ABSTRACT
Soviet commentators began to speak of Maoism as sharing the “harebrained assumptions of Mussolini.” By 1958, Mao Zedong had driven China into the “Great Leap Forward”—an effort to surpass the productive capabilities of some of the most advanced industrial nations by marshaling raw peasant labor to fabricate pig iron and steel in primitive “backyard furnaces.” Mao abandoned all the enjoinments that had been at the center of Sun’s plans for the modernization of China. According to Mao’s “solemn declaration,” the accession of the Chinese Communist party to power would bring with it the realization of Sun Yat-sen’s program for the nationalist development of retrograde China. Maoism, for Soviet academicians of the 1970s and early 1980s, was nothing other than a caricature of European fascism. In retrospect, it is easy to recognize the confusion that attended the accession of Mao’s Communist party to power in China. Whatever Soviet Marxist-Leninists objected to in Maoist policies was immediately identified as “petty bourgeois.”.
