Mao: The Unknown Story

Stalin had recently expelled Tito, the Yugoslav leader, from the Communist camp. Tito had shown too much independence and an inclination to carve out his own sphere of influence. In an earlier message to Stalin, Mao had referred to Tito’s experience, seemingly placing it alongside Russia’s as a possible model, and had been slapped down hard in return. Mao now made the right noises about Tito commending Stalin’s criticism of Yugoslav nationalism. This was Mao’s effort to reassure Stalin that he would not be another Tito.

Mao also made a point of stressing to Mikoyan how much he regarded himself as Stalin’s subordinate. Toasting Stalin’s health, Mao “emphasised that … Stalin was … the teacher of the Chinese people and the peoples of the whole world,” Mikoyan reported to Stalin. Mao “emphasised several times that he was a disciple of comrade Stalin,” and “was awaiting instructions … and deliberately downgraded his own role … as a leader and as a theoretician … [saying] that he … had made no new contribution to Marxism, etc.” But the astute Mikoyan was not taken in. “This,” he told Stalin, “does not correspond to what Mao Tse-tung is in reality, nor to what he thinks about himself.”

Indeed, when Mikoyan brought up the subject of “coordination” among Asian Communist parties, Mao was ready with his plan, which was to create an Asian Cominform, which he proposed starting to organize as soon as he had completed his conquest of China. He wanted the group to consist of “several” other Asian parties, listing the Koreans, the Indo-Chinese and the Filipinos, to begin with.

Mikoyan then produced Stalin’s offer, which restricted Mao to China’s immediate backyard, saying that Mao should “head” a bureau of East Asian parties, consisting initially of only three members: China, Japan and Korea. “Later on,” he said, others “could also be involved gradually.”

Stalin was conceding some ground. At the same time, he sent a signal for Mao not to push too hard. The day after the conversation about turf, Stalin sent Mikoyan a very strong cable telling him to order Mao to arrest an American working with the CCP called Sidney Rittenberg—“as a spy.” Stalin linked Rittenberg with Anna Louise Strong, the American whom Mao had sent abroad to promote himself; according to Stalin, Strong too was an American spy. (Mikoyan said Stalin had given him special orders to check for US and British “spies” in the entourage of the CCP leadership.) Rittenberg was duly arrested.

Strong herself was at that moment stranded in Moscow, denied an exit visa for China. On 13 February, the day after Mikoyan returned to Moscow and saw Stalin, she was thrown into the Lubyanka prison. Most unusually, her arrest, on a charge of “espionage,” was reported in Pravda the next day, which made the warning more emphatic for Mao, and for Communist satellite regimes. After Strong was deported shortly afterwards, she wrote to a CCP intermediary: “Please tell Chairman Mao … that, so far as I could learn, it was my too persistent search into the road to China [sic] that the Russians finally attacked as ‘spying.’ ”

One of Strong’s contacts in Moscow was Mikhail Borodin, Stalin’s main operative in China in the 1920s, who had been trying to help get her book promoting Mao published in Russia. Two weeks after Strong’s arrest, Borodin too was arrested and tortured for information about Mao.

Though these arrests were shots across Mao’s bows, he was unruffled. Stalin was saying: Don’t mess with America, or Europe. But Mikoyan had already promised him East Asia. Mao was now demarcating turf with Stalin. So it was in a cheerful mood that he thought out loud on this subject to a pre-victory Central Committee plenum on 13 March 1949.

At this meeting, his old challenger Wang Ming, who by now had conceded defeat, curried favor instead, declaiming that Mao’s Thought was “the … development of Marxism-Leninism in colonial and semi-colonial countries.” Not East Asia, or just Asia, but all “colonial and semi-colonial countries.”

Wang Ming had spelled out what Mao had in mind, and Mao was so delighted that he got rather carried away: “Comrade Wang Ming’s phrase gives off a smell of dividing a ‘market.’ Colonial and semi-colonial countries take up a very large part of the world. Once they come under us, doesn’t that mean Stalin only takes charge of the developed industrial regions, and [the rest of the world] is under our charge …?” Persisting with the royal “we,” Mao continued: “… we say colonial and semi-colonial countries belong to us. But what if one of them doesn’t buy our goods and goes straight to Moscow …?… Of course, let’s not be in a hurry to think too big; let’s fix China first.”

Mao had begun to dream about dividing the world with Stalin.