Mao: The Unknown Story

MAO FLEW OFF to Moscow on 2 November 1957 for the Communist summit, having decided to be cooperative so as to get what he wanted out of Khrushchev, while at the same time to try to place himself on the map of the Communist camp as Khrushchev’s equal, even superior. The summit, the biggest of its kind ever, was attended by leaders of 64 Communist and friendly parties, among which 12 of the Communist parties were in power. Just before leaving Peking, Mao floated to the Russians the idea of the final declaration being signed only by himself and them.

Mao did not quite bring this off, but China was the sole co-drafter, with the Russians, of the final declaration, and Mao himself was accorded special treatment in Moscow, being the only foreign leader put up in the Kremlin, where everything was arranged to his taste, with a large wooden bed, and the toilet turned into a squat one, by making a platform on the seat. At the ceremony on the eve of the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao and Khrushchev appeared hand in hand. At parades on Gorky Street and Red Square people waved Chinese flags, and shouted “Long live Mao and China!”

Mao’s great asset in his drive for equal status with Russia was China’s manpower. A Muscovite said to a top Finnish Communist at the time: “We don’t need to be afraid of America any more. The Chinese army and our friendship with China have altered the whole world situation, and America can’t do a thing about it.” And it was the asset Mao himself promoted while he was in Moscow. There, he totted up to Khrushchev how many army divisions each country could raise, based on its population. China outnumbered Russia and all its other allies combined by two to one. Immediately after returning from Moscow, Mao definitively rejected birth control for China, a policy on which the regime had earlier kept a fairly open mind.

As a way of showing that he was equal to his Russian host and above the rest of the participants, Mao brushed away the conference standing order that every speaker must provide an advance text, saying: “I have no text. I want to be able to speak freely.” He did indeed eschew a written text, but he had prepared his seemingly off-the-cuff speeches with intense care. Before entering the conference hall, Mao was in a state of super-concentration, so intensely focused that when his Chinese interpreter moved to button up his collar as they were waiting for the lift, Mao seemed totally oblivious of what his aide was doing.

Mao was also the only person to speak sitting down, from his seat. He said he had been “sick in the head.” This, as the Yugoslav ambassador wryly put it, “came as a surprise to the majority of those present.”

Mao talked about war and death with a gross, even flippant, indifference to human suffering:

Let’s contemplate this, how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world. One-third could be lost; or, a little more, it could be half … I say that, taking the extreme situation, half dies, half lives, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.

An Italian participant, Pietro Ingrao, told us the audience was “shocked” and “upset.” Mao gave the impression that not only did he not mind a nuclear war, he might actually welcome it. Yugoslavia’s chief delegate Kardelj came away with no doubt: “It was perfectly clear that Mao Tse-tung wanted a war …” Even the Stalinist French were appalled.

Mao dismissed concerns about improving living standards:

People say that poverty is bad, but in fact poverty is good. The poorer people are, the more revolutionary they are. It is dreadful to imagine a time when everyone will be rich … From a surplus of calories people will have two heads and four legs.

Mao’s views ran dead against the mood of the post-Stalin Communist regimes, which wanted to avoid war and raise living standards. He was not a success. Although he met plenty of Communist leaders this time, unlike on his previous visit, when Stalin had banned any such meetings, and although he missed no opportunity to dispense advice, few took his words seriously. Notes by Britain’s John Gollan of Mao’s advice to the tiny and irrelevant British Party read: “… wait for opportune moment — one day England will be yours. — when win victory don’t kill them, give them a house.” To the third-rate Bulgarian Todor Zhivkov, one of the youngest present, Mao remarked: “you are young and clever … When socialism is victorious in the whole world, we will propose you for president of the world community.” No one but Zhivkov himself thought Mao meant it. Mao fascinated some, but he did not command the kind of respect that translated into allegiance, or confidence.