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 it invites the reader to understand that what follows is the settled judgement of a world movement. Nineteen articles from eleven countries, assembled in Moscow, translated into English by David Skvirsky and shipped abroad by Progress Publishers: the plurality of datelines is the point. No single Soviet author could have produced this effect. So the first question to put to the book is not whether its criticisms of Mao are true — many of them are — but whose eyes these are, and which eyes were not invited.
The roster is easily reconstructed, because every article carries its source in a footnote. Bulgaria contributes one piece, from Novo Vreme. The German Democratic Republic contributes four: one from Einheit, two from Deutsche Aussenpolitik, one from the economics journal Wirtschaftswissenschaft. The Soviet Union contributes three unsigned surveys, two from Kommunist and one from Pravda, over and above the speech by Brezhnev that opens the volume. Then one article each from Czechoslovakia's Nová mysl, Hungary's Társadalmi Szemle, the Warsaw weekly Polityka, and the Mongolian party journal Namyn Amdral. That is twelve of the nineteen articles, all of them from ruling parties of the Soviet bloc. The remaining seven come from four non-ruling parties: three from the Japanese Communist Party's monthly Zen-ei, two from the American Political Affairs, one from the Indian Communist Party's New Age, and one from the French party's daily L'Humanité.
Now the absences. There is nothing from Italy — from the Partito Comunista Italiano, then the largest communist party in the capitalist world, with a million and a half members and a quarter of the Italian vote. Nothing from Britain, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland or Australia. Nothing from Romania, whose party had refused to break with Peking and went on refusing. Nothing from Yugoslavia, nothing from Cuba, nothing from the Vietnamese or Korean parties, which declined throughout these years to take a side in the quarrel. And nothing, of course, from Albania, or from the pro-Chinese groups that Brezhnev's opening speech says "now exist in nearly 30 countries." The common thread is not hard to find. The parties that criticised the entry of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and the parties that declined to condemn China, are absent to a man. What the volume presents as the verdict of a movement is the verdict of the parties that agreed with Moscow about both.
The enterprise was not a one-off, and its second run is the best reason for reading the first this way. Five years later Progress issued Present-Day China: Socio-Economic Problems — thirteen papers from the China institutes of the Warsaw Pact, each author's country printed after his name, the same ruling parties assembled, and again no Romania, no Yugoslavia, no Cuba, no Vietnam, no Korea. What changed was the trade. The 1975 volume is the work of economists and demographers, prints wage tables from named Chinese enterprises and marks its own estimates as estimates; this one is journalism, party-journal commentary translated and bound. Two books that share a roster and a set of exclusions while differing completely in method tell you that the exclusions were not a by-product of the genre. Somebody was choosing the guest list, and choosing it the same way twice.
The Italian case is the sharpest, because the PCI is in the book — as a quotation. In the Czechoslovak contribution, Miroslav Mika writes that "The newspaper L'Unita has correctly observed" that the Cultural Revolution had produced "a picture of an extremely acute political struggle which has caused a deep split in the country's ruling circles and among the people." The Italian party is good enough to be cited when it agrees about China. It is not good enough to be given an article, because on Czechoslovakia it did not agree about anything.
Which brings us to the Czechoslovak contribution itself, and to the most revealing single fact about the book's construction. Mika's article is footnoted to Nová mysl, No. 4, 1967. It was published before the January 1968 plenum that brought Dubček to the leadership, before the Action Programme, before the abolition of censorship, and before the invasion. When Progress needed a Czechoslovak voice for a volume printed in 1970, it reached back past the Prague Spring to the last year in which the Czechoslovak party journal could be relied upon. And the invasion is not passed over in silence: the Bulgarian contributor A. Kozharov states the doctrine outright. "Troops of five socialist countries entered Czechoslovakia in order to prevent the counter-revolution from seizing that country and prevent Czechoslovakia from falling prey to the imperialists." A few pages later, listing the Soviet Union's services to the revolution, he includes the defence "of socialist Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia today against the inroads of the counter-revolution." So the book contains a Czechoslovak article from 1967 and a Bulgarian justification of the tanks that arrived in 1968, and the reader is asked to take the two together as the eyes of communists.
The Japanese entries are stranger still, and the book depends on the reader not knowing why. Three articles — more than any country except the USSR and the GDR — come from the Japanese Communist Party. The JCP had broken with Peking in 1966; it had also condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and its relations with Moscow were frozen for most of the following decade. Mitsugu Hashimoto's long essay is a defence of the sovereignty of the national party against outside interference, built on Lenin's polemics against liquidationism. He objects that the Maoists engage in "Great-Power interference in and subversion against our Party and the Japanese democratic movement." Every word of that sentence had, in 1968, a second address. The volume reprints the argument and suppresses its other half. The two American articles from Political Affairs are the only pieces in the book whose footnotes admit that they are "Printed here in abridged form" — an editorial hand acknowledged nowhere else, on the only contributions from a party outside Europe and Asia. They are also the oldest things in the volume. Both are replies to Lin Piao's "Long Live the Victory of People's War!"; the first opens by noting that "On September 3 of this year there appeared in Jenmin Jihpao, organ of the Communist Party of China, an article which brings the controversy in the world Communist movement to a new point," and neither cites anything later than 1965. They were written in the autumn of that year and printed at the beginning of the next — that is, before the Cultural Revolution which this volume exists to describe had begun. (The footnotes as scanned give their issue year as 1960, which the contents make impossible; the digit is damaged.) Two of the nineteen articles predate the book's subject entirely, and a third, the Czechoslovak one, predates the events that made its author's country unquotable.
None of this would matter much if the reporting were worthless. It is not, and it is important to say so plainly, because the book's factual core is the reason to reprint it. The Soviet survey from Kommunist No. 4, 1969 is a serious piece of work, and its central finding is one that the anti-Stalinist left reached independently and by the same route. "The Communist Party as the leading force of society, the elective organs of state power, the trade unions, the Young Communist League and all other public organisations have been disbanded or paralysed," it reports; and then, precisely: "With the disbandment of the Party organisations and of the elective organs of power (people's committees), the workers have been deprived of the possibility of defending their interests, while the abolition of the trade unions left their occupational interests unprotected." The Pravda article records that "The All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Youth League and other public organisations have been disbanded." The Hungarian contributor Gyula Denes notes that "The protest of the workers was expressed in strikes and in actions against the hungweipings," and that the Maoists answered by demanding a "rational low wage." The German economist Klaus Mähnel reconstructs the model oilfield at Taching, where "Wages had been halved in order to create large accumulation funds" and "the workers had made dugouts for themselves in order to save funds for the state." Jean-Emile Vidal, writing in L'Humanité, puts the conclusion in one line: "Mao Tse-tung unquestionably plans to use the working class after the Party and the trade unions are destroyed."
That is a workers'-movement criticism of the Cultural Revolution, and it is substantially correct. The campaign against "economism" was a campaign against wage demands; the dismantling of the trade unions did leave Chinese workers with no organisation of their own; the strikes and the Shanghai stoppages of early 1967 were suppressed. The other tradition was reading the same Chinese press at the same moment and reaching the same finding. Ernest Mandel, writing as Ernest Germain between May and December 1967 — while Mähnel, Hashimoto and Yonezawa were writing their articles — went to the strikes this volume only alludes to and named them: the general strike in Shanghai transport of December 1966 and January 1967, the railway strike at Harbin, the national mobilisation of contract workers at Peking demanding wages owed since 1958 and lent out by the communes at "famine wages". His conclusion was that "A part of the working class was beginning to move independently," and that the army was brought in to stop it ("The Cultural Revolution: An Attempt at Interpretation," International Socialist Review, vol. 29 no. 4, whole no. 187, July–August 1968). Livio Maitan reached the same place from the same sources; see his "Report on the 'Cultural Revolution'" in Intercontinental Press, vol. 7 no. 26, 14 July 1969, and "The Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party," vol. 7 no. 27, 28 July 1969, where he observes of the Congress that "the play of democracy was fundamentally perverted from the start." Two hostile traditions, reading the same press, arrived at overlapping judgements. Nor is the convergence a coincidence: both were asking what had happened to the independent organisation of the working class, and that question has only one answer in China in 1967.
There is even a moment of intellectual honesty, and it is worth noticing where it falls. The Polish contributor Włodzimierz Wowczuk closes his survey of the Chinese economy by conceding that "It is impossible to check the authenticity of the information coming from China and that unfortunately makes it extremely difficult to sift facts or attempt to assess the actual situation," and the Japanese economist Hideo Yonezawa opens his by presenting his verdict as "the author's personal conclusion drawn from his analysis of the present situation and of the meagre information that has been made available." The two admissions of ignorance in the volume come from Warsaw and Tokyo. Neither sentence would survive in a Soviet-authored chapter. They are the sound of writers who have been allowed to say that they do not know.
But the book cannot ask its own question of itself, and this is where it fails. Hashimoto counts Mao's purge exactly: of the 172 Central Committee members and alternates elected at the Eighth Congress in 1956, "the number attacked by the Mao group during the 'proletarian cultural revolution', removed from office or forced to 'confess' has, according to the latest information, already reached 107." It is a devastating figure and it is very probably right. It is also a figure with a Soviet precedent that no contributor mentions: of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee elected by the Seventeenth Congress of the CPSU in 1934, 98 were arrested and shot, a fact stated by Khrushchev to a closed session of the Twentieth Congress in 1956 and published in the West within months. Every charge the book brings against Maoism — the personality cult, the appointment of congress delegates, the criminalisation of disagreement inside the party, the promotion of soldiers into political authority, the rewriting of party history around one man — describes something that had happened in the Soviet Union within the adult memory of the men writing. Not one of them says so.
The measure of it is a single number. In one hundred and ten thousand words, the name Stalin does not occur once — not as a comparison, not as an admission, not even as an insult thrown at Peking, which was the easy move and the one the Chinese were making in the opposite direction. Yet the book uses the phrase "personality cult" six times, and that phrase is a Soviet coinage minted in 1956 for one man. Mika writes that "Fear of the spirit of the 20th Congress of the CPSU made Mao Tse-tung, Marshal Lin Piao and the other members of this group settle accounts ruthlessly with all the people who could make them see their own reflections"; the unsigned Kommunist survey traces Peking's whole line to "a desire to halt the process started by the 20th Congress of the CPSU." The Twentieth Congress is invoked twice as the thing Mao was running from, and what happened at it is never said. Khrushchev himself appears once in the volume, quoted by Edgar Snow on the subject of the atom bomb. The vocabulary of de-Stalinisation is fully operational here, and its referent has been surgically removed.
The right test of a book like this is not how often it says "opportunism" — the Fourth International's own congress documents of these years use the word at much the same rate. It is whether the charge is ever cashed out into an act that could be shown not to have happened, and whether the category could ever turn on the speaker. On the first the book is uneven rather than worthless: Hashimoto's complaint of "Great-Power interference in and subversion against our Party" names an organisation and a behaviour, and the JCP could be argued with about it, whereas Brezhnev's frame — "Right-wing opportunism is a slide-down to liquidationist positions" — is an essence with no act attached. On the second there is no unevenness at all. Trotsky is named sixteen times and no work of his is cited once; "permanent revolution" appears twice, in scare quotes both times. Hashimoto, who builds his article on Lenin's struggle against liquidationism and calls Trotsky's the "most pernicious" variety of it, quotes Trotskyists — Shigemi Ota, and J. Posadas on the "overthrow of bureaucracy in a workers' state" — but never Trotsky. An opponent who is cited can be checked; one who is only characterised cannot. And wherever the deviation vocabulary comes within reach of the CPSU, the CPSU is combating it and never charged with it. The category is applied outward only.
The same asymmetry governs Indonesia. The GDR contributor Gerhard Weisser writes that Peking's influence on the Indonesian Communist Party "gave the reactionary forces the possibility of dealing the progressive movement in that country a crippling blow and starting a reign of terror against Indonesian Communists," and N. K. Krishnan of the Communist Party of India treats the episode as evidence in a factional argument. What neither says is what happened: between late 1965 and 1966 the Indonesian army and allied militias killed somewhere between half a million and a million people, and destroyed the largest communist party in the non-socialist world. Estimates remain genuinely contested, and the lower and upper bounds differ by a factor of two, but no serious account is smaller than the first figure. The PKI's fate is used here as a debating point about Peking's advice, and the massacre itself is never described. The party that was destroyed gets no article; it is only the moral of someone else's story. Nor was the fact unavailable, or available only to those with no stake in blaming Peking. George Novack wrote of the "Indonesian Blood Bath" in the American Socialist Workers Party's International Socialist Review within months of it, and laid it at Peking's door; Joseph Hansen, in the same journal in January 1968, wrote that the Maoists' policy "helped pave the way for a defeat of major historic proportions and the slaughter of as many as 500,000 Communists" ("The Political Crisis in China," vol. 27 no. 4, whole no. 177, Fall 1966; "Report on the International Situation," vol. 29 no. 1, whole no. 184, January–February 1968). The indictment this volume wants to bring had already been brought, harder, by people willing to say what had happened to the members.
There is one more silence, and it is the silence the 1975 volume keeps as well. The Great Leap Forward is attacked here at length and from every direction, and the mechanism is right. Mika: "In both 1958 and 1959 the autumn harvest was not brought in because nearly 80 million people were 'smelting steel' in primitive blast-furnaces." Mähnel: agricultural production "falling below the 1954 level in 1960 despite the population increment of 90 million in the course of these six years." What no contributor has is a single dead person. "Starvation" does not appear in the book at all. "Famine" appears three times and not once about 1959–61 — the unsigned Kommunist survey writes of "the constant threat of famine" in the present tense of 1969, and Dénes and Vidal use the word only of the old China the revolution abolished, Vidal writing that "An end was put to famines, an eternal scourge that used periodically to take a toll of millions of lives." The volume possesses the phrase "take a toll of millions of lives" and spends it on the emperors. Mika closes his account of the catastrophe by saying China "found herself up against serious economic problems, which were aggravated by a series of elemental calamities" — Peking's own euphemism, the three years of natural calamities, reproduced by a hostile critic without a mark on it, and Yonezawa repeats it, dating the flight of villagers into the cities to "the 'big leap' and the elemental calamities of approximately ten years ago." The worst thing the book will say happened is that "industry and agriculture remained at the 1957 level."
Be exact about what this does and does not convict them of. Nobody outside China knew the scale of the deaths of 1959–61 until the 1982 census was released and the demographers went to work; a book of 1970 could not have supplied a number, and the charge is not that it failed to know one nobody knew. The anti-Stalinist left was no better placed and did no better: the Fourth International's Ninth World Congress, in the resolution quoted below, got no further than "the near-famine period at the beginning of the sixties." The charge is narrower than that, and it holds: these authors chose to condemn the Great Leap as an economic policy, to describe its consequences entirely in tonnages, and to borrow the accused regime's own word for the thing they would not name. One fact they certainly did have. In 1960 the Soviet Union withdrew its specialists from China and cancelled its contracts, in the middle of the worst agricultural crisis in the country's history. The volume mentions Soviet experts exactly once, and then only to complain that during the Leap "the advice of Soviet experts and the warnings of own specialists were ignored"; the withdrawal appears nowhere in it, exactly as it appears nowhere in the 1975 companion. The Fourth International, no friend of Peking, called that rupture "a stab in the back of the Chinese revolution and the Chinese people, at the very moment when they were confronted with near-famine at home," and put "The historic responsibility for breaking up the Sino-Soviet alliance ... at the door of the Kremlin" (Resolution on the "Cultural Revolution" in China, Intercontinental Press, vol. 7 no. 26, 14 July 1969). Two Progress volumes, five years apart, different authors, different disciplines, leave out the same event. Neither of them mislaid it.
On the Ussuri, the book gives the Soviet version and only that. Kommunist No. 5, 1969 calls "the outrageous armed provocations organised by the Mao group on the Soviet-Chinese frontier on March 2, 14 and 15 of this year" the central link of Peking's anti-Soviet line, and concedes only that the clashes "took a toll of life on both sides." Here the reader should know that the historiography has moved. The ambush of 2 March at Zhenbao/Damansky is generally now attributed to a Chinese plan; the far heavier engagement of 15 March was a Soviet counter-blow with armour and artillery; and the fighting at Tielieketi in Xinjiang that August was initiated from the Soviet side. What the book cannot say at all is what Moscow was privately considering that summer. In September 1969 the Soviet journalist Victor Louis, a man used by Soviet departments for unattributable messages, published in the London Evening News the suggestion that the doctrine invoked over Czechoslovakia might be extended to China, and speculated openly about a strike on the nuclear installations at Lop Nor. Pierre Frank set that alongside the Czechoslovak precedent at the time, in "Concerning 'Limited Sovereignty'," Intercontinental Press vol. 7 no. 38, 17 November 1969 — the reply that this book's readers in Turin and Tokyo were not offered.
One further weakness is worth naming because it is the book's own, not the censor's. Mika's explanation of Maoism runs through Confucianism, imperial despotism, the Taiping rebellion and the claim that "China is the only country in the world where to this day the millennia-old civilisation continues to be part and parcel of national and state life." He even offers, as evidence of continuity, that in China "a young man cannot quite independently choose a wife, nor can a girl choose a husband." This is culturalism, and it sits badly beside the class analysis the rest of the volume advances; a party's degeneration cannot be explained both by the weight of the peasantry and by three thousand years of national character, and the second explanation is doing no analytic work at all.
Read the book, then, for what it is. It is a dossier, and a good deal of the dossier holds up: the destruction of Chinese workers' organisations, the collapse of industrial output, the substitution of appointed committees for elected ones, the army's arrival at the centre of the state. 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. What fails is the frame. Vidal asks, in the French article, the question the whole volume ought to have turned on itself: "What are those people now thinking who once maintained that the purpose of the 'cultural revolution' was to 'overthrow the bureaucracy' and establish a 'new proletarian democracy'?" It is a fair question, and it is fatal in both directions. A book that assembles its witnesses by first excluding everyone who disagrees, and then presents the result as the eyes of communists, has answered a question about Mao by demonstrating something about Moscow.