A Critique of Mao Tse-Tung's Theoretical Conceptions

Most Soviet books written against Mao fought on political ground: the Cultural Revolution, the trade unions, the border, the Ninth Congress. This one picks a harder fight. Its charge is not that Mao's policy was wrong but that his philosophy was never Marxist at all - that the vocabulary was borrowed and the content underneath it was something else.

Unusually for the genre, the volume says exactly who wrote what, assigning nine named contributors to their sections: V. G. Georgiyev and V. A. Krivtsov on philosophy, Y. G. Plimak and Y. F. Karyakin on revolution, war and peace, G. S. Ostroumov on arbitrary rule, and four others. It was produced by the Institute of Philosophy and the Institute of the Far East of the USSR Academy of Sciences, with F. V. Konstantinov and M. I. Sladkovsky as responsible editors - Konstantinov an Academician who had directed the Institute of Philosophy and edited the five-volume Soviet Philosophical Encyclopaedia, Sladkovsky the head of the Institute of the Far East.

The strongest passage is philological, and it holds up. Georgiyev sets out the contents of a pamphlet published at Talien in the late 1940s from lectures Mao gave at Yenan, and demonstrates that it rests on two Soviet works - the 1933 Moscow textbook Dialectical Materialism edited by M. Mitin, and the corresponding encyclopaedia article - with whole passages carried across. He traces which sections Mao later published as "On Practice" and "On Contradiction", shows where the qualifications were dropped, and quotes Mao's own disclaimer that he had only just begun to study dialectics. Western scholarship reached the same conclusion independently, two decades later.

A footnote dates the book precisely: it names an attendee of the reception for President Nixon in Peking in February 1972.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.