Maoism Through the Eyes of Communists

The title is the argument. Maoism Through the Eyes of Communists does not say "Soviet communists", or "the communist parties allied to Moscow". It says communists, without qualification, and invites the reader to understand that what follows is the settled judgement of a world movement.

Nineteen articles from eleven countries, assembled in Moscow and shipped abroad by Progress Publishers: the plurality of datelines is the point. Every article carries its source in a footnote, which makes the volume unusually easy to audit. Bulgaria contributes one piece from Novo Vreme; the German Democratic Republic four; the Soviet Union three unsigned surveys from Kommunist and Pravda, over and above the Brezhnev speech that opens the volume; then one each from Czechoslovakia's Nova mysl, Hungary's Tarsadalmi Szemle, the Warsaw weekly Polityka and the Mongolian party journal Namyn Amdral. The remaining seven come from four non-ruling parties - the Japanese, American, French and Indian.

A good deal of the dossier holds up, and that is the reason to read it. On the destruction of Chinese workers' organisations, the collapse of industrial output, the substitution of appointed committees for elected ones and the army's arrival at the centre of the state, these writers had access to information and a willingness to use it that Western enthusiasts of the Cultural Revolution conspicuously lacked in 1970. Its most confident prediction - that China was moving towards a military-bureaucratic dictatorship - looked prescient within eighteen months, when Lin Biao died fleeing the country.

Edited by V. I. Krivtsov and translated by David Skvirsky.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.