During the war Stalin had encouraged rumours of more freedom to come, but these were crushed as soon as the fighting ended. Millions of Russians who had become involuntary prisoners of the Germans were considered besmirched and potentially treacherous. Treated as traitors, many were sent to camps, others shot. Stalin also feared that foreign ideas had contaminated the rest of the population.
As tensions between the three allies developed into a Cold War in 1947 the screws tightened further. Andrei Zhdanov, in a campaign closely scripted by Stalin, imposed ideological orthodoxy. Everything foreign was attacked, everything local extolled, from literature, linguistics, economics and biology to medicine. Stalin personally intervened in several scientific debates, posing as an arbiter acting in the interests of Marxism. In a 10,000-word essay in Pravda he hinted that Russian was the language of the future, dismissing a leading linguist as anti-Marxist. In 1948 he lambasted genetics as a foreign and bourgeois science, bringing research in biology to a halt. For over a decade Stalin had ruled over a fearful and obsequious court. Now he battered entire fields of science into submission, promoting flatterers who fawned over his genius while sending dissenting professors to the gulag. Only one branch was exempt, namely research into the atomic bomb, for which unlimited resources were made available.67
Stalin’s cult began to assume industrial proportions. Stalin had not only liberated the Soviet Union, but also occupied half of Europe. From Poland in the north to Bulgaria in the south the Red Army took over huge territories that were progressively converted into satellite states. Future leaders known as ‘little Stalins’ were flown in from Moscow to oversee the colonisation of their respective countries – Walter Ulbricht in East Germany, Bolesław Bierut in Poland, Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary. Initially progress was slow, since Stalin had ordered them to proceed cautiously, but everywhere by 1947 the secret services were incarcerating real and imagined enemies or sending them to camps. The communists also began to nationalise schools, dismantle independent organisations and undermine the Church. Demand for posters, portraits, busts and statues of Stalin skyrocketed, as new subjects were required to worship their distant master in the Kremlin, celebrated in Warsaw as ‘Poland’s unbending friend’, in East Berlin as ‘the best friend of the German people’.68
At home, too, statues and monuments to Stalin’s glory multiplied, even though he himself, increasingly frail and exhausted, withdrew from public life. The peak of his cult came when he turned seventy in 1949. As he celebrated his birthday at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, searchlights picked out a giant figure of Stalin in full military uniform, suspended from balloons high above the Red Square. Millions of small red flags fluttered over Moscow the following day, with banners proclaiming the same message: ‘Glory to the Great Stalin’. The authorities distributed some two million posters, plus thousands of portraits, many illuminated at night. Monumental busts, Pravda proudly announced, had by then been placed on thirty-eight Central Asian mountain peaks. The first had appeared in 1937, as mountaineers had carried a statue to the highest summit in the Soviet Union, named Stalin Peak.69
Gifts were borne to Moscow on special trains decorated with red flags. But by contrast with previous occasions, Stalin’s birthday was now a global event. People across the socialist camp vied to demonstrate their love for the leader in the Kremlin, the head of the international communist movement. More than a million letters and telegrams arrived from all corners of the world. Not until the summer of 1951 did the chorus of greetings abate, with Pravda publishing several hundred every day. Signatures from ordinary people were also required. In Czechoslovakia some nine million affixed their names, collected in 356 volumes, to a congratulatory message. North Korea easily outdid them, sending along precisely 16,767,680 signatures filling 400 hefty tomes.70
Gifts poured in, with workers from Eastern Europe sending an aircraft, several motorcars, a railway engine and a motorcycle. From China came a magnificent statue of Hua Mulan, a legendary woman warrior from the sixth century, and also Stalin’s portrait engraved on a grain of rice. Many of the presents, meticulously inventoried, were exhibited in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, including some 250 statues and 500 busts. There were many spectacular pieces, perhaps none quite so impressive as a seventy-square-metre carpet representing Stalin in his office.71
Stalin appeared on his birthday flanked by the leaders of Eastern Europe and by Mao Zedong, who in October had triumphantly proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. A few months earlier the first Soviet atomic bomb had been successfully tested, making Stalin the leader of a global superpower. It was a show of force as the socialist camp retreated behind an iron curtain, marking a turning point in the Cold War.
Stalin continued to purge to the very end. Paranoia is hard to measure, but age seemed to make him even more pitiless. Family was no exception, since Stalin wished to hover above all others like a distant deity, mysterious and detached from his own personal history, which relatives knew only too well. In 1948 his sister-in-law Anna Allilueva was deported for ten years after publishing a memoir that offered seemingly innocuous glimpses into his earlier life. Except for his own children none of his relatives were safe. His court was terrified, reduced to fawning on his wisdom and competing for his favours even as he baited and humiliated them, playing on their fear or pitting them against each other. Constantly and inexorably, new purges unfolded, as the population in the gulag more than doubled to 2.5 million between 1944 and 1950. In between purges Stalin approved ever more extravagant monuments to his own glory. On 2 July 1951 he commissioned a statue of himself on the Volga–Don Canal using thirty-three tonnes of bronze. Stalin began self-deification as he sensed the coming of the end.72
On 1 March 1953 Stalin was found lying on the floor, soaked in his own urine. A blood vessel had burst in his brain, but no one had dared to disturb him in his bedroom. Medical help, too, was delayed, as the leader’s entourage was petrified of making the wrong call. Stalin died three days later. His body was embalmed and displayed, but crowds of mourners determined to catch a last glimpse of their leader ran out of control. Hundreds were trampled to death in the ensuing panic. After an elaborate state funeral on 9 March he was laid to rest next to Lenin. Tower bells were rung and salute guns fired. Every train, bus, tram, lorry and car in the country came to a halt. Complete silence descended over Red Square. ‘A single sparrow swooped over the mausoleum,’ observed one foreign correspondent. An official announcement was made, then the flag slowly raised back to full mast. Eulogies came in from the beneficiaries of the regime, none more eloquent than those penned by Boris Polevoi and Nicolai Tikhonov, winners of the Stalin Prize. Millions grieved. One month after his funeral Stalin’s name vanished from the newspapers.73
4
Mao
When Stalin appeared at the Bolshoi Theatre to show himself to the cameras for his seventieth birthday gala, he stood between Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev. Mao looked dour, awed by his counterpart in the Kremlin but resentful at the way he was being treated. He had expected to be welcomed as the leader of a great revolution that had brought a quarter of humanity into the communist orbit, but had been met at Yaroslavsky Station by two of Stalin’s underlings who did not even accompany him to his residence. Stalin had granted Mao a brief interview, praising him for his success in Asia, but for several months a shroud of silence had been placed in the Soviet Union over the victory of the Chinese Communist Party.
After the birthday celebrations Mao was whisked off to a dacha outside the capital and made to wait several weeks for a formal audience. Meetings were cancelled, phone calls never returned. Mao lost patience, ranting about how he was in Moscow to do more than ‘eat and shit’. With every passing day he was made to learn his humble place in a communist brotherhood which revolved entirely around Stalin.1
For the previous twenty-eight years the Chinese Communist Party had depended on Moscow for financial support. Mao, a tall, lean and handsome young man aged twenty-seven, had been handed his
first cash payment of 200 yuan by a Comintern agent in 1921 to cover the cost of travelling to the founding meeting of the party in Shanghai. But the money came with strings attached. Lenin realised that the principles of Bolshevism had little popular appeal beyond the shores of Europe, and demanded that communist parties join their nationalist counterparts in a united front that would overthrow foreign powers. He had a point. After several years membership of the party lingered in the low hundreds in a country of more than 480 million people.
In 1924 the Chinese Communist Party joined the Nationalist Party, which also received military aid from Moscow. It was an uneasy alliance, but two years later the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek launched a military campaign from their base in the south, attempting to seize power from local warlords and unify the country. In Mao’s home province of Hunan they followed instructions from Russian advisers and funded peasant associations in the hope of fomenting a revolution. Social order unravelled in the countryside, as poor villagers used the opportunity to turn the world upside down. They became the masters, assaulting the wealthy and powerful, creating a reign of terror. Some victims were stabbed with knives, a few even decapitated. Local pastors were paraded through the streets as ‘running dogs of imperialism’, their hands bound behind their backs with a rope around their necks. Churches were looted.2
It was a revelation for Mao, who was enthralled by the violence. ‘They strike the gentry to the ground,’ he wrote admiringly in his report on the peasant movement. He made a bold prediction, foreseeing how ‘Several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm … They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.’3
For years Mao had tried to find his way. As a young man he had read voraciously, viewing himself as an intellectual who penned nationalist essays. He had worked as a librarian, a teacher, a publisher and a labour activist. In the countryside he finally discovered his calling: although he was still a lesser figure in the party, he would be the one to lead the peasants towards liberation.
The violence in the countryside repelled the nationalists, who soon turned away from the Soviet model. A year later, after his troops entered Shanghai in April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek launched a bloody purge in which hundreds of communists were executed. The Chinese Communist Party went underground. Mao led a motley army of 1,300 men into the mountains, in search of the peasants who would propel him to power.
Mao turned ideology on its head, abandoning the urban workers to espouse the very peasants despised by orthodox Marxism. Relegated to remote mountainous areas, he and his followers spent years learning how to mobilise the raw power of poor peasants to overthrow government posts, plunder local resources and control increasingly large tracts of land. They became experts at guerrilla warfare, using ambushes and raids to harass the less mobile troops of the nationalists, their arch-enemy.
All along there were ideological clashes with the Central Committee, which stayed underground in Shanghai, close to the factory workers. Some took a dim view of his unorthodox tactics. Zhou Enlai, a suave, educated young man in charge of the party’s military affairs, described Mao’s troops as ‘just bandits who roam here and there’. But by 1930 Mao began to attract the attention of Stalin. Mao knew how to deal with the ‘kulak scum’ in the countryside, and he knew how to fight off his competitors. He was single-minded in the pursuit of power, driven by a ferocious ambition that was served well by a manipulative personality and great political skills. It was also ruthless. In one incident that took place in a town called Futian, a hundred officers of a battalion that had mutinied against his leadership were confined to bamboo cages, stripped naked and tortured, many of them being finished off with bayonets.4
On 7 November 1931, the anniversary of the October Revolution, Mao proclaimed a Soviet Republic in a mountainous area of Jiangxi province, financed by Moscow. It was a state within the state, issuing its own coins, paper money and stamps. Mao was its head, lording over some three million subjects. But members of the Central Committee joined him from Shanghai, and they were critical of guerrilla warfare. They stripped Mao of his positions, handing command over the battlefront to Zhou Enlai instead. The result was a disaster, as Chiang Kai-shek mauled the Red Army, forcing the communists to flee in October 1934. What later became known as the Long March was an arduous trek of 9,000 kilometres through some of the country’s most forbidding terrain.
Mao used the Long March to claw his way back to power. On the way to Yan’an, a remote and isolated mountain area on a loess plateau in Shaanxi province, he exploited the defeat of the Jiangxi Soviet to isolate his rivals, dislodging Zhou Enlai to take back control of the Red Army.
The troops arrived in October 1935, reduced from some 86,000 to a mere 8,000, but they were loyal, dedicated followers. Always the demagogue, Mao turned the Long March into a manifesto: ‘The Long March has announced to some 200 million people in eleven provinces,’ he wrote, ‘that the road of the Red Army is their only road to liberation.’5
It was not all bravura. Mao was counting on a world war, hoping that it would ignite a global revolution. And he knew he had Stalin’s attention. Months earlier Moscow had shifted its foreign policy, increasingly apprehensive of an attack from either Germany or Japan. In 1931 Japan had invaded Manchuria, a vast region rich in natural resources that stretched from the Great Wall north of Beijing all the way to Siberia. There were endless border disputes with the Soviet Union, including air intrusions. By July 1935 the Comintern openly referred to Tokyo as a ‘fascist enemy’.6
Stalin, like his master Lenin more than a decade earlier, now encouraged communists abroad to seek a united front with those in power instead of trying to overthrow them. But this strategy demanded that the authority of communist party leaders be elevated. A full-blown campaign to exalt Mao began. The Comintern acclaimed him as one of the ‘standard-bearers’ of the world communist movement. Later that year Pravda published a long tribute entitled ‘Mao Zedong: Leader of the Chinese Working People’, followed by a pamphlet entitled ‘Leaders and Heroes of the Chinese People’. Mao was the vozhd, great leader, a title reserved for Lenin and Stalin alone.7
Mao took the cue. A few months later, after careful vetting, he invited Edgar Snow, a young, idealistic reporter from Missouri, to come to Yan’an. Every detail about how the journalist should be handled was dictated: ‘Security, secrecy, warmth and red carpet.’ Snow spent several months at the communist base, as Mao offered a mythical version of his own life, speaking about his childhood, youth and career as a revolutionary. Mao checked and amended every detail of what Snow wrote.8
Red Star over China, published in 1937, was an instant success. It introduced the mysterious leader of the Chinese Communist Party to the rest of the world, describing him as ‘an accomplished scholar of classical Chinese, an omnivorous reader, a deep student of philosophy and history, a good speaker, a man with an unusual memory and extraordinary powers of concentration, an able writer, careless in his personal habits and appearance but astonishingly meticulous about details of duty, a man of tireless energy and a military and political strategist of considerable genius’.9
Mao was the poor child of the soil who had pulled himself up through sheer willpower and pride, determined to fight for his humiliated compatriots. He was a man of simple habits, living in a loess cave, growing his own tobacco leaves. He was down to earth, a rebel with a lively, rustic sense of humour. He worked tirelessly. He was a poet. He was a philosopher. He was a great strategist. But most of all, he was a man of destiny, called upon by deep historical forces to regenerate his country. ‘He might very well,’ Edgar Snow announced, ‘become a very great man.’10
Red Star over China was a sensation, selling 12,000 copies in the United States within a month of publication. It was immediately translated into Chinese, turning Mao into a household name. The photograph on the cover of th
e book, showing Mao wearing a military cap with a single red star, became an iconic image.11
Stalin had asked for an alliance between the communists and the nationalists. Mao knew full well that Chiang Kai-shek had no intention of collaborating with him, and promptly declared his willingness to form a ‘broad revolutionary national united front’ against Japan. He also asked Stalin for an extra two million roubles in military aid.12
Mao’s offer made him look like the leader most concerned about the fate of the nation, as the threat of war with Japan loomed ever larger. On 12 December 1936 Chiang was kidnapped by members of his own alliance and forced to cease all hostilities against the communists. The truce was a blessing, giving Mao the time to build up his strength under a new united front.
More good fortune came in July 1937, when Japan crossed the border from Manchuria, capturing Beijing within weeks. Over the next few years the Japanese army would do what the communists would never have been able to achieve, namely attack, destroy or displace the nationalist troops from all major cities along the coast. One gruesome battle followed another, with the best of Chiang’s divisions in Shanghai sustaining a three-month assault by enemy tanks, naval gunfire and aircraft. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the Battle of Shanghai. The fate of Nanjing was even worse, as the Japanese systematically murdered and raped civilians in the nationalist capital during the winter of 1937–8.
How to Be a Dictator Page 12