraine and Kazakhstan famines (pp. 133–40) out of all affected areas in the Soviet Union during the early 1930s. The disclaimer about omitting the international dimension of both revolutions does not justify the decision to do so, even if the Chinese Communist Party was “nationalist above all else and communist by chance” (p. 120), for this leaves out the very root of the PRC's modeling itself on the Soviet Union, the Comintern pact with the Guomindang of 1923, the international dimensions of both regimes (e.g., the aspiration to world revolution), as well as similarities in nationalities policies that were instrumental in building the “affirmative empire,” to borrow a term from Terry Martin, of the communist parties in power in China and Russia. Likewise, it overlooks the organizational origins and multiethnic dimension of the early Bolshevik party and Soviet leadership, including that of Stalin himself. The international context, particularly regarding some of the Western European countries of the 1970s, might also put into perspective the “failure of women's emancipation” (p. 43) in a similar way, as, according to Bianco, “China's development” in comparison with capitalist countries was simply slower (p. 34).

Although Bianco lays out the differences between the Chinese and Russian revolutions, he argues that those differences are “pushed into the background as soon as a regime arises that is capable of manufacturing fanatics out of any psychological raw material” (p. 12). Those of us born too late to experience that epoch firsthand know of such arguments from existing scholarship about life east of the Iron Curtain. This otherwise refreshing study reminds us how much our scholarship reflects our personal journeys and those of our generation. Bianco quotes from Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's infamous biography of Mao (p. 406 n1), devotes one-third of the book (the chapters “Famines,” “The Camps,” and “Dictators”) to gory details of famines and comparisons of which is worse, laogai or the Gulag, and stresses the consequent dehumanization of the population in the PRC and the Soviet Union, with occasional comparisons with the Nazi concentration camps, though with disclaimers that these are incomparable (pp. 321, 290). He concludes that “two monster” regimes (p. 310) required lies from all participants. But this conclusion, while not historically inaccurate and no doubt humanistic, is not novel.

For all these reasons, this outstanding work of scholarship is as fascinating to a specialist as it would be to a general audience. Hopefully, it will inspire more inquiries that build on its insights.