Most of the Soviet books written against Mao fought on political ground: the Cultural Revolution, the trade unions, the border, the Ninth Congress. This one picks a harder fight. Its charge is not that Mao's policy was wrong but that his philosophy was not Marxist at all — that the vocabulary was borrowed and the content underneath it was something else. The four sections of Chapter One run from ideological origins through "The Meaning of Marxist Terminology in Mao's Writings" and "On the Real Meaning of Maoist Dialectics" to the verdict: "Subjective Idealism Instead of the Materialist View of History." Mao, the book argues, replaced material conditions with will, and theory with the thought of a leader. It is a serious charge, made with real technical equipment, and it is the most dangerous thing Moscow could have chosen to say out loud in 1972.
Unusually for the genre, the volume tells you exactly who wrote what. The Introduction names nine contributors and assigns them by section: V. G. Georgiyev and V. A. Krivtsov on philosophy and chauvinism; Y. G. Plimak and Y. F. Karyakin on revolution, war and peace; G. S. Ostroumov, a lawyer, on arbitrary rule; and four others. The jacket copy adds that it was produced by "the Institute of Philosophy and the Institute of the Far East of the USSR Academy of Sciences, with Academician F. V. Konstantinov and Professor M. I. Sladkovsky as responsible editors" — an institutional signature, not a personal one. Konstantinov was a genuine professional: an Academician, director of the Institute of Philosophy in the 1960s, editor-in-chief of the five-volume Soviet Philosophical Encyclopaedia. Sladkovsky ran the Institute of the Far East. A philosophy institute and an area-studies institute yoked together to produce an export monograph: the commission is legible in the shape of the thing. So is the date — a footnote in the last chapter names an attendee of the reception for President Nixon "during his sojourn in Peking in February 1972." This is Soviet philosophy dispatched to hold the intellectual ground while the diplomacy moved.
The core of the argument is stated flatly. Mao's postulates — that relations of production outrank productive forces, that "politics and not economics is the command force in socialist society," that moral incentives outrank material ones — "boil down to the thesis that under socialism men's 'subjective activity' has the decisive role to play, which essentially means an urge to subordinate the objective laws of socialist construction to the subjective activity of leaders." The Maoists, it continues, mean by subjective activity not "conscious, purposeful activity of the masses" but "action in realising any subjectivist propositions of the leaders"; the result is "an apology of voluntarism and subjectivism. This is a subjective, idealist standpoint." And the human material on which will operates is blank: the book returns repeatedly to Mao's image of the Chinese people as a sheet of clean paper on which one may write "the newest, the most beautiful characters."
Is the argument any good? In places it is very good, and the reader should know where.
The strongest single passage is philological. Georgiyev sets out the table of contents of a pamphlet, Dialectical Materialism, published at Talien between 1945 and 1949 and based on lectures Mao gave in Yan'an, and states the finding: the text "was written on the basis of two Soviet works: the textbook Dialectical Materialism (written under the direction of Academician M. Mitin), which was published in Moscow in 1933, and the article 'Dialectical Materialism', in Volume 22 of the first edition of the Bolshaya Sovietskaya Entsiklopedia." And then: "Mao's pamphlet is essentially a digest of these two works." The book traces which sections of that pamphlet Mao later published as "On Practice" and "On Contradiction," shows a passage where he takes two clauses of a Soviet paragraph and drops the qualifications that followed, and quotes his own disclaimer at the time: "This lecture course of mine cannot likewise be considered a good one, because I myself have just started to study dialectics."
This holds up. Western scholarship reached the same conclusion independently and later — Nick Knight's edition of the 1937 lecture notes, Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism (1990), documents the dependence on Soviet textbook material in detail. The Soviet authors got there first, from the texts, and they were right. The related footnote claim, that "On Practice" and "On Contradiction" were "in fact written in the late 1940s and the early 1950s," is overstated as put, but points at something real: the essays as printed in the Selected Works were substantially reworked around 1950–52, and the 1937 texts differ.
A second reading is accurate and worth having. Discussing "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," the book notes that Mao replaced antagonistic and non-antagonistic with "contradictions between ourselves and our enemies" and "contradictions within the ranks of the people," and placed the contradiction between the working class and the Chinese national bourgeoisie inside the second. That is what Mao's text says, and calling it a right-opportunist move rather than an ultra-left one is a fair reading. It is also awkward for the rest of the book: here Mao is convicted of being too soft on the bourgeoisie, a chapter away from being convicted of manufacturing class war where none exists.
Elsewhere the philosophy is thinner than it looks. Much of Chapter One consists of quoting Mao and then asserting that a real Marxist would have gone further. Of Mao's Wuchang speech on classes becoming paper tigers, the book objects that "a mere statement of the generally known historical facts does not yet add up to scientific dialectics" — true, and no argument. And one complaint is revealing: that Mao's dialectic "envisages the destruction of mankind and the globe," on the strength of his remark that the earth too must eventually perish. The objection is not to an error but to a mood.
Now the difficulty, which is the whole interest of this volume. If the charge is that a leader's will was substituted for material conditions, and that one man's thought became the measure of theory, no reader needs prompting to ask where else this had happened. The book knows it, and manages the problem in a way that repays attention.
Begin with a count. In 102,000 words of Soviet philosophy about the abuse of Marxism, Lenin is named more than three hundred times. Stalin is named twice. Once as one of the classics from whom Mao lifts quotations, and once inside a long extract from the 1967 Central Committee Theses on the Fiftieth Anniversary, condemning "Stalin's personality cult which was expressed in the glorification of the role of one man" and closing with the formula that governs the whole series: "These distortions, for all their gravity, did not alter the nature of socialist society, nor did they shake the pillars of socialism." Stalin's own Dialectical and Historical Materialism of 1938 — the philosophical section of the Short Course, which for a generation of communist intellectuals from Prague to Peking simply was Marxism — is not cited, discussed or mentioned. The near miss is almost a joke: the footnote at the pivot of the plagiarism argument reads "Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Part 1, Moscow, 1933," and that is Mitin's textbook, not Stalin's essay, which merely shares the title.
Consider what Mitin's name is doing there. The standard against which Mao's borrowings are measured is a 1933 textbook produced under the direction of the man who, with Stalin's personal backing, had just destroyed Soviet philosophy as an independent discipline in the campaign of 1930–31 against Deborin and the so-called Menshevising idealists. Deborin survived it. Jan Sten, who had tutored Stalin in Hegel, was shot in 1937. Mao is convicted of vulgarising a text; the reader is not told what the text was for.
The same mechanism runs through the doctrinal argument. Chapter Five, section 4, is titled "Artificial Aggravation of Class Struggle," and charges Mao with inventing an intensifying class struggle under socialism in order to license permanent repression. The correction offered is that "in the course of socialist construction the bitterness of the class struggle is moderated," and that under socialism "antagonism disappears but contradictions remain." That is sound Leninism, and it is also the exact repudiation of Stalin's thesis of 1937 — that the closer socialism comes, the fiercer the resistance of the defeated classes — which was the theoretical warrant for the Terror. The book states the correct doctrine and never says whose it is correcting, so a reader in Turin or Tokyo is left to suppose Mao thought of it himself.
And then, once, the book walks right up to the edge. Chapter Four argues that revolution requires coercion but that "the antitoxin may well become... a potent toxin," and that Marxists must "keep violence down to a minimum at every stage of the struggle." Narrating 1918, it observes that Soviet power had to create "special agencies and apparatuses of class suppression — the Red Army and the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission," and then this: "However, the existence of special apparatuses of coercion was to some extent latent with dangerous tendencies and in the event of any relaxation of Party control over these agencies... opened up the possibility for their abuse." The possibility for their abuse. What follows is not a description of the abuse but a quotation from the 1956 Central Committee resolution about "some limitations of democracy" that were "justified by the logic of our people's struggle for socialism." Nothing that happened between 1936 and 1938 is named anywhere in this book. The word for it does not appear.
There is a sharper irony still. The most sustained analysis of the personality cult in these pages is not Soviet but Chinese: the authors quote at length, and with open approval, the 1956 CPC article "On the Historical Experience of the Proletarian Dictatorship," which treated the cult as "a rotten legacy which has come down from mankind's long history," rooted in small-producer society and over-centralisation, and add that it "contained an indirect critique of Mao's personality cult and had been written without his consent." A Soviet philosophy institute in 1972 praising a Chinese text of 1956 for its historical analysis of a phenomenon the Soviet Union had produced, and offering none of its own: that is the book in one page.
The chapter on nuclear war deserves separate handling, because the charge in it is real and the evidence offered for it is not what a reader would want. Plimak and Karyakin quote Mao from the 1930s — war "can only be abolished through war; in order to get rid of the gun we must first grasp it in our hand," and a war "will form a bridge leading world history into a new era" — and answer with the best sentence in the book: "But if it is a bridge, it is one which is made up of corpses." They then report that at the 1957 Moscow Meeting Mao said "if one-half of mankind were destroyed, there would still remain the other half, but then imperialism would be completely wiped out"; that Chinese officials told smaller countries that "in the event of a devastating war, the small countries would have to subordinate their interests to the common interests"; and that Mao told Edgar Snow that on Bikini the wells were potable and the birds were singing, so that "in the eyes of nature and the birds, the mice and the trees the atom bomb was a paper tiger."
The substance is not seriously disputed. Mao did speak in something like these terms at the Moscow meeting of November 1957, before a large audience of foreign delegates, and the remark disturbed people who were in no sense Soviet clients. But look at the footnotes. The Moscow speech is sourced to China Today, Moscow, 1969. The Snow interview is sourced not to Snow but to Maoism Through the Eyes of Communists, Moscow, 1970 — another Progress volume, already in this series. The reply to Mao is a Soviet government statement in Pravda of 21 August 1963. There is no Chinese-language citation anywhere in the passage; the whole indictment circulates inside Soviet publishing. On the gravest charge in the book, the reader is asked to take Moscow's word for what was said in Moscow. Nor is any counter-case allowed in: no mention of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and none of what Moscow itself had been considering about Chinese nuclear installations three years earlier. Chapter Three attacks Peking for refusing the non-proliferation and seabed treaties, which is true, without observing that a treaty freezing nuclear weapons in the hands of those who already had them looked different from Peking.
The larger silence is the year. A book denouncing Mao for refusing peaceful coexistence went to press in the months after Nixon shook Mao's hand. A third tradition read the same events and reached a conclusion neither Moscow nor Peking would print: Allen Myers, in Intercontinental Press vol. 10 no. 9, 6 March 1972, went through the Shanghai communiqué line by line and argued that Nixon and Mao "had agreed, not to change the world, but to preserve the status quo in Asia" — Washington conceding the five principles of peaceful coexistence and a vague eventual withdrawal from Taiwan, both nearly free, in exchange for Chinese pressure on Hanoi. Myers notes in passing that Chiang Ching's Cultural Revolution slogan "peaceful coexistence corrupts" was "not likely to be inscribed on Peking wall posters in the immediate future." Both sides of the quarrel were being overtaken by the same diplomacy, and neither could say so.
Chapter Two, on Great-Han chauvinism, has hard material in it — Mao's 1936 remark to Snow about Outer Mongolia, the 1954 approach to a Soviet delegation about a Chinese-Mongolian merger, the 1964 conversation with Japanese socialists in which he said China had yet to "present her bill" for the territory between Baikal, Kamchatka and Vladivostok. Those happened. But it dismisses in a footnote the Chinese description of the border treaties as unequal, and the treaties in question, Aigun in 1858 and Peking in 1860, transferred the Amur and Ussuri lands to Russia in precisely the conditions that gave the phrase its meaning. And the state publishing it had sent five armies into Czechoslovakia four years earlier. Czechoslovakia appears once in this book, in a subordinate clause — "the counter-revolutionary action in Czechoslovakia in 1968" — as proof that class enemies persist, with Hungary 1956 alongside it. The chapter denouncing hegemonism contains no self-examination of any kind.
One sentence in the Conclusion should be flagged because it is simply untrue. Listing resemblances between Maoism and Trotskyism, the book writes: "Trotsky tried artificially to accelerate the world revolution by means of a world war." It carries no footnote, in a book where nearly every assertion carries one. Trotsky argued the opposite for his entire political life. The neighbouring charges are more honest because they are partly true — he did defend the militarisation of labour at the Ninth Party Congress in 1920, and Lenin did oppose him in the trade-union controversy — and it is precisely because the true charge was available that the invented one is revealing.
What, then, is worth reading here? Chapter Three, sections 1 to 3, and Chapter Four, sections 1 and 2 — the Plimak and Karyakin material. These are the pages where the argument stops reciting and starts thinking: the insistence that revolutionary violence was "a necessary and legitimate weapon of the revolution only at definite stages," the warning that the antitoxin becomes the toxin, the careful reformulation that one should speak "not of some kind of 'peaceful transition' and violent proletarian revolution" but "of the peaceful and the non-peaceful ways of socialist revolution," the fair-minded observation that the Chinese leadership's own 1963 letter had conceded that "the Communists always prefer to make the transition to socialism by peaceful means." It has a political function, of course — it is the doctrinal case for the parliamentary road that Western communist parties were then taking, and Chile, where a Popular Unity government had been elected in 1970 and had three years left, is nowhere named. But it is honest about difficulty in a way Soviet philosophy of this period rarely was, and the small initials in its footnotes, "Y.K. and Y.P.," mark the one place in the book where two authors are visibly present rather than one committee.
The answer this book's readers were not offered appeared in the same season, and it made the connection the volume could not. In "The Downfall of Lin Piao," Intercontinental Press vol. 10 no. 36, 9 October 1972, Livio Maitan took Lin Biao's death as the test of Maoism's claim to be something new, and wrote that the mechanism by which a designated successor became a traitor overnight was "fundamentally Stalinist, even if in Stalin's time the losers usually ended up facing firing squads." He treated Mao less as the author of a line than as "the balancer, as well as the symbol, of the bureaucratic leadership." That is the charge Konstantinov's authors bring, delivered without the exemption. The earlier instalments are Maitan's "Report on the 'Cultural Revolution'," vol. 7 no. 26, 14 July 1969, and "The Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party," vol. 7 no. 27, 28 July 1969.
One last sentence is worth carrying away. Describing what Maoist epistemology does to ordinary people, Chapter One says that under it the practice of millions becomes "blind, unconscious activity, each of these being no more than a 'little cog' in a gigantic machine run by the hand of the 'great genius'." The metaphor was not new. Stalin had used it about Soviet citizens, approvingly, in a Kremlin toast in June 1945. Konstantinov's authors reach for it as an image of everything wrong with Mao, and do not appear to hear it. That is why the book is worth reprinting: a competent, sometimes acute, occasionally brave philosophical critique of voluntarism, produced by an institution built by voluntarism and unable to say so.