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The chinese essay.

An Anthology

Selected and translated by David Pollard

Columbia University Press

Pub Date: September 2002

ISBN: 9780231121194

Format: Paperback

List Price: $38.00 £32.00

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In keeping with its venerable tradition of publishing scholarship on China, Columbia has produced a groundbreaking work edited by a respected Sinologist and translator. In his lengthy and useful introduction to this collection of essays by 36 Chinese authors, Pollard discusses the important differences between the Western notion of 'essay' and its Chinese version--or sanwen (everything that is not a poem)--which is steeped in the classical school curriculum....Pollard's up-to-date, lucid translations of this specialized form of prose can be read effectively as a companion piece to Elizabeth Buckley Ebrey's sourcebook Chinese Civilization and Society (CH, Jul'81) by anyone interested in serious study of Chinese history and culture. B.M. McNeal, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvnia, Choice

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Home / Renditions / Publications / Renditions Books / The Chinese Essay

The Chinese Essay

Edited and translated by David E. Pollard

1999 400 pages ISBN 962-7255-21-1

The Chinese Essay

By david pollard.

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The Chinese Essay

Edited and translated by David E. Pollard

Reviewed by Charles A. Laughlin MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January 2004)

David E. Pollard, editor and translator. The Chinese Essay . New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. 372 pp. US $65.00, ISBN: 0-231-12118-0 (cloth); US $24.50, ISBN: 0-231-12119-9.

The Chinese Essay is the first anthology to provide a comprehensive introduction to Chinese literary non-fiction prose from earliest times to the present. Comparable collections in print, such as Richard Strassberg’s Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China and Sang Ye’s Vignettes from the Late Ming, are restricted to the premodern period, and until now modern essay translations (often Pollard’s) have only appeared scattered in journals like Renditions and Chinese Literature and in more general anthologies like The Literature of the Hundred Flowers , The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature , and monographs devoted to individual authors such as Zhou Zuoren and Yu Pingbo. The selections in The Chinese Essay represent most of the best-known Chinese essayists, through some of their most anthologized and well-known works. Never have premodern and modern essays been placed next to each other, and never has the considerable tradition of the modern Chinese essay been presented so richly. Pollard’s effort is commendable, and should be interesting not only to the general reader but a great boon as well to instructors of courses devoted to Chinese literature or to the essay across cultures.

Pollard has translated all of the essays himself. As a much-published translator, and author of A Chinese Look at Literature: The Literary Values of Chou Tso-jen (Zhou Zuoren, the pioneer of the modern Chinese literary essay), there could hardly be a better choice for this task. Not only are the translations faithful to the semantic meaning of the original texts (as far as I can tell), but Pollard’s clipped, dry, and often humorous style is also often perfectly suited to the spirit of the essays presented here. The anthology also includes portraits or photographs of many of the authors as well as their calligraphy or handwriting. Though not numerous, these illustrations very effectively convey the love of writing and the emphasis on personal style that tie together the many phases of the Chinese literary essay’s long tradition.

Because of the infancy of the study of the Chinese essay in English, an anthology like this and its introduction are potentially seminal statements, situating this genre in the field of Chinese cultural studies in general, justifying our interest in it, and pointing the way to avenues of further inquiry. But if The Chinese Essay answers the question, Why publish or read such an anthology?, it does so only meekly. Pollard observes that there has not been a general anthology of Chinese essays published since Herbert Giles’ 1884 Gems of Chinese Literature , so his argument begins from a gap or lack in the representation of a genre. Rather than engage with this lack critically, Pollard goes on to assert two reasons for it, almost as if to justify it, namely, the inherent difficulty of representing and discussing linguistic style in a foreign language (but why should this not have been a hindrance to the translation and circulation of other Chinese literary genres?), and the decline in prestige of the essay in the English-speaking world. Thus, in effect, rather than answering the question of why he is offering this anthology now, Pollard is simply providing convincing reasons why it had not been done before. What is missing from this explanation is why the prestige of the essay in modern and contemporary China, unlike the English speaking world, has not declined. If this book could bring the English reader around to understand the power and agency of the essay in contemporary China, despite all that has been said in our field about the overwhelming importance of fiction, it would create more than enough motivation and capacity to appreciate the importance of the contents of this anthology on its own terms, even for a general reader.

The general reader, moreover, seems to be the main target of this anthology. Yet this general-audience orientation is belied by the inclusion of Chinese characters for authors’ names and titles to works. Indeed those who would benefit from the Chinese characters (most of the likely audience of this collection) will generally want more bibliographical information, as well as some engagement with scholarship in the field such as Yu-shih Chen’s Images and Ideas in Chinese Classical Prose: Studies of Four Masters , Chih-p’ing Chou’s Yuan Hung-tao and the Kung-an School . In addition to a more in-depth and informative introduction, I think the book as a whole could have included more scholarly apparatus, including a less sketchy, multi-lingual bibliography, without harming its appeal to a general audience.

If Pollard assumes anything about his audience, it is that they are familiar with the European prose essay, which I think leaves some room for doubt especially with respect to the younger generations. The European essay was of course an important context for the modern Chinese essay, but Pollard is probably putting unnecessary emphasis on features peculiar to the European tradition (“absence of dignity,” “refining and directing sensibilities to create a polity that was new and particular,” “entertainment value,” [p. xii-xiii] “independence of thought,” [p. 7] etc.) in the effort to define the Chinese essay for the general English reader. It might have been more effective and engaging to discuss what prose essays in China are like and what they are used for, rather than comparing them (often unfavorably) to the European tradition that the reader may not be very familiar with anyway.

After detailing in the Preface negative aspects of traditional Chinese culture and literary conventions that explain why premodern Chinese essays do not resemble those of Montaigne and Bacon, Pollard does go on to list what he feels are some of the positive aspects of the Chinese essay in general: “The qualities are on the one hand common to mankind, on the other particular to Chinese literary arts. The first kind includes the expression of character in the writer, either impressively strong or appealingly weak; the expression of sentiment, usually to commemorate friends and relatives; nostalgia for past times; appeals for justice and compassion; pleasure in diversions. The second kind concerns the musicality of the language, a prime and often, regrettably, the prime requirement for approval.” Then he goes on to explain why musicality cannot be translated. Thus, all of the positive aspects of the premodern Chinese essay that are particular to Chinese literary arts are here lost in translation, and what is left is a variety of expressions of ideas and sentiments. I am not certain, but a general English readership (which has already proven itself lukewarm to Chinese fiction and poetry in translation) may not be inclined to delve into this anthology thus described. Why not say more about the extraordinary personalities and intellectual genius evinced in included works by Tao Qian, Han Yu and Su Shi, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Feng Zikai and Zhang Ailing? Why not talk about some of the larger cultural themes for which the Chinese essay served as the principal vessel, and which through the essay traditional and modern writing are linked—the cultivation of the art of living, the struggle between transcendent and worldly values, or the contrarian resistance to “political correctness” of every imaginable kind?

In an anthology with such broad coverage but short length, the editor is obliged to explain his principles for selection, and Pollard very honestly acknowledges that it would have been impossible to adhere to a single principle. I applaud his insistence that personal taste—an important theme in ancient and modern essays—was his principal guide. This accounts for his enthusiastic inclusion of essays by Gui Youguang (1506-1571) despite their criticism by the modern essayist Lin Yutang, his exclusion of Lin Yutang’s own essays, and no doubt as well the inclusion of contemporary writer Yu Qiuyu, well-known for his popular, fictionalized imaginings of significant historical moments, over those with strong links to the Republican period essay tradition like Wang Zengqi, Zhang Zhongxing and Ji Xianlin. On the other hand, in his note on sources Pollard states that “the classical prose section consists almost entirely of anthology pieces; they had to be so in order to represent the classical heritage” (369). He also states that he felt he had to include certain perennial classics (both traditional and modern) that may not have been among his favorites, even when they were available in other collections. In saying this Pollard makes it clear that he intends this collection to represent the Chinese essay with some authority and self-sufficiency, which seems out of step with his claim of using personal taste as his guide. Nevertheless, I think the resulting balance between personal taste and the need to reflect the received canon makes for a selection that both makes good reading and a good textbook.

Though Pollard alludes to wide reading in anthologies, the only one he cites is a 1987 publication, implying that anthologies tend to select the same works for each author. I am currently in the midst of a survey of anthologies of premodern essays that so far suggests to me that selections vary significantly across eras (Qing, Republican, Taiwan, Early PRC, recent PRC) for various different reasons. For example, premodern anthologies such as the seventeenth-century Guwen guanzhi generally favor formal essays of serious import that cleave to Confucian values, while more modern collections increasingly favor heterodox views, and include more “individualistic” essays on small, private matters. This is in part due to the gradual acceptance in the late imperial period that informal or casual writing possesses its own aesthetic value that can be appreciated by posterity. Moreover certain Republican period publications such as Shen Qiwu’s 1932 Jindai sanwen chao (A selection of early modern essays), Zhang Dai’s Tao’an mengyi (Dreamlike remembrance) edited with prefaces by Yu Pingbo and Zhou Zuoren, and Shi Zhecun’s 1935 Wanming ershi jia xiaopin (The Late Ming xiaopin: twenty masters) exerted an influence on the modern Chinese essay, and these could at least have been mentioned. The reader who wants to explore the Chinese essay in more detail would have benefited greatly from some guidance as to which anthologies are best, and which exerted the greatest influence.

It is interesting that The Chinese Essay , covering both premodern and modern periods, devotes the lion’s share of its space to the modern period. There are about forty pages devoted to ancient-medieval times (through the Song Dynasty), forty to late imperial times (Ming and Qing dynasties), about 170 to the first half of the twentieth century, when the modern essay came into its own, and ninety to the post-war period; thus over seventy percent of this collection is from the past 100 years. The slant in favor of modern essay has the effect of showing the reader the pre-modern essay through modern eyes, which I applaud, but the editor could have been more forthcoming about this in the introduction. If, for example, the reader took The Chinese Essay to be a general survey of the Chinese essay from antiquity to the present, it would give the impression that the essays of the twentieth century are much more important than those in the more than two millennia before. Modern Chinese essays can often be understood better through their relationships (sometimes conspicuous) with premodern literary or philosophical trends, and these relationships do not in themselves lessen the modern texts’ “modernity,” but help constitute it. In this respect, if it was in fact Pollard’s intention to present premodern essays primarily as precursors to modern ones, he could have done more in the introduction, commentary and translator’s notes to emphasize which kinds of premodern texts have particularly exerted agency in modern times, which modern texts manifest their influence, and how.

Turning to the modern period, the cavalier dismissal of prose literature under leftism and socialism is unfortunate; the development of the genre of reportage is misrepresented in the introduction as originating as anti-Japanese propaganda in the War Against Japan and developing in Communist China only to extol the Party (p. 20), and no mention is made at all of prominent lyrical essayists within the socialist camp like Qin Mu, Yang Shuo and Liu Baiyu, leading to the mistaken impression that all socialist prose is reportage. The exclusion of all of this material detracts from the anthology’s authority as a survey of the genre. As I have argued elsewhere, reportage may be looked upon as the leftist answer to the essay, but it originates as a form of revolutionary social critique in the 1930s, and its use in the War Against Japan is much broader than just propaganda. Moreover, though it would not be appropriate to include examples in the anthology, it should have been pointed out in the introduction that reportage made an important revival in the 1980s and beyond in the hands of Liu Binyan, Su Xiaokang and others; the concern for the environment that Pollard so admiringly observes in the contemporary Taiwanese essay has been one of the major themes of mainland Chinese reportage literature for at least ten years.

Another ramification of the editor’s inattention to the condition of modernity is Pollard’s explanation of the Chinese term sanwen . Pollard presents the Chinese concept as stable and unchanging, and explains its meaning entirely in terms of contrasts with European concepts. But the term sanwen was not used to denote a literary genre until modern times and even now critics and literary historians struggle with the equivocal nature of the term (“literary genre” vs. “all kinds of writing not in verse form”). It would have been helpful to put more emphasis on the particular modes or genres that the premodern works belong to (memorials to the emperor, philosophical treatises, formal and informal correspondence, prefaces and colophons, travelogues, epitaphs, biographies, etc.). This is not to say that this variety of forms ought not to be placed in a more general category under the term “sanwen,” but it is regrettable that the modern cultural process by which this was achieved receives no emphasis or attention.

Pollard’s concern here with limiting the scope of the collection to a describable form (“a free-standing, self-contained, relatively short composition” that “surfaced in the stable empire of the Han dynasty”) is, I think, unnecessarily limiting, and in fact might hamper the uninformed reader’s understanding of the broader context of the Chinese essay’s evolution. On page 2 of the introduction, Pollard makes a convincing, if somewhat defensive, argument for excluding the writings of the ancient Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zi. However, informed readers reading through the selections throughout both premodern and modern periods will easily discern the pervasiveness of Zhuang Zi’s influence in this genre. Indeed, Zhuang Zi’s playful spirit and philosophical critique of Confucianism may be described as one of the principal characteristics that distinguish the Chinese informal essay, which was the principal model for the modern literary essay, from formal prose. Similarly, though he devotes a page or so to the tremendous significance of Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian as a model for the spirit and the letter of prose writing, Pollard excludes it because, “[being] a work of objective history, however, or at least attempting to be such, the author’s own comments are minimal” (4), implying that self-expression is working as a criterion for selection (see also his comments on page 5 about Cao Pi’s use of the term qi to denote “the physical underpinning of the distinctive character, or personal stamp, that an author’s writing is imprinted with”), but that self-expression can only be manifested in the form of direct “comments.” How many readers of even a few biographies from the Shi ji , though, come away from it without feeling that Sima Qian has very forcefully expressed his own views through them? A similar example is the exclusion of the Six Dynasties collection of anecdotes, Shishuo xinyu (New account of tales of the world), of which a translation by Richard Mather was published a generation ago. Like Zhuang Zi and the wealth of apocryphal writings of the Daoist tradition, Liu Yiqing’s New Account , which describes remarkable events, actions and utterances of the medieval aristocracy, though perhaps not fitting. Pollard’s criterion, was an important and frequently imitated foundation of the Chinese essay tradition.

The introductions to the sections on each author, though at times impressionistic, often include insightful analytical meditations or epigrammatic summaries of the author’s style that strike me as most apt and useful. However, I am not sure it is necessary for Pollard to separately include “commentary” and “translator’s notes” (sometimes both) before or after certain works in addition to the introductory sections on each author. Often the translator’s note will emphasize interpretation in a cross-cultural context, as in the case of Zhu Ziqing’s “View from the Rear” (Bei ying), but I feet that such considerations would have been much more effectively delivered in a critical essay that treats a variety of issues of style or interpretation, or this could have been integrated with the historical overview given in the introduction. The second of the three paragraphs of commentary on Zhuge Liang, for example, is almost identical in content to the last page of Zhuge Liang’s own text; the first paragraph of the “Translator’s Note” to Han Yu’s “Address to the Crocodiles of Chaozhou” simply reiterates the corresponding section of the biography of Han Yu given in the “Commentary” two pages before. Together with the functional overlap of the preface and introduction, the commentary and translators notes make The Chinese Essay overly complex in its multilayered contextualization of the translations and thus unnecessarily confusing.

Apart from stealing thunder from the essays themselves, the volume of notes and commentary raises an important question that plagues the translation of Chinese literature into English in general: can these texts not speak for themselves? If this collection really is intended for a general readership, I think it is safe to assume that such readers would be more interested in texts that speak directly to them without a great deal of explanation from the translator. And it is not only a question of “how much” explanation would be needed to supplement a “raw” translation; the act of translation itself imparts meaning. If scholarly semantic fidelity were relaxed to the degree that items were made easier for the general reader to relate to with a reduced amount of explanation, the potential impact of this book would be greatly enhanced.

The Chinese Essay does nevertheless fill a crucial gap in materials for courses on Chinese literature in translation. While most scholars in the field of Chinese literature are probably not going to set up a course exclusively devoted to the essay even with a comprehensive anthology available, the selections in this book would mix well with other genres and materials in a more general course. I could see using it this way in either premodern or modern Chinese literary courses, but more likely for the modern period because of the greater concentration of material there.

Charles A. Laughlin Associate Professor, Chinese Literature Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures Yale University

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The Chinese Essay: An Anthology Hardcover – 15 March 2000

Print length 372 pages
Language English
Publisher Columbia University Press
Publication date 15 March 2000
Dimensions 15.88 x 1.91 x 22.86 cm
ISBN-10 0231121180
ISBN-13 978-0231121187
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Columbia University Press; 1st edition (15 March 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 372 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0231121180
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0231121187
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.88 x 1.91 x 22.86 cm

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The Chinese Essay

Edited and translated by David E. Pollard 1999 400 pages ISBN 962-7255-21-1

Table of contents

This anthology of seventy-four representative essays from the 3rd century to the late 20th century is the first of its kind in a Western language. The translations are prefaced by an informative historical survey as well as commentaries on each author. It offers readers a unique opportunity to sample the best from a genre central to the Chinese literary tradition.

David E. Pollard, the editor and translator, served as Chair Professor of Chinese at London University from 1979 to 1989, and Chair Professor of Translation at The Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1989 to 1997.

'Sinology has rarely touched upon the essay. Professor Pollard's anthology fills this yawning gap.'

—GP Deshpande in China Report

'... never has the considerable tradition of the modem Chinese essay been presented so richly.'

—MCLC Book Reviews

'The reader will certainly get a feel for the range of the Chinese essay genre. But he will get something more ... This collection contains a vast amount of information on the details of everyday life, on man's reaction to the environment, on the textures of social intercourse and on Chinese attitudes and reaction to the world they inhabit.'

—Denis Twitchett, Emeritus Professor of Chinese, Cambridge University

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The Moscow Trials and the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938: What the Evidence Shows

Grover Furr July 31 2010

[To be added at the end of Part One of "Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform" ]

Since my two-part essay "Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform" was written in 2004-5, a great deal more evidence has been published concerning the Opposition, the Moscow Trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938, the Military Purges or "Tukhachevsky Affair", and the subsequent "Ezhovshchina", often called "the Great Terror" after the title of the extremely dishonest book by Robert Conquest first published in 1968.

The newly-available evidence confirms the following conclusions:

* The defendants at the Moscow Trials of August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938, were guilty of at least those crimes to which they confessed. A "bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" did indeed exist. It planned to assassinate Stalin, Kaganovich, Molotov, and others in a coup d’�tat , what they called a "palace coup" ( dvortsovyi perevorot ). The bloc did assassinate Kirov.

* Both Rights and Trotskyites were conspiring with the Germans and Japanese, as were the Military conspirators. If the "palace coup" did not work they hoped to come to power by showing loyalty to Germany or Japan in the event of an invasion.

* Trotsky too was directly conspiring with the Germans and Japanese, as were a number of his supporters.

* Nikolai Ezhov, head of the NKVD from 1936 to late 1938, was also conspiring with the Germans.

We now have much more evidence about the role of NKVD chief Nikolai Ezhov than we had in 2005. Ezhov, head of the NKVD (People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs), had his own conspiracy against the Soviet government and Party leadership. Ezhov had also been recruited by German intelligence.

Like the Rights and Trotskyites, Ezhov and his top NKVD men were counting on an invasion by Germany, Japan, or other major capitalist country. They tortured a great many innocent people into confessing to capital crimes so they would be shot. They executed a great many more on falsified grounds or no grounds at all.

Ezhov hoped that this mass murder of innocent people would turn large parts of the Soviet population against the government. That would create the basis for internal rebellions against the Soviet government when Germany or Japan attacked.

Ezhov lied to Stalin, the Party and government leaders about all this. The truly horrific mass executions of 1937-1938 of almost 680,000 people were in large part unjustifiable executions of innocent people carried out deliberately by Ezhov and his top men in order to sow discontent among the Soviet population.

Although Ezhov executed a very large number of innocent people, it is clear from the evidence now available that there were also real conspiracies. The Russian government continues to keep all but a tiny amount of the investigative materials top-secret. We can’t know for sure exactly the dimensions of the real conspiracies without that evidence. Therefore, we don’t know how many of these 680,000 people were actual conspirators and how many were innocent victims.

As I wrote in 2005, Stalin and the Party leadership began to suspect as early as October 1937 that some of the repression was done illegally. From early in 1938, when Pavel Postyshev was sharply criticized, then removed from the Central Committee, then expelled from the Party, tried and executed for mass unjustified repression, these suspicions grew.

When Lavrentii Beria was appointed as Ezhov’s second-in-command Ezhov and his men understood that Stalin and the Party leadership no longer trusted them. They made one last plot to assassinate Stalin at the November 7, 1938 celebration of the 21 st anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. But Ezhov’s men were arrested in time.

Ezhov was persuaded to resign. An intensive investigation was begun and a huge number of NKVD abuses were uncovered. A great many cases of those tried or punished under Ezhov were reviewed. Over 100,000 people were released from prison and camps. Many NKVD men were arrested, confessed to torturing innocent people, tried and executed. Many more NKVD men were sentenced to prison or dismissed.

Under Beria the number of executions in 1938 and 1940 dropped to less than 1% of the number under Ezhov in 1937 and 1938, and many of those executed were NKVD men, including Ezhov himself, who were found guilty of massive unjustified repression and executions of innocent people.

Some of the most dramatic evidence published since 2005 are confessions of Ezhov and Mikhail Frinovsky, Ezhov’s second-in-command. I have put some of these on the Internet in both the original Russian and in English translation. We also have a great many more confessions and interrogations, mostly partial, of Ezhov, in which he makes many more confessions. These were published in 2007 in a semi-official account by Aleksei Pavliukov.

Anticommunist Scholars Hide the Truth

All "mainstream" – that is, anticommunist – and Trotskyist researchers falsely claim that there were no conspiracies. According to them, all the Moscow Trial defendants, all the military defendants, and all those tried and sentenced for espionage, conspiracy, sabotage, and other crimes, were innocent victims. Some claim that Stalin had planned to kill all these people because they might constitute a "Fifth Column" if the USSR were attacked. Other anticommunists prefer the explanation that Stalin just tried to terrorize the population into obedience.

This is an ideological, anticommunist stance masquerading as an historical conclusion. It is not based upon the historical evidence and is inconsistent with that evidence. Anticommunist historians ignore the primary source evidence available. They even ignore evidence in collections of documents that they themselves cite in their own works.

Why do the anticommunist "scholars", both in Russia and the West, ignore all this evidence? Why do they continue to promote the false notions that no conspiracies existed and that Stalin, not Ezhov, decided to execute hundreds of thousands of innocent people? The only possible explanation is that they do this for ideological reasons alone. The truth, as established by an examination of the primary source evidence, would make Stalin and the Bolsheviks "look good" to most people.

Collectivization of Agriculture Saved The World from Nazis and Japanese…

We have an example of this ideological bias in the way anticommunist scholars and writers treat the Bolshevik collectivization of agriculture. Anticommunists have long attacked it as immoral and unjustified. Yet collectivization provided the capital for the crash industrialization of the USSR. And only industrialization made a modern Red army possible.

Without a technologically-advanced modern army the Nazis would have conquered the USSR. Then, with the resources and manpower of the USSR and the rest of Europe behind them, the Nazis could have invaded the British Isles. Nazi armies would have been a far more formidable foe against all Allied powers. Meanwhile the Japanese, strengthened by the petroleum of the Soviet Far East, would have been a far more formidable enemy for the USA in the Pacific war.

Millions more Slavs and Jews – "Untermenschen" to the Nazis – and millions more Europeans and American soldiers – would have been killed. That this did not occur can be attributed, in large part, to the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. This is an obvious conclusion. There was simply no other way than by collectivizing agriculture that the USSR could have industrialized, and thus stood up to the Nazis and Japanese.

The only alternative was the one promoted by the Right and Trotskyite conspirators: to make peace with the Germans and Japanese, even if that meant granting them huge trade and territorial concessions. That would have greatly strengthened the Axis powers in their war against the U.K. and the USA.

For purely ideological reasons anticommunists cannot admit that collectivization made it possible for the Axis to be defeated.

… And So Did The Defeat of the Conspirators in 1936-1938

Whether they were able to seize political power through a "palace coup", or whether they would have to rely on a German and/or Japanese attack as they only way they might be able to overthrow the Stalin government, the Opposition conspirators were planning some kind of alliance with the Axis.

In fact they would have had no choice, as they realized themselves. A USSR weakened by internal revolt, with or without an invasion from abroad, would have had to make trade, territorial, and ideological concessions to its major potential adversaries simply in order to avoid invasion and inevitable conquest.

At a minimum, a USSR led by some combination of conspirators would have made treaties with Germany and Japan that would have provided the Axis powers with huge natural resources, possibly with manufactured goods as well. The military conspirators were contemplating going much farther than mere trade with the Axis. They were contemplating an outright military alliance with Germany. That would have meant millions more soldiers to fight alongside the German Wehrmacht.

Therefore, in foiling the machinations of the Rights, Trotsky and his supporters, and the Military conspirators, Stalin saved Europe from Naziism – again!

No doubt this is why anticommunist "scholars" insist, in the face of all the evidence, that there were no conspiracies in the USSR and no collaboration with the Germans and Japanese. Once again they refuse to admit these truths on purely ideological grounds because doing so would seem to justify Stalin’s actions.

Bukharin, Not Stalin, To Blame for the Massive Repressions

One interesting aspect of this is that Nikolai Bukharin, leading name among the Rightists and one of its leaders, knew about the "Ezhovshchina" as it was happening, and praised it in a letter to Stalin that he wrote from prison.

It gets even better. Bukharin knew that Ezhov was a member of the Rightist conspiracy, as he himself was. No doubt that is why he welcomed Ezhov's appointment as head of the NKVD -- a view recorded by his widow in her memoirs.

In his first confession, in his now-famous letter to Stalin of December 10, 1937, and at his trial in March 1938 Bukharin claimed he had completely "disarmed" and had told everything he knew. But now we can prove that this was a lie. Bukharin knew that Ezhov was a leading member of the Rightist conspiracy -- but did not inform on him. According to Mikhail Frinovsky, Ezhov's right-hand man, Ezhov probably promised to see that he would not be executed if he did not mention his own, Ezhov's, participation (see Frinovsky's confession of April 11, 1939 ).

If Bukharin had told the truth -- if he had, in fact, informed on Ezhov -- Ezhov's mass murders could have been stopped in their tracks. The lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people could have been saved.

But Bukharin remained true to his fellow conspirators. He went to execution -- an execution he swore he deserved "ten times over" * -- without revealing Ezhov's participation in the conspiracy.

This point cannot be stressed too much: the blood of the hundreds of thousands of innocent persons slaughtered by Ezhov and his men during 1937-1938, are on Bukharin's hands.

Objectivity and Evidence

I agree with historian Geoffrey Roberts when he says:

In the last 15 years or so an enormous amount of new material on Stalin … has become available from Russian archives. I should make clear that as a historian I have a strong orientation to telling the truth about the past, no matter how uncomfortable or unpalatable the conclusions may be. … I don’t think there is a dilemma: you just tell the truth as you see it. ("Stalin’s Wars", Frontpagemag.com February 12, 2007. At http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/35305.html )

The conclusions I have reached about the "Ezhovshchina" will be unacceptable to ideologically-motivated people. I have not reached these conclusions out of any desire to "apologize" for the policies of Stalin or the Soviet government. I believe these to be the only objective conclusions possible based on the available evidence.

I make no claim that the Soviet leadership was free from error. Stalin’s vision of a socialism leading to communism was obviously faulty in that it did not come to pass. During Stalin’s time, as during the short period of Lenin’s leadership, the Soviets made a great many errors. Error is, of course, inevitable in all human endeavor. And since the Bolsheviks were the first communists to conquer and hold state power, they were in unknown waters. It was inevitable, therefore, that they would make a great many mistakes – and they did.

However, any objective study of the evidence and the historical record shows that there was simply no alternative to forced collectivization and industrialization – except defeat at the hands of some combination of capitalist powers. Likewise, the fact that the Right, Trotskyite, and Military conspiracies really did exist but were snuffed out by the Soviet leadership, which managed to out-maneuver Ezhov and foil his conspiracy as well, proves that once again the USSR – "Stalin" – saved Europe from Naziism and all the Allies from an immense number of additional casualties at the hands of the Axis powers.

* Bukharin's two appeals for clemency, both dated March 13, 1938, were reprinted in Izvestiia September 2, 1992, p. 3. They were rejected, and Bukharin was executed on March 15, 1938. I have put them online in English here.

Additional Bibliography

Ezhov’s interrogations: I have translated all of Ezhov’s interrogations available to me as of July 2010 and put them online here:

http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/ezhovinterrogs.html (Russian original: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/ezhovpokazaniia.html )

Lubianka. Stalin I NKVD – NKGB – GUKR "SMERSH". 1939 – mart 1946 . Moscow, 2006.

Frinovsky confession of April 11, 1939, pp. 33-50. http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/frinovskyeng.html (Russian original here: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/frinovskyru.html )
Ezhov confession of April 26, 1939, pp. 52-72. http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/ezhov042639eng.html (Russian original: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/ezhovru.html )

Petrov, Nikita, Mark Jansen. "Stalinskii pitomets" – Nikolai Ezhov . Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008, pp. 367-379.

Ezhov confession of August 4, 1939. http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/ezhov080439eng.html (Russian original: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/ezhov080439ru.html )

Furr, Grover and Vladimir L. Bobrov, "Bukharin's Last Plea: Yet Another Anti-Stalin Falsification." http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/bukhlastplea.html - translation of Russian original published in Aktual’naia Istoriia for February 2009 at http://actualhistory.ru/bukharin_last_plea

Furr, Grover and Vladimir L. Bobrov, "Nikolai Bukharin's First Statement of Confession in the Lubianka" in English translation, Cultural Logic 2007 - http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Furr_Bobrov.pdf

Furr, Grover and Vladimir L. Bobrov, "Pervye priznatel'nye pokazaniia N.I. Bukharina na Lubianke." Klio No. 1 (2007). http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/furrnbobrov_klio0107.pdf

Furr, Grover and Vladimir L. Bobrov, eds. "Lichnye pokazaniia N. Bukharina." Klio (St. Petersburg), No. 1 (2007). http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/furrnbobrov_klio0107.pdf

Furr, Grover. "Evidence of Leon Trotsky's Collaboration with Germany and Japan." In Cultural Logic for 2009. http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Furr.pdf

Holmstr�m, Sven-Eric. "New Evidence Concerning the 'Hotel Bristol' Question in the First Moscow Trial of 1936". Cultural Logic 2008. At http://clogic.eserver.org/2008/Holmstrom.pdf

Furr, Grover.Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every "Revelation" of Stalin's (and Beria's) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev's Infamous "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False. Kettering, OH: Erythros Press & Media LLC, 2011. At Amazon.com ; at Erythros Press & Media : at Abebooks.com ; at Abebooks.co.uk (United Kingdom)

Furr (‘Ferr’), Grover Antistalinskaia podlost’ ("Anti-Stalin Villanies"). Moscow: Algoritm, 2007. Home page: http://www.algoritm-kniga.ru/ferr-g.-antistalinskaya-podlost.html Brief summary in this interview: "The Sixty-One Untruths of Nikita Khrushchev" (Interview with Grover Furr). http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/litrossiainterv0608_eng.html (original here: http://www.litrossia.ru/article.php?article=3003 )

Pavliukov, Aleksei. Ezhov. Moscow: Zakharov, 2007.

Karl Marx Works 1844

Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 [1]

Written: Between April and August 1844; First Published: 1932; Source: Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow 1959; Translated: by Martin Milligan; Transcribed: for marxists.org by Andy Blunden in 2000; Proofed: and corrected by Matthew Carmody 2009; See alternate translation .

A National Journal of Literature & Discussion

The Sad State of Cultural Life In Moscow (Or Peking) As Viewed From Peking (Or Moscow)

By lowell r. tillett.

During the last decade Cold War rhetoric has taken an unexpected turn. The quantity and intensity of angry exchanges between capitalism and Communism have subsided almost everywhere, while the two major practitioners of Communism have been having it out. Moscow and Peking have blasted each other with charges more scurrilous and personal than the wildest anti-Communist might have ventured in the fifties. In May, 1970, the New York Times, reflecting on the fact that Mao had included in his celebration of Lenin’s centennial a comparison of Brezhnev and Hitler, and Moscow had reciprocated with a charge that Mao was a philanderer who had murdered his own son, observed that “even at the height of the Cold War, it is doubtful that any official American pronouncement matched, much less exceeded, the bitterness” of such exchanges.

Lost in the shadoAvs of the more newsworthy arguments about borders, nuclear war, and leadership of world Communism, is another aspect of the unprecedented Sino-Soviet ideological quarrel—a no-holds-barred and below-the-belt brawl on the nature and function of culture in a Communist society. Each of the Communist giants contends that the other is a traitor to Marxism and has done irreparable harm to the cause of proletarian culture.

This enormous, orchestrated propaganda campaign is carried on not only in the press, but especially by round-the-clock broadcasts over the back fence from Radio Moscow and Radio Peking. The Soviet Party journal Kommunist complained in 1969 that two-thirds of some Chinese newspapers were filled with anti-Soviet material and that Radio Peking was broadcasting to the USSR up to fifty hours per day on forty frequencies, including some reserved for distress calls. The Soviet press and radio were answering on the same scale, the latter intensifying its effort beginning in that year through “Radio Peace and Progress,” beaming broadcasts from Tashkent in the languages of the Chinese minority peoples, as well as standard Chinese.

The campaign has had its ups and clowns. It grew more and more intense from 1967, reaching a peak in the summer of 1969. It was then turned off like a faucet for a few months—neither Moscow nor Peking saying a disparaging word about the other—while border talks were being held. It has had periodic outbursts since. The Soviets have recently made occasional references to the relaxation of Mao’s cultural policies, but have not retreated from their basic charges. The Chinese have not retreated one iota, but have observed long periods of silence on the subject.

Each side holds that the other has strayed from the Marxist path and betrayed the proletariat. The method of betrayal is the same in either case: the Communist Party of China (or the Soviet Union) has been “kidnapped” by a small clique, which is building its power and ruling for selfish goals. Each side assigns a definite date to the betrayal. The Chinese claim that Stalin hewed to the Marxist line, but soon after his death that “buffoon,” Khrushchev, and his “renegade revisionist clique” began a clandestine but systematic program for “the all-round restoration of capitalism.” The Soviets hold that at roughly the same time the Chinese Party lost its battle against Mao, who is not a Marxist at all, but an unprincipled opportunist Avho has built a fearful “personality cult” through purge and intimidation.

The cultural policies of each power, as observed by the other, are an important manifestation of the Marxist heresy and a means of realizing the tyrants’ goals. Each side presents a caricature of the other and in the process reveals something about itself. The Chinese have concentrated on detecting and exposing capitalistic characteristics in Soviet culture; the Soviets have dwelt on the wild, romantic, whimsical experimentation of Maoism, which “has nothing in common with Marxism.”

In support of their proposition that the Soviet “renegades” are restoring capitalism, the Chinese point to what they consider scandalous wage differentials and examples of high living, in the worst tradition of bourgeois capitalists, among Soviet leaders. These cases prove to Chinese satisfaction that a new class division is growing in the USSR and that the class struggle—that hallmark of a capitalist society—is not only present, but is intensifying.

The Chinese find many examples of extravagant living among the “high-salaried privileged stratum.” While among Soviet workers “two or three families share a single room,” the tycoons are concerned about luxurious second houses by the sea. One villa on the Black Sea “has two swimming pools, one for fresh water and another for salt water” and another has a special room for the master’s dog. While Soviet workers suffer from periodic food shortages, their leaders enjoy “beef and mutton from Mongolia, champagne from France, onions from Poland, grapes from Bulgaria.” And while the Avorkers complain of shortages of shoes and underwear, the privileged squander hard currency on imported fashions. As evidence, the Chinese once wryly quoted a compliment from the camp of the enemy: Die Welt’s opinion that the Soviet Union “has never seen a Party chief as fashionable as Brezhnev . . ., with a silvery grey necktie and an impeccable, well-tailored black suit, he is so smartly groomed that he gives no thought at all about Lenin’s style of dress.”

It is little wonder that Soviet leaders, seduced by these capitalist comforts, should be diverted from the causes of the people. “When these fat and comfortable Communists . . .tog themselves up in Italian fashion, sip a glass of martini [sic] and bounce to the rhythm of American jazz, how it is possible for them to think of the liberation fighters in the South Vietnamese jungles, the starving peasants in the Indian countryside, and the Afro-Americans in Harlem?”

The evils of the system are not confined to the “upper strata,” but have seeped down to another group which can only be identified by its capitalist nomenclature, the middle class. The Chinese have denounced such capitalist trappings as pawnshops, classified advertising, and the free markets where agricultural products and handicrafts are sold by individuals. When the Moscow Pawnshops Administration tried in 1967 to promote its operations by offering better guarantees, transactions by telephone, and even house calls by the pawnbroker, the Chinese press rose to the occasion, asking rhetorically, “Just what is a pawnshop?. . . Whatever the color of its signboard, and whatever its sidelines, its main business is usury, in other words, sucking the blood out of the poor. It is rather strange that thriving pawnbrokers should be a sign of the transition to Communism and that the workers will enter Communist society with wads of pawn tickets in their pockets.”

The Chinese were also disturbed by the proliferation of classified advertisements in the Moscow evening newspaper. The mere existence of such ads was regarded as prima facie evidence of a capitalist society, since “advertising in the bourgeois press is a medium by which capitalists push sales, carry out cut-throat competition, and grab profits.” But the Chinese turned the knife in the wound by noting the business being transacted: villas and summer cottages wanted, medals wanted, lottery tickets wanted, jobs wanted, and divorce announcements. “Multiplying like fungi , . . .these ads reek with the stink of bourgeois ideology and way of life.”

The Chinese share with the Russians great fears about the profit motive in the private sector of Soviet agriculture. They regard the free markets, where products from the private plots are sold as “a paradise for kulaks and speculators. . . . In the free markets, people rub shoulders in crowds. They push and jostle each other. It is a sickening scene of noise and confusion, with hawkings to attract customers, angry bargaining, etc.”

The Chinese also detect signs of restored capitalism in the trappings of popular culture in the USSR. What could be more symptomatic of decadent bourgeois society than fashion shows, fashion magazines, beauty shops, nude pictures, fancy wedding ceremonies, dog shows, and comic strips?

According to the Chinese, “the Soviet revisionists have discarded the plain working-class clothing of Lenin for the sophisticated styles of the bourgeoisie.” They publish “fashion and hair style magazines to corrupt the Soviet people, particularly the youth,” and have staged fashion shows at home and abroad. At one “Soviet fashion design show” in Washington, the models wore fashions by “the Soviet Union’s best-known avant garde designer, who copied the cowboy pants and mini-skirts of the West.”

The Chinese claim that even the Communist Youth League, the customary apprenticeship to the Communist Party, has entered the race for fashion and beauty. They were alarmed to find out that “there is a Beauty Parlor for Young Communist League Members and Youths” in Leningrad, where discussions on “new hair fashions” and “hair-do contests” are held every Sunday. And “in Moscow, so-called clubs for girls have been set up in some cultural palaces to attract young women workers to study “the secrets of beauty culture” and “problems of love. ” Is this following the behest of Lenin?”

It is only a short step from the fashion show to the even more decadent dog show. “The Soviet revisionists also put on dog shows in Moscow similar to those in New York and London and went so far as to make this thing fashionable. All this is the height of rottenness.”

In popular Soviet wedding ceremonies, Peking detects a throwback to tsarist days. “In Moscow nowadays, one often sees troikas of the type common in the days of old Russia galloping by. They carry no ordinary passengers, but cater to newlyweds,” carrying them to the wedding palace. The hiring of troikas has become a thriving business, for, according to TASS, “wedding vehicles have been booked up for the whole spring season.”

For the younger set, Soviet authorities have tried to make learning about scientific subjects more palatable by using the form of the comic strip. The Chinese reaction was this:

The Soviet revisionists have resorted to new methods of corrupting the young by churning out “science” fiction and comics modeled after “Alley-Oop,” “Blonclie,” “Batman,” etc. Under the pretext of disseminating scientific knowledge, such garbage from the Soviet press fosters venomous fantasy.

Having set the Soviet Union on such a dangerous course, the leaders have accepted the uglier features of bourgeois society—unsavory night life, increasing crime, alcoholism, and prostitution. When the Soviet press called on recreation officials to “brighten up night life,” the Chinese press wondered what the workers, who “toil from dawn to dusk,” could possibly do with a nightclub. They have no time to loaf, and such “decadent and licentious recreation is completely alien” to them. Nightclubs are “the hallmark of the Western way of life” where “bourgeois ladies and gentlemen and their offspring, who fatten on the sweat and blood of the working people . . .squander their ill-gotten gains.” And “since night clubs are being readied, brothels, gambling houses, and other such foul trades will also make their public appearance before long.”

On at least one of these subjects, alcoholism, the Chinese get plenty of ammunition from the Soviet press. But characteristically they accentuate the negative, citing the most glaring cases from Soviet articles, without acknowledging that the whole purpose of the Soviet discussion is remedial. They suggest that Ivan drinks a lot to cover his disillusionment with the régime, his sorrow for a revolution betrayed.

The Soviet counterpart of the Chinese charges of restored capitalism in the USSR is the contention that Mao’s erratic ideas and adventurism have wrecked traditional Chinese culture and have not put anything worthwhile in its place. Maoist thoughts not only drive out the harder currency of creative ideas; they serve as a religious opiate: “Mao Tse-tung’s thoughts do not differ from the religious intoxicants which develop the minds of the people and promise them a better lot—in another world.” Furthermore, Mao has a deep anti-intellectual streak (“the more books you read, the more stupid you become”) and Chinese intellectuals have been the scapegoats for the failure of his many experiments. As a result of all this, the Soviets see China as a cultural wasteland.

According to Marxism cultural life, like almost everything else, is based on economic underpinnings and the Soviets contend that Mao has failed the Chinese people at this basic point. The standard of living in China remains at a very low level, and there is no plan to improve it substantially in the foreseeable future. According to Mao’s doctrine of “primitive asceticism” all incentiA r es to material gain are denounced, and poverty is a virtue. While the Chinese rail against wage differentials in the USSR, the Russians deplore the grinding poverty of the whole Chinese population, a condition which is accepted and lauded by the leadership. One Soviet spokesman cited the chorus from a popular Chinese play:

First you walked barefoot. Then you put on rag slippers, and then—rubber shoes. This time you may wish to sport leather shoes, or even high boots. What will become of you in this process of bourgeois degradation?

Another Soviet position in this quarrel rings strange in the Western ear, for vis-à-vis the Chinese, they are champions of the rights of the individual against the demands of the state. They charge that Mao has so completely subdued, “brainwashed,” and regimented the Chinese people that there are no areas of individual freedom left, and this includes all cultural life at a personal level. The demands for group activity are so great that a Chinese can no longer enjoy the simplest pleasures—taking a walk, going fishing, playing cards, or taking a nap on his day off. Such activities have been condemned as bourgeois. One Soviet broadcast lamented Mao’s purge of billions of goldfish. “The Peking press, . . .calling for greater revolutionary vigilance, urged the people to destroy the fishbowls and to carry out the revolution, because goldfish breeding was an assault by the bourgeoisie on the proletariat.”

The goal of Maoist cultural policy, in the Soviet view, is to reduce the individual to the rôle of an ant in the giant anthill. Several phrases on this theme, which were upheld as ideals in China during the Cultural Revolution, have been quoted in contempt in Soviet propaganda. Workers are asked to become “little stainless screws” in Mao’s machine. According to the diary of a Chinese soldier, “although a cog is small, its rôle is inestimable. I want to be a cog always, . . .cleaned and protected so that it does not rust.” The peasant’s variant has him aspiring to be “an obedient buffalo of the great helmsman,” and children pledge themselves as “red seedlings.”

Chinese culture has been submerged in the morass of Mao worship. Instead of reading traditional Chinese literature (much of which has perished in the flames of the Cultural Revolution) Chinese children memorize twenty quotations per day from Mao’s thought. Mao quotations are chanted at meals and at public rallies. “From the very early morning Peking’s streets are filled with a roar which comes from loudspeakers. . . . It is impossible to collect one’s thoughts and think about what is happening.” There is no escape in visiting the theater or the music hall, in listening to the radio, or reading the popular press, which are all saturated with Mao themes.

The Soviets are also, rather surprisingly, the champions of traditional cultural values and have given much attention to the cultural nihilism of the Cultural Revolution. While the Chinese were citing Marx and Lenin passages calling for the destruction of bourgeois culture and the remolding of intellectuals, the Soviets have cited other passages emphasizing the need for continuity and critical assimilation of the culture of the past.

In the fine arts the Chinese are somewhere to the right of Stalin; they advocate socialist realism with a vengeance. Every work of art is judged strictly on its utility in furthering the revolution, and any work that does not do so in a straightforward way is a “poisonous weed” which must be eradicated. One of the earliest criticisms of Khrushchev’s cultural policy was that he had permitted the rehabilitation of “revisionist royalist writers” who had quite properly been suppressed by Stalin. Among these were Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova, who shared the heresy of ideological neutrality in some of their works. Like Stalin, the Chinese regard non-conforming literature to be extremely detrimental: “a single bullet can only kill a single person, but the influence of a single reactionary novel can harm ten thousand people.”

The Chinese have attacked more than a dozen Soviet writers, but their main efforts have been made against three. Mikhail Sholokhov has drawn more fire from Chinese critics than all other Soviet writers combined. They regard him as the most dangerous kind of cultural figure, a counter-revolutionary who manages to hoodwink his countrymen, a “termite that sneaked into the revolutionary camp.”

In the Chinese view, Sholokhov’s works are full of counter-revolutionary messages, and his characters are not properly oriented. In “And Quiet Flows the Don” Grigory is an out-and-out white guard, whose tragic experiences are treated sympathetically. Sholokhov weighs the personal sufferings of his characters against the Revolution and questions whether the sacrifice was worth it. Furthermore, the author “exaggerated the counter-revolutionary rebellion,” stated openly that “there were too many bad elements” in the Bolshevik Party, and pointed out the “excessive actions” of the Red Army against the enemy-—all “impermissible” according to Maoist literary standards. In “Virgin Soil Upturned” Sholokhov “maliciously distorted the features of the poor and lower-middle peasants and vilified them as opponents of collectivization.” He “prettifies the class enemy” and “describes collectivization as a series of endless disasters.”

Sholokhov’s Nobel prize confirms Chinese suspicions. “Sholokhov, in a state of awed excitement, accepted the Nobel prize for literature, which even the French bourgeois writer Jean-Paul Sartre would not accept. In Sartre’s words, to accept the prize would be to receive “a distinction reserved for the writers of the West or for the traitors of the East. “”

Konstantin Simonov’s popular war novels, “The Living and the Dead” and “Days and Nights,” have been attacked for their strong condemnation of war. In Mao’s view the violence and destructiveness of wars should not be emphasized to the exclusion of the positive results of just wars, which are the means by which the working class will destroy imperialism. In Mao’s words, “war is politics with bloodshed.” But Simonov’s novels, concerning the German invasion of Russia in 1941 and the battle of Stalingrad, view war in a totally negative way. There is too much gore, not enough glory. The main characters only want to survive—to survive for such selfish reasons as to return to a lover or to school. Simonov would “stamp out the flames of peoples’ revolutionary wars.” Besides, he emphasizes the might of the German army and the weakness of the Red Army. He had the Red Army falling back to Stalingrad because of weakness and not to launch a counter-attack, as the Chinese prefer to have it.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who is always referred to as a “playboy poet,” has committed all the cardinal sins: he has condemned Stalin, China, and written anti-war poetry. Furthermore, he is a writer “who sold his soul” to United States imperialism. He first came to fame for “brutally defaming Stalin after the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. This clown described himself as “weeping like all others when Stalin died. ” Yet before his tears were dry, he had trod upon Khrushchev’s heels in attacking Stalin.” Yevtushenko’s “mud-slinging” poems against the Cultural Revolution have drawn heavy fire from the Chinese, as have his popular recital trips to the West.

Soviet criticism of the current Chinese literary scene seldom involves specific writers or works, since the main Soviet complaint is that the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist cult have destroyed old literary works and prevented new ones from being written. “In effect, sentence of death has been pronounced on China’s centuries-old culture.” A 1969 broadcast charged that not a single novel had been published in China during the last four years and that the author of the last one was soon in trouble. The fate of foreign literature in China was equally bad. According to Sovetskaya Kultura, “between 1949 and 1956, 2683 works of classical Russian and Soviet literature had been published in the Chinese language in a total of 66,500,000.” But these have all been swept away in “the prairie fire of the Cultural Revolution.” Soviet accounts are full of descriptions of book burning, the destruction of bookshops and libraries, and of trash heaps which serve as collection points for condemned literature. Meanwhile three billion copies of Mao’s works have been turned out in China.

The Russians do single out one Chinese writer for biting criticism, and it cuts to the quick: they have a very low opinion of the literary efforts of Mao Tse-tung. His poems are always vague and sometimes incomprehensible. One of the Russian translators of Mao’s poetry stated in an interview that “these verses are incomprehensible, not merely on first reading; even readers with philological education cannot explain the meaning of some phrases exactly.” Red Guards sing Mao’s words “frequently without understanding their meaning.”

Furthermore, Mao’s poetry is ideologically suspect. The Soviet verdict on one of his poems was that “it is merely an imitation of decadent court poetry, full of embellishing phrases.” Other Soviet critics have noted that “Mao’s imagination has always been captivated by the imagery and personalities of the rulers of old imperial China. Moreover, Mao’s personality has clear traces of the characteristics of the Chinese Emperors.” Radio Moscow has broadcast detailed analyses of “Yellow Stork Flying,” one of Mao’s most popular poems, detecting almost precise figures found in the verse of one of the Tang emperors, “an aesthete, whose life . . .was given over to meditations concerning the apparition of the yellow stork.”

“Counter-revolutionary plays dominate the Soviet stage”—so reads a typical Chinese critique. Popular Soviet plays are condemned for sowing “the virus of pacifism,” “distorting facts about the anti-fascist war” with Hitler, “repudiating the Stalin cult, vilifying the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and for advocating “a life of eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die.”

Chinese objections to the Soviet theater center about their attacks on Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose method acting has drawn frequent fire from Peking. The core of the method, as the Chinese see it, is the “self,” the “innermost I.” Such “stinking egoism” is a betrayal of class consciousness. According to the method, the actor who plays a landlord or capitalist must delve into his sub-consciousness and evoke all those hated traits of the class enemy. He “becomes” the landlord or capitalist and presents his new “self” in the best possible light. This is intolerable for current Chinese critics, who argue that all characters, including the darkest villains, must be played from a proletarian viewpoint. There must never be the slightest doubt about the true colors of the actors; the theater must occupy itself with showing the class struggle in action. “If the proletariat does not turn the theater into a red revolutionary crucible, then the bourgeoisie will change it into a black and stinking dyeing vat, disseminating the ideological poison of the bourgeoisie and contaminating the ideology of the masses.”

Soviet films come in for the same treatment. Blunderbuss attacks on Soviet films strongly suggest that the Chinese critics have not had an opportunity to see what they are condemning, the giveaway coming in some variation of the clause: “such titles alone suffice to show what these movies peddle and what sort of creatures their producers are.”

One favorite theme of Chinese critics is the growing popularity of United States films in the USSR. Peking regarded the Moscow Film Festival of 1969 as “a sickening spectacle of dewy-eyed admirers standing spellbound before the altar of Western imperialist films, . . .a disgusting exhibition of the clique’s maneuver to use the junk cranked out by the bourgeois scum . . .to promote the full-scale capitalist restoration.”

Among Soviet film figures the director Grigory Chukrai shares the villainous rôle of Sholokhov among the Chinese, and for some of the same reasons. His pictures are soft on war, and besides he made the tactical error of commenting unfavorably on Chinese films in an article for the British magazine, Films and Filming, observing that “with dogmatism and logic alone the Chinese artist cannot make good films.” Taking on his best known films one by one, a Chinese critic condemned “The Forty-First” as a flimsy love story, in which “human nature overcomes class nature, and the enemies become lovers”; “Ballad of a Soldier” is really a “condemnation of war, [showing] how the anti-fascist patriotic War wrecked people’s happiness”; “The Clear Sky” is an anti-Stalin diatribe: “when Stalin dies, “the ice melts” and “the sky clears. ” ” Chukhari’s films are all revisionist, reeking of the “odor of bourgeois humanism and pacifism.”

The Soviet view of Chinese theater and film is similar to that on literature, emphasizing cultural nihilism and political subservience. By one Soviet account, “of 3,000 theatrical companies which existed until quite recently, less than ten are alive. The silence of the Chinese theater is proof of the crisis in its art, until recently extremely popular and widespread in China.” The “spectacular revolutionary plays” which have replaced the classics are artistically worthless, and are mere propaganda pieces. “The theater in China has become a primitive means of frontal propaganda for the political lines of the present leadership.”

The Soviets also react sharply to the repudiation of Stanislavsky and to the Chinese practice of casting all characters from the proletarian viewpoint. One Soviet visitor reported a shocking experience on a visit backstage in Peking: “I was looking for the actor whom we liked very much and who appeared in the rôle of a Japanese intelligence officer. Finally I discovered him at the end of the line; it turned out that he had no right to stand next to the actors appearing in positive rôles.”

Soviet critics also regret the demise of the popular theater in China.

In the old days Chinese rural areas were blessed with popular forms of art; Chinese theatrical performers would tell stories and give performances and magic shows. . . . Thousands upon thousands of native theatrical groups used to roam from village to village giving performances, but the Maoists today have wiped out the native arts the same way they have wiped out the professional arts.

The Russians have complained about the arid film fare as well. They have from time to time reeled off the titles of films showing in Peking; all feature Chairman Mao in the titles, and most are produced by his wife, Chiang Ching. Chinese documentaries are especially deplored for their anti-Soviet bias.

Impugning the merits of “Swan Lake” is for the Russians as low a blow as discrediting Mao’s poetry for the Chinese. A Red Guard penned the following reaction:

Treasured as a masterpiece by people like you and your kind, the ballet “Swan Lake” has been going on and on for decades but the performances remain the same. What can “Swan Lake” arouse in a revolutionary of this era . . .except disgust for its corrosive rôle in leading people astray into a world far removed from real life?

A presumably more mature critic in Red Flag found it to be “a cacophony of primitive dance melodies [which] can in no way compare with the elevated music being written today in China to the words of Mao Tse-tung.” The plot is as bad as the music: “Evil genius romps about the stage, suppressing everything, while devils have become the main characters! This is indeed a sinister picture of the restoration of capitalism on the stage.”

Soviet music critics weep for the fate of the Peking opera, whose rich repertory of hundreds of masterpieces has been eliminated and replaced by a handful of worthless “revolutionary model operas.” One reason the Peking opera had to go was that Mao’s henchmen felt implied threats from its Aesopian language: “in every character, in every situation, the Maoists’ sick imagination felt an allusion.” The same fate has befallen the ballet, whose ballerinas now carry rifles to attack imaginary bourgeois fortresses.

The Chinese critics are most indignant of all when it comes to popular music—specifically the Soviet surrender to the wishes of young people to hear jazz and other mod music from the West.

Disguised as “cultural co-operation,” degenerate Western music, commercialized jazz, has become the rage in the Soviet revisionist musical, dancing, and theatrical world. . . . As a result, various weird-named American and British jazz bands have performed in the Soviet Union.

The Russians could hardly be expected to defend jazz festivals, but they do counter such charges with their own broadsides against the politicization of popular music. In one commentary they noted that the stirring old songs of the Chinese revolutionary movement had been abandoned, and new words had been set to the tunes. The new lyrics “praise Mao, his current policies, and the threat of war from the Soviet Union” and are “published in all newspapers and endlessly broadcast by the radio.”

The non-Communist bystander can only react to these arguments with a certain amount of amusement, and it is not unlikely that the people on the receiving end regard them the same way. The great majority of the charges go unanswered. Aside from an occasional angry riposte resulting from wounded national pride, there is little evidence that the charges are taken very seriously. Neither government is concerned enough to put up funds for systematic jamming of the broadcasts, and while the USSR tries to prevent Chinese printed matter from coming into the country (as it does for all unfriendly materials), the Chinese have from time to time reprinted the Soviet charges with a brief editorial note asking readers to see how ridiculous they are. While each side claims a large, sympathetic audience in the other country, there is no evidence of a large number of converts.

This propaganda is to some extent intended to persuade the rest of the world (the broadcasts are usually aimed directly at the adversary in his language, but elaborate translation services turn out news releases and magazines in all major languages). Its influence cannot be measured, but the total effect must be negative, judging from the singular lack of success of each side in converting the third world. If there are impressionable Marxist-leaning leaders of the future looking to Moscow and Peking for guidance, their frustration must be equal to that of Christendom five centuries ago when two rival popes demanded allegiance.

Each country reveals something about its view of the world in this propaganda, even through the thick layers of self-righteousness and hypocrisy. The Chinese revolutionists are still in the fiery, youthful, idealistic stage, while the Russians have reached middle age and want its comforts. In some respects the Chinese are where the USSR was a quarter-century ago: many of these charges are similar to those Stalin hurled at the West. And unquestionably the USSR has softened somewhat in the last two decades; its lecturing of the Chinese on human rights and tyranny could hardly have been made in Stalin’s day. The big question is whether the Chinese have also begun to move in this direction, and there are indications of such motion in the new diplomacy and the dampening of the fires of the Cultural Revolution.

Above all, these cultural polemics add a new dimension to the proposition that the Sino-Soviet conflict is deep and fundamental. These charges are somehow more drastic and irrevocable than border disputes, which can be settled on a legal basis. The good old days of a mere twenty years ago, when cultural agreements were signed with great fanfare, when cultural troupes of every description traveled between Moscow and Peking, and the press was full of congratulations of the cultural achievements of the other, seem far removed, and not likely to return.

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ESSAY; Moscow's China Card

By William Safire

Sept. 8, 1986

Every decade or so, China undergoes a political convulsion. In 1948-49, the Communists threw out the Kuomintang; in 1956, Mao's ''Great Leap Forward'' plunged the country into a depression; in 1966, the Cultural Revolution to purify the party brought on a new Dark Ages; in 1976-78, we saw Mao's would-be radical successors, the ''Gang of Four,'' replaced by pragmatic Deng Xiaoping.

Now we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the death of Mao, and some Pekingologists would have us believe that this decade's upheaval will not come.

Mr. Deng, at 82, has provided for his succession, we are assured: it's all set for Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang to succeed him, with Hu Qili of the next generation right behind. Not to worry, goes the current Edgar Snow-job: China's new era of ''commutalism,'' communism with a capitalist face, will march undisturbed into the next millennium.

I wonder. Maybe the conventional wisdom will prove right for once. But for argument's sake, let's look at what is happening in China through a different set of glasses, seeking truth from facts.

Fact number one is that a wave of materialism is sweeping across the billion people of China. After a generation of repression, good ol' greed is back in the saddle, and an I'm-all right-Deng attitude permeates the new entrepreneurs.

As a longtime expositor of the virtue of greed in powering the engine of social progress, I cannot cluck-cluck at this. But there is a difference between the materialism of the Chinese on Taiwan, who are accustomed to free enterprise, and the lust for the good life of available goods on the mainland, where a terrible thirst has been a-building.

Let us assume that the outburst of materialism in China leads to some reaction: that some spoilsport faction emerges to summon up the ghost of Mao's ideological purity, and that this new gang of fortyish Outs finds its way back in. It is at least a possibility.

I think that shrewd old Deng is well aware of this possibility. That is why, despite his ostentatious rejection of personal cultdom, he is preparing his most dramatic assault on the memory of Mao. That father of the revolution startled the world by breaking with the Soviet Union; Mr. Deng, playing a revisionist Lenin to Mao's Marx, wants to startle the world and overwhelm internal opposition by a rapprochement with Moscow.

Accordingly, fact two: He has abandoned his demand that Russia move back its huge army from the Chinese border, thereby double-crossing his own Army leaders. He has forgotten his requirement that Soviet forces be withdrawn from Afghanistan, thereby double-crossing his Westernish ally, Pakistan.

All Mr. Deng now asks of the Russians is that they try to squeeze their Vietnamese clients to pull out of Cambodia. Of course they'll try - ''best efforts'' is an easy promise - and since the Vietnamese are notoriously independent, Moscow cannot be blamed for not succeeding. Result: Mr. Deng takes the salute from atop the wall in Red Square.

That reestablishes his Communist credentials, defanging hard-left opposition at home. And it is Middle Kingdom orthodoxy; I suspect Chinese agents in the U.S. supply the K.G.B. with intelligence, just as Peking permits our Big Ears on its soil to overhear Kremlin transmissions. Chinese policy has always been to play the barbarians against each other.

This theory would also explain fact three: Mr. Gorbachev's seizure of a U.S. newsman as hostage. It is no coincidence that this particular hostage selection follows China's arrest and expulsion of a reporter for a U.S. newspaper. The Soviet leader, advised by Anatoly Dobrynin, must have known that this slap in the face would jeopardize a summit - and went ahead with his calculated humiliation, similar to Mr. Nixon's mining of Haiphong harbor before his Moscow summit in 1972.

Because the Russians now have the prospect of a pilgrimage to Moscow by Mr. Deng, they can taunt the U.S. President with impunity. As Mr. Dobrynin probably predicted, Mr. Reagan is reduced to begging for the hostage's release, in effect volunteering testimony to a Soviet court, in his eagerness to crown his Presidency with a peacemaking summit.

Now Mr. Gorbachev can hang tough, holding a show trial and thereby delaying negotiations with the U.S. until the Deng visit - or can graciously accede to the Reagan plea, thereby establishing his dominance. And the overconfident Mr. Reagan never suspected, as he sat down to summit poker, that this time the China card was in his opponent's hand.

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古今散文英译集,英译本,英文版,卜立德译, The Chinese Essay trans by David E. Pollard
古今散文英译集,英译本,英文版,卜立德译, The Chinese Essay trans by David E. Pollard 2000
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The Chinese essay = [Ku chin san wen Ying i chi]
The Chinese essay = [Ku chin san wen Ying i chi] ... Pollard, David E Autocrop_version ..14_books-20220331-.2 Boxid IA40917912 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier urn:lcp:chineseessaykuch0000unse:epub:ba33ae00-2fb2-41af-85fc-d354fe464afb ... PDF access not available for this item.
The Chinese Essay
The Chinese Essay. Though collections of Chinese fiction, poetry, and drama abound, there have been no English-language anthologies of Chinese essays on the market. Now, veteran sinologist David Pollard has selected and translated the best and most representative examples of Chinese prose writing from the third century to the contemporary period.
The Chinese Essay: An Anthology
The Chinese Essay. : Columbia University Press, 2002 - Education - 372 pages. Though collections of Chinese fiction, poetry, and drama abound, there have been no English-language anthologies of Chinese essays on the market. Now, veteran sinologist David Pollard has selected and translated the best and most representative examples of Chinese ...
The Chinese Essay
The Chinese Essay. Edited and translated by David E. Pollard. 1999. 400 pages. ISBN 962-7255-21-1. Order.
The Chinese Essay
The Chinese Essay. David E. Pollard. Hurst, 2000 - Literary Collections - 372 pages. This anthology presents as selection of Chinese prose compositions from the 3rd century AD to the present. The essays start from the early masters of the form, Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, take in the stalwarts of the middle generations, like Ye Shengtao, Zhu Ziqing ...
Amazon.com: The Chinese Essay: 9780231121194: Pollard, David: Books
Now, veteran sinologist David Pollard has selected and translated the best and most representative examples of Chinese prose writing from the third century to the contemporary period. Succinctly tracing the history of the genre in China in his introduction, Pollard then wittily and informatively introduces each writer chosen. ...
The Chinese Essay by David E. Pollard
The Chinese Essay by David E. Pollard, 1999, The Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong edition, Hardcover in English
The Chinese Essay
"Though collections of Chinese fiction, poetry, and drama abound, there have been no English-language anthologies of Chinese essays on the market. Now, veteran sinologist David Pollard has selected and translated the best and most representative examples of Chinese prose writing from the third century to the contemporary period. Succinctly tracing the history of the genre in China in his ...
The Chinese Essay
David Pollard is a veteran scholar of sinology and one of the most respected interpreters and translators of the Chinese essay. He was previously professor of Chinese at the University of London and professor of translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he coedited Renditions, the Chinese-English translation journal, with his wife, Eva Hung.
The Chinese essay = by David Pollard
October 28, 2022. Edited by ImportBot. import existing book. September 26, 2008. Created by ImportBot. Imported from Miami University of Ohio MARC record . The Chinese essay = by David Pollard, 2000, Columbia University Press edition, in English.
The Chinese Essay by David Pollard
The Chinese Essay by David Pollard, March 15, 2000, Columbia University Press edition, Paperback in English. It looks like you're offline. Donate ♥. Čeština (cs) Deutsch (de) English (en) ...
The Chinese essay
This anthology presents as selection of Chinese prose compositions from the 3rd century AD to the present. The essays start from the early masters of the form, Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, take in the stalwarts of the middle generations , like Ye Shengtao, Zhu Ziqing, Feng Zikai, Liang Shiqiu and Liang Yuchun, and conclude with living writers who publish in Taiwan and the mainland. The aim has been ...
The Chinese Essay
The European essay was of course an important context for the modern Chinese essay, but Pollard is probably putting unnecessary emphasis on features peculiar to the European tradition ("absence of dignity," "refining and directing sensibilities to create a polity that was new and particular," "entertainment value," [p. xii-xiii ...
The Chinese Essay: An Anthology
The Chinese Essay: An Anthology. Hardcover - 15 March 2000. Veteran sinologist David Pollard has selected and translated the best and most representative examples of Chinese prose writing from the third century to the contemporary period. Though spanning the past 1,800 years, the bulk of the selections are from the twentieth century and range ...
Amazon.com: The Chinese Essay: 9780231121187: Pollard, David: Books
The Chinese Essay. Hardcover - March 15, 2000. Veteran sinologist David Pollard has selected and translated the best and most representative examples of Chinese prose writing from the third century to the contemporary period. Though spanning the past 1,800 years, the bulk of the selections are from the twentieth century and range from early ...
The Chinese Essay by David E. Pollard
Succinctly tracing the history of the genre in China in his introduction, Pollard then wittily and informatively introduces each writer chosen. The selections themselves include Ye Shengtao's ruminations of making a boat trip to visit his ancestors' graves, Fan Bao on life in prison, Gui Yougang's reminiscence of his mother, Yuan Mei's essay on ...
The Chinese Essay
Edited and translated by David E. Pollard. 1999. 400 pages. ISBN 962-7255-21-1. Table of contents. This anthology of seventy-four representative essays from the 3rd century to the late 20th century is the first of its kind in a Western language. The translations are prefaced by an informative historical survey as well as commentaries on each ...
IV Book Reviews : DAVID POLLARD (Trans., Ed.), The Chinese Essay
IV Book Reviews : DAVID POLLARD (Trans., Ed.), The Chinese Essay. Columbia University Press, New York, 2000, xvi + 372 pp. $49/50 (HB) G.P. Deshpande View all authors and affiliations
The Moscow Trials and the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938: What the
The Moscow Trials and the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938: What the Evidence Shows. Grover Furr July 31 2010 [To be added at the end of Part One of "Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform"]. Since my two-part essay "Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform" was written in 2004-5, a great deal more evidence has been published concerning the Opposition, the Moscow Trials of 1936, 1937 ...
Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
The only original German works of substance in this science, however - other than Weitling's writings - are the essays by Hess published in Einundzwanzig Bogen [3] and Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie by Engels in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, where also the basic elements of this work have been indicated by me in a ...
The Sad State of Cultural Life In Moscow (Or Peking) As Viewed From
In the old days Chinese rural areas were blessed with popular forms of art; Chinese theatrical performers would tell stories and give performances and magic shows. . . . Thousands upon thousands of native theatrical groups used to roam from village to village giving performances, but the Maoists today have wiped out the native arts the same way ...
Opinion
See the article in its original context from September 8, 1986, Section A, Page 23 September 8, 1986, Section A, Page 23

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The Moscow Trials and the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938: What the Evidence Shows

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