By Sophia Liu, V Form

A Quest for Purity: The Nuances Between Stalin’s Great Purge and Mao’s Cultural Revolution

In the 20th century, the concept of an intentional and permanent revolution for the proletariats called Communism spread across the continent. Although the philosophy of Communism is the true embodiment of the people, they in fact became oppressed under a number of the Communist regimes, such as Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. In 1922, Joseph Stalin rose to power after the death of Vladimir Lenin. He established a totalitarian regime based on terror and propaganda throughout the next three decades; especially during the Great Purge, when an estimate between 600,000 to 3 million people were killed, having been labelled ‘counter-revolutionary.’ Meanwhile, a parallel event was taking place south of the Soviet Union. After a long power struggle both externally and internally, the Chinese communist party came to power under the lead of Mao Zedong, who also imposed a totalitarian regime upon the country. Similarly, Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution (1966-1967) radically oppressed any ‘counter-revolutionary’ ideas, culminating with the death of hundreds of thousands of people. Many of those killed were intellectuals, ‘bourgeois’, and political opponents of Mao. The two revolutions surprisingly had very different outcomes. After the death of Stalin in 1953, Khrushchev rose to power and openly denounced Stalin in his ‘On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.’ Similarly, the public perception of Stalin were generally negative immediately after the end of his regime. In the long term, the Soviet Union collapsed. (more…)