The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  44. Schram, Thought of Mao, p.46.

  45. Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: the Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician, trans. Tai Hung-chao (London, 1996), pp.77, 103.

  46. Snow, Red Star, pp.112–13.

  47. N. Knight, Rethinking Mao. Explorations in Mao Zedong’s Thought (Lanham, 2007), ch.4.

  48. Schram, Thought of Mao, p.39.

  49. For this episode, see J. Chang and J. Halliday, Mao: the Unknown Story (London, 2006), p.125.

  50. H. Van de Ven, ‘New States of War. Communist and Nationalist Warfare and State Building, 1928–1934’, in Van de Ven (ed.), Warfare in Chinese History (Leiden, 2000), p.335.

  51. Ibid., p.361.

  52. For the contrast between the two military models, see ibid., p.323.

  53. Mao Zedong, May 1930, MRPRW, vol. iii, pp.296–418. See also Short, Mao, pp.304–6.

  54. Mao Zedong, June 1930, MRPRW, vol. iii, p.445.

  55. Short, Mao, p.286.

  56. For the myth of the Long March, see D. Apter and T. Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), p.85 and passim.

  57. This is argued in Chang and Halliday, Mao, pp.254–5.

  58. Snow, Red Star, p.64.

  59. For Mao’s definition of ‘Sinification’, see Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung [SWMT] (Beijing, 1961), vol. ii, p.209.

  60. Smedley, China Correspondent, p.122.

  61. For this point, see Schram, Thought of Mao, p.92. For the use of datong see SWMT, vol. ii, pp.148–9.

  62. Knight, Rethinking Mao, pp.129–30.

  63. Though this could be exaggerated. Mao first entered the realm of Marxist philosophy with a set of lectures on Dialectical Materialism in Yenan that were very reliant on Soviet sources: MRPRW, vol. iv, pp.573–670.

  64. See, for instance, his notes on A Course in Dialectical Materialism by M. Shirokov and others, November 1936–April 1937, MRPRW, vol. iv, pp.674–5.

  65. For the complexity of the relationship between Marxism and Chinese ideas in Mao’s thinking, see Knight, Rethinking Mao, chs.5, 7.

  66. Mao’s attitude to this issue is controversial. Schram emphasizes the ‘voluntarism’ of Mao – his emphasis on will rather than economics, in S. Schram, ‘The Marxist’, in D. Wilson (ed.), Mao Tse-tung in the Scales of History (Cambridge, 1977), pp.35–69. For Mao’s Marxist orthodoxy, see A. Walder, ‘Marxism, Maoism and Social Change’, Modern China 1 (1977), pp.101–18. Nick Knight argues that Mao is firmly within an ambiguous Marxist tradition. Knight, Rethinking Mao, ch.6, esp. p.189.

  67. Knight, Rethinking Mao, p.141.

  68. M. Selden, China in Revolution. The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk, NY, 1995), p.121.

  69. G. Benton, ‘The Yenan “Literary Opposition”’, New Left Review 92 (1975), pp.102–5; Dai Qing, Wang Shiwei and ‘Wild Lilies’. Rectification and Purges in the Chinese Communist Party, 1942–1944, eds. D. Apter and T. Cheek (Armonk, NY, 1994).

  70. Selden, China; Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse, pp.211–13.

  71. For rectification, see Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse, pp.279–88.

  72. Ibid., p.285.

  73. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p.300.

  74. Chen Yung-fa, ‘Suspect History and the Mass Line. Another “Yan’an Way”’, in G. Hershatter et al. (eds.), Remapping China. Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford, 1996), pp.242–60.

  75. J. Byron and R. Pack, The Claws of the Dragon. Kang Sheng – The Evil Genius behind Mao – and his Legacy of Terror in People’s China (New York, 1992), p.139.

  76. F. Teiwes and W. Sun, ‘From a Leninist to a Charismatic Party; The CCP’s Changing Leadership, 1937–1945’, in T. Saich and H. Van de Ven (eds.), New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution (Armonk, NY, 1995), p.378.

  77. Cited in Short, Mao, p.392.

  78. G. Benton, Mountain Fires. The Red Army’s Three-Year War in South China, 1934–1938 (Berkeley, 1994); G. Benton, ‘Under Arms and Umbrellas. Perspectives on Chinese Communism in Defeat’, in Saich and Van de Ven (eds.), New Perspectives, pp.116–43.

  79. Although self-defence against the Japanese could involve opposition to all outsiders, including the Communists.

  80. For this argument, see H. Van de Ven, War and Nationalism in China, 1925–1945 (London, 2003).

  81. For this argument, see Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution. The Communist Movement in East and Central China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley, 1986), esp. ch.3. For a summary of the literature on this debate, see L. Bianco, ‘Responses to CCP Mobilization Policies’, in Saich and Van de Ven, New Perspectives, ch.7.

  82. W. Hinton, Fanshen. A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York, 1966), pp.137–8.

  83. Chen, Making Revolution, pp.187–8.

  84. O. Westad, Decisive Encounters: the Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (Stanford, 2003), pp.115–18.

  85. R. Thaxton, Salt of the Earth. The Political Origins of Peasant Protest and Communist Revolution in China (Berkeley, 1997), ch.9.

  86. K. Hartford, ‘Repression and Communist Success: The Case of Jin-Cha-Ji, 1938–1943’, in K. Hartford and S. Goldstein (eds.), Single Sparks. China’s Rural Revolutions (Armonk, NY, 1989), p.27.

  87. Bianco, ‘Responses’, pp.181–2.

  88. The Malay Communist Party and Mao’s CCP are not directly comparable, as the Chinese in Malaya were a disadvantaged minority within a British colony, unlike the mainland Chinese. Even so, like the Chinese Communists, they were Communist guerrillas from a Chinese Confucian culture who fought against the Japanese and then against anti-Communist forces. Pye’s interviewees were Communist guerrillas who had surrendered to the British and then agreed to cooperate in exchange for good treatment, not those (presumably more committed) Communists who refused and went on trial. Yet his material is revealing. See L. Pye, Guerrilla Communism in Malaya. Its Social and Political Meaning (Princeton, 1956). For a discussion of the research, see N. Gilman, Mandarins of the Future. Modernization Theory in Postwar America (Baltimore, 2003), pp.167–71.

  89. Pye, Guerrilla Communism, p.124.

  90. Ibid., p.211.

  91. Though Pye argues this was a less important motivator.

  92. Pye, Guerrilla Communism, pp.228, 229.

  93. Ibid., pp.248, 296.

  94. Ibid., 297, 301.

  95. Westad, Decisive Encounters, ch.4. For the issue of corruption and the Guomindang’s legitimacy, see S. Pepper, Civil War in China. The Political Struggle, 1944–1949 (Lanham, 1999), pp.155–60.

  96. For this argument, see Westad, Decisive Encounters, p.10.

  97. Ibid., p.259.

  98. Chang-lai Hung, ‘Mao’s Parades. State Spectacles in China in the 1950s’, China Quarterly 190 (2007), p.415.

  99. Yong-ho Ch’oe, ‘Christian Background in the Early Life of Kim Il-Song’, Asian Survey 26 (1986), pp.1082–91.

  100. A. Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: the Formation of North Korea, 1945–1960 (London, 2002), pp.17–19.

  101. O Yng-jin, quoted in R. Scalapino and C.-S. Lee, Communism in Korea. Part I: The Movement (Berkeley, 1972), pp.324–5.

  102. C. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, 2003), pp.68–70.

  103. Lankov, From Stalin to Kim, ch.3.

  104. Duiker, Communist Road, p.105.

  105. Duiker, Ho, p.69.

  106. D. Marr, Vietnam 1945. The Quest for Power (Berkeley, 1995), p.106.

  107. Ho Chi Minh Selected Writings (Hanoi, 1977), pp.55–6.

  108. B. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion. A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley, 1977).

  109. Chin Peng, My Side of History (Singapore, 2003), pp.47–8.

  110. Cheah Boon Kheng, The Masked Comrades: a Study of the Communist United Front in Malaya, 1945–48 (Singapore, 1979).

  111. R. Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960 (London, 1989).

  EMPIRE

  1. A. Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe durin
g the Stalin Era (New York, 1992), pp.90–3.

  2. W. Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge, 1993), p.490.

  3. K. Tyszka, Nacjonalizm w Komunizmie. Ideologia Narodowa w Związku Radzieckim i Polsce Ludowej (Warsaw, 2004), pp.115–41; Martin Mevius, Agents of Moscow: the Hungarian Communist Party and the Origins of Socialist Patriotism, 1941–1953 (Oxford, 2004), pp.249–62.

  4. N. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers. The Last Testament, trans. and ed. S. Talbott (London, 1974), p.98.

  5. Åman, Architecture, pp.88–9.

  6. Cited in K. Boterbloem, Life and Death under Stalin. Kalinin Province, 1945–1953 (Montreal, 1999), p.188.

  7. M. Harrison, Accounting for War. Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940–1945 (Cambridge, 1996), pp.160–2.

  8. M. Edele, ‘“More than just Stalinists”. The Political Sentiments of Victors 1945–1953’, in J. Fürst (ed.), Late Stalinist Russia. Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006), p.176.

  9. D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge, 2002), pp.34–9.

  10. Ibid., pp.22–5; G. Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism. The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, trans. C. Flath (Armonk, NY, 2000), p.116; A. Applebaum, Gulag. A History (London, 2004), p.518.

  11. E. Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind (London, 1989), pp.71–2.

  12. O. Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System (Jefferson, NC, 1997), p.131.

  13. Filtzer, Soviet Workers, p.242.

  14. C. Hooper, ‘A Darker “Big Deal”’, in Fürst, Late Stalinist Russia, p.147.

  15. Cited in Y. Gorlizki and O. Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (New York, 2004), pp.32–3.

  16. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii [RGASPI] 558/11/732/19.

  17. N. Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, 1997), p.181; D. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).

  18. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, p.263.

  19. I. Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1946–51), vol. xiii, p.28.

  20. A. Weiner, Making Sense of War (Princeton, 2001), ch.4.

  21. Cited in Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, p.156.

  22. V. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), p.92.

  23. M. Kundera, The Joke (London, 1992), p.71.

  24. Ibid., p.32.

  25. M. Pittaway, Eastern Europe 1939–2000 (London, 2004), p.57.

  26. J. Mark, ‘Discrimination, Opportunity, and Middle-Class Success in Early Communist Hungary’, Historical Journal 48, 2 (2005), pp.502–7.

  27. C. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. J. Zielomko (New York, 1990), pp.98–9.

  28. D. Crowley, ‘Warsaw’s Shops, Stalinism and the Thaw’, in S. Reid and D. Crowley (eds.), Style and Socialism (Oxford, 2000), p.36.

  29. Pittaway, Eastern Europe, pp.110–11.

  30. A. Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World. The Politics of the Borderlands from pre- to post-Communism (Stanford, 2000), pp.247–8.

  31. T. Toranska, Oni: Stalin’s Polish Puppets, trans. A. Kolakowska (London, 1987), p.298.

  32. Janos, East Central Europe, p.247.

  33. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, pp.61–2.

  34. W. Leonhard, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder (Cologne, 1957), pp.487, 493–7.

  35. G. Hodos, Show Trials. Stalinist Trials in Eastern Europe, 1948–1954 (London, 1987), ch.7.

  36. C. Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries. The German Communists and their Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), pp.136–7, 144.

  37. Cited in C. Jones, Soviet Influence in Eastern Europe: Political Autonomy and the Warsaw Pact (New York, 1981), p.7.

  38. Toranska, Oni, pp.335–6.

  39. S. Beria, Beria My Father: Inside Stalin’s Kremlin (London, 2001), p.141.

  40. W. Taubman, Khrushchev. The Man and his Era (London, 2003), p.214.

  41. Toranksa, Oni, pp.235–6.

  42. H. Margolius Kovaly, Prague Farewell (London, 1988), pp.118–19.

  43. S. Bartolini, The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860–1980: the Class Cleavage (Cambridge, 2000), pp.542–3.

  44. I. Wall, French Communism in the Era of Stalin: the Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945–1962 (Westport, Conn., 1983), p.125.

  45. D. Desanti, Les Staliniens, 1944–1956: une expérience politique (Paris, 1975).

  46. For this point, see T. Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2007), pp.212–13.

  47. M. Adereth, ‘Sartre and Communism’, Journal of European Studies 17 (1987), p.10.

  48. F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, preface Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. C. Farrington (Harmondsworth, 1967).

  49. For the case, see G. Kern, The Kravchenko Case: One Man’s War on Stalin (New York, 2007).

  50. M. Hyvarinen and J. Paastela, ‘Failed Attempts at Modernization. The Finnish Communist Party’, in M. Waller, Communist Parties in Western Europe: Decline or Adaptation? (Oxford, 1988), p.115.

  51. S. Gundle, ‘The Legacy of the Prison Notebooks: Gramsci, the PCI and Italian Culture in the Cold War Period’, in C. Duggan and C. Wagstaff (eds.), Italy in the Cold War. Politics, Culture and Society 1948–58 (Oxford, 1995), p.139.

  52. D. Kertzer, Comrades and Christians. Religion and Political Struggle in Communist Italy (Cambridge, 1980), p.106; C. Duggan, ‘Italy in the Cold War Years and the Legacy of Fascism’, in Duggan and Wagstaff, Italy in the Cold War, p.20.

  53. For these themes, see Duggan, ‘Italy in the Cold War Years’, pp.1–24.

  54. For this account of the visit, see D. Heinzig, The Soviet Union and Communist China, 1945–1950. The Arduous Road to the Alliance (Armonk, NY, 2004), pp.263–384.

  55. Shi Zhe, cited in J. Chang and J. Halliday, Mao: the Unknown Story (London, 2006), p.431.

  56. Hua-Yu Li, ‘Stalin’s Short Course and Mao’s Socialist Transformation in the Early 1950s’, Russian History/Histoire Russe 29 (2002), p.363.

  57. For their role, see O. Westad, Decisive Encounters: the Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (Stanford, 2003), pp.260–1, 267–9.

  58. See D. Kaple, The Dream of a Red Factory. The Legacy of High Stalinism in Russia (New York, 1994).

  59. W. Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War. A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton, 2002), pp.73–4.

  60. J. Strauss, ‘Paternalist Terror. The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolution-aries and Regime Consolidation in the People’s Republic of China, 1950–1953’, Comparative History in Society and History 44 (2002), pp.80–105.

  61. Cited in ibid., p.97.

  62. Mao Zedong, 7 February 1953, in K. Fan (ed.), Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao: Post-revolutionary Writings (Garden City, NY, 1972), p.102.

  63. Yu Miin-Ling, ‘A Soviet Hero, Pavel Korchagin, comes to China’, Russian History/Histoire Russe 29 (2002), pp.329–56.

  64. Tina Mai Chen, ‘Internationalism and Cultural Experience. Soviet Films and Popular Chinese Understandings of the Future in the 1950s’, Cultural Critique 58 (2004), p.96.

  65. Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (London, 2005), pp.104–5.

  66. Cited in A. Finnane, Changing Clothes in China. Fashion, History, Nation (London, 2007), p.209.

  67. Cited in ibid., p.224.

  68. This is argued by Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, 2003).

  69. Ibid., p.167.

  70. B. Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2. The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947–1950 (Princeton, 1990), p.341.

  71. Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, pp.222–9.

  72. J. Palais, ‘Confucianism and the Aristocratic/Bureaucratic Balance in Korea’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44 (1984), pp.427–68.

  73. For this argument, see Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, p.73.

  74. Cited in K. Lebow, ‘Public Works, Private
Lives. Youth Brigades in Nowa Huta in the 1950s’, Contemporary European History 10, 2 (2001), p.205.

  75. Ibid., p.208.

  76. This is argued in the Hungarian case in M. Pittaway, ‘The Reproduction of Hierarchy: Skill, Working-Class Culture, and the State in Early Socialist Hungary’, Journal of Modern History 74 (2002), pp.737–69. For the disillusionment of established Polish workers, see P. Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, 1997), p.292.