Excoriating Stalin, Criticizing Mao

Abstract

Abstract Stalin and Mao both left pasts of terror and trauma their heirs had to address to embark on reforms that altered the quality of governance. In 1956 and 1978, Nikita Khrushchev and Deng Xiaoping confronted their Communist Parties with painful pasts and reevaluated the leaders’ respective legacies. Although facing similar challenges in dealing with the devastating ramifications of arbitrary rule and cults of personality, Soviet and Chinese strategies to approaching party history strongly differed. Diachronically comparing post-Stalinist and post-Maoist politics of memory reveals how communist regimes came to terms with the past. Analyzing synchronic and diachronic transfers between Moscow and Beijing demonstrates the lessons Deng Xiaoping drew from Soviet de-Stalinization and China’s perception of it in the late 1970s. Thus, Sino-Soviet reevaluations of the past were entangled, and not only because Deng Xiaoping—who had attended the Soviet Party Congress in 1956—shaped China’s interpretation of it and took the lead in revising Mao’s legacy in the 1970s.