The “Cultural Revolution”

Not a committee's argument but a memoir, and a genuine historical source.

A. Zhelokhovtsev was a young Soviet sinologist, a specialist in the medieval Chinese urban story, who left Moscow by train in February 1966 on a student exchange and took up residence at the Peking Pedagogical University expecting ten months among seventeenth-century woodblock prints. Four months later the university was closed, its Party committee had been overthrown, and he was watching professors dragged to a stadium in paper caps. He went home before the end of the year with a notebook.

A foreign academic resident inside a Chinese university through the first six months of the Cultural Revolution is a rare vantage point, and he used it as a trained scholar would. He read the big-character wall posters as documents and copied them down. Those posters were ephemeral by design, pasted over within days, and much of what he transcribed survives nowhere else in English.

He is a careful witness even about atrocity. On the suicides he separates what he heard from what he saw before giving a tally he can stand behind, with the circumstances of each, alongside those who collapsed after hours at a denunciation rally and were recorded as having died of ailments. On the death of the novelist Lao She he does something better than assert: he reproduces the Red Guard leaflet announcing it.

What he describes - the persecution of teachers, the struggle sessions, the ritual humiliations - has been amply confirmed by Chinese accounts published after 1978 and four decades of scholarship since. This book was in print, in English, more than a decade before most of it became sayable in China.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.