The impact of civil wars on communist political culture: The Chinese and Russian cases

Abstract

During the 1950s the adherence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the Soviet bloc masked differences between Chinese and Soviet politics. But, the Sino-Soviet split, with recurrent Chinese charges of Soviet revisionism and Soviet denunciations of Chinese dogmatism, and ultimately even border clashes, revealed sharp differences between the two great communist powers and exploded the myth of a unitary ‘totalitarian’ model. In this article I will first explore the nature of some key differences in Soviet and Chinese politics during the first two decades after the end of the civil war (1921-1940 and 1950-1971 respectively). During this period the original revolutionary generation (Old Bolsheviks in Russia, ‘Long March cadres’ in China) dominated politics and sought socialist transformation of society. Then I will argue that in both countries the civil war periods played an important role in fostering these differences. Perhaps the most basic difference came in the strategies of political and economic development. Politically aligned with the Soviet Union in the 1950s the Chinese, impressed by successful Soviet industrialization and the possibilities of Soviet aid, had adopted the Soviet model of development with suitable modifications in their First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957). But once they rejected this plan in 1958, they rapidly moved to a strategy of development-the Great Leap Forward-which radically diverged from the Soviet model. The Chinese model focuses on the social transformation of the individual and creation of a new man, while the Soviet model centered on transformation of the entire social system. While the Soviet strategy focused on a highly centralized command economy building a heavy industrial base, the Chinese strategy was based at the intermediate commune level with the simultaneous development of industry and agriculture. The emphasis on planning and individual material incentives in the Soviet model was countered by a stress on social mobilization within the plan and moral and collective material incentives in the Chinese model. Soviet gigantism of industry was counterposed by Chinese stress on small scale industries and backyard steel furnaces. Finally, while the Russian party was the centralized promoter of change, the Chinese party was to be the social mobilizer in the process of ‘continuous revolution’.’