More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Soviet Union under Stalin, in striking contrast, suppressed spontaneity wherever it appeared, lest it challenge the basis for his rule.
Each of them set out to liberate Marxism-Leninism from the legacy of Stalinism. They found, though, that the two were inextricably intertwined: that to try to separate one from another risked killing both.
Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief since 1938,
He could scarcely conceal his delight at Stalin’s demise—some historians suggest that he even arranged it32—and he moved immediately afterward to try to undo some of the worst aspects of Stalin’s rule.
On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev shocked delegates to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party by candidly cataloging, and then denouncing, Stalin’s crimes.
The Polish party leader, Boleslaw Bierut, had a heart attack when he read Khrushchev’s speech, and promptly died.
under pressure from Mao Zedong, he ordered Soviet troops to re-enter Hungary and crush the rebellion.
repression, which seemed—such was the lesson of Hungary—to be the only way in which Marxist-Leninists knew how to rule.
Mao Zedong himself was another post-Stalinist leader with ideas about how to salvage communism. His solution all along, though, had been to go back to Stalin.
Stalin was useful to Mao in another way: as a model for how to consolidate a communist revolution.
Mao took a different path. His principal theoretical innovation was to claim that peasants were proletarians: that they did not have to be transformed.
The result of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was the greatest single human calamity of the 20th century. Stalin’s campaign to collectivize agriculture had caused between 5 and 7 million people to starve to death during the early 1930s. Mao now sextupled that record, producing a famine that between 1958 and 1961 took the lives of over 30 million people, by far the worst on record anywhere ever.
“It’s not a very nice solution,” Kennedy acknowledged, “but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
The ugly structure Khrushchev had erected was “the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see.”
This is where the capitalists got it right: they were better than the communists at learning from history, because they never bought into any single, sacrosanct, and therefore unchallengeable theory of history.
pragmatic, adaptable, and given to seeking truth in results produced rather than in dogmas advanced. They made mistakes, but they corrected them.
Marxism and its successors, Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism, cannot be judged on their economic performance alone. The human costs were far more horrendous. These ideologies, when put into practice, may well have brought about the premature deaths, during the 20th century, of almost 100 million people.
There can be few examples in history in which greater misery resulted from better intentions.
and—without realizing it—germs across the oceans that had hitherto kept human societies apart.
Diamond's description is not "fine"
World War I, in turn, produced two compelling justifications for an end to colonial rule. One came out of the Bolshevik Revolution, when Lenin called for an end to “imperialism” in all its forms. The other came from the United States. When Woodrow Wilson made the principle of self-determination one of his Fourteen Points
The collapse of colonialism coincided, therefore, with the onset of the Cold War, but the Cold War did not cause that development—its
One of the most shocking things for the Americans about the Korean War had been the rapidity with which a peripheral interest—the defense of South Korea—had suddenly become vital.
the idea was to commit to neither side in the Cold War, but to leave open the possibility of such commitment.
Yugoslavia—not a “third world” state—pioneered the process.
Ill-conceived, badly timed, and incompetently managed, the invasion almost broke up the NATO alliance. Eisenhower was furious: at having been surprised, at the distraction from what was happening in Eastern Europe, and at the appearance, at least, of a resurgent European colonialism. “How could we possibly support Britain and France,” he demanded, “if in doing so we lose the whole Arab world?”
The real winner, though, was Nasser, who kept the canal, humiliated the colonialists, and balanced Cold War superpowers against one another, while securing his position as the undisputed leader of Arab nationalism.
Both Washington and Moscow therefore wound up supporting Korean allies who were embarrassments to them. It was a curious outcome to the Korean War, and another reminder of the extent to which the weak, during the Cold War, managed to obtain power over the strong.
two significant points had been made. One was that another ally had extracted a security commitment from the United States by advertising its weakness. The other was that Washington had relinquished the initiative to Mao, for as the Chinese leader later explained, by sticking their necks out over Quemoy and Matsu, the Americans had handed him a noose, which he could relax—or tighten—at will.
Mao had neglected to consult the Russians, who were thoroughly rattled when he casually suggested to them that a war with the United States might not be such a bad thing: the Chinese could lure the Americans deep into their own territory, and then Moscow could hit them “with everything you’ve got.”
The offshore islands, Mao later boasted, “are two batons that keep Eisenhower and Khrushchev dancing, scurrying this way and that. Don’t you see how wonderful they are?”
The very weakness of an ally had driven the United States—with reluctance and, on the part of the president, deep foreboding—into making an all-out commitment to its defense.
Once the war in Vietnam began, though, they felt obliged to support the North Vietnamese, partly for reasons of ideological solidarity, but also because they knew that if they did not do so, the Chinese communists, who were by now hurling open polemics at them, would make the most of it.
the actions of smaller powers locked the superpowers into a confrontation from which they lacked the means, or the resolve, to escape.
Ulbricht was playing this card as early as 1956. Taking advantage of growing unrest in Poland and Hungary, he warned Khrushchev that insufficient economic assistance from the Soviet Union “would have very serious consequences for us,” and “would . . . facilitate the work of the enemy.”
Nevertheless, he issued his November, 1958, ultimatum on Berlin largely in response to Ulbricht’s urgings—perhaps also because he feared that a failure to tighten the “noose” around Berlin might elicit contempt from the increasingly critical Chinese.
ADENAUER AND ULBRICHT were not the most difficult allies, though: that distinction belonged to Charles de Gaulle and Mao Zedong.
welcomed confrontation with the United States as a way to regain France’s identity as a great power.
Mao sought a different kind of equilibrium: a world filled with danger, whether from the United States or the Soviet Union or both, could minimize the risk that rivals within China might challenge his rule.
It is all the more curious, then, that youthful radicals throughout Western Europe and the United States—themselves safe from reeducation at the hands of workers, peasants, and soldiers—regarded Mao as a hero, a distinction he shared with Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionary Che Guevara, who had bungled an attempt to start a Cuba-like insurgency in central Africa and then gotten himself captured and killed, in Bolivia in 1967, by the Central Intelligence Agency.71 Competence, however, was not the quality admired here. Revolutionary romanticism was, and for that, Mao, Fidel, and Che
...more
I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think—not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.
“It was a major event in American foreign policy,” Kissinger later commented, “when a President declared that we had a strategic interest in the survival of a major Communist country, long an enemy, and with which we had no contact.”
what would Moscow make of it? Nixon
and Mao had certainly intended to unsettle the Russians.
Red Army officers almost lost control of their troops when they were jeered rather than welcomed—as they had been told they would be—in the streets of Prague.
The invasion sparked protests from the Yugoslavs, the Romanians, and the Chinese, as well as from communist and other left-wing parties in Western Europe that normally deferred to Moscow’s decisions.
He could exert “leverage”—always a good thing to have in international relations—by “tilting” as needed toward the Soviet Union or China, who were by then so hostile to one another that they competed for Washington’s favor.
what Watergate also revealed was that Americans placed the rule of law above the wielding of power, however praiseworthy the purposes for which power
Every chief executive since Franklin D. Roosevelt had sanctioned acts of questionable legality in the interests of national security, and Abraham Lincoln had done so more flagrantly than any of them in order to preserve national unity.
The last years of the Nixon administration marked the first point at which the United States and the Soviet Union encountered constraints that did not just come from the nuclear stalemate, or from the failure of ideologies to deliver what they had promised, or from challenges mounted by the deceptively “weak” against the apparently “strong.” They came as well now from a growing insistence that the rule of law—or at least basic standards of human decency—should govern the actions of states, as well as those of the individuals who resided within them.
for Stalin’s Soviet Union, “justice” meant the unquestioning acceptance of authoritarian politics, command economies, and the right of the proletariat to advance, by whatever means the dictatorship that guided it chose to employ, toward a worldwide “classless” society.
