This is not the kind of book this series usually has to argue with. Most Progress titles are made objects: a committee's argument, assembled from approved sources, with the conclusion fixed before the research began. The Cultural Revolution: A Close-Up is a memoir. A. Zhelokhovtsev was a young Soviet Sinologist at the Institute of Sinology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a specialist in the medieval urban story who had published a book on the huapen, and what he wanted from Peking was a reader's ticket. He left Moscow by train on 2 February 1966 under a student exchange between the Soviet and Chinese ministries of higher education, took up residence at the Peking Pedagogical University, and expected 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.
The result is a genuine historical source, and the honest thing to say first is that most of it holds up. A foreign academic resident inside a Chinese university during the first six months of the Cultural Revolution is a rare vantage point, and Zhelokhovtsev used it in the way a trained scholar would: he read the tatzupao — 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. When he describes the persecution of teachers, the struggle sessions, the ritual humiliations and the suicides, he is describing things that Chinese accounts published after 1978, and four decades of subsequent scholarship, have amply confirmed. This book was in print in Moscow, in English, more than a decade before most of that material became sayable in China.
Its best pages are the ones where he simply reports. A physicist at the Pedagogical University, denounced by his own laboratory assistants for being "wrapped up in physics", pins his reply to the wall: "I believe in physics, a science of the future as well as of the present. China needs my knowledge today, but in another 25 years the country will need it even more, while people will very soon forget Mao Tse-tung's policy and thought." Zhelokhovtsev copied it into his notebook and never learned the man's name or his fate — "from then on the light in his laboratory was out." He walks past a work team of old people weeding a gutter with rakes, placards round their necks, and reads one: "Relative of a counter-revolutionary element." He asks a guard why the accused are paraded in fool's caps and gets an answer worth more than any analysis: "This is a class struggle, and they are our class enemies. How can a class enemy have any human dignity? It's ridiculous! We don't regard them as people at all."
He is a careful witness even about atrocity. On the suicides he separates what he heard from what he saw — "Rumour is one thing, however, but actually seeing this kind of thing happen is something else again" — and then gives a tally he can stand behind: "There were three suicides in two months at the Pedagogical University alone", with the circumstances of each, plus the people who "succumbed to strokes and heart failures after facing a disgrace rally for hours on end" and were recorded as having "died of various ailments". On the death of the novelist Lao She he does something better than assert. He reproduces the Red Guard leaflet announcing it, in its own vocabulary — the writer's "mean, black suicide", his library "stuffed with poisonous literature", his wife biting the raiders "like a mad dog" — and then, noting that Lao She was sixty-seven and in poor health and that the leaflet gave no details, says plainly that the boys may have killed him themselves. That is source criticism, done under pressure, in the street.
The single finest passage in the book is a long conversation with a frightened teacher who had joined the "Leftists" out of fear and now expects to be destroyed for it. It runs for pages, and Zhelokhovtsev lets the man talk: about the annual campaigns — "we have a new movement every year, and one's at one's wits' end about what to do to be left alone" — about the 1957 anti-Rightist crackdown as a warning of what the current movement may become, and finally about the famine: "It's four years since the famine. Four years ago we had to eat grass, leaves and bark. That was the time of the 'great leap forward' and the 'people's communes'." Nothing in the polemical literature of the Sino-Soviet split comes close to it.
And that conversation is also where the book's limits become visible, because of what the Soviet participant in it is able to say and unable to say.
Consider the vocabulary. Zhelokhovtsev uses the phrase "personality cult" thirteen times in this book. Every one of them is about Mao. The word "Stalin" appears exactly once in ninety-five thousand words — and not in the author's own voice, but inside a Red Guard poster he is quoting, which complains that Liu Shao-chi's writings cite "Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin" ten times for every quotation of Mao. Khrushchev is never mentioned. The Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, which in 1956 put the phrase into international communist speech in the first place, is never mentioned. The instrument by which the author is permitted to describe China was manufactured to describe the Soviet Union, and by 1975, under Brezhnev, it had been quietly withdrawn from that use at home. Zhelokhovtsev inherits the tool without the history that made it.
The consequence is a book of systematic one-way recognitions. He records, without visible strain, that after the 1957 campaign "All my Chinese friends, whom I had met at the Moscow youth festival, disappeared after 1957" — a Soviet writer in 1975 could observe that a state makes people disappear, provided the state was China. He lets his interlocutors date the Great Leap famine, describe eating bark, and observe that "our leaders later blamed the Soviet Union for the famine of the following two years" — while the Soviet famine of 1932–33 is not in the book, and could not have been. He watches a summary trial at a stadium, mass denunciation meetings, children denouncing parents, confessions shouted in a falsetto to a drumbeat, and at no point does the year 1937 enter his mind on the page. The most he permits himself is a woman's murmur — "You've reminded me of the old days" — which is her memory, not his.
It would be cheap to call this hypocrisy. Zhelokhovtsev was thirty-odd years old, wanted to keep working as a Sinologist, and was writing for a publishing house of the Soviet state; the comparison could not be printed and probably could not be finished in his own head. The point is not about his character but about the form. This is what a witness is permitted to notice, and the permission is the most historically revealing thing in the volume. A reader who wants to understand how Soviet intellectual life actually worked in the détente years will learn more from the shape of Zhelokhovtsev's blind spot than from a hundred pages of Maoism Through the Eyes of Communists.
There is one small, telling exception. Arguing with the frightened teacher about "uninterrupted revolution", Zhelokhovtsev remarks: "But the idea of permanent revolution is an old idea, it was Trotsky who first suggested it." No denunciation, no epithet — a flat statement of intellectual paternity, of the kind a scholar makes in conversation and an apparatus never makes in print. Elsewhere in the book, reviewing a French magazine's flattery of Mao, he treats a comparison with Trotsky as self-evidently damaging. Both reflexes are in the same man.
The second question is what this memoir was doing in Moscow's export list. The front matter places it in a series labelled "theories and critical studies", which it plainly is not; the back matter advertises it in the publisher's voice as an account of "the outrages and atrocities against the Chinese Communists and leading intellectuals" and notes that "The latest edition of his book gives a fuller account" — so the text grew between editions, in a direction. The chapter titles do the same work: "On the Eve of the Disaster" is a title written after the fact, by someone who needs the reader to know from page one that a verdict is coming. And the final chapter breaks register completely. The memoirist's first person disappears, and the book ends in the flat institutional prose of a Party report — the Ninth and Tenth Congresses of the CPC, the Lin Piao affair, "armed provocations along the Soviet-Chinese border" — closing on a long quotation from Brezhnev's report to the 24th Congress of the CPSU. A man's diary has been fitted with a policy conclusion.
That epilogue also shows the book's analytical weakness, which is real and separate from its honesty. Zhelokhovtsev explains the Cultural Revolution entirely as a design: Mao wanted absolute power, manufactured a movement of "deceived" young people, used them, then had the army suppress them and deported them to the countryside. Everything he saw is thereby reduced to fraud from above. This is not sufficient, and it was not the only account available at the time. Livio Maitan's report on the Cultural Revolution, summarised in Intercontinental Press of 14 July 1969, starts instead from China's economic base, the failure of the Great Leap and the crisis of 1961–62, and treats the upheaval as the eruption of unresolved contradictions within a bureaucratised workers' state — an approach that can accommodate Zhelokhovtsev's own best material, the terrified conformism of the teacher, the careerism of the "Leftists", precisely because it does not require every participant to be a dupe. Readers who want that argument at length should go to Maitan's Party, Army and Masses in China (English edition, NLB, 1976).
There is one further silence, and it is the one that most sharply marks the difference between a witness and a state. Zhelokhovtsev catalogues the victims of Maoist repression with real sympathy: Lao She, Tien Han, the physicist, the deans in fool's caps, old Communists who had fought in the underground since the 1930s. There is a category he does not and could not include. On 16 April 1972 the United Secretariat of the Fourth International issued a statement, published in Intercontinental Press on 8 May, on the Chinese Trotskyists swept up by Mao's police in December 1952 and held for two decades without trial. Among them was Chen Chao-lin (Zheng Chaolin), a founding member of both the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Trotskyist movement, who had worked in Paris with Chou En-lai; the statement's arithmetic is the whole point — he had by then "lived as a political prisoner for twenty-seven years — seven years under Chiang, twenty years under Mao." These were the one set of Chinese prisoners about whom Moscow had nothing to say, because the charge that put them in Chinese jails had been drafted in Moscow twenty years earlier and had already killed their Soviet counterparts.
Read it, then, for what it is. Strip the last chapter, discount the chapter titles, ignore the series label, and what remains is the notebook of an intelligent and decent young scholar who happened to be standing in the right courtyard in June 1966 and wrote down what he saw. That is worth a great deal. The frame around it is worth something too, though not in the way Progress Publishers intended: it is a precise measurement of how far a Soviet citizen could see in 1975, and exactly where the wall was.