The subtitle is doing more work than it looks. Maoism Unmasked is not a book somebody wrote; it is fourteen articles lifted out of Soviet journals and bound together, and every one of them carries its origin at the foot of its last page. That habit — rare enough in this literature to be worth praising — lets a reader do something the volume never intended, which is to date it. 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 Voprosy filosofii nos. 7 and 3 of 1969; Titarenko is Filosofskiye nauki no. 4, 1969. The economic section runs through Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodniye otnosheniya (1967), Politicheskoye samoobrazovaniye (1968 and 1969), Ekonomicheskaya gazeta (May 1969) and one piece of newspaper journalism, Sladkovsky in Izvestia of 27 April 1970. The foreign-policy section is Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn, 1968 and 1969.
That is the whole range: April 1970 at the latest, and the bulk of it 1969. The spine says 1972. In the two years between the newest article here and the English edition, Lin Biao — named in these pages as Mao's spokesman and the author of the "world village" thesis — died fleeing China, and Richard Nixon shook Mao's hand in Peking. Neither event appears. A companion volume in this series, the Konstantinov and Sladkovsky Critique of Mao Tse-tung's Theoretical Conceptions, was still being adjusted in early 1972 and footnotes the Peking reception; this one was simply reprinted. Read it, then, as a document of 1969, exported in 1972 to hold ground that had already moved.
Who wrote it matters here more than usual, and two of the names should stop a reader of this series cold. A. Rumyantsev, who supplies both the philosophical demolition of Mao's dialectics in Part I and, with A. Sterbalova, the long economic study that opens Part II, is the same Rumyantsev who fifteen years later edited A Dictionary of Scientific Communism — the volume with no biographical entries at all, a thousand words of hostility under "Trotskyism", and the Terror of 1936–38 rendered as a passage in which "socialist changes during the second five-year-plan period (1933–37)… eliminated the internal forces that wanted to restore capitalism." E. Batalov, whose essay "Destruction of Practice" is the best piece of philosophy in this book, is the Batalov who six years later published The Philosophy of Revolt, a genuinely learned study of Marcuse and the Western New Left in which the words Czechoslovakia, Khrushchev and Twentieth Congress do not occur. Sladkovsky, director of the Institute of the Far East, is a responsible editor of the Konstantinov volume. Fedoseyev was an Academician and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences, a man who had run Bolshevik in the late 1940s and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in the 1950s. Kapitsa was a diplomat-sinologist. Others — K. Ivanov, A. Vladimirov, N. Kapchenko — appear as an initial and a surname and cannot be securely identified at all.
So this is the Soviet philosophical and area-studies establishment, at close to full strength, prosecuting a single charge. And the charge is the interesting thing. It is not primarily that Mao's policy failed. It is that Mao substituted will for conditions. "It has rejected the materialist understanding of history in favour of voluntarism," Fedoseyev writes; the "magnification of the role played by the subjective factor is ultimately reduced to the influence of a 'great' personality on the social process." The book returns again and again to Mao's 1958 image of the Chinese people as "a sheet of clean paper" on which "one can write the newest and most beautiful words, and draw the newest and most beautiful pictures" — for these authors the single most damning sentence Mao ever uttered, because it treats a society as material with no properties of its own.
Is the argument good? In places it is very good indeed, and a reader should know where.
Rumyantsev's Kommunist essay is a real piece of philosophical criticism. He tracks Mao's account of contradiction from the 1937 Yan'an lecture into the edited text of "On Contradiction" in the Selected Works, notes that "this text had been edited and does not at once reveal what he really means", and shows that the earlier version said flatly that opposites "are enemies hating each other". He shows that Mao's schema — equilibrium, disturbance, new equilibrium — is not dialectics but the mechanistic theory of equilibrium under another name, and traces it back through Bogdanov's Philosophy of Living Experience to Herbert Spencer's First Principles. He is right that Mao's examples collapse the distinction between genuine dialectical opposites and any pair of contraries whatever; the passage where Mao lists "above" and "below", "misfortune" and "good fortune", landlords and tenants, bourgeoisie and proletariat as instances of one relation is quoted in full, and it does not survive the quotation. The essay is unkind but not unfair on Mao's formation: that he came to Marxist philosophy in 1933 through textbooks and popularisations, that many of his Lenin citations are second-hand, and — the sentence with the sting — "Mao Tse-tung knows no foreign language."
Batalov's essay is better still, and it is the reason to keep this book. Working from the Chinese texts and from Mori Nobushige's Japanese critique, he argues that Mao severs perceptual from rational knowledge, ties practice only to the perceptual, and so strips practice of thought: "Practice degenerates into blind, unconscious, thoughtless activity." What is left for ordinary people is obedience — the individual "reduced to the blind performance of the will of the 'great leader', to that of a 'stainless cog' of a mammoth machine, set in motion personally by the 'helmsman', who ruthlessly 'changes' these 'cogs' if they begin to 'rust', i.e., to think." He then defends the intelligentsia, at length and without embarrassment, against a state that had decided intellectuals were a problem to be solved: he objects to the "brainwashing" campaigns, to the practice by which "it became customary to send intellectuals to the countryside for long periods of 're-education through labour'", and to a political climate in which "critical thinking and an uncompromising attitude to shortcomings were assessed as counter-revolutionary; any accomplishment distinguishing a person from the masses was qualified as egoism and egocentrism and, consequently, as 'revisionism'." He quotes Gramsci, in Italian, from the 1949 Rome edition, against the reduction of ordinary people to their own common sense. Whatever else this is, it is not hackwork.
Titarenko supplies the moral argument, and one paragraph of it is a theory of bureaucracy in miniature. Petty-bourgeois adventurists in power, he writes, "after gaining control of the instruments of compulsion… make them self-contained, independent and free from control from below and turn them into weapons, which the regime uses to preserve itself and extend its authority." Against that he sets Marx on the Commune: leadership must act "in bright daylight, with no pretensions to infallibility, not hiding itself behind circumlocution offices, not ashamed to confess blunders by correcting them." Both sentences were printed in a Soviet philosophy journal in 1969, a year after the tanks entered Prague.
The economic half of the book is where the reporting is, and it is largely sound. Rumyantsev and Sterbalova reconstruct the tiny weight of the industrial working class in Chinese society — under one per cent of the employed population in 1949 — and are candid that no reliable statistics exist, saying so in a footnote to their own table. They date the quarrel to the mid-1950s: infringements of workers' economic rights became "a bone of contention in the Party and in the trade unions", strikes broke out, and "those who championed the interests of the proletariat were again accused of economism." They report that after the recovery of 1962–65 "wages remained at the 1956 level of 40 to 60 yuans a month" against a Peking cost of living of 59–60. Vyatsky reconstructs the workers' resistance to the Cultural Revolution: the Shanghai factories' protest to the Central Committee, the Red Guard detachments (chihweitui) formed against the tsaofan rebels, and a strike wave which "according to the foreign press… involved over 7 million workers in 60 towns", where "in most cases the workers demanded higher wages and better working and living conditions." That is a workers'-movement account of 1966–67, and in its essentials it is correct. It is also, as the introduction to Maoism Through the Eyes of Communists in this series notes of the parallel material there, the same account the Fourth International reached from the same Chinese sources.
One thing in the economic section is badly understated and should be named. On the famine that followed the Great Leap, the book will say only that in 1959–60 "the food situation in China sharply deteriorated", that "in 1961 some areas were on the verge of famine", and — almost in passing — that by the mid-sixties "only the most urgent problem, that of famine, was settled." The best modern estimates of excess deaths in 1959–61 run from roughly fifteen to forty-five million; the range is genuinely contested, the floor is not. These authors had every polemical incentive to say so and did not. It is difficult to read that reticence as anything but an unwillingness to establish, in print, that forced collectivisation followed by famine is a thing that happens in states like theirs.
Which brings us to the question the book exists to avoid. If the offence is that a leader's will was put in place of material conditions, that one man's writings became the measure of theory, that cadres were destroyed on invented charges and intellectuals sent to the fields — the reader does not need to be prompted.
Begin with a count. In 82,000 words denouncing the personality cult, Stalin's name appears exactly once, and not in a Soviet sentence: it occurs inside a quotation from Jenmin Jihpao and Hungchi of May 1967, in which the Chinese assert that "Lenin and Stalin enlarged on Marxism". Lenin is named more than two hundred times. There is no Twentieth Congress here, no Khrushchev, no 1937, no Short Course. Stalin's own Dialectical and Historical Materialism of 1938 — for a generation of communists from Prague to Peking simply the thing Marxism was — is not cited, discussed or named. The Konstantinov volume at least brushed against the problem by measuring Mao's borrowings against Mitin's 1933 textbook. This book does not even name the source. Rumyantsev writes that Mao's works contain "Marxist propositions borrowed mainly from the popular Soviet literature of the 1930s" and leaves it there. The reader is told that Mao's philosophy is a digest of Soviet manuals, and is not told what was in them or who wrote them or what they were for.
Bukharin fares worse. He appears once, correctly identified as the exponent of the theory of equilibrium and described as "one of the most active adversaries of Marxist dialectics". That was written in 1969. Bukharin had been shot in March 1938 after the third Moscow Trial; he would not be rehabilitated until 1988. Rumyantsev's readers in Turin and Tokyo are given the philosophical charge and nothing else — not the trial, not the confession, not the execution — as if the man had merely lost an argument.
The deepest irony is structural rather than a matter of omission, and it belongs to Rumyantsev's own analysis. His explanation of Maoism is that Marxist theory is liable to be displaced by petty-bourgeois substitutes precisely "in countries that are extremely backward economically and politically, where the working class is numerically small and peasants and other petty-bourgeois strata are the main force of the revolution, where for one reason or another no link exists with the international working-class movement and where no proletarian party steeled in class battles exists." He and Sterbalova add that the Chinese proletariat was concentrated in industrial centres that were islands in an ocean of peasant households, and that this permitted "the propagation of a kind of 'peasant' Marxism in the CPC". This is a theory of how a revolution in a backward country produces a doctrine that flatters its own leaders and a regime that rules in the name of a class it has silenced. It is a good theory. It is also, word for word, the argument the Left Opposition had made about the Soviet Union — and these men were writing in a state that had been isolated, blockaded, overwhelmingly peasant, and had lost most of its proletariat in the civil war. The category is precise and it points only outward.
There is a second, narrower silence, and it is the more damning because Rumyantsev walks right up to it. Listing Mao's early errors, he writes that "at the 3rd Congress of the CPC he adhered to a line" combining a pessimistic view of the proletariat with adventurism, and that "in 1927 Mao Tse-tung put his stake on the theory of 'permanent revolution.'" The Third Congress of the Chinese Communist Party met in June 1923 and adopted, on Comintern instruction, the policy of entering the Kuomintang. That policy, and the "bloc of four classes" built on it, is what the Left Opposition held responsible for the massacre of the Shanghai workers in April 1927 and the destruction of the Chinese party as a workers' organisation — the disaster after which what remained of the CCP went to the countryside, and out of which the peasant party these authors deplore was actually made. Whose line it was at that congress, Rumyantsev does not say. He also assigns "permanent revolution" to Mao without ever mentioning the man whose theory it was; Batalov, in the same volume, calmly attributes the doctrine of the uninterrupted revolutionary process to "Marx or Lenin". Fifteen years later Rumyantsev's own dictionary would perform the same trick at greater length, printing "Uninterrupted Revolution" as authentic Marxism and "Trotskyism" as its caricature, four hundred pages apart.
The reply exists and can be read. Trotsky's The Third International After Lenin, written for the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, devotes its third chapter to exactly this: the subordination of the Chinese communists to the Kuomintang, the Canton insurrection as "a virtual laboratory experiment on a colossal scale", and — the point that bears directly on this volume — the doctrine behind it, that "beginning with 1924… Stalin advanced the formula of the 'two-class workers' and peasants' parties for the Eastern countries.'" The "peasant Marxism" Rumyantsev and Sterbalova identify in the CPC had an author, and he was not in Yan'an. And the specific genre of this book — the theoretical journal of the CPSU turning its philosophical apparatus on a heresy — was being read in the West as it appeared. George Saunders's "Moscow Still Haunted by Trotskyism", in Intercontinental Press vol. 7 no. 33 of 13 October 1969, went through Kommunist no. 12 of that year, in which P. Pospelov surveyed four new Soviet books against Trotskyism published in a single twelve-month period, among them an article by M. Basmanov whose later Progress volume also appears in this series. Kommunist no. 2 carried Rumyantsev against Mao; Kommunist no. 12 carried Pospelov against the Fourth International. Same journal, same year, same department.
One more thing should be said about how the book uses its witnesses. Its Chinese authority against Mao is Wang Ming, quoted for the judgement that the Cultural Revolution was a "counter-revolutionary upheaval" — Wang Ming, leader of the Moscow-trained faction Mao had defeated in the 1930s, by then living in the Soviet Union. Its French authority is Jean-Émile Vidal, quoted twice and well: Vidal's question, whether socialist foundations can guarantee a socialist future "in a country where the working class has been deprived of the possibility to act as leader, where one man or a group of people has destroyed everything that enabled the people to control, criticise and express their will", is the best sentence in the volume and belongs to somebody else.
And then there is the ending, which no editor can have looked at twice. The last article, Kapitsa's, from Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn in 1968, closes by warning that American strategists — it names a Professor "Cyrus H. Peacke" writing in the New Republic of 17 August 1963, along with Bill Moyers and Hubert Humphrey — were proposing to abandon the doctrine that the road back to China ran through war, on the argument that "this road lies through the utmost Western support for Chinese nationalism and anti-Sovietism". The suggestion, Kapitsa writes, amounts to "turning China into an anti-Soviet force". That was published in 1968. It was reprinted, without a word of revision, in an English-language book that reached its readers in the year Nixon flew to Peking. The prediction was right, and the volume that made it could not say so, because saying so would have required an account of why it happened — and that account would have had to be about two bureaucracies, not one.