The Tiger

by John Vaillant

Almost as soon as Stalin died, in 1953, the untenable nature of the Soviet empire began to reveal itself to the outside world, and it wasn’t long before the fraternal solidarity that had existed between the Soviets and the Chinese since 1949 began to break down as well. The stresses began to tell in the late 1950s, after Mao accused Stalin’s more moderate successor, Nikita Khrushchev, of betraying Marx’s vision. China, then in the throes of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, was mimicking some of Lenin’s and Stalin’s most disastrous policies and programs with one result being that the country suffered the worst famine in its history—perhaps in all of history. Between 1958 and 1962, China strove to create an illusion of industrial progress by producing ton upon ton of useless low-grade steel, but it did so at the expense of basic food production. Not only did the massive project draw countless workers away from the fields, it claimed their tools as well: in a futile effort to reach unattainable production quotas, even shovels and plowshares were melted down. Hoping to save face and conceal the true costs of this Great Leap Forward, China continued to export grain (to Russia, among other countries) with the result that tens of millions of peasants starved to death.