Believing that current Communist leaders were taking the party, and China itself, in the wrong direction, Mao called on the The Great Awakening was a religious revival that impacted the English colonies in America during the s and s. The movement came at a time when the idea of secular rationalism was being emphasized, and passion for religion had grown stale.
Christian leaders often traveled The Russian Revolution of was one of the most explosive political events of the twentieth century. The violent revolution marked the end of the Romanov dynasty and centuries of Russian Imperial rule.
During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, led by leftist The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U. Vladimir Lenin was a Russian communist revolutionary and head of the Bolshevik Party who rose to prominence during the Russian Revolution of , one of the most explosive political events of the twentieth century. The bloody upheaval marked the end of the Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault.
Sergei Kirov The first event of the Great Purge took place in with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a prominent Bolshevik leader. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Great Society. Joseph Stalin. In addition, his purging of senior leaders set the tone at the grass-roots level; if he had pursued a less radical policy and listened to advice, and encouraged his underlings to do so as well, their actions would surely have been different. The Cultural Revolution—the year period of government-instigated chaos and violence against imagined enemies—resulted in probably 2 to 3 million deaths, according to historians such as Song Yongyi of California State University Los Angeles, who has compiled extensive databases on these sensitive periods of history.
He estimates 32 million in the Great Leap Forward, 1. It is probably fair to say, then, that Mao was responsible for about 1. At this point, I must digress briefly to deal with two specters that diligent researchers will find on the Internet and even on the shelves of otherwise reputable bookstores. One is the political scientist Rudolph Rummel , a non-China specialist who made wildly higher estimates than any other historian—that Mao was responsible for 77 million deaths.
His work is disregarded as polemical, but has a strange life online, where it is cited regularly by anyone who wants to score a quick victory for Mao. Equally scorned but extremely influential is the British-based author Jung Chang. After writing a bestselling memoir about her family the most popular in what now seems like an endless succession of imitators , she moved on to write, along with her husband, Jon Halliday, popular history, including a biography of Mao as monster.
Few historians take their work seriously, and several of the most influential figures in the field—including Andrew J. Goodman— published a book to rebut it. But is starting a war of aggression less of a crime than launching economic policies that cause a famine?
If one includes the combatant deaths, and the deaths due to war-related famine and disease, the numbers shoot up astronomically. The Soviet Union suffered upward of 8 million combatant deaths and many more due to famine and disease—perhaps about 20 million. As for Hitler, should his deaths include the hundreds of thousands who died in the aerial bombardments of Germans cities? After all, it was his decision to strip German cities of anti-aircraft batteries to replace lost artillery following the debacle at Stalingrad.
And what of the millions of Germans in the East who died after being ethnically cleansed and driven by the Red Army from their homes? On whose ledger do they belong? And there is the sensitive matter of percentages. So is Mao simply a reflection of the fact that anything that happens in China becomes a superlative? Relativizing can be perilous. It was a war that Hitler wanted, and so German responsibility must predominate; but in the event it began with a German-Soviet alliance and a cooperative invasion of Poland in The pool of evil simply grows deeper.
The most fundamental proximity of the two regimes, in my view, is not ideological but geographical. Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were, at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility.
What can we make of the fact, for example, that the lands that suffered most during the war were those occupied not once or twice but three times: by the Soviets in , the Germans in , and the Soviets again in ? The Holocaust began when the Germans provoked pogroms in June and July , in which some 24, Jews were killed, on territories in Poland annexed by the Soviets less than two years before.
The Nazis planned to eliminate the Jews in any case, but the prior killings by the NKVD certainly made it easier for local gentiles to justify their own participation in such campaigns. As I have written in Bloodlands , where all of the major Nazi and Soviet atrocities are discussed, we see, even during the German-Soviet war, episodes of belligerent complicity in which one side killed more because provoked or in some sense aided by the other.
Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. The Germans shot so many civilians in part because Soviet partisans deliberately provoked reprisals.
The Germans shot more than a hundred thousand civilians in Warsaw in after the Soviets urged the locals to rise up and then declined to help them. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest.
Read Next. La Documentation Francaise Soon after liberation, an emaciated child survivor is carried out of camp barracks by Soviet first-aid workers. A poster for the film Song of Russia. News about upcoming issues, contributors, special events, online features, and more. The New York Review of Books: recent articles and content from nybooks. I consent to having NYR add my email to their mailing list. Submit a letter: Email us letters nybooks.
Our Own Reichstag Fire Moment. What Ails America. The Editors. Kirkus Reviews. John Ashbery. Jason Epstein. Richmond Lattimore. In , as part of his plan to rapidly create a totally communist economy, Stalin had imposed collectivization , which replaced individually owned and operated farms with big state-run collectives. Grain confiscated from a family derided as "kulaks" in the village of Udachoye in Ukraine. In response, the Soviet regime derided the resisters as kulaks —well-to-do peasants, who in Soviet ideology were considered enemies of the state.
There still might have been enough food for Ukrainian peasants to get by, but, as Applebaum writes, Stalin then ordered what little they had be confiscated as punishment for not meeting quotas. It further called for the arrest of collective farm chiefs who resisted and of party members who did not fulfill the new quotas.
An armed man guards emergency supply grain during the Ukrainian famine of early s. Meanwhile, Stalin, according to Applebaum, already had arrested tens of thousands of Ukrainian teachers and intellectuals and removed Ukrainian-language books from schools and libraries. She writes that the Soviet leader used the grain shortfall as an excuse for even more intense anti-Ukrainian repression.
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