I’ve read that the CCP, observing how Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was catastrophic for the Communist cause globally, never attacked Mao after his death but emphasized on separating “Mao Zedong thought” from Mao the man, whom they say made mistakes in his later years.
Of course it seems intuitive how such a vehement repudiation of the head of the biggest communist state would be detrimental for communism worldwide but how did it actually happen in practice?
Surely communists didn’t just become liberals after hearing about le evil communist. Though it certainly must have been grist for the anticommunist propaganda mill.
It’s impossible to even imagine how difficult the 1929-1950 period was in the USSR. Rapid collectivization necessary due to external threat, sanction and isolation, Nazi invasion and 27mn associated deaths (and tens of millions more of lives and families ruined), necessary and excessive repressions as a result… The tensions introduced in the period were extreme, and it was convenient for the latter government to pin it on “mustache man bad” to try to move on from those painful and difficult decades. Add the loss of practically all young communists (volunteers in the war who were murdered by the Nazi death machine), and you have a cocktail explaining the changes in party line and attitudes. Never stop analyzing the material conditions.
He also changed the party itself, expanding it from a vanguard of dedicated MLs into a “party of all the people”. This was a drastic widening of the ideological base of the party, allowing in previously banned “intellectuals”, non-communists, PMC, farmers, etc. This was a significant dilution of ideology and set in motion what you hear about as the slow deterioration of things leading to the end.
The CPC avoids this in two ways, very strict requirements to study and test taking as a part of the membership process and an internal meritocracy based on performance bringing about real actual changes for the people. Presumably also through spying and monitoring.
Here’s my personaly opinion on it: It’s not like people or even politicians in the USSR were uniformly ideologically Marxist, and by turning the USSR of the previous ~19 years into a monstrosity purely driven by the satan-like Stalin (someone who in many respects was very concerned with trying to uphold Marxist reasoning), you can attack Marxism via attacking the existing USSR policies via attacking Stalin. The cult of the individual, which Stalin was increasingly responsible for as he aged (a massive strategic error), made it much easier to attack communism under the cover of attacking Stalin.
My personal take on is is that for various complex reasons CPSU did not manage to establish a strong ideological core that would be able to withstand the cold war. Stalin was simply a useful too to pin all the bad things on while still maintaining the appearance of communism, until it could be overthrown altogether. Who wanted to overthrow it and who did it without thinking? Don’t know exactly, probably never will.
A single person cannot and will never in the history on the entire world do anything other than what their own body is capable of, their image, name and stories left will always be infinitely more impactful than their own work, because those stories are shared by the work of others, for their own reasons. It’s quite clear who benefits from Stalin being turned into a demonic figure, regardless of their intent their action speak for themselves. It is quintessentially anti-Marxist, anti-materialist to ever treat anything in a vacuum.
I’m going on a tangent but my biggest pet peeve kind of related to this is people throwing out the “I have no enemies…” line which is not profound at all. That kind of thinking is (one of many) reasons USSR got destroyed. There’s absolutely enemies out there who exploit you so that they don’t need to do shit themselves and you will never be able to convert them from the outside in, they have to be willing to convert themselves.
