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Why do you think socialism was appealing to many people at the moment of the revolutions in Russia and China? Consider the historical context, and be specific. Then, discuss if you think communist regimes in those countries met the expectations people had for the socialist revolutions.
China and Russia Audio Lecture
The chapters are very important in this module, as are the primary sources on the Soviet Union. We also have a documentary on Stalin. But for some reinforcement of main ideas, please listen to this after having read through the textbook chapters. Transcript follows.
Play media comment.Transcript
[00:00:00] Your textbook does a very good job with World War I, World WarII, and the communist regimes that develop in the Soviet Union, which was Russia, and China. So I don't need to deliver a lot here. I am also very cognizant of the fact that you're working on a significant paper with a lot of points, and so we don't want to load you down with too much material at this juncture, especially as we also have to contend with that coming Thanksgiving holiday and then studying for our final exam. So this is the point at which I want you to realize we're delivering the material. You are to study this material. Of course, you continue to take your tests online, but you also should be paying a lot of attention to that paper, focusing on it. And then of course you will come back and review this material as you head towards the final exam. [00:00:47]
[00:00:50] Now, the few points I want to make about this issue of communism and really socialist revolutions that happen in Russia and China is that they have similarities and differences. And to start I want to go back to some of the points that the book made all the way back in your chapter on the industrial revolution to bring Karl Marx back into the picture. And really quickly, you'll remember that Marx was observing the capitalist world in evolution. And everything that Marx wrote about that would contribute to a socialist ideology was really about capitalism. And ultimately he saw capitalism as something that would evolve and crumble on itself due to the fact that it is so highly exploitative -- that workers end up becoming these pieces of a machine that produces wealth for people who don't actually do the work, and that ultimately those workers are so disaffected from the labor that they essentially don't own anymore -- that they're just kind of being paid to do -- would revolt right and would lead this revolution. And that is very simplistic, and we could have an entire course on the concepts of Marx, but I'm just bringing us back to the idea that Marx was writing about and looking at capitalism, and in order to have a socialist revolution that would lead to a communist country. One would have to go through capitalism first because it is the capitalism that then creates this, this socialist revolution that creates the rising up of the proletariat against what was called the bourgeoisie, you know the business-owning class. [00:02:35]
[00:02:37] Now the idea then that you get a socialist revolution out of a very capitalist country would lead us to not think it would happen in China or in Russia because in the 1800s neither of these places was capitalist and neither was really industrialized. Russia attempted a top-down industrialization, and this was also discussed in that chapter on industrialization that you can go back and review, but it never was able to do it to the extent that Europe or the United States could because in fact it was not organic -- it was not being driven by innovators and people who were industrialists and businessmen; it was being driven by those who wanted to compete want to create industrialization. And so it just added another layer of authoritarian exploitation but not a layer of capitalist exploitation. Still, Russian intellectuals would read Marx, and they were educated on everything that was going on in Europe and all the major writings of Europe, and they understood that they were being exploited by the czars rule, authoritarian as it was -- maybe wasn't capitalism, but it was definitely exploitative, and it was definitely a way in which a populace was being punished. The czar ruled with an iron fist and could rule arbitrarily, had a kind of secret police around him, and was in collaboration with the Russian Orthodox Church to essentially control the population. And that was enough, right, for many people to be very dissatisfied. The czar would use scapegoating, often blaming certain minority populations -- you had significant numbers of Muslims and then had significant numbers of Jews in Russia. And those people became a very obvious scapegoat for the czar to use, and with the czar's permission oftentimes outburst of violence would occur against Jews, and this would be to distract from this heavy-handed rule but also from the fact that Russia just started to become miles behind Europe and United States in terms of development and in terms of the rights and liberties that people had. [00:04:58]
[00:05:00] In China, you know, there's a similar situation. You have an ailing emperor who starts to have almost no control over the state and over the population. You have a series of unequal treaties in which Europe is just continuously kind of deciding what happens in China. And as you read in the book, as we cross the century line from the 19th century to the 20th century, you have more and more rebellions. And it is in fact Great Britain and other Europeans who have to bail the Chinese state out when they are trying to deal with those rebellions, essentially funding the resistance to those rebellions and squashing them. And then of course Europe asks always to be paid back. So it puts the Chinese empire into great fiscal difficulty and lots and lots of debt to Europe. [00:05:54]
Communist Russia Primary Sources
Source 21.1
Stalin on Stalinism
In January 1933, Stalin appeared before a group of high-ranking party officials to give a report on the achievements of the country’s first five-year plan for overall development. The years encompassed by that plan, roughly 1928–1932, coincided with Stalin’s rise to the position of supreme leader within the governing Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Questions to consider as you examine the source:
What larger goals for the country underlay Stalin’s report? Why did he believe these goals had to be achieved so rapidly?
To what indications of success did Stalin point? Which of these claims do you find most and least credible?
What do you think Stalin meant when he referred to the “world-wide historic significance” of the Soviet Union’s achievement? Keep in mind what was happening in the capitalist world at the time.
Joseph Stalin
The Results of the First Five-Year Plan, 1933
The fundamental task of the five-year plan was to convert the U.S.S.R. . . . into an industrial and powerful country, fully self-reliant and independent of the caprices of world capitalism, . . . to completely oust the capitalist elements, to widen the front of socialist forms of economy, and to create the economic basis for the abolition of classes in the U.S.S.R., for the building of a socialist society. . . .
Let us pass now to the results of the fulfillment of the five-year plan. . . .
We did not have an iron and steel industry, the basis for the industrialization of the country. Now we have one.
[Stalin follows with a long list of new industries developed during the first five-year plan: tractors, automobiles, machine tools, chemicals, agricultural machinery, electric power, oil and coal, metals.]
And we have not only created these new great industries, but have created them on a scale and in dimensions that eclipse . . . European industry.And as a result of all this the capitalist elements have been completely and irrevocably ousted from industry, and socialist industry has become the sole form of industry in the U.S.S.R. . . .
Finally, as a result of all this the Soviet Union has been converted from a weak country, unprepared for defense, into a country mighty in defense . . . , a country capable of producing on a mass scale all modern means of defense and of equipping its army with them in the event of an attack from abroad.
We are told: This is all very well; many new factories have been built, and the foundations for industrialization have been laid; but it would have been far better . . . to produce more cotton fabrics, shoes, clothing, and other goods for mass consumption. . . . Then we would now have more cotton fabrics, shoes, and clothing. But we would not have a tractor industry or an automobile industry; we would not have anything like a big iron and steel industry; we would not have metal for the manufacture of machinery — and we would remain unarmed while encircled by capitalist countries armed with modern technique. . . .
It was necessary to urge forward a country which was a hundred years behindhand and which was faced with mortal danger because of its backwardness. . . .
The five-year plan in the sphere of agriculture was a five-year plan of collectivization. . . . [I]t was necessary in addition to industrialization, to pass from small, individual peasant farming to . . . large collective farms, equipped with all the modern implements of highly developed agriculture, and to cover unoccupied land with model state farms. . . .
The Party has succeeded in routing the kulaks [relatively well-off peasants] as a class, although they have not yet been dealt the final blow; the laboring peasants have been emancipated from kulak bondage and exploitation, and the Soviet regime has been given a firm economic basis in the countryside, the basis of collective farming.
In our country, the workers have long forgotten unemployment. . . . Look at the capitalist countries: what horrors result there from unemployment! There are now no less than 30–40 million unemployed in those countries. . . .
- The same thing must be said of the peasants. . . . It has brought them into the collective farms and placed them in a secure position. It has thus eliminated the possibility of the differentiation of the peasantry into exploiters — kulaks — and exploited — poor peasants — and abolished destitution in the countryside. . . . Now the peasant is in a position of security, a member of a collective farm which has at its disposal tractors, agricultural machinery, seed funds, reserve funds. . . .
- [W]e have achieved such important successes as to evoke admiration among the working class all over the world; we have achieved a victory that is truly of world-wide historic significance.
- Source: Joseph Stalin, “The Results of the First Five-Year Plan,” Pravda, January 10, 1933.
Source 21.3
Living through Collectivization
The reality of collectivization was often quite different from the perspective of those undergoing the process, as the following set of sources illustrates. Source 21.3A details one of the most painful aspects of collectivization — the expulsion of kulaks, or rich peasants, believed by communist authorities to bear the germs of rural capitalism and to be unalterably opposed to socialism. Many of those who remained on the collective farms deeply resented the regimentation, often branding their role as slavery or even a “second serfdom.” Furthermore the government’s persistent demand for more grain from the collective farms, which was needed to support the industrialization drive, contributed to a terrible famine in the early 1930s that led to millions of deaths. Source 21.3B comes from a report by a Communist Party official on the desperate conditions in the collective farms near Novosibirsk in Siberia during that time. Even after the famine had passed, life on the collective farms remained intolerable for many, as reflected in Source 21.3C, a letter written by a peasant to a Russian official in 1937.
Questions to consider as you examine the sources:
In what ways did the realities of collectivization contradict Stalin’s high hopes for the movement?
Construct an imaginary debate between an activist supporter of the collective farms and a peasant opponent.
Why were Stalin and the Communist Party so insistent on destroying the kulaks?
Source 21.3A
Anna Akimovna Dubova
“Branded Kulaks and Dispossessed,” 1928–1929
[E]veryone was opposed to joining the kolkhoz, but people were forced to join. If someone resisted, he was punished and everything was taken from him — his land, his animals, everything he had. People were literally herded onto the kolkhoz. . . . We were branded kulaks and dispossessed. They took away our vote because we had this shop and engaged in trade. Then in 1929 forced requisitioning of grain began and they started imposing taxes in kind, procurement quotas, and who did they impose them on? On lishentsy [“deprived ones,” peasants accused of being kulaks], of course. . . . So my father was put in prison for not meeting [quotas]. . . .
They wanted to deport us. But then I guess some chairman must have taken pity on us. . . . Now the poor peasants, or bednota, immediately went after our possessions. They were filled with such hatred. “Why should they have lived so well?” But others were deported in our place [to meet government quotas for dispossession of kulaks in various regions]. . . . We were told that we could settle wherever we wanted, to get going, and everything was taken from us, everything. I remember so well how Mama sat and cried when they took away the cow. Then they took away the horse. . . . They took down the mirror, took away the bed . . . and then said “get out of here.”. . .
No one would take us in any longer. Everybody was afraid that they would be accused of harboring kulaks, that people would say, “Aha, so you’re sympathetic to kulaks. That’s it for you; you’ll be deported too.” I remember how Mother went to her brother, to her own father and mother, to the very spot where she had been married, and even they couldn’t keep her.
Source: Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, A Revolution of Their Own(Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 26–28. Reproduced with permission of WESTVIEW PRESS in the format Republish in a book via Copyright Clearance Center.
Source 21.3B
Letter from Feigin to Ordzhonikidze, April 9, 1932
I was in various kolkhozes . . . , but everywhere there was only one sight — that of a huge shortage of seed, famine, and extreme emaciation of livestock.
In the kolkhozes which I observed I attempted to learn how much the livestock had diminished in comparison with the years 1927–28. It turns out that kolkhoz Ziuzia has 507 milch cows at present while there were 2000 in 1928. . . .
The situation of the kolkhoz livestock farms is a bad one, primarily because of lack of feed. Milk production has reached extremely low levels of 1, 2 or 3 liters per day instead of the 5–7 liters normal for this region in a high-yield year. . . . The main issue is the fact that almost all of the kolkhozniks’ [residents of the collective farms] livestock is contracted [by the state] and removed. . . . In addition, when this livestock is contracted, the kolkhoznik and individual farmers slaughter off the rest.
The second item concerns the sowing campaign. The situation is such that there is not enough seed in the kolkhozes. There is no way that we will be able to fulfill the plan for grain production. . . . Besides this, horses are quite emaciated, a significant number of them have already died, and in addition, the people do not have provisions.
Third issue — the peasant's attitude. Their attitude is utterly bad in light of the famine and the fact that they are losing their last cows through contracting — as a result the kolkhoznik has neither bread nor milk. I saw all this with my own eyes and am not exaggerating. People are starving, living on food substitutes, they grow weaker, and naturally, under such circumstances, their mood is hostile.
Source: Letter from Feigin to Ordzhonikidze, April 9, 1932, “Revelations from the Russian Archives: Collectivization of Livestock,” Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/aa2feign.html.
Source 21.3C
Leaving the Collective Farms, 1937
I read . . . about the achievements of the collective farms, but that’s all window-dressing. If you look inside the collective farms, then it will surely be the opposite. . . . What really shows how things are is the way the kolkhozniks are leaving the collective farms. . . . If you count the old population that used to be in the [villages], only 50 percent is still there. That fact demonstrates that people are unwilling to live in kolkhoz. . . .
But what explains the kolkhozniks’ departure from the collective farms? I think it is that the kolkhozy and the kolkhozniks are insulted by the government. And this is why: If you compare workers in factories, they live better than kolkhozniks. If you want to prove that — there are kolkhozniks who left the collective farms two years ago and got jobs at factories and enterprises, and they write that now it has become better to live at the mills and factories than in the kolkhozy. There you know how much you earn every day, they write; you can make 15 rubles and more at the factory; you can buy cloth and other goods too, as much as you want; and they write “I live much better here than in the kolkhoz.”
But just let the kolkhoznik try to buy something where he lives — you can’t buy cloth here and the kolkhoznik goes around badly dressed. . . . Now what we have is a pecking order in real life in which the kolkhozniks have missed the boat and you can’t get any lower than the village.
Source: Quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 102.
Source 21.6
Living through the Stalinist Terror
- More than anything else, it was the Terror — sometimes called the Great Purges — that came to define Stalinism as a distinctive phenomenon in the history of Soviet communism. Millions of people were caught up in this vast process of identifying and eliminating so-called “enemies of the people,” many of them loyal communist citizens. Source 21.6A provides an excerpt from the memoirs of Irina Kakhovskaya, an ardent revolutionary, though not a party member, who was arrested in 1937 and spent seventeen years either in prison or in a labor camp. Here she describes her arrest and interrogation. Source 21.6B comes from the experience of Eugenia Ginsberg, a woman who survived many years in perhaps the most notorious of the gulag camps — Kolyma in the frigid northeastern corner of the Soviet Union. In this selection, Ginsberg recounts an ordinary day in the camps. Beyond those arrested, killed, or imprisoned during Stalin’s terror were those left behind, fearful of their own arrest, anxiously awaiting news of their missing loved ones, or endlessly waiting in line to seek information about them or to send parcels to them. In Source 21.6C, Inna Shikheeva-Gaister recounts her efforts to send packages to her imprisoned mother.
- Questions to consider as you examine the sources:
- In what different ways did people experience the Stalinist Terror? What do you think motivated each of these women who wrote about it?
What might you infer from these selections about the purposes of the Terror, the means by which it was implemented, and its likely outcomes, whether intended or not?
Many innocent people who were arrested believed that others were guilty as charged, while in their own case a mistake had been made. How might you account for this widespread response to the Terror?
Source 21.6A
Irina Kakhovskaya
Arrest and Interrogation, 1937
Early on the morning of February 8, 1937, a large group of men appeared at the door of our quiet apartment in Ufa. We were shown a search warrant and warrants for our arrest. The search was carried out in violent, pogrom-like fashion and lasted all day. Books went pouring down from the shelves; letters and papers, out of boxes. They tapped the walls and, when they encountered hollow spots, removed the bricks. Everything was covered with dust and pieces of brick. . . .
At the prison everything was aimed at breaking prisoners’ spirits immediately, intimidating and stupefying them, making them feel that they were no longer human, but “enemies of the people,” against whom everything was permitted. All elementary human needs were disregarded (light, air, food, rest, medical care, warmth, toilet facilities). . . .
In the tiny, damp, cold, half-lit cell were a bunk and a half bunk. The bunk was for the prisoner under investigation and on the half bunk, their legs drawn up, the voluntary victims, the informers from among the common criminals, huddled together. Their duty was never to let their neighbor out of their sight, never to let the politicals communicate with one another . . . and above all to prevent the politicals from committing suicide. . . .The air was fouled by the huge wooden latrine bucket. . . .
The interrogation began on the very first night. . . . Using threats, endearments, promises and enigmatic hints, they tried to confuse, wear down, frighten, and break the will of each individual, who was kept totally isolated from his or her comrades. . . . Later stools were removed and the victim had to simply stand for hours on end. . . .
At first it seemed that the whole thing was a tremendous and terrible misunderstanding, that it was our duty to clear it up. . . . But it soon became apparent that what was involved was deliberate ill will and the most cynical possible approach to the truth. . . .
In the interrogation sessions, I now had several investigators in a row, and the “conveyor belt” questioning would go on for six days and nights on end. . . . Exhaustion reached the ultimate limit. The brain, inadequately supplied with blood, began to misfunction. . . . “Sign! We won’t bother you anymore. We’ll give you a quiet cell and a pillow and you can sleep. . . . ” That was how the investigator would try to bribe a person who was completely debilitated and stupefied from lack of sleep.
Each of us fought alone to keep an honest name and save the honor of our friends, although it would have been far easier to die than to endure this hell month after month. Nevertheless the accused remained strong in spirit and, apart from the unfortunate Mayorov, not one real revolutionary did they manage to break.
Source: Irina Kakhovskaya, “Our Fate,” in An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union,translated by George Saunders and edited by Stephen Cohen (New York: Norton, 1982), 81–90. Copyright © 1982 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form of by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Source 21.6B
Eugenia Ginsberg
A Day in Kolyma, 1939
The work to which I was assigned . . . went by the imposing name of “land improvement.” We set out before dawn and marched in ranks of five for about three miles, to the accompaniment of shouts from the guards and bad language from the common criminals who were included in our party as a punishment for some misdeed or other. In time we reached a bleak, open field where our leader, another common criminal called Senka — a disgusting type who preyed on the other prisoners and made no bones about offering a pair of warm breeches in return for an hour’s “fun and games” — handed out picks and iron spades with which we attacked the frozen soil of Kolyma until one in the afternoon. I cannot remember, and perhaps I never knew, the rational purpose this “improvement” was supposed to serve. I only remember the ferocious wind, the forty-degree frost, the appalling weight of the pick, and the wild, irregular thumping of one’s heart. At one o’clock we were marched back for dinner. More stumbling in and out of snowdrifts, more shouts and threats from the guards whenever we fell out of line. Back in the camp we received our longed-for piece of bread and soup and were allowed half an hour in which to huddle around the stove in the hope of absorbing enough warmth to last us halfway back to the field. After we had toiled again with our picks and spades till late in the evening, Senka would come and survey what we had done and abuse us for not doing more. How could the assignment ever be completed if we spoiled women fulfilled only thirty percent of the norm? . . . Finally a night’s rest, full of nightmares, and the dreaded banging of a hammer on an iron rail which was the signal for a new day to begin.
Source: Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 366–67.
Source 21.6C
Inna Shikheeva-Gaister
Sending a Parcel, 1938
I started sending parcels to my mother. . . . I was thrilled if I managed to do it once a month. At first they accepted parcels in Moscow, but that soon ended because on those days [when parcels were accepted] the post office lines would be longer than those in the grocery stores. After that we had to go to Aleksandrov or Mozhaisk — that is about two hundred kilometers outside Moscow. . . .
They would only accept a limited number of parcels, so if you got there late, they might close the window before your turn came. . . . When the train arrived in Mozhaisk, there would be a terrible stampede. . . . Everyone would be running like crazy, pushing and shoving, trying to get ahead. In the beginning I was frightened, but then I got used to it.
The parcel had to weigh exactly eight kilos — no more no less. Imagine standing in that line and then having your parcel rejected because of an extra two hundred grams. . . . If it was too heavy, you had to open your box and take something out. In the meantime you might miss your turn; then you would try to push your way back through to the window, with the people in line acting like wild animals, growling and pouncing on one another. . . . If you finally had it accepted, you would walk back to the station in a state of utter bliss — as if you had just come out of a bathhouse after a good steam.
Source: Inna Shikheeva-Gaister, “A Family Chronicle,” in In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women, from 1917 to the Second World War, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 386–87.
[00:05:55] So, you know, you have these two authoritarian states. And it's just something to point out that neither seems like the type that should really go into a socialist regime, if we're reading Marx. But what they do have at their core is this notion of being very exploitative very authoritarian and very repressive towards your average person, who would long for a change. [00:06:19]
[00:06:20] So if we fast forward to the time of the change in Russia -- and again I'm not going to go into great detail because your book does a very good job of this -- you know, the major figure in that revolution becomes Lenin. And here's the other really interesting thing about this revolution: again it's not happening in a capitalist context, and also it's not necessarily being 100 percent driven by the people. They're dissatisfied but they don't read Marx, you know, and they may understand that workers are uniting workers and making changes, but they may have lots of diverse ideas as to how to get away out of authoritarian rule, how to assert their independence. Now what Lenin wants is to take the direction of socialism because he believes that the kind of world that Marx describes would be the right one when thinking about what a socialist regime would look like. But what's interesting about Lenin is he doesn't think that you have to have this revolution come from the people. In fact, as an intellectual, somebody who has you know studied in and read the works of Europe, he kind of sees regular Russian peasants, who are essentially living in a feudal world, as backwards, as superstitious, as way overly religious, and as incapable of really driving a revolution. For Lenin, he thinks it is the group of intellectuals who create the Communist Party, essentially, who should lead the revolution and tell people what is in their best interest. So it is interesting because the revolution happens in a top-down manner in many ways, led by this intellectual and his and his cohort, and whereas it does get the support of a lot of people because they have had it with the czar and with that type of rule, it is not crafted by them nor is it guided by them. It is guided by Lenin, who firmly believed that he was in a much better position to decide what should happen to Russian people than Russian people were. [00:08:24]
[00:08:26] Now I also should point out that Lenin wasn't the only person talking about this. Russia had a lot of intellectuals talking about socialism and like how to move in that direction. And there were two different trains of thought. One train of thought was the Lenin train of thought that was like, look, I realize I've read Marx and we're not a capitalist country and our people are peasants, not workers, but since we read it and we know the end result, let's just go to the end result, like let's create a socialist society -- we can skip all those stages that Marx describes in what you have to be capitalism you have to be exploited and that people have to have enough -- we can skip all of that and go to the end result because we know what it's supposed to look like and because we're educated people who can guide the massive population in this. But there were others who said, no, honestly, you know the way you get to socialism is through capitalism, and we are going to have to just create a capitalist society, and then basically that capitalist society will make certain people wealthy and a lot of people not wealthy and those workers will get exploited and after several generations they'll revolt. But like who's going to buy that? You know if you sell that to the Russian people as hey let's do capitalism so that you know some of you all do find alive you guys will just basically be poor workers instead of poor peasants and then one day maybe your great grandchildren will revolt. Like no one's going to go for that. So it's pretty easy to see why even if Lenin thought that Russians can really do the revolution themselves, they would go for his brand. [00:09:57]
[00:09:59] So the Russian Revolution then takes place in that manner and it has an aggravating factor which was World War I. You know, the czar got Russia into the war because it kept him relevant and it made him a player and he had to think about his territory on the western front of Russia. But it was a war nobody else wanted to be in in Russia, and it cost a lot of money and it cost a lot of lives and people start starving and soldiers were deserting, they didn't have the proper clothing. They were just getting beat by Germany. And so the war is a really good window for people to have enough and for Lenin people to be able to eventually take control. And it leads to the downfall of the czar and the downfall of imperial rule by czars which had basically been in place since the 1400s, so some 500 years. That wasn't really just you know the clean end. There was a civil war that ensued, and people who supported the monarchy-- wealthy people, people who had land -- fought vehemently against this new Communist Party that was taking control of Russia. And that that civil war lasted three years, so Russia was in World War I, then exited that war to have its revolution and then immediately drove into a civil war that finally ends. By about, you know, 1921 or so Russia has basically completed its revolution and is firmly in the hands of Lenin and his Communist Party. And your book goes over this and then gets you into the transition to Stalin's rule and we also have a documentary on Stalin. [00:11:42]
[00:11:44] So let's compare that for a second to China. So China as we know also has an emperor who is highly exploitative, lots of authoritarian rule, we've talked about it at length. When the Chinese dynasty falls, unlike in Russia, China doesn't just go into communist rule. China goes through a generation of trying to do nationalist rule, trying to do a form of like Westernized republican rule in which they're going to try to emulate forms of Western government. It makes sense because China has been getting assaulted by the West now for basically, you know, 80 years straight, and they've seen that Japan has been able to defend itself by adopting a lot of Western norms. And so at this point it makes sense that if the dynasty falls, which it does at the beginning of the century, that the next step to take is to institute some sort of a westernized government and allow people a voice and try to work with that model. And it is by far and away not really perfect. And it is something that is very fitful in its evolution, goes through two major leaders as they try to craft this National Party. But, you know, it is a phase in Chinese history that we have to remember is there, that the Chinese people go through this interim phase between being ruled by the emperor and then turning to communism -- which is an attempt to look at a kind of Western style government. [00:13:26]
[00:13:26] Now the problem is, you know, if you are Chinese there's millions and millions and millions and millions of Chinese people. The likelihood that you understand Western government and that you understand a republican nationalist party if you don't live in one of those major cities where Europeans have kind of been trading and then throwing their weight around is very low. A lot of Chinese people don't really think the same way as or identify with these leaders who are educated and who understand the West, whereas a regular Chinese peasant does not. So in trying to make this new revolution towards a western government these new leaders in China, they really get more support from urban people for people who are educated from people that exposure to the west. But the regular peasantry, which is the vast majority of Chinese people, they're alienated from these ideas, and they don't necessarily see the benefits of them right away. You know, you may see some participation amongst people who know how to participate. But just spreading a new nationalist government out in the countryside which has been feudal for thousands of years is very difficult. So what this does is it leaves room -- it leaves room for people with alternate ideas to come up. And that's where you get Mao. Now interestingly China also has a war in its story that acts as the window. But rather than it being World War I, for China it's World War II. So. During World War II, China is attacked by Japan, which has been actually attacking Russia and China for many years now starting in 1905 as it started to kind of create this new empire around the Pacific. But in earnest, there were invasions of rather great significance during World War II, and it was up to the Chinese government to defend China against Japan, which remember had modernized and now had a large military and, you know, more advanced weaponry than China. So no longer being ruled by an emperor, it was up to the new Chinese Nationalist government to defend China. And the way to do that is to mobilize people to defend. [00:15:48]
[00:15:50] But the people who needed to be mobilized are all these peasants, right. So why did these peasants rise up to help defend China? Not because the Nationalists called on them but in fact because someone else did, and it was Mao over the course of the time preceding World War II in the twenties and in the thirties, Mao began to voice a new type of idea for the future of China, and he did it in the countryside, out in the areas where people farmed. And he was voicing communism. He was talking about the benefits of moving towards a socialist regime. And he was criticizing this government for just being Westernized. When was the last time something Westernized did anything good for China, right? It's done nothing but bad. Because these nationalists were not really very good at being in contact with rural people, you know, Mao had a lot of influence over those peasants. In addition, the Nationalist government really didn't like Mao at all and persecuted Mao and the Communist Party that had been created in the 1920s, basically chasing them out of major cities and chasing them out of the eastern seaboard of China. And so the way for the Communists to survive was to go out into the more western and southern areas of China and make contact with peasants, and, you know, this was a period in which Mao literally went around on a donkey and did thousands of miles on foot with other you know members of the new Communist Party and just started to get support. And he knew how to talk to peasants, you know. He knew how to talk to people who didn't think about or speak the language of westernisation but really wanted something better in their lives. [00:17:39]
[00:17:41] So when we bring Japan's invasion into this story in World War II, what we get is a national government that needs the peasants to get into the military right now and start to mount a great defense, but they can't get people to do it on their own. They have to ask Mao to mobilize those people, and it is Mao and the Communist Party who basically come to the rescue and who mobilize many, many people to fight off Japan. And that is the entry point for communists into rule of China because essentially now we've shown that the people who have the power to mobilize the population are the communists, not the nationalists. And so by the time World War II has ended, the Nationalist Party is very, very weekend, and their struggle with the Communists is turning against them. And it is the Communist Party that becomes the de facto ruling party and ultimately by 1949 is able to put itself in charge of China and declare China a communist -- the People's Republic of China -- a communist state that year under the rulership of Mao. [00:19:00]
[00:19:01] So the parallels between China and Russia are really interesting. The critical role that a war plays on the fact that there are these two factions that kind of struggle, the fact you have this one charismatic leader Lenin on one side and then Mao on the other side. At the center and the fact that you have a large peasant population rather than an industrialized working populace. These are things that they have in common but they have some differences right. You know there are differences in terms of the timing of it. Russia transitions earlier and it goes through a much shorter, in fact kind of nonexistent, experimentation with any sort of representational government, whereas China goes into this later because it spends a whole generation trying to dabble in in a western-style republican government. They have different understandings of socialism, you know: whereas Lenin thought peasants were backwards and needed to be educated, Mao loved peasants and thought they were like the best form of support. He's going to speak their language and talk to them directly had no inkling of the urge to turn them into urban people. And you know Russia was doing this just kind of as a first country to do this, whereas China was doing it while being able to look at what was happening in Russia and see how the experimentation with communism was working. [00:20:31]
[00:20:32] So I will let the book handle the rest of this. You also have a documentary on Stalin. You have primary sources. It's more than enough. But I do just like to always point to these kind of little nuances so that we can understand a little bit better what was happening but also put China and Russia into relationship with one another in the story.[00:20:32]