Maoism Unmasked

Not a book somebody wrote: fourteen articles lifted out of Soviet journals and bound together, each carrying its origin at the foot of its last page. That habit is rare enough in this literature to be worth praising, and it lets a reader date the collection exactly.

Fedoseyev's opening essay comes from Kommunist no. 5, 1967. Rumyantsev's philosophical attack is Kommunist no. 2, 1969. Ivanov on Confucius and Batalov on practice are from Voprosy filosofii in 1969. The economic section runs through Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodniye otnosheniya, Politicheskoye samoobrazovaniye, Ekonomicheskaya gazeta, and one piece of newspaper journalism by Sladkovsky in Izvestia of 27 April 1970. Nothing is later than that, and the bulk is 1969.

The charge is more interesting than the usual political indictment. It is not primarily that Mao's policy failed but that he substituted will for conditions - rejecting the materialist understanding of history in favour of voluntarism, and magnifying the subjective factor into the influence of a great personality on the social process. The book returns repeatedly to Mao's 1958 image of the Chinese people as a sheet of clean paper on which the newest and most beautiful characters might be written, which for these authors is the most damning sentence he ever uttered, because it treats a society as material with no properties of its own.

In places the argument is very good. Rumyantsev tracks Mao's account of contradiction from the 1937 Yenan lecture into the edited Selected Works text, and argues that the schema of equilibrium, disturbance and new equilibrium is not dialectics but the mechanistic theory of equilibrium under another name, traced back through Bogdanov to Herbert Spencer.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.