-Caveat Lector-
Published in Washington, D.C. Vol. 15, No. 11 -- March 22, 1999
www.insightmag.com
The Evil Twins
By Stephen Goode and Eli Lehrer
Under the banner of Marxism, Josef Stalin in Russia and Mao Tse-tung in
China slaughtered many millions in an attempt socially to engineer the
perfect society.
There can be no doubt about it. If a contest were held to determine the era
that has experienced the world's cruelest and most ruthless tyrants, the
20th century would win hands down. Adolf Hitler's slaughter of more than 6
million Jews, gypsies, gays, political opponents and others alone makes our
century rank among the bloodiest on record.
But Hitler's misdeeds, horrendous as they were, are only part of the
picture of 20th-century horrors -- a picture that is vastly enlarged by the
atrocities of two other men, each of whose victims far outnumber those of
Hitler and whose pernicious influence on our century outweighs even that of
the Nazi dictator. As bad as he was, Hitler ruled Germany for only 12
years. Josef Stalin, whose victims number in the tens of millions, was top
man in the Soviet Union for a quarter-century. Mao Tse-tung, who ruled
Communist China with an iron fist and reckless will for 27 years, left
behind a tally of dead that is greater even than Stalin's.
"Hitler is really a distant third when you compare these three horrible
dictators of the 20th century," Yeshiva University history professor Albert
Marrin tells Insight. Marrin, who has written biographies of all three
tyrants, ranks Mao and Stalin as equals in perfidy: "If people are more
tolerant about Mao," he says, "it's just ignorance. There's absolutely
nothing to it. People know less about Mao. He was a pathological killer, no
better than Stalin."
How many died at the hands of Stalin and Mao? No one knows for certain --
times were too chaotic; mass murderers don't always keep meticulous records
-- but estimates abound. A census taken in the USSR in January 1937, for
example, was suppressed and its figures never made public until 1989,
during the Soviet Union's last years. What the suppressed 1937 census
revealed was a deficit of 15 million to 16 million people -- victims of
Stalin's policies during the first decade of his coming to power. (Stalin
characteristically announced publicly that the census had been sabotaged by
his opponents. Secretly, he had those "responsible" for the "sabotage" put
to death.)
The 15 million or 16 million "missing" Soviet citizens only are a portion
of those who suffered under Stalin, however. Historians now know that on
Dec. 12, 1937, alone, Stalin and his deputy, Vyacheslav Molotov, approved
the executions of 3,167 men and women; after they were done, the duo went
off to the movies. And that slaughter was only a small salvo in what was to
be known later as the Great Terror, during which millions of Soviet
citizens were murdered or thrown into concentration camps (or both) in the
Far North or Siberia -- and a terror that Stalin ordered directed at
society as a whole to instill fear in all his subjects precisely by the
irrationality and injustice of the killings and imprisonments.
The figures for China under Mao are equally staggering. "In 1958-60 some
20 million to 30 million people lost their lives through malnutrition and
famine because of the policies imposed upon them by the Chinese Communist
Party," write historians John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman in the
opening of their chapter on Mao Tse-tung's "Great Leap Forward," in their
book China: A New History, published in 1998.
Twenty million to 30 million is an enormous figure, but even that is not
the final tally on Mao's victims: The same authors estimate that the
victims of the Cultural Revolution undertaken by the Red Guards (bands of
teenagers acting at Mao's instigation) in the mid-1960s "now hover around a
million, of whom a considerable number did not survive."
And if we go back even earlier, to 1949-51, where figures are very
sketchy, we find historians estimating the death toll as a result of Mao's
earliest policies during his first two years as dictator to range from lows
of 1 million to 3 million to as high as 15 million.
Why all this slaughter? Part of the reason can be found in Marxism. "Both
men were ideologues," says Marrin. Both men (as far as we can tell) were
convinced -- as genuine Marxists must be -- that they were in possession of
all the knowledge necessary to form the perfect society. All that was
lacking was the will -- what Danton called the audacity -- to create that
society.
Following Marx, Stalin and Mao saw society as something that could be
molded and perfected by men and women willing to take the steps necessary
to do that molding and perfecting, whatever those steps might be
--slaughtering whole classes of people regarded as enemies of the
revolution, for example -- and not shying from any task of social
engineering, as long as it was done in the name of the revolution.
Like true-believing Marxists everywhere, Stalin and Mao at least purported
to believe that Marxism's understanding of human nature and society was as
scientific and precise as man's knowledge of the planets' orbit of the sun,
and like the motion of the planets it could be studied, calculated and
predicted. What they were doing was experimenting with mankind. Everything
was permitted for the sake of social engineering.
Stalin, once a student in a Russian Orthodox seminary, had converted to
Marxism-Leninism in the 1890s. Mao came to the faith in the 1920s. But
their actions weren't solely motivated by ideology, and both ruled at an
intensely personal level. Lord Acton's famous dictum that all power
corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely applies. Much of the
destruction wrought by both men seems motivated by personal hatreds and
directed against personal enemies, and done in the name of increasing their
own personal power. For both men, as Robert Conquest writes of the Soviet
dictator in his book Stalin, the appeal of Marxism was that one of its
central doctrines was that there are "unappeasable enemies who must be
destroyed," a belief that gave them license to eliminate anyone they felt
personally threatened by.
How far Stalin was willing to go to force Russia to fit the mold of the
new society he wanted to build was revealed in his collectivization policy.
The Polish Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has described it as
"probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a state
against its own citizens." (The description might be used to characterize
almost any of Stalin or Mao's social and economic undertakings.)
Marxism dictated that peasants could not own their own property -- that
the population of the countryside should live on collective farms where
workers shared machinery and seeds and were under the guidance of party
commissars. To enforce this policy, Stalin's government encouraged the
poorest peasants to loot the homes and seize the property of kulaks
(somewhat prosperous Russian peasant farmers) who worked their own bits of
land. Such "landowners" soon were killed or simply starved to death.
Peasants who survived to resist collectivization were surrounded by
military units and killed, forced onto the collective farms or arrested and
sent to the camps, in which many of them perished. Others fought the
government with what power they had: They burned their grain rather than
turn it over to the government or they slaughtered their cattle, horses,
sheep and goats. What remained was confiscated by communist authorities.
The result was the Great Famine of 1932-33, in which millions more died.
Yet the appeal of both Stalin and Mao for their supporters was tremendous,
a fact that helped keep them in power after they came to be feared, even
loathed. Young Soviet citizens "saw their nation as a pioneer in the
building of socialism. They saw [Stalin's] regime as leading the country
out of backwardness," Sheila Fitzpatrick, a professor of history at the
University of Chicago, tells Insight. Fitzpatrick is author of the recently
published Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet
Russia in the 1930s.
This faith in progress helped them support Stalin even when his policies
hit hard because they accepted the argument that harsh measures were
necessary in the name of progress: "The leaders of Stalin's Russia were
looking to change the basis of the economic structure. They thought if you
took everything into the hands of the state, if you abolished private
trade, that it would advance everything into some brilliant future," says
Fitzpatrick.
"Terror and surveillance were part of day-to-day life. You had people
denouncing neighbors who annoyed them," she adds -- all justified because
it was leading to the perfect society of tomorrow. When Stalin attempted to
put his own spin on things -- as he did in the mid-1930s by announcing that
things "are getting better and life is more cheerful" in the USSR -- people
reacted with enormous skepticism and "learned to read between the lines" of
the propaganda that regularly was given them in the state-run press, says
Fitzpatrick. But they didn't rebel.
Stalin's power also was cemented by his leadership in World War II, which
Russians call the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, whose troops
penetrated deeply into Soviet territory and were defeated only after great
effort -- and extraordinary sacrifice -- by the Soviet people. Similarly,
Mao earned credibility through wartime leadership. "Mao was continually at
war for a large part of his career," notes Yeshiva's Marrin.
Stalin and Mao's most staggering legacy is the number of dead they left
behind, but it wasn't their only legacy. "When you think that 50 years ago
someone could be shot for voicing the slightest degree of criticism for the
way things were," notes Adam Hochschild, author of The Unquiet Ghost:
Russians Remember Stalin, it "had to have real effect on the population."
"Awful things were done to people even when they didn't voice any
opposition at all," adds Hochschild, who is founding editor of the
left-wing Mother Jones magazine. "It bred fear and passivity into people."
When there are "such terrible consequences for speaking out, it breeds the
attitude that it's best to be passive." This heritage of "fear and
passivity" continues to plague the Russia of today, he says. In China,
Mao's legacy included an economy and society ravaged by the dictator's
repeated attempts to uproot the past and rip China from its traditions.
Though different men in significant ways, Stalin and Mao did share some
characteristics. They both had severe, dominating fathers who oppressed
their mothers. And in both cases, Mao and Stalin as boys felt impotent when
it came to protecting their mothers from their fathers' cruelties.
Both saw themselves as tough, realistic men unhampered by moral scruples.
Significantly, when it made Stalin Man of the Year in 1942, Time magazine
noted that one of the few phrases in English in the Soviet dictator's
vocabulary was "tough guy." Both also were very boorish, crude men. Mao in
1956, for example, shocked prudish communists in Moscow when he announced
before the assembled top leaders of the Communist Party USSR, "We must not
blindly follow the Soviet Union.... Every fart has some kind of smell, and
we cannot say that all Soviet farts smell sweet."
And Marrin notes that "one of Stalin's favorite records was of a man
farting in tune." Stalin and his cronies would get drunk and roar with
laughter at the record, says Marrin. "He was an object of veneration by his
people and for fun he would listen to farts."
There were other crudities. Mao for much of his life had venereal disease
and deliberately was promiscuous, subjecting others to infection. "He
believed that by sleeping around he would limit the effects of the disease
and live longer," says Marrin.
Stalin biographer Conquest notes the Soviet dictator's propensity toward
personal cruelty. A Russian biographer of Stalin, Conquest explains,
"talked to hundreds of people who knew Stalin personally" and came to the
conclusion that "for this man, cruelty was quite simply an inalienable
attribute of his being."
This cruelty manifested itself in personally signing scores of thousands
of death sentences, often for longtime supporters of his tyranny, rather
than simply issuing vague orders, Conquest writes. In addition, Stalin
personally ordered the worsening of conditions in concentration camps to
make life more miserable for his innumerable political prisoners, and would
issue personal instructions on how his henchmen should beat innocent men
and women who had been seized as enemies of the state.
Adds Marrin, "Stalin was very careful to kill all those people who knew
anything about him personally." One of his mistresses, for example, was
smart enough to decline an invitation to come to Moscow to live near him
because she knew she would be killed. "Anyone who knew anything about his
early days and private life was killed."
But the two powerful tyrants also differed in significant ways. In his
widely read book Modern Times, historian Paul Johnson notes that Mao "was
above all a violently impatient man" who lacked Stalin's stoic and patient
ability remorselessly to "pursue his objectives and his hatreds." Mao, like
Hitler, according to Johnson, "wanted to speed up history" and attain his
goals as quickly as possible. Stalin, though equally as cruel, could wait.
Stalin's assumption of total power was gradual but relentless. In its last
stages, in the 1930s, he nearly destroyed the Communist Party, half of
whose membership was arrested on his orders. Seventy percent of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union died by execution or
in the camps. A majority of Soviet generals suffered the same fate. So
effective was the terror he instilled, says historian Johnson, that "after
February 1937, Stalin could kill anyone, in any way he wished."
It is of interest that the University of Chicago's Fitzgerald says that
family helped many to survive the horrors of Stalin's terror. "The family
proved surprisingly resilient despite the factors that would tear it
apart," she says. "The instinct to keep the family together remained a
strong one."
This was less true in China, where Mao directed some of his harshest
measures against the family. The teenagers who made up Mao's Red Guard,
many as young as 13 and 14, shouted in unison: "Beat down the capitalist
roaders in power! Beat down the reactionary bourgeois authorities! Sweep
away all wicked devils and evil spirits!" and even more significantly, "Do
away with the Four Old Things: old thought, old culture, old customs, old
habits. The Thought of Mao Tse-tung must rule and transform the spirit
until the power of the spirit transforms matter!"
And one of the old habits and customs Mao most wanted destroyed was the
traditional Chinese reliance on family. During their reign of terror in the
mid-1960s, Red Guards broke into the homes of people they regarded as rich,
too intellectual or politically incorrect and destroyed much they came into
contact with: manuscripts, art, family heirlooms. They beat and humiliated
parents in front of their children and even killed them. (Agence
France-Presse estimated that the Red Guards directly killed at least
400,000 men, women and children.)
The legacy of the tyrants continues in both countries. "What achievements
China has made have come despite Mao, not because of him," says Marrin.
Hochschild adds, "I was so struck with the absence of any kind of
independent spirit during my time in the former Soviet Union, the absence
of the idea that workers can form their own labor union, the idea of
creating any civic organization to do anything at all. Stalin left a
permanent mark by destroying any idea of civil society."
Stalinism went into disfavor in the Soviet Union after 1956, when Soviet
Premier Nikita Krushchev made his famous speech revealing his dead
predecessor's crimes. It has made something of a return, however, in recent
years. "You see people carrying the old boy's portrait in parades," says
Hochschild. "I think a sizable minority of the population identifies
[Stalinism] with economic stability, even though things were terrible under
Stalin. In China, Maoism went into eclipse after the great tyrant's death
in 1976, and it has not made a return."
What would things be like in China and Russia if Mao and Stalin never had
come to power? "There would be tens of millions of people who would have
lived, who would be alive now, people who had ideas and creativity and who
were killed," says Yeshiva University's Marrin. "I've heard people say that
what was wrong with communism was that [Stalin and Mao] just made a few
mistakes. That's wrong. The entire system was corrupt."
Copyright © 1999 News World Communications, Inc
----------------
"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the
name of "Liberalism" they will adopt every fragment of the socialist
program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing
what happened."
-Norman Thomas, former U.S. Socialist Presidential candidate
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