HOW THE SOVIET
PEOPLE SIZE UP MAOISM
What has been the effect on popular consciousness in the Soviet Union and China of the dispute. between the Maoist and Khrushchevist regimes? Very little that might be considered.reliable has appeared on this in the world press. The main reason for the lack of. information is of course the absence of socialist democracy in either country. It is extremely difficult to gauge sentiment without provisions for the spontaneous expression of opinion through a free proletarian press or through polls conducted on a scientific basis. So long as such material is not available, it is necessary to rely on scattered reports, indirect evidence, deductions and the impressions of observers whose objectivity and competence are-only too often subject to reservations.
An article by Claude Roy in the November 16 issue of the Paris weekly Le Nouvel Observateur on the popular mood in the Soviet Union is of exceptional interest in this respect. Entitled "From the Cult of Stalin to the Idolatry of Mao" [Du culte de Staline a l'idolatrie de Mao], it compiles the views of ordinary people with whom Claude Roy talked in many parts of the Soviet Union after making a visit to China. The author specifies that he saw none of the Soviet leaders and that he is excluding the opinions of the Soviet sinologists. Moreover, his own aim in the discussions he engaged in was to counteract the split and to help bring about a better understanding of Peking's position among the Soviet people.
The article conveys two overwhelming impressions: the profound and ineradicable way in which the evils of the Stalin cult registered on popular consciousness and the way in which Mao's rehabilitation of Stalin and fostering a cult of his own personality completely blocked any possibility of the Maoists receiving a sympathetic hearing among the Soviet masses.
The universal response among all those interviewed by Roy ran as follows, he reports: “What do the Chinese propose to us in their speeches, the Russién- language broadcasts. of Radio Peking, Mao's newspapers?” To go back to Stalin. They talk about Stalin's ‘errors' for ten seconds and his 'great merits' for an hour. Their criticism of Stalin is like the paté that's half rabbit and half horse -- one rabbit and one horse. A rabbit of condemnation and a horse of approval. If they have learned nothing from all that we suffered and endured, then it's not the uninterrupted revolution that's developing in China but the reenactment of all our misfortunes and of other peoples which were also part of the revolution.
Stalin, the purges, the camps, the terror, the Twentieth Congress -- all this, says Roy, pertains to domestic politics. But this nevertheless lies at the heart of the problem of foreign policy, of the big Sino-Soviet debate.
"You think you have grasped, felt, what the big Stalinist ‘freeze' was like," he continues. "But it was only in the Soviet Union itself, after all the reports, secret or otherwise, of witnesses, documents, that I was able to gauge the profound silent fear of the people, the depth and the extent of the evil."
Roy says that despite everything he had had a tendency to believe that there was at least some exaggeration in the figures provided by informed Communists and the anti- Soviet Kremlinologists. He even thought that Aragon, the well-known French Stalinist intellectual, was exaggerating when he gave the fearful figure of 18,000,000 deported, of whom 3, 000, 000 died; and that Souvarine and Branko Lazitch were exaggerating ina still worse way when they talked of 25,000,000 to 30,000,000 deported, with 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 who disappeared. :
"From Moscow to Erivan, I found hardly a single family that had not lost one or two members in the German-Russian War and that had not had one or two other members inprisoned, deported, shot or who. disappeared during the big purges from 1938 to 1948.
"There is an obvious striking Soviet vitality that prevents one from advancing questionable hypotheses about biological fatigue, the exhaustion of the Russian people and their republics. But, in a fifty-year period, they have undergone. three bloodlettings that have hardly any historic precedent: the civil war and the famine, a repression beyond all measure, a world war that was more savage and destructive in their land than anywhere else."
. A Soviet historian told Roy: "Revisionist? if this means being a disciple of Bernstein or Karl Kautsky, no. But the weight of several million Communists sent to
as a critical reexaminer of the history of the Revolution."
Roy continues by telling about his findings in Georgia and Armenia concerning the decimation of the intellectuals and workers there during the great purge. A few sentences will indicate the nature of this chilling account. "Out of a dozen students in Piatigorsk whom I met one evening by chance, there were six parents or uncles killed in the war, four older brothers killed in the war and eighteen close relatives who were arrested, deported or who disappeared between 1948 and 1952."
How the Soviet people could retain their faith in socialism in face of the Stalinist terror appears almost miraculous. But Roy offers some anecdotes showing how in the very worst days faith in the socialist future survived and along with it the conviction that a regression of this kind would never occur again.
It is against this background that Roy places the interviews and arguments he had with many different individuals.
"In all the circles with whom I talked, the Chinese ‘errors' were rarely discussed dispassionately. You could feel the still raw wounds, the acute sensibilities. I did not agree with much of their criticism nor all their uneasiness. It is nonetheless important to understand them, these people like a cat burned to the quick that (perhaps) fears cold water. And since the Soviet press limits itself, in general, to replying very briefly (and rather vaguely) to the Chinese attacks, it is well to listen carefully to the unauthorized voices of the 'ordinary' people.
"The Soviet people know the atrocious reality accompanying the exaltation of Stalin, the dithyrambs, the unrestrained iconography, the generalized cult, the state religion of the Father of the Peoples, the genius chief, the dazzling sun, etc., and it is understandable that the extraordinary idolizing of the figure of Mao organized by the press, the mass organizations and the official Chinese speeches evokes horrible memories among them. When Radio Peking reports that on the day when Chairman Mao went swimming in the Yangtse someone swimming in the river became so excited on finding himself nearby that he burst out shouting: ‘Long live Chairman Mao! (and) swallowed several gulps of water but the taste of which seemed to him particularly delicious’; or rebroadcasts a speech that begins with: 'Oh, Chairman Mao! You are the reddest sun of the red:suns of our heart!' it is agreed that the people need to have an exemplary figure whom they can admire, but as simple and rough as the masses are, it is always unhealthy to offer them the statue of a living god to adore.
"When you explain in the Soviet Union that the men who were the official spokesmen yesterday of the ‘struggle against modern revisionism' -- Peng Chen who levelled his attacks in the name of the Chinese CP in 1965 from the podium of a congress in Indonesia, or Chou Yang, the Zhdanov of Chinese culture -- are ‘degenerate neobourgeois elements, a hodge-podge of feudalism, capitalism and modern revisionism, a counterrevolutionary clique,' the Soviet people say that these methods remind them unfortunately of the most dangerous Stalinist methods -- transformation of critics into opponents, opponents into traitors, amalgamation, gross deformation and extremist simplication of critical positions, authoritarian smothering of tactical differences, misrepresentation of nuances in thought into plotting activities."
Roy reports that a large number of persons told him: "Through the truncated quotations of the Communists who are in process of being placed under the steamroller of the Great Cultural Revolution, you can tell that there are in fact within the Chinese party, in the Central Committee and in the ministries, courageous men who do not agree with idolizing Mao, with reducing the Marxist tradition to a single 'thought,!' with the blows struck against democratic centralism, with the impossibility of reestablishing the unity of the ‘socialist camp.' These men are neither Johnny-come—lately Communists nor ‘agents of imperialism.' To present them as adepts in 'the restoration of capitalism,’ as defenders of 'a right opportunist, antiparty and antisocialist line,' as ‘the spokesmen of the reactionary classes,' is neither honest nor in conformity with the principles of a regime that seeks to explain, to educate, to persuade, to convince. This was precisely the way Stalin liquidated nine-tenths of the Old Guard Bolsheviks, by distorting their thought, by slandering them, by arresting and killing em. :
To this, Roy responded, "But it seems that in China there have been neither any ‘Moscow Trials,'nor summary executions, nor concentration camps. My friends K.S. Karol, Marc Riboud, and ten other Western specialists visited China without seeing anything like that." ;
Sample retorts ran like this: "Norentz told me, 'You stopped in 1952 at Krasnoyarsk. Did you see the camp where I was, less than a hundred kilometers north of that
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city? Did-a single person from the West, from 1938 to 1954, see the Soviet camps?'
"A Tass correspondent who had returned from China said: 'China doesn't have any camps. Let's say it's so. But when a Chinese "revisionist" intellectual is taken under heavy guard to a people's commune 800 kilometers from Peking and handed over to the peasants with the words, "Here's an enemy of the people; he hates you; look at his soft hands! He's yours; make him work hard; do with him what you want"; what shape do
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"A Russian writer who had traveled in China told me: 'When the ministry of State Security said in a report -- two years later -- that there had been only (sic) two million persons executed between 1949 and 1952 was there a single person from the Soviet Union or the West who witnessed a single one of these executions? No. If Stalin could murder millions of Soviet citizens without this creating much reaction outside of Russia at the time, this could occur much easier still in China.'™
The debates on specific points which Roy engaged in fill in the picture he paints of the feelings of ordinary people in the Soviet Union:
"If you reply to them that they are saying that an inclination, a tendency is under way in China, they nod. They saw Stalin's tendency to see ‘enemies of the people’ at every step at too close range to have any confidence or optimisn.
"If you tell them that China is a besieged fortress, excluded from the UN, denied the bomb by Russia, which America promises to destroy, encircling China meantime, that a country in a virtual state of war cannot ‘afford the luxury' of a generalized democracy, that the true law for China in 1966 is martial law, that the results already obtained are considerable, justifying the means employed, they reply:
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(9 OO ee ee eee eee ee eee. heart of Russia; that he undermined the revolutionary faith of our people. Read the new historical book just published in Moscow under the title '21 June 1941" and you will see if the Stalinist terror, the dismantling of the Old (and the Young) Guard Bolsheviks, the destruction of all the former democracy in the party prepared our em OO _
pare a people.to win a war that threatens the country! It is not by shouting betrayal the moment anyone expresses a critical view, by slandering ‘opponents' before dropping them through a trap door, by simplifying everything in the most grotesque way, by
are primitive, backward, ignorant and enthusiastic.'
"And when you try, with informed people, to weigh the pros and cons of the Chinese Revolution, to measure who is right and who is wrong in the issues in dispute in the big split, they finally say:
"'You make us laugh, you people of the left in the West, who split hairs as if it were a political round table or a comparison of economic balance sheets! Yes, Viet-
between two contestants. Russia has greater weight but the Yellow men have very clever holds. e Chinese have learned nothing from our errors; nothing can make us forget Stalinism. The revolutionary spirit today, the defense of the oppressed or bombed peoples, does not consist of shouting slogans, of tripping up allies, of stifling revolutionary thought as under the Komsomols of Stalin's time who learned in school to denounce their parents and to demand that their father be shot or today under the
but we are now in a position to understand and to make our friends understand the causes of our success and the roots of our errors.
"'For the immediate future, it is not by preventing us from furnishing Vietnam with matérial, arms, technicians, and in having Red Guards march under the windows of our embassy in Peking booing us, that you can help the Vietnamese to conquer. More distantly, it is not by converting the socialist revolution into a caricature, by repeating the lies of Stalin with Mao's sauce, Stalin's crimes in a Chinese style, the cult and the terror of Stalin camouflaged behind silken curtains, that you will inspire the peoples of the third world to break the yoke of neocolonialism and of imperialism. The
Chinese policy is not only Vietnam martyrized, it is Indonesia bleeding, it is Southeast Asia handed over to the Americans, it is the Japanese Communists correctly aghast, it_is the Mongols and the Koreans taking their distance from Peking, it is Cuba breaking with China. The Chinese say that America is a paper tiger. But China, right now, what should it be called? A silk tiger...'"
Roy says that he would have liked to have left the Soviet Union reassured, again comforted and optimistic as to the perspectives for a possible, if not even early reconciliation between the "heirs of October and the heroes of the Long March." However, he left much more pessimistic than when he went there. In fact he despairs that anything can be done. "Despair, I know," he says in conclusion, "is not a political attitude. But unfortunately it is the only thing I believe today is realistic."