THE CHINESE revolution rose out of the soil of Chinese social conditions and historic circumstance. Its course was shaped largely by the interplay and friction of different class interests within the country. But the time had long since passed when events in China could be purely "Chinese" in content. A nationalist revolution in China, by definition, meant a collision between Chinese and foreign interests. The seeds of nationalism had been sown in the first place by the invading imperialism of the West, which had shaken China out of its stagnation and forced profound and belated changes upon it. Ultimately, the stimulus that touched off the revolutionary impulses in Chinese cities and villages came from the war of 1914-18, fought by Western powers on battlefields half a world away. China was inextricably enmeshed in world events and directly affected by the course of world power politics. In turn, China itself exerted an influence on the outcome of great struggles waged beyond its borders and, often, beyond its ken. It was not merely that China was now entering upon a crisis in its own history. Its travail was part of the crisis of world society in our century.

China had been brought face to face with the need to break with its precapitalist past and to establish and define itself as a nation. This same purpose had been achieved in the West by the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since then a whole historic epoch had intervened. Capitalism had established the division of labor on a world scale. Great technological advances and the automatic expansion of capital wealth were now straining against the national barriers originally erected to help organize the internal market and the productive system that fed it. For two centuries, rival national groups fought for markets, for fresh sources of raw materials, for cheap labor, and for higher profits. Out of these conflicts, colonial empires grew. By the end of the ninteenth century all the economically undeveloped areas of the world had been more or less forcibly subjected to the more advanced countries and drawn irresistibly into the orbit of world capitalist economy. Asia and Africa became the "heaters of large-scale economic, political, and military conflicts. Out of the ruthless competition that lay at the heart of this swiftly unfolding process emerged the movement toward concentration of capital wealth and the division of the world into a decreasing number of increasingly mighty economic and political groups which warred incessantly with one another by economic or military means. Industrial control was transformed into financial control, crossing seas and the highest mountains and reaching into the remotest African jungles and Asian villages.

By the beginning of this century, the productive power generated by this system had already outstripped the national-economic structure through which it functioned. Concentrated economic power within the nations developed into international and world-wide monopolies and cartels. These, in their own way, demonstrated the need to enlarge the economic units of the world and produced the greater inter-nation conflicts which finally exploded into the first World War of 1914-18. The scope of that war proved that the globe itself had become the smallest possible unit of necessary change. National states, each jealously seeking to retain or increase its share of a contracting world economy, could no longer fruitfully or peaceably coexist but were doomed to constant conflict with one another. The great system of national political economies had nourished the growth of productive forces on a spectacular scale for more than two hundred years. But it had now outlived its usefulness. This is the root of the crisis in world society in our time. All the convulsions of our century are the symptoms of this crisis, and the Chinese revolution was subject to all its terms and all its pressures. China, like the rest of the subjected East, had to try to become a nation at a time when the nation, as such, had ceased to be the instrument of fruitful human progress. China's revolution had to be part of the effort to replace international anarchy by a new system that would embrace the entire globe in some kind of more rational social and economic order; or else it had to suffer, with the rest of the world, the agony of prolonged frustration. Such was the issue that emerged in all its full global dimensions at the end of the World War in 1918 and has been with us ever since.

Woodrow Wilson's conception of a League of Nations based upon the peaceful co-operation of all peoples was aimed to meet this fundamental historical problem, but it was doomed by the failure to break through the established framework of national political, social, and economic interests. These had to be successfully assaulted and transformed if men were really going to begin to find the way to fashion some better system under which to live. This the League of Nations never undertook to do. Instead—and this is perhaps the cruelest paradox of our era—the first really vigorous attempt in this direction came not from among the more advanced industrialized countries of the West but in backward, peasant Russia. Wilson's ringing phrases had made a profound impression, even in remote Asia. But the cynical horse trading at the Versailles conference soon made it plain that they signified nothing. This was especially plain to the Chinese, who were asked at Versailles to accept Japan's wartime encroachments in China. In China in particular, as the wave of hope aroused by Wilson receded, the tide of the Russian revolutionary influence began to roll in. It came upon China as a set of ideas and soon as an actively intervening political force.

Russia played a decisive role in the whole course of events in China between 1924 and 1927. Conversely, the events in China formed a critical episode in the evolution of Russia itself. The history of this period, which is the subject matter of this book, can be made intelligible only in terms of the interaction of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. This relationship, in its own time and place, was extremely complex. Its main features tend to be obscured for us now, moreover, by the many events and transformations that have taken place since, especially in the position of Russia as a factor in world affairs. We know the Soviet Union in 1951 as a supernationalist totalitarian state which rules by brute force and police terror and cynically manipulates other peoples to further its own national strategic ends. An oligarchic bureaucracy rules the people and the economy of Russia under conditions of total tyranny. It is, along with the mortally sick but stubbornly surviving system of Western capitalism a huge and formidable obstacle in the path of human advance toward freer institutions. But this Russia by no means Sprang full-grown from the brow of Lenin and his Bolshevik party ~n 1917 It grew, over a period of years, out of the backwardness of Russia itself and the frustration of revolutionary impulses elsewhere, especially in Europe immediately after the end of the first World War. In conception and purpose, the Bolshevik revolution was not nationalist but daringly internationalist. Bolshevism certainly bore within it the seeds of totalitarianism, particularly in the system of one-party rule that rose out of it. This system certainly provided no adequate safeguards against the consequences of power won and held by violence. But it is certainly equally true that the men who made that revolution were convinced that they were overthrowing tyranny and opening the door of history upon a new era of expanding freedom. That was the conviction that communicated itself to millions of people in Asia and elsewhere and became an objective political fact of the first magnitude.

For Lenin and Trotsky the revolution did not merely signalize the end of Czarism in Russia. It heralded the downfall of the capitalist system throughout the world. It was, as they saw it, the beginning of a new world order based on the social ownership of the means of production. The Bolsheviks did not in the least consider that they were engaged in building a new national power in Russia. They were seeking an end to all national power. They were interested in building not a new Russia but a new world. Theirs, they believed, was the first in a series of socialist revolutions soon to reverberate around the world. They looked upon their own as merely a prelude. The break in Russia, as they saw it, was only the snapping of the weakest link in the chains of world capitalism. Lenin said, and repeated a thousand times in 1917 and afterward, that socialist Russia could not survive alone in a hostile capitalist world. "World revolution" was neither catch phrase, by-product, nor afterthought. It was a necessity, the core of their hopes and expectations. It was, they believed, the only way to break out of the mortal crisis in human society, to end the cycle of wars over colonies, markets, raw materials, and strategic position in the world by reorganizing the globe for the more rational use of its physical and human resources.

They believed they were launching this great effort by establishing in Russia the "dictatorship of the proletariat." This is a term and an idea that was never very precisely defined by Marxists from the time Marx first used it in 1852. There was never any clear development in Marxist thought about the nature of the state that would emerge from the proletarian revolution. It was always clouded by Marx's utopian notion about the withering away of the state. Among the Russian Marxists, and particularly between Lenin and Trotsky, there were bitter polemics for years over Lenin's conception of what he called "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, These disputes in theory had their own considerable importance, and they were summoned up later to play a role, both in the Chinese events and in the internal political struggle in Russia. But in the first years of Bolshevik power, the new Russian state was molded not so much by theories as by the harsh circumstances of civil war and intervention. In later years, the evolution of the Russian state under Stalin provided its own definition of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat." The historic reality usurped the claims of the theoretical concept, and despite the possible appeal to the real democratic content of many other aspects of Marxist thought, no restoration on this score seems possible.

Neither Lenin nor Trotsky could be described as liberal democrats. But neither were they authoritarian monsters. The fact is that, to consolidate his power, Stalin had to replace Lenin's uncompromisingly internationalist ideas with a Russian nationalist doctrine of his own. He had to exile Trotsky and imprison and ultimately annihilate the whole leadership of the Bolshevik party which actually made the revolution of 1917. Stalin did not take this path until Lenin died, but it is not difficult to believe the bitter remark made by Lenin's widow, Krupskaya, in 1927, that had he lived Lenin would by then have been rotting in a Stalinist prison. There is evidence that in his failing last years Lenin was aware of the abyss into which the Russian revolution was falling as a result of its isolation. The police state that emerged from his handiwork signalized the failure, not the victory, of his ideas and his leadership.]

From the whole record of his written and spoken words, it is abundantly plain that Lenin looked upon the revolution in Russia as the opening skirmish of a world struggle that would soon shift to other, more important "heaters. He saw the civil war in Russia as a holding operation which would enable the Bolsheviks to cling to power until the workers' revolutions in Central Europe took over the leadership of the anticapitalist struggle. To the interests of the revolution elsewhere, above all in Germany, Lenin was ready to make the utmost sacrifices. At the Second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1920, Lenin defined internationalism as "the Subordination of the interests of the proletarian struggle in one nation to the interests of that struggle on an international scale, and the capability and readiness on the part of one nation which has gained a victory over the bourgeoisie of making the greatest national sacrifices for the overthrow of international capitalism."2

The Russian revolution was like an option on world socialism, valid for only a short period. It had to extend or else retreat upon itself. It had to become in fact international or else reassume, in some new form, its purely national identity. It could not survive, as Lenin foresaw, as a socialist revolution. But it could and did transform itself into something else. Internationalism was a tender plant that had to grow strong rapidly or else be choked in the weeds of renewed nationalism. First subtly, then headlong, this choking process began to take place within the Russian Bolshevik regime. It began the shift now slowly, now perceptibly, now swiftly, from the radical world view to the conservative national view. Instead of making "the greatest national sacrifices for the overthrow of international capitalism," the regime began to seek from elsewhere the greatest international sacrifices for the preservation of Russian national "socialism."

The Bolsheviks triumphed in their own country. They were victorious in the civil war and fought off the military intervention of the Great Powers which lasted until 1922. But the successful revolutions in Central Europe upon which Lenin had so desperately counted did not materialize. They rose and fell. They were dammed and diverted. Russia was isolated. It had to adapt itself to lone existence within a bristling rim of hostility. Its people war-weary, its land ravaged, its revolutionary vitality ebbing, Russia turned in upon itself. The economic structure inherited from Czarism had been strained to its meager limits by the drain of war communism. To win a breathing space, Lenin retreated to the New Economic Policy, re-establishing the free market. Lenin was fully aware of the new dangers that bore down on the infant state as the revolutionary wave in Europe receded and the high tension of the Russian people began to give way to fatigue and disillusionment. He could hope for a new conjuncture of events that would alter the external prospect, but he could not hope to freeze the Russian state in a posture of waiting for it to come about. In these conditions of isolation and the retreat of the people from the political arena, especially after the last great battles of the civil war were fought, bureaucratic reaction within the Bolshevik regime grasped at the machinery of power. It began to entrench itself long before the young and green revolutionary parties in Europe could find their way once more to opportunities for political conquest.

This bureaucratic stratum which began to solidify on the outer crust of the Soviet state took Russia's national isolation as its starting point. Under its influence, Soviet policy began to shift from the premise of the international socialist revolution to the need for consolidating and extending the privileges of the new bureaucracy. This bureaucracy identified itself with the workers' power even while it took all power into its own hands. Lenin opposed this shift, but it was stronger than he was. When he died, the representatives of the new bureaucratic caste, personified and led by Joseph Stalin, took over. Stalin's party machine already reigned, but it was not until after Lenin's death in 1924 that Stalin formalized the new orientation by advancing, for the first time, his theory of "socialism in one country" —the idea that socialism could triumph and maintain itself indefinitely within a single national state. This represented a complete ideological break with the internationalism of Lenin. It rationalized the isolation of the Russian state and provided new theoretical justification for the gradual abandonment of the original ideas and perspectives of the Bolshevik revolution.

This transformation in the character and emphasis of the Soviet regime took place over a period of several years. The impulse to subordinate revolutionary movements abroad to Russian national interests appeared almost from the beginning. It began to play its role in some of the earliest maneuvers of Soviet diplomacy. It was reflected in Russian domination of the Communist International and the "Russification" of Communist parties abroad, in organizational structure, attitude, and policy. This had become so evident, even in 1922, that at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, the last Lenin attended, he criticized the Congress for imposing Russian terms and Russian ideas on the other parties and warned, perhaps more pregnantly than he knew, that this would in the end lead to defeats 3 National interest already dominated the policies dictated by the Kremlin leaders to the German Communists in the critical year of 1923 The tactics of the party were determined not by the Conditions of the social crisis among the German people but by the shifts in the foreign policy orientation of the Stresemann government. In the spring of the year, when German-Russian relations Were apparently prospering, especially in the military sphere, the German Communists were instructed to stand back from the immense revolutionary surge that sent great masses of the German workers out into the streets in a leaderless and vain attempt to grasp political power. When that summer Stresemann began to seek a rapprochement with England, the Kremlin abruptly turned about face and drove the German Communists into a hopeless insurrection.4 The defeat and dispersion of that uprising in Germany in October 1923 dissipated the last Russian hopes in the European revolution. The Russian retreat from Europe was turned into a rout.

The next three years, 1924 to 1927, the new bureaucratic leadership in Russia devoted to consolidating itself. It did not go unchallenged. To settle itself in power, Stalin's party machine had to wage a bitter struggle against the surviving members of the original leadership of the revolution and against its original ideas and impulses Tendencies within Bolshevism toward nationalism and oligarchic dictatorship had been vainly challenged by obscure oppositions and small factional groups ever since 1918. Resistance now belatedly took form in the top leadership of the party itself. Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had joined hands with Stalin in the "triumvirate" of 1923, made a bloc with Leon Trotsky against Stalin in 1925. This united opposition attempted in the next two years to speak against Stalin in the accents of the international socialist revolution. It had wide support among members of the Bolshevik party, but this support was already muted under the control of the bureaucratic machine and the opposition itself was laced tight within the rigid party regime that Bolshevism had created and which Stalin already had under his control. Beyond the council chambers of the party, the Russian workers and the people generally were already too tired and too passive to respond to the new conflict. The opposition's fight was ineffectual and unsuccessful. The headlong plunge toward the creation of a monolithic police state inspired by nationalist motives was already under way. It was precisely during this three-year period of transition that the Russian influence came to bear in China. The climactic events of the Chinese revolution in 1926-27 took place while Stalin, in Russia, was riding roughshod over the opposition in his final conquest of power. The struggle, in which debate over the Chinese events played a large part, decided the course of Russia for a whole historic epoch. It also, tragically, determined the fate of the Chinese revolution.

The defeat in Germany in 1923 led the Kremlin to look with new interest and calculation on developments in Asia. In the rising tide of national and colonial revolt in that part of the world, it hoped to find new sources of diplomatic, political, and military support for Russia against the pressure of the Western powers under the leadership of Great Britain. The colonial powers were being challenged in the years after 1918 in almost all the countries of Asia. Russian influence was present, if only as an idea, in many of these movements. But circumstances of geography and time fixed China as the main theater of active Russian intervention. Here the opportunity for action at both the diplomatic and political levels was obviously the most promising: Russian Bolshevism and nascent Chinese nationalism had a common enemy in England. The first Soviet approaches to China were, strikingly enough, efforts to establish contact with any group, with any clique of militarists or politicians, which might prove usefully ready to join hands with the Russians against the British.

It might be worth reminding the reader at this point that in the time of which we speak, a bare thirty years ago, Great Britain was to all appearances still the world's paramount Great Power. It was still the master of the world's greatest empire, still the mistress of the seas. The decline of Britain was already a fact, but an unacknowledged or at least a stubbornly resisted fact. The passage of the center of gravity in world affairs across the Atlantic to the United States was already under way, but the United States had not yet recognized, much less welcomed, this new immigrant to its shores. It was going to take another world war to complete the rearrangement of strength and weakness among the nations that had by then already begun. In the 1920's, however, it was England who led the Western world in its hostility to Bolshevik Russia. It was also England, great imperial England, who was the prime target of the major national revolutionary movements in Asia. In China, Britain held the largest capital stake, the premier positions of privilege. The burgeoning Chinese revolution was directed in the first place, against the British. The identity of purpose on this score was the primary basis for the co-operation that soon developed between the intervening Russians and the Chinese nationalists.

But this was by no means a mere repetition of the old pattern in which Chinese political interests would seek to jockey between contending powers, or by which a foreign power tried to utilize a Chinese political faction to further its own interests against a foreign rival The Russian influence that came to bear in China also contained other newer ingredients that gave it an entirely different and unique historical significance. There was the prestige of the October Revolution itself as an historic fact; the ideas underlying the Russian revolution and their theoretical significance for China; the grotesque deformation of these ideas filtered through the minds of the new leaders in the Kremlin and translated by the agents and advisers and military specialists who came to China from Russia; finally, the conflict between the unfolding dynamics of the revolution within China and the purposes and prospects of that revolution as viewed by the Kremlin.

To begin with, there was the fact of the Russian revolution. Russia, like China, was a huge backward country. It was more Asian than European in the quality of its despotism and in the nature of its economy. The Russian peasants had risen in a gigantic Jacquerie that had fused with revolutionary currents in the army and in the cities, had overthrown the Czar, rejected the moderate leaders, embraced the Bolsheviks, and fought off the united forces of the Western powers for four years. This was something the Chinese could translate directly into their own terms, whether it was the Chinese peasant suffering the exactions of landlords and autocratic militarists, or the Chinese intellectual smarting under the subjection of his land to the control of the same Western powers and the same Japan who had tried so hard to smash the Russian revolution. This new Russia, in 1919 and 1920, had in startlingly new language abrogated all the unequal treaties imposed by the Czarist government on China in the past. It had offered China friendship based on complete political equality.

The contrast between this attitude and that of the Western powers was extremely compelling. Belief in the good intentions of the World War victors was quickly dispelled by events. The discovery that the Powers had no intention of applying the idea of self-determination to China led Chinese of all classes to look with receptive interest toward Russia, either through the misty eyes of inspired revolutionists or with the calculating eyes of men in search of a make weight against Western pressure. The first great swell of the Chinese revolution had come in 1919 when nationalist students, supported by workers in the cities, rose in protest against the Versailles settlement and against the corrupt Peking politicians who wanted to capitulate to Japan.

This new current in Chinese life and the new revolutionary impulses radiating out of Russia quickly found a common path, generated a high political amperage, and sent powerful shocks coursing through the entire political structure of China and, for that matter, the whole East.

The October Revolution offered more than an example to the Chinese people. It appeared to be a successful test, on a huge scale, of a whole set of ideas that had peculiar relevance in China. Marxist thought had already begun to make its way among Chinese intellectuals, following the path opened into Chinese libraries and universities a generation earlier by Huxley, Spencer, and Mill. As a political economic analysis of Western industrial society, these ideas seemed to have at best only an indirect application to China. Marx's few allusions to Asia were never fully developed and were little understood. But now they had been sifted through the experience of Russia, which was at least a semi-Asian nation with a backward peasant economy in the main and governed by a system of entwined capitalist and precapitalist economic relations not too different from those existing in China. The ideas stemming from Marx, developed in polemics between Lenin and Trotsky, and tested in Russia in 1905 and 1917, came down in essence to this: that in a world ripe for socialism, a backward country had to make the leap from its precapitalist past to the threshold of the socialist future; that the bourgeois or nascent capitalist class was not capable of leading the country through these changes; that it was both possible and necessary now to skip over the stage of capitalism and the bourgeois-democratic order; that this could be done if the urban working class shouldered aside the would be builders of a national capitalist system, took over the leadership of the peasantry, and assured the breakup of the old system of land relation5 This achieved, the workers in power could set out to make over the economy and political institutions of the country on the new basis of socialist property relations, i.e., social ownership of the principal means of production. Large-scale urban industrialization would bring on, in due course, industrialization of agriculture as well and bring rural and urban workers into a new and more harmonious relationship nourished by an elevated standard of living. But—and this was the crucial qualification—this all was going to be possible only in a World engaged in building socialism. It could be accomplished not in one country particularly a backward country, but only through the co-operation of the backward countries with at least some of the more advanced countries of the world and "through the creation of a unified world economy based on one general plan and regulated by the proletariat of all the nations of the world."5

In more precise Marxist terms, it can be put this way: With the world as a whole maturing for socialism, an entirely new political perspective opens up for those backward countries which have not yet fulfilled the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, i.e., achievement of national independence and unification, and breakup of precapitalist forms of rural economy. These tasks can now be carried through to completion only by a proletarian revolution, taking place in a context in which the more advanced countries of the world are converting themselves from capitalist into socialist states. In these circumstances, the purely national or anticolonial revolutions in the backward countries would tend to "grow over" into socialist revolutions. The process would be a fusing or telescoping of stages, the bourgeois into proletarian into world revolution. This was, in essence, the theory of "permanent revolution" developed by Trotsky. In the time of the revolution itself, it fused with the ideas of Lenin, bringing to an end years of harsh polemics between them.6 It formed the root conception of the Communist International and was immediately applied to the broad strategy of world events, as the Bolsheviks saw it, after their victory in Russia. The struggle to overthrow capitalism in the advanced West, sparked by the overturn in Russia, would go hand in hand with the struggle for national liberation in the subject countries of Asia and Africa. Guided and helped by the advanced countries, the Asians and Africans would be able to emerge from their varying stages of backwardness and join directly in the socialized reorganization of the world's productive forces, skipping entirely the intermediate stage of capitalism.

For China these ideas had unique and overwhelming significance. They opened a way through what was otherwise a blank wall. The world had no place to offer it as a new and free national state based upon a freely functioning capitalist economy. The hope of budding Chinese capitalists for national sovereignty collided with the political and economic and territorial positions of the foreign Powers. China's hope for expansion on a capitalist basis collided with the superior competitive position of foreign capital, which was far more interested in extracting immediate profit from Chinese raw materials and cheap labor' in the classic manner of colonial exploitation, than it was in the systematic development of a new and productive economy for the Chinese people as a whole. Finally, the ruling class in China could not by its own efforts revitalize the internal Chinese market without solving the agrarian problem; and it could not solve the agrarian problem, as we have seen, without destroying itself. With the rise in China of an urban working class of substantial proportions and weight in the society, the underlying ideas of the Russian revolution offered a radically new point of departure.

At the Second Congress of the Communist International, Lenin worked out in considerable detail the application of these ideas to the colonial and semicolonial countries. He laid it out in terms of the strategy to be followed by the Comintern and by the Communist parties which were even then just coming into existence in the various countries of Asia. The Congress resolution stressed the distinction to be made between bourgeois-nationalist movements which, it warned, would try to compromise with imperialism, and revolutionary-nationalist movements which would fight imperialism to the bitter end on the basis of solving the most pressing internal social and economic problems.7 In a group of theses written for the Congress, Lenin defined the relationship between these two tendencies in colonial nationalism and suggested the strategy and tactics to be followed by the Communist parties in colonial struggles. Since this was the crux of the problems that developed in China in the ensuing years, it is important here to quote them at length:

It is of special importance to support the peasant movements in backward countries against the landowners and all feudal survivals. Above all we must strive as far as possible to give the peasant movement a revolutionary character, to organize the peasants and all the exploited into Soviets…

It is the duty of the Communist International to support the revolutionary movement in the colonies and in the backward countries for the exclusive purpose of uniting the various units of the future proletarian parties—such as are Communist not only in name—in all backward countries, and educate them to the consciousness of their specific task, i e., to the tasks of the struggle against the bourgeois democratic tendencies within their respective nationalities. The Communist International must establish temporary relations and even unions with the revolutionary movements in the colonies and backward countries, without, however, amalgamating with them, but preserving the independent character of the proletarian movement, even though it be still in its embryonic form.8

To guard against being "taken in tow" by national bourgeois movements seeking to exploit the prestige of the Russian revolution, Lenin injected a specific warning "to wage determined w ar against the attempt of quasi-Communist revolutionists to cloak the liberation movement in the backward countries with a Communist garb." In a supplementary document drafted by M. N. Roy under Lenin's eye and presented by Lenin at the same Congress, this warning was elaborated as follows:

There are to be found in the dependent countries two distinct movements which every day grow farther apart from each other. One is the bourgeois democratic nationalist movement, with a program of political independence under the bourgeois order, and the other is the mass action of the poor and ignorant peasants and workers for their liberation from all sorts of exploitation. The former endeavor to control the latter, and often succeed to a certain extent, but the Communist International and the parties affected must struggle against such control and help develop class consciousness in the working masses of the colonies. For the overthrow of foreign capitalists, which is the first step toward revolution in the colonies, the cooperation of the bourgeois nationalist revolutionary elements is useful. But the foremost and necessary task is the formation of Communist parties which will organize the peasants and workers and lead them to the revolution and to the establishment of soviet republics. Thus the masses in the backward countries may reach Communism, not through capitalist development, but led by the class conscious proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries....

The real strength of the liberation movements in the colonies is no longer confined to the narrow circle of bourgeois democratic nationalists. In most of the colonies there already exist organized revolutionary parties which strive to be in close connection with the working masses. (The relation of the Communist International with the revolutionary movement in the colonies should be realized through the mediums of these parties or groups, because they are the vanguard of the working class in their respective countries. ) They are not very large today, but they reflect the aspirations of the masses and the latter will follow them to the revolution.

The revolution in the colonies is not going to be a Communist revolution in its first stages. But if from the outset the leadership is in the hands of a Communist vanguard, the revolutionary masses will not be led astray, but will go ahead through the successive periods of development of revolutionary experience.... In the first stages the revolution in the colonies must be carried on with a program which will include many petty bourgeois reform clauses, such as division of land, etc. But from this it does not follow at all that the leadership of the revolution will have to be surrendered to the bourgeois democrats. On the contrary, the proletarian parties must carry on vigorous and systematic propaganda for the Soviet idea and organize the peasants' and workers' Soviets as soon as possible. These Soviets will work in cooperation with the Soviet Republics in the advanced capitalistic countries for the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist order throughout the world.9

In sum, Lenin was proposing to Communists in the colonies that they concentrate on building workers' parties, however embryonic. These parties had to aim at giving the most radical kind of leadership to the peasantry. They had at all costs to preserve their political independence, even while they co-operated with bourgeois nationalist groups. They had to resist being swallowed up by these groups, whose object was not the transformation of society but a better bargain with the foreign masters.

These were potent ideas and this was potent advice. Translated into the Chinese political terms and circumstances of 1923, they would have had results that no one can measure now. But the fact is that while the Russian revolution came to enjoy in China immense authority and prestige, its basic ideas were never communicated, never translated into Chinese terms, never independently applied. They were tested in China only by negation. The Communists, under Russian direction, not only did not follow any of Lenin's prescriptions, but they fell into every pitfall against which he warned. They were caught fast by the fact that by the time Russia actively intervened in China, the revolution in Russia itself was in full retreat and the new nationalist Russia had begun to emerge. The Soviet bureaucracy, thrust back, as we have seen, from the frontiers of Europe by the collapse of the German uprising of 1923, did not come to the East in search of new proletarian conquests. It came looking for new allies, new bulwarks, new fronts on which to blunt the hostile pressure of the Western powers and of England in particular. To accomplish this, it still freely borrowed all the terms of the international socialist revolution, twisting them grotesquely in the process to serve the national ends of the Russian state.

It would be difficult to try to measure in this the degree of conscious cynicism which was certainly present at the top. But it was in any case a simple matter for the Soviet bureaucracy to begin to identify international revolutionary aspirations with its own narrow interests. Russia was the vanguard of the world revolution: anything that helped Russia helped the world revolution; the bureaucracy represented Russia; ergo, anything that helped the bureaucracy helped Russia. By an almost natural and inevitable shift of emphasis, the Kremlin bureaucracy had begun to view popular movements abroad as tools to be manipulated for its purposes. It came to regard the prime function of Communists abroad as the servicing of Russian diplomacy. Similarly, as they retreated from the original premises of Bolshevism, Stalin and the other new leaders lost sight of the ideas which had brought them into power. They had only dimly understood what had happened in the revolution of 1917. Lenin had come back from abroad and practically bludgeoned them into following his course.10 Once the civil war was won, they were able with comparative ease to establish first their power over the Bolshevik party and then, in an increasingly absolutist manner, over the people and the nation. To the business of intervening in popular movements abroad, they brought little more than the pseudo-cunning psychology of manipulators who believed that great social forces in motion would respond mechanically to their pedantic and self-interested notions.

It has to be stressed, however, that while this shift in power and emphasis was taking place, it had by no means taken on the brutally cynical character which Soviet policy and action acquired in later years. For one thing, Russia was much weaker. It still, in 1924, had to depend more on the attractive power of ideas than on its own brute strength, and when it came to ideas and revolutionary strategy, Stalin was on uncertain ground. In 1924, the Kremlin's approach to events in China was in a way more myopic than malignant. It was eclectic, scholastic, and remarkably self-deceiving. Russian leaders like Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin, who had never understood how in Russia the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions had fused, reverted for Chinese purposes a few years later to the notion of rigidly separated stages in the revolutionary process. Because they desperately wanted to convert the Chinese bourgeoisie into an ally of Russia, they proceeded to endow it with infinite revolutionary capacity. Out of a profound ignorance of the real social physiology of China, they convinced themselves that there was irrevocable conflict between the Chinese bourgeois nationalists and the Western imperialists. They cloaked this conviction in lawyerlike briefs that reduced people to robots and ideas to lifeless dogmas. They were certain that all they had to do was to place a powerful mass movement at the disposal of the Chinese nationalist leaders, and to this end they were ready to sacrifice anything that stood in the way, including the Chinese Communists.

Both the Chinese Communist party and the Kremlin have come a long way since the events of 1925-27. Both have shed the naivete of those early days. Both have been hardened by war and shaped by the successful exercise of power. The Chinese Communists remain ritualistically faithful to the Kremlin, but the well-preserved memory of past defeats due primarily to Russian dictation must always be subtly present in their mutual relations now. The Kremlin, for its part, has transformed Russia into a world Power of the first magnitude. It has hardened itself in the mold of a totalitarian state, with pervasive police terror and military strength as the prime tools of its authority. Abroad it subverts and perverts popular movements to its own ends and has grown far more cynically accustomed to juggling foreign Communists on the international checkerboard, using them as spies, puppets, or pawns for purely Russian purposes. This Russia evolved out of a history in which the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 was an important episode. But that evolution had, at that time, only just begun. These events took place less than ten years after the October Revolution in Russia. The supernationalist totalitarian state we know today had then only begun to take shape out of the ashes of the October dream. By the measure of history, the span of time has been short and the tendency to flatten the jagged path of development into a straight line is not easy to resist. Yet in this case, to endow the evolving Russia of 1924 with all the characteristics of the developed Russia of 1951 would be to obscure the real history of the intervening period almost entirely and make great and decisive events virtually impossible to understand. The tragedy of the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 lay precisely in the fact that it took place within the same period of years during which the Russian national dictatorship was coming into being. Had it occurred a few years earlier, the whole course of history would have been different.

Thus it is necessary to see that if even today hosts of people are still drawn into the Russian political orbit by the pull of the mummified remains of the revolutionary ideas of 1917, the attraction was far more legitimate in 1924-27, when these ideas and impulses had not yet been extinguished and when the real lineaments of the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Russia were still not visible. Some of the Russian and Comintern advisers and specialists who swarmed into China in 1924 undoubtedly still thought of themselves as socialists and revolutionists, although they were already little more than Soviet diplomatic agents. In the name of serving the Chinese revolution, they came to serve Russian national interests and in doing so they led the Chinese people to a catastrophe.