In the 1950s, Did Mao fear that Soviet revisionism could influence China in the future?

by rayy2130

When Khrushchev came into power in the 1950s and turned the Soviet Union into "revisionists" as Mao would call it (e.g. the denunciation of Stalin), did this lead Mao to fear that China could turn also into "revisionists" in the future?

And if possible, could you provide a source?

theshadowdawn

If we take Mao's published statements at face value, yes he did.

For example, here's a quote from the official published transcript of his Feb 1957 speech 'On the correct handling of contradictions among the people':

"At the same time as we criticize dogmatism, we must direct our attention to criticizing revisionism. Revisionism, or Right opportunism, is a bourgeois trend of thought that is even more dangerous than dogmatism. The revisionists, the Right opportunists, pay lip-service to Marxism; they too attack "dogmatism". But what they are really attacking is the quintessence of Marxism. They oppose or distort materialism and dialectics, oppose or try to weaken the people's democratic dictatorship and the leading role of the Communist Party, and oppose or try to weaken socialist transformation and socialist construction. Even after the basic victory of our socialist revolution, there will still be a number of people in our society who vainly hope to restore the capitalist system and are sure to fight the working class on every front, including the ideological one. And their right-hand men in this struggle are the revisionists." (Source: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_58.htm )

Here, Mao explicitly links 'revisionism' with a backsliding to a bourgeois society, which shows early evidence of the thinking that would lead him to launch the Cultural Revolution a decade later.

However, you'll note I said that this is only if we take Mao at face value. Because there are two issues that mean we can't answer this question with certainty.

Firstly, the historical record on Maoist China was manipulated on a number of occasions to ensure Mao was 'correct'. The transcript I just quoted was famously altered in June or July of 1957. Originally, the speech expressed Mao's faith that open debate would not harm communism and reassured the audience that dissent would not be punished; but after a torrent of denunciations emerged in the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the transcript was revised to include a warning that if "poisonous weeds" of dissent appeared, then the party would necessarily scythe them down in a purge. Historians have found it easy to identify this specific alteration of the historical record (because so many eyewitnesses to the original speech recorded their surprise at the changes in the revised, published transcript - it was basically a complete 180 degree turn on policy). But not all of Mao's thoughts were as well catalogued as this, and we can't detect every alteration that was made to the historical record. So it's possible that Mao's thoughts were retroactively altered to correctly 'predict' the dangers of revisionism after the Sino-Soviet split developed, and as the tensions leading to the Cultural Revolution developed. e.g. Mao accused Liu Shaoqi of revisionism in 1966 when he launched the Cultural Revolution, and claimed he had recognised this threat as early as 1962 (but, conveniently for Liu, Mao's concerns were apparently ignored by the party.)

Secondly, several historians (e.g. Jonathan Fenby, Michael Lynch) have argued that Mao wasn't so much afraid of 'revisionism' as he was afraid that Khrushchev's secret speech would give Mao's critics ammunition. Mao had, in many ways, patterned his style of leadership on Stalin's. He had launched his own purges - albeit on a much smaller scale than Stalin's - and he had his own cult of personality. In the secret speech, Khrushchev, as leader of the USSR and thus the preeminent interpreter of Marxist-Leninist Orthodoxy, rejected the Stalinist approach. He thereby implicitly rejected Maoism and made Mao vulnerable to domestic critics. Thus, revisionism was invented as an ideological shield to deflect these attacks.