The Philosophical Views of Mao Tse-Tung

The English title is a softening. On the Russian title page this is a kritika, a critique, and nothing about the book is mild. M. Altaisky and V. Georgiyev set out in five chapters to prove that Mao Tse-tung never held a dialectical-materialist position, that the Marxist vocabulary in his writings is an imported element, and - the sharp end - that his two celebrated philosophical essays were not written when they claim to have been.

The central finding is genuinely valuable, and it holds up. In 1937 Mao delivered lectures on philosophy at Yenan; part appeared in a Shanghai journal in 1940, and a fuller text was issued anonymously in Talien in the late 1940s. Altaisky and Georgiyev reproduce that pamphlet's contents and report what comparison shows: that it rests almost entirely on two Soviet works, the 1933 textbook Dialectical Materialism edited by M. Mitin and the corresponding encyclopaedia article, with whole passages carried across with little change. Western scholarship arrived independently at the same conclusion two decades later; Nick Knight's 1990 edition of the lecture notes documents the dependence in detail.

On the dating of "On Practice" and "On Contradiction" they are careful, hedging the claim and supporting it with four numbered silences: the essays appear on no rectification-campaign reading list, go unmentioned in the Yenan party newspaper, are absent from the Selected Works of 1945 and 1947, and go unmentioned in the two book-length celebrations of Mao as theoretician written for the Party's thirtieth anniversary in 1951.

For once the translation did not lag: the Russian text closed in mid-1971 and Brian Bean's English followed the same year, with the quarrel with Peking at its loudest and before Nixon's visit changed the terms.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the yardstick the authors chose to measure Mao against.