Slicker than Stalin

...But I can see no grounds for inferring from this that the regime is acting out of weakness or is in any sense threatened by its present difficulties...

...Mao says only that "some mistakes" were made, but the Peking published version of his speech does not include the figure, given in the texts available in Warsaw, of 800,000 victims of the regime for the entire period of 1949-54...

...We have now watched this leadership go through several such phases...

...But it seems to me a sterile exercise to try to establish this difference by examining the scholastic formulas to which both Stalin and Mao reduced matters of doctrine or theory...

...It is a complicated way of making a doctrinal virtue out of some harsh political necessity...

...The Stalin-Mao school of doctrine consists mainly of a didactic style of re-hashing the jargon of Marxist formulas to fit every possible real-life contingency with which the controlling group must contend, whether to win power or to maintain it...

...Mao and his cohorts are obviously facing a considerable array of serious problems, but they are acting with great skill and self-confidence and are again demonstrating their knowing grasp of what it takes to manipulate the people and forces on whom and on which they are riding herd...

...with a subtle skill which Stalin and his henchmen never possessed...

...But with these gains came also a bad case of indigestion...

...Thereupon it moved into a period of feverish construction and the swift mobilization of millions of peasants into cooperatives...

...It is the system, amply illustrated at almost every point of Mao's text, whereby what he giveth in one sentence he taketh away in the next, where every bet is hedged, every thought matched with its opposite, every path provided with its own pitfall and its own exit, and the whole explained by the magic of the dialectic...

...And these retreats were carried out under cover of a major relaxation of tension, a chance for all disaffected and unhappy elements to speak their minds on something more than mere bureaucratic peccadillos...

...As for Stalin's successors, the only thing that keeps them in the same league with Mao and his successors-to-be is that the Russians have the steel and the nuclear energy and the Chinese do not, as yet...

...Mao's definition of the multi-class character of his regime and the stages of socialism was old hat with Stalin a generation ago...

...Those who accepted Mao Tse-tung's February invitation to speak during March, April, and May were busy apologizing in June...

...The regime itself was brought under attack and so were its relations with Russia...

...It was a reapplication on a vast scale of Mao's often-reiterated principle of "unity-criticism-unity" (which, literally translated, means: say that and smile...

...Stalin and Mao belong essentially to the same ideological school, both as to basic premises and even some more detailed ideas...

...Then, in 1951, under the pressures of the heavy costs of the Korean War, the regime deliberately turned on the spigot of terror...

...In 19W, immediately after the conquest of power, they "patiently explained" and made an enormous impression on both Chinese and foreigners by their reasonableness...

...The few published examples of public criticism which we have seen seem to suggest that these have been allowed to range further and cut deeper and enjoy larger circulation than any "self-criticism" that was ever allowed in Russia under Stalin...

...The consolidation by terror in 1951 pulled the regime through the Korean War and its early difficulties...

...In the light of the 1951 events alone, this seems a conservative total...

...The number of victims for this half-year alone was estimated in the hundreds of thousands...

...There is a real contrast between the two leaderships...

...For six months, the country and the world were treated to the spectacle of trials by denunciation and by mass meetings, an induced mass hysteria and a massive public bloodletting, all broadcast by the Communist radio and pictured and published in the Communist press...

...In all these respects, Mao left Stalin behind long, long ago...

...It is not yet clear whether the spigot of "freedom" has been turned entirely off, or how much it will be allowed to run on...

...We are told by the Peking People's Daily that all sorts of "Rightist deviations" and even "enemies of the people" have been brought into view and that the campaign has served its purpose...

...Slicker Than Stalin By Harold R. Isaacs The flowers that bloomed in the spring may not last the summer and the schools of thought that have been contending are, it seems, about to be let out at the end of their brief term...

...In this, too, they far outdid their Russian mentors...

...I think it is much less threatened than the Kremlin oligarchy felt itself to be when Khrushchev opened his Pandora's box on Stalin at the 20th Soviet Party Congress...

...Hard figures are hard to come by, but all authorities seemed to be impressed by the results, and even Life published rather awed captions under pictures of Chinese Communist construction...

...Great new strains opened up, and, as Mao's speech makes clear, the "contradictions" multiplied in almost every sector of Chinese society...

...by which his regime reinvigorates itself while never, for a single instant, relinquishing its absolute control over the life of the country...

...There is a totalitarian slickness about this which is applied by Mao & Co...

...The critical differences lie not in these formulas, but in the respective strategies for using the Communist power instrument, the ways of winning and wielding power, the consequences of policy pragmatically measured, the flexibility with which the country and its problems and its people are manipulated, and, most of all, the relative closeness to reality achieved by the giver of the line...

...The regime retreated, ordering pull-backs in the agricultural sphere, the industrial sphere and even, seemingly, in the military sphere...