Entangled Communisms

Abstract

The idea of entangled modernities is best understood as a complement and corrective to that of `multiple modernities': it serves to theorize the global unity and interconnections of modern socio-cultural formations in a non-reductionist and non-functionalist way. But it can also help to highlight complexity and divergence behind the outwardly uniform or parallel patterns of development. This line of thought seems particularly relevant to the history of Communism. The interdependent but divergent trajectories of the two imperial revolutions, Russian and Chinese, exemplify the multiple patterns of entanglement in unusually instructive ways. In both cases, imperial legacies and traditions interacted with modernizing imperatives and geopolitical constraints, as well as with the revolutionary projects proposed as solutions to the imperial crises. The Sino-Soviet entanglement was highly asymmetric; although the Chinese connection seems to have been important at several critical junctures in Soviet history, the impact of the Soviet model on Chinese Communism was incomparably more formative. But the Chinese metamorphoses of the Soviet model deviated from the original in various ways; they were too complex and sometimes too self-destructive to be explained in terms of an adaptive logic. Rather, the transfigurations that took place at various stages - from the beginnings of Chinese Bolshevism to the aberrations of Maoism in power - can be understood as changing patterns of entanglement, combining radicalizing twists to the Soviet model with selective reactivation of Chinese traditions.