When will China and Russia come clean about these monsters? 面对我们的过去--毛和斯大林的魔影

When will China and Russia come clean about these monsters? 面对我们的过去--毛和斯大林的魔影

The mass murderers Mao and Stalin continue to exert a baleful influence on their countries, says George Walden.

By George Walden
Published: 5:01PM BST 03 Sep 2009

If they woke up one morning to discover a giant portrait of Hitler in the centre of prosperous, democratic Berlin, Germans would be outraged. Yet China, a country that is freer and richer by far than at any time for 60 years, keeps its portrait of Chairman Mao, one of the cruelest tyrants in history, in a dominant position in Tiananmen Square.

Hitler's war claimed a total of some 35 million lives, soldiers and civilians. Mao starved or murdered double that. Admittedly they were his own people, but then you might have thought the Chinese would be even keener to have his portrait removed, and the full truth told.

Meanwhile, in Russia, Stalin enjoys a creeping rehabilitation. Some of the truth came out in Khrushchev's famous, denunciatory speech of 1956, but Stalin's international actions are assigned to a different, patriotic realm. To this day Russians have been slow to make the link between the gulag at home and aggressive policies abroad: the Comintern, designed to promote Soviet-type revolution the world over, the invasion of Finland, the Baltic States and Poland at the onset of the war, the brutal subjection of Eastern Europe in its wake.

The man who slaughtered his top generals on the eve of Hitler's onslaught, and when told that the Nazis had invaded simply refused to believe it, has gone down as the saviour of his nation. His tough domestic policies and ruthless diplomacy, such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, we increasingly hear, were necessary to protect the country from the Nazi hordes.

It is true that Stalin and Mao succeeded in building up their countries' strength and making them count in the world. In a pitiless dictatorship, you can get things done; Hitler did wonders for the German economy in the Thirties. But in the longer haul totalitarianism ran Russia into the ground economically, and deformed its spirit. In China, Mao's Great Leap Forward (40 million dead), then his Cultural Revolution, beggared the country.

In Stalin's fearsome Kolyma labour camp it was one inmate's job to hack off the hands of starved and frozen corpses and hang them in rows, so they could thaw for finger-printing. In China's remoter provinces, as a result of Mao's famines, mothers gave their babies to each other, not wanting to eat their own.

Now that the Russians and the urbanised Chinese have access to more facts about their respective monsters, how can their governments fail to tell the whole truth, and nothing but? In essence the answer is: for governments there is never a good moment to incite the tensions and divisions truth-telling would bring, and in any case many people are in no hurry to know.

This is not to say there is no pressure to face up to the past. In China the official line – that Mao's policies were 70 per cent "correct" and 30 per cent "incorrect" – was laid down in 1993 by Deng Xiaoping. Pressed by victims of the Cultural Revolution for greater honesty, he said that determining the exact balance was limited by "the situation". The situation being that less educated Chinese can be nostalgic for the Mao era of the "iron rice bowl", and that to go further might risk damaging the Communist Party's leading position.

In Russia, there is a feeling of going backwards. Stalin was alarmingly well placed in a poll of the nation's most revered historical figures. In the context of President Putin's refusal this week to condemn him outright for the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact, we should remember that 61 per cent of Russians have no idea that their troops invaded Poland on September 17 1939, weeks after it was signed. I doubt whether many want to know.

What can the West do to encourage Russia to face up to its past, and make its foreign policy less prickly? We have certainly shown our ability to make things worse, with our cack-handed policy of expanding Nato relentlessly eastwards, thereby nourishing Russian fears about encirclement. Who next for membership, China?

Such fears are not wholly manufactured to keep people loyal. Russia was invaded by Napoleon and Hitler, with unimaginable suffering. China will soon be a vastly more powerful country, Mao's lunacies brought the countries close to war in 1969, and there is historical distrust between them.

Intelligent, open-minded, westernised folk I meet in Moscow become hyper-patriotic on the subject. The most striking thing about our policy on Georgia and the Ukraine is that the older generation of hard-line anti-communists in Britain and America were against it, because they knew their history. Younger politicians and commentators were panting to earn their Thatcherite spurs. But Thatcher was a realist, and in power I can't imagine her committing herself to nuclear war with Moscow in defence of an unstable Georgian leadership.

Something else we can do is to expose revisionism, which is becoming fashionable in our own countries. A generation of younger historians is emerging with little or any experience of totalitarianism. Capitalism isn't covering itself in glory, so inevitably we are seeing the question asked: seen in the round, were Stalinism and Maoism really so bad? They most certainly were. As a Russian journalist has written: "The Molotov-Ribbentrop cocktail has a delayed fuse. It explodes in people's heads, mutilating the conscience of the Russian nation." Failure to tell the truth about Mao mutilates China's conscience too.