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New Delhi, 08
February 2003
By
studying the life and times of dictators such as Stalin, Hitler and
Chairman Mao, Mohan Guruswamy has come to the conclusion that ––
“There is a relationship between absolute power and the behavior
of leaders seeking a part of it. The more centralized a system is,
the greater the dictatorial tendencies allowing even small people to
wield great power. We get to see this even in India."
"It
is possibly because of this that China’s level of income
inequality is about the same as India’s, in that the top ten
percent account for more than 45% of the national income.... No
nation can wait endlessly while the rulers are making hay and when
the sons and sons-in-law shine. It must be made to listen to the
clamor of the people and meet their minimal expectations.”
We
hope that there is a lesson in this for our leaders too.
Not
in the name of Mao!
By
Mohan Guruswamy
Even
when the true inner workings of great dictatorships are revealed,
they are posthumous revelations. In “The Last Days of Hitler”
the British historian, Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died at 89 in
Oxford, England on January 26, painted “an extraordinary picture
of a deluded, isolated Nazi leadership holed up in the bunker and
believing right to the end that it would turn defeat into
victory.” Professor Trevor-Roper served in Britain’s Secret
Intelligence Service during WWII and this account was based on the
official investigation into Hitler’s fate conducted by the Allied
Powers. The main purpose of the Allied investigation was to
establish once and for all that Hitler was dead, because his remains
were not found.
The
world got an inner glimpse of how Stalin’s dictatorship of the
proletariat functioned when Nikita Khrushchev denounced his excesses
and the personality cult he fostered in a secret speech at the
Twentieth Party Conference in Moscow in February 1956. In his
memoirs “Khrushchev Remembers” published in the West from a
clandestinely obtained manuscript, Khrushchev captures the
arbitrariness and brutality of Stalin’s terror. We also learn
about the drinking binges and the sheer commonness of the rest of
the leaders as they succumbed to fear and Stalin’s awesome
personality. Through these memoirs we get snapshots of history being
made by small and devious men like Lavrenti Beria, and how great
military personalities like Marshal Klementi Voroshilov and
politicians like Anastas Mikoyan were reduced to mere buffoons whose
places in the hierarchy were ensured by keeping Stalin in good humor
and nourishing his vast ego. Khrushchev makes no apologies for his
own cravenness, making it more than apparent several times that
otherwise there was no way to make it.
Soon
after the death of VI Lenin in 1924, collective leadership died in
the Soviet Union as Stalin consolidated his position as General
Secretary of the CPSU, and concentrated all power in himself through
a process of murder and ideological posturing. Soon after he took
over he drove his great rival Leon Trotsky into exile, had Sergei
Kirov, the party’s charismatic boss in Leningrad, murdered on
December 1, 1934 and then charged leaders like Grigori Zinoviev, Lev
Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin and others who were great Lenin’s
closest comrades, labeled “Moscow Centre”, with conspiring to
kill Kirov. They were all shot, but not after they “confessed”
in great show trials. At the same time Stalin purged the Red Army
and an entire generation of its leaders including Marshal
Tukachevsky were liquidated. Common people suffered even more.
Robert Conquest in his two books, “Harvest of Sorrow” and “The
Great Terror” vividly portrays the excesses in which just in
1937–38 it is estimated that 10 million Russians were killed. When
Stalin, the former Georgian bank-robber Joseph Dzhugashvili, died in
1953 there were 12 million prisoners held in vast labor camps in the
most desolate parts of Siberia.
But
to get a real feel about how Stalin’s innermost coterie worked, we
had to wait for “The Inner Circle” a film directed by the
Russian director, Andrei Konchalovsky, and made possible by Mikhail
Gorbachov’s experiment with freedom, Perestroika. This is the
story of Ivan Sanshin, Stalin’s film projectionist and his great
admirer. The workings of the Kremlin in wartime Russia were
recreated as only possible in the former Soviet Union. The sets were
elaborate and the actors all bore uncanny resemblances to the
leaders. As the leaders grovel and worm their way into Stalin’s
good graces they are vicious to each other and most unconcerned with
the plight of common people who stoically suffer the worst excesses
committed in their name. Such is the “truth” created by
relentless propaganda that even as his neighbors keep disappearing
and even despite the impregnation of his own wife by Beria, Sanshin
continues to hero-worship Stalin. It is only after the destruction
of his family and the death of Stalin that Sanshin finally seems to
grasp the “truth”?
But
history has been kinder to Mao Zedong. Possibly because he became
America’s ally in a crucial period of the Cold War and almost
definitely because his successor Deng Xiaoping preferred to let him
be even as he reversed Mao’s disastrous economic policies. Even
after he ruthlessly dispensed with Hua Guofeng, Mao’s chosen
successor, and the notorious Gang of Four headed by Mao’s widow,
Jiang Qing, Deng did not openly denounce Mao. It could be pragmatism
for even after death Mao commanded millions of loyalties, but also
because Deng preferred to focus on economic policies without
changing the nature of the Chinese state.
Mao
Zedong had become an Emperor who could even threaten to make war on
the Communist Party, as he did in 1962 when the party leadership
criticized the disastrous consequences of the so-called Great Leap
Forward. In 1959 when the legendary Marshal Peng Dehuai and at that
time China’s Defence Minister criticized it in a private letter to
Mao, he was ruthlessly purged, and imprisoned till he died in 1974.
The former Chairman Liu Shaoqi fared worse. Even as the head of the
state he was dragged out of his residence in Zhongnanhai by a mob of
Red Guards, beaten and stripped as the PLA garrison troops watched.
Liu too died in prison. Like Marshal Peng he too asked questions
about the efficacy of the Great Leap Forward and the extravagant
claims of food production being made when millions were dying of
starvation. Deng himself similarly suffered and was imprisoned only
to be released after Lin Biao’s abortive and fatal flight. Mao’s
terror was no less arbitrary and capricious than Stalin’s.
Mao
was an avid student of Chinese history and would often say: “we
have to learn from the past to serve the present.” That morality
had no place in Mao’s politics was evident in that the Emperors he
admired most were the most ruthless and cruel of the long line of
tyrants who ruled China. The ruler who Mao admired most was the
Emperor Qin Shihuangdi (221-206 BC) who founded the imperial China
that lasted nearly two thousand years. He too vastly expanded China
by absorbing smaller nations. He constructed roads, introduced
weights and measures, and built the Great Wall that still stands. He
also killed and persecuted thousands if not millions. The Chinese
people also considered him a cruel tyrant because he killed
Confucian scholars and burned classical books. But Mao considered
all these minor aberrations and argued that the good outweighed the
bad.
This
was exactly Mao’s attitude when the CCP told him that at least ten
million had died between 1959–61 in the famines that resulted
after Peoples Communes were forcibly formed. Just in the manner Bal
Thackeray would argue that Hitler had made Germany strong and
powerful, built the autobahns and gave the German people Volkswagen
cars at affordable prices, and what if he killed a few million Jews
and waged war on all of Germany’s neighbors?
But
we get an extraordinary glimpse of the kind of person Mao was from
“The Private Life of Chairman Mao” by his long time personal
physician; Dr.Zhisui Li was in Mao’s inner circle till he died in
1976. Li has written a unique historical and political biography. It
is an astonishing story of human weakness and pettiness, as well of
great political intrigue in the Chairman’s court. He tells all
about Mao’s voracious sexual appetite and Daoist beliefs in the
mystical healing power of sex, his life of indolent luxury and the
deep paranoia that afflicted him and periodically manifested with
devastating consequences, not only to those around him but to the
Chinese nation as well. He tells about Mao’s abominable personal
habits –– like he never brushed his teeth and only rinsed it
with tea and that he seldom bathed. He tells of the imperial
grandeur and lavish lifestyle of the rulers living in the secure
Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing, when the Chinese people were
starving and living in the most abject poverty. He tells about how
Zhang Yufeng, the last of Mao’s many mistresses acquired so much
power that even Premier Zhou Enlai who died in 1976 had to wait
outside her room when wanted to see Mao. This book is great
relevance to us at a time when a major part of the country is now
stricken by Naxalite violence and where the state is under attack by
those apparently inspired by Chairman Mao.
There
is a relationship between absolute power and the behavior of leaders
seeking a part of it. The more centralized a system is, the greater
the dictatorial tendencies allowing even small people to wield great
power. We get to see this even in India. The great lesson of Public
Administration is that it is the nature of the regime that
determines the outcome. It is possibly because of this that
China’s level of income inequality is about the same as India’s,
in that the top ten percent account for more than 45% of the
national income. Quite clearly it doesn’t matter if the cat is
black or white, if it is fat and lazy it will not catch the mice.
I
am not opposed to force when the state’s oppression is unbearable
and it remains uncaring. There is little that can be said in
justification of a system that persists in keeping at least 300
million people in perpetual starvation, deprivation and ignorance
for it is a system that oppresses the very people who sustain it.
No nation can wait endlessly while the rulers are making hay
when the sons and son-in-laws shine. It must be made to listen to
the clamor of the people and meet their minimal expectations. To
coerce it to good behavior is an inalienable right. But to do this
in the name of Chairman Mao is to demonstrate ignorance of history
and barrenness of ideology, and only beget more of the same.
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