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My Summary

Main Ideas, Takeaways & Similarities

Questions

I. What is the problem?
A. How is this problem formulated?
B. Why is this problem important?
C. What is the history of this problem?
D. Which prominent personalities have been interested in this problem?

II. What solutions to the problem are there?
A. What are the conclusions reached?
B. By what argument(s) is the conclusion reached?
C. What facts or assumptions serve as premises?
D. When a prominent personality offers a solution, does he also argue for or against other prominent personalities? Does he raise objections to alternative solutions? Does he consider objections to his own solutions?

III. Evaluation
A. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative formulations to the problem?
B. Has the importance or history of the problem ever been misrepresented?
C. Are the solutions logically related to the premises?
D. Are the facts true? Are the assumptions acceptable? Are the objections answerable?

AI Summary

Highlights

Lecture 1 Joseph Stalin: The Soviet Man of Steel (Page 11)

Stalin’s stealthy ascent, his crafting of a personality cult around the dead Lenin to cement his own power, and his dramatic and brutal transformation of Old Russia. (Page 11)

In the Marxist worldview, one individual should not have so overwhelmingly large a role. (Page 11)

It’s estimated that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of some 10 to 20 million, while some estimates go far higher than that. Yet his record is less known than it deserves to be because he was an ally of the United States during World War II, presented in propaganda as Uncle Joe, a down-to-earth, honest leader of the Soviet Union. (Page 11)

Georgian from the southern reaches of the tsarist empire, in the Caucasus region (Page 12)

expelled from Orthodox seminary in 1899 and converted to Marxism. was a revolutionary (Page 12)

By robbing banks to fund revolutionary action, Stalin gained prominence in the Bolshevik movement and was made a member of the Central Committee. Beginning in 1912, when he was in his early 30s, he spent time in Siberian exile, a kind of rite of passage for revolutionaries. He gained a reputation for crudeness, raw manners, and cruelty. (Page 12)

crucial talent: He was a very capable bureaucratic organizer as party general secretary. (Page 12)

Comrade Index Card (Page 12)

building a support base inside the bureaucracy of party and state. (Page 12)

He did not quite fit in with the often more cosmopolitan, well-traveled, and intellectual Old Bolsheviks who had shaped the movement. Later, he would take his revenge on them for looking down on him. (Page 12)

his natural heir seemed to be Leon Trotsky (Page 12)

Yet from behind the scenes, Stalin also laid claim to the top position. In place of permanent revolution, Stalin championed the formula of socialism in one country to build a power base in the homeland of the revolution, the Soviet Union. (Page 12)

Against Trotsky’s charisma, Stalin cultivated a reputation as a steady moderate—someone who conciliated extremes. (Page 13)

The Russian dissident writer Solzhenitsyn concluded that Stalin’s core trait was distrust of other people, and Stalin’s own personal secretary, Bazhanov, said that his main characteristics were “cunning, malevolence, political ambition, and a pathological desire for power,” cloaked in his silent manner and peasant cunning. (Page 13)

master at party infighting (Page 13)

back in 1921, Lenin had insisted on outlawing factions within the party, and now Stalin used that ban as a weapon. (Page 13)

By 1929, Stalin was the unquestioned supreme leader of the state. Some historians have preferred to think of Stalin as a distorter of Lenin’s project, with Lenin as merely a socialist in a hurry. But we need to consider that Lenin promoted Stalin, and Lenin first created the organs that Stalin later used, expanded, and perfected—the concentration camps, secret police, and exemplary use of revolutionary terror. (Page 13)

A series of Five-Year Plans was designed on the premise that scientifically and rationally directed economics would spur huge gains in productivity, exactly matching supply to demand, without the wasteful crises and misallocations of chaotic capitalism. A cult of planning reigned, with quotas set for production. (Page 14)

The first state priority was to secure control of the food supply, (Page 14)

collectivization of agriculture (Page 14)

state-owned collective farms, where peasants worked like factory laborers. (Page 14)

Agricultural production plummeted due to peasant resistance. Not only did farmers lose incentive to plant grain; they slaughtered livestock and burned crops rather than turn them over to the authorities. (Page 14)

Food became state property, and a 1932 law provided the death penalty for theft of food. (Page 14)

In Ukraine, collectivization policies caused the Great Famine of 1932–1933, known as the Holodomor, or “hunger killing.” Soviet troops seized grain from areas where hunger already threatened and closed off territories where resistance arose. This was not a natural disaster caused by climate or drought or a bad harvest; this was a political famine engineered (Page 14)

Estimates suggest that 5 to 7 million people starved in Ukraine. The Soviet government denied reports of the event, though Stalin is said to have later casually admitted to Churchill that 10 million died. (Page 15)

Culture had a political mission; it had to be simple, easily accessible, and unstinting in its praise of Stalin. (Page 15)

Militant atheism was the order of the state, visibly demonstrated in the destruction of churches, monasteries, and synagogues. Tens of thousands of clergy were arrested and executed in the 1930s. (Page 15)

The 1936 Stalin Constitution was full of guarantees for freedoms and extensive rights, celebrated the most democratic country on earth, and cemented the leading role of the Communist Party in the new society. But what came immediately afterward was the Great Terror, mass murder, and the realization of a Gulag state. (Page 16)

Lecture 2 The Stalinist Gulag State (Page 17)

Stalin’s will produced waves of purges and bizarre show trials in which the condemned confessed to the most extensive alleged crimes. Purges and show trials, however, were not Stalin’s invention but part of established Bolshevik practice. He merely elaborated on what had come before. (Page 17)

Expansion inevitably led to anxieties about the dilution of true belief, and that would prompt purges of those who had hidden their class backgrounds, missed meetings, drank heavily, or engaged in corruption. In the past, that meant merely losing one’s membership card. (Page 17)

The spark was provided by the mysterious assassination of the popular Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov, in December 1934. Many have since come to believe that Stalin had Kirov killed. Rumors circulated that Kirov had gotten longer and louder applause at meetings than Stalin, stirring his jealousy. Whatever the true story of the murder, Stalin exploited it as a pretext for what came to be called the Great Purge or Great Terror, at its height from 1936 to 1938. (Page 18)

Quotas and norms for arrests were sent to the NKVD, and local secret police chiefs vied to outdo one another in overproducing. (Page 19)

estimated that during the Great Purge of 1936 to 1938, some 600,000 were executed. (Page 20)

It’s estimated that the Gulag accounted for around 12% to 15% of the economy in the late 1930s. (Page 20)

An estimated 1.8 million died in the Gulag. In all, the total number of people imprisoned by Stalin is estimated at some 25 million, amounting to 15% of the population. (Page 21)

people were at the disposal of the state, rather than the state being a creation for the people. (Page 21)

Trotsky had warned of this development all the way back in 1903, before he joined the Bolsheviks, in a criticism of Lenin. Examining the implications of Lenin’s vanguard party idea, Trotsky warned, “the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the central committee.” (Page 21)

As Kołakowski formulated it, the ideal “appeared to be a situation where everyone in the country (except Stalin) was an inmate of a concentration camp and also an agent of the secret police.” A bitter joke claimed that once perfect communism was achieved, and the state and police withered away, people would learn to arrest themselves for improper thoughts or feelings. (Page 21)

Lecture 3 Pilgrims to Utopia: Foreigners in the USSR (Page 23)

Back in Paris, Steffens ran into the American financier Bernard Baruch, a presidential advisor to Woodrow Wilson. Baruch said, “So you’ve been over to Russia.” Steffens replied, “I have been over into the future, and it works!” (Page 23)

George Bernard Shaw (Page 24)

So skeptical and sarcastic about his own society, Shaw dropped those attitudes in admiring the Soviet Union. He wanted ardently to celebrate his 75th birthday in Moscow and was allowed to do so. (Page 24)

Foreign visitors claimed the model prison in Bolshevo was so pleasant that inmates refused to leave when their sentences were done. (Page 26)

The American visitors simply lacked a frame of reference to clearly see what an inmate called “this frozen hell with its hundreds of thousands of the damned.” Visitors who witnessed the Moscow show trials faced a similar problem of incomprehension. Many argued that no one would confess to such treasonous crimes unless they were really guilty. (Page 26)

Lecture 4 World War II: Steel Tempered in the Furnace (Page 29)

The Second World War proved a period of emergency, miscalculation, and then survival against the odds. It ended in victory for Stalin, which brought communism to its peak worldwide. Soon after World War II, a third of humanity was governed by Marxist regimes. (Page 29)

Stalin closed off the Soviet Union to wait until the capitalist world exhausted itself in another great war, at which point he would step in and inherit it all. (Page 29)

The slogan of German communists was “After Hitler, Our Turn!” That meant that instead of cooperating with the socialists to stop Hitler coming to power, the communists fought the socialists. The result was that when Hitler came to power in 1933, he defeated both the socialists and the communists and destroyed both of their formidable political organizations. An estimated 30,000 German communists perished in Nazi captivity. (Page 30)

The threatening international scene worsened in 1936, when Spain spiraled into civil war. The Spanish general Francisco Franco revolted against the government of the Spanish Republic, which was supported by an anti-fascist Popular Front of democrats, socialists of different types, anarchists, and communists. The ensuing proxy conflict between the fascist powers and the Soviet Union lasted for three years and cost some half a million lives, many of them civilians. (Page 30)

As this vicious war raged, it became increasingly clear that the communists, steered by orders from Stalin, were more interested in eliminating their competitors. The communists, controlling the police, purged in particular the anarchists and Trotskyists in the Popular Front. Franco’s forces were victorious in Spain by 1939, winning the proxy war that’s sometimes called a dress rehearsal for World War II. (Page 31)

What followed, however, was deeply bizarre. Stalin was upset with what he saw as the Western democracies’ attempt to divert Hitler eastward, particularly at the Munich Agreement of 1938, when they handed Czechoslovakian territory to Hitler. So, Stalin now responded eagerly to overtures from Nazi Germany for a nonaggression pact and secret clauses spelling out a division of Eastern Europe between them. (Page 31)

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or Hitler-Stalin Pact, was signed on August 23, 1939. When the news broke worldwide, it came as a huge shock— especially to lower-ranking Nazis and communists who had just been abusing one another as archenemies. (Page 31)

This surprising treaty allowed Hitler to start World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Then, on September 17, the Soviets moved in to take their share. From now on, the Soviets delivered goods to Germany and raw materials to aid their war in the West. Stalin also handed over an estimated 4,000 German exiles to the Nazis. (Page 31)

To secure control of the Baltic, Stalin now launched the Finnish Winter War of 1939–1940. Soviet forces invaded Finland, but purges of the officer corps had left a weakened Red Army. Finnish ski troops, fighting winter guerilla warfare, inflicted terrible casualties on the Soviets. But at long last the Soviet numbers overwhelmed this country and forced it to sign over territory. Hitler looked on with glee, concluding that the Soviets were terminally militarily weak. This would be a factor in his own calculations when he attacked his ally. (Page 32)

Whereas Stalin had seemed to promise liberalization during the war, by 1946, he no longer addressed crowds as “brothers, sisters, friends, and countrymen,” but again as “comrades.” (Page 33)

Nearly 6 million Soviet soldiers had been captured by the Germans and suffered terribly. Those POWs who were returned from German captivity were sent straight on to Siberian Gulag camps for the crime of having surrendered. Within the Soviet Union, ethnic groups that were considered disloyal were deported en masse. (Page 33)

As divisions hardened between former allies, what Churchill aptly called an Iron Curtain descended on Europe. But Stalin was already thinking in wider terms. The Soviets were secretly at work on their own atomic weapons program to match the devastating weapon engineered by the US, and by 1949, they had their own bomb. Stalin’s attention also turned to war-torn Asia as an arena for further revolutionary advance. When China went communist in that same year, Marxism ruled more than a third of humanity. (Page 33)

Lecture 5 American Communists: Beyond the Red Scare (Page 34)

In the US, the process was especially convoluted, as two contending parties were formed in September 1919: the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party. The Comintern in Moscow intervened and ordered both parties to fuse, which they did by 1921, becoming the Communist Party of the United States of America, or CPUSA. (Page 34)

By 1939, the party had about 70,000 members. The communists claimed to speak for the growing masses of unemployed. They sought to encourage “fellow travelers” in the fields of education, science, and the arts—those who sympathized without formally being party members. They also made inroads into the union movement. (Page 35)

Communists were opposed to the segregation of African Americans, and the movement gained much sympathy when it championed the cause of the Scottsboro boys, nine African American teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. (Page 36)

Loyalty to the Soviet Union was evident in the movement’s clandestine role in espionage, which ran parallel to its aboveground, legal existence. Agents infiltrated government bureaucracies to gather information and sway policy. During the Second World War, Soviet spying on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb was prioritized. (Page 37)

Then came a key moment in the history of the CPUSA: the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. In America, the popular front of organizations and sympathizers that the CPUSA had built up over decades was destroyed as it became clear that the party followed the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union over all other commitments. Many communists quit the party or just dropped out, especially Jewish members disgusted by any common cause with Hitler’s Nazis. (Page 37)

Not surprisingly, the fortunes of the CPUSA declined steeply from the 1950s. When the Soviet Union revealed Stalin’s crimes and set about de-Stalinizing, there was a large exodus from the party. The CPUSA continues to be active today from its headquarters in Manhattan, but it’s a shadow of its former self. (Page 39)

Lecture 6 The Soviet Elephant and the Secret Speech (Page 40)

High Stalinism (Page 40)

Zhdanov announced that the world was split into two hostile camps: the imperialist West and the democratic East. Western influences needed to be driven out so that the greatness of the Soviet order would be recognized (Page 40)

The world’s most productive agriculture was promised by the crank Trofim Lysenko, an alleged biologist and agronomist. Rejecting Mendelian genetics, Lysenko championed outlandish ideas of densely planted crops cooperating to help each other grow. His pseudoscience destroyed the field of Soviet genetics, subjecting all work to political criteria of usefulness. He claimed wheat could produce rye seeds. Although promising record harvests, Lysenkoism set the stage for agricultural disasters, especially when his wild promises were imported by communist China. (Page 41)

In the fall of 1949, Chinese communists had won their civil war and declared the People’s Republic of China. In 1950, Stalin’s North Korean comrade Kim Il-Sung launched an invasion of South Korea with Stalin’s approval and later with Chinese communist backing. The Americans and their allies would be distracted by and fully concentrated on that conflict. (Page 41)

Nikita Khrushchev (Page 43)

Berlin Workers’ Uprising of June 16 and 17, 1953. (Page 43)

Soviet delegates were summoned to an unscheduled secret assembly. Khrushchev spoke for almost four grinding hours, denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, his crimes, his abuses of power, his mistakes during the war, and the violence against committed communist party members on invented and absurd charges of treason or espionage. The answer was to renew the party and return to Leninism, pure and undiluted by personality cults. In his denunciation (Page 44)

The Soviet repression of Hungary led many communists worldwide to quit the movement. (Page 44)

Lecture 7 Building East Germany, Albania, and Romania (Page 46)

internal contradiction that promises of social togetherness actually led to individual isolation. (Page 46)

But the economy faced a key problem: the continuing drain of the best and brightest workers who “voted with their feet” and simply moved to the west—especially in Berlin, where the western zones of the city controlled by the Americans, British, and French were accessible. Flight from the republic became a criminal offense, but by 1960, more than 2 million had fled. By late 1960, 2,500 a day were leaving. (Page 47)

Propaganda presented this not as a measure of imprisonment but as a defense to fend off incursions from the corrupt and scheming West. (Page 48)

Meant to cement the existence of the East German state, the building of the Berlin Wall, as an implicit admission of failure to win support, proved one of the biggest turning points in the history of communism. (Page 48)

A different context for communist construction was Albania—a highly unlikely location for a Marxist revolution, given its intense underdevelopment as the poorest region in Europe. Between the world wars, Albania was ruled by the dictator King Zog. (Page 49)

By 1967, Albania declared itself the first officially atheist country in the world. Mosques and churches were shut down and turned into sports centers or warehouses. Starting in 1967, Hoxha began a (Page 50)

A final fascinating case of national communism comes from Romania. During the Second World War, Romania fought alongside the Axis powers before switching sides late in the war. Afterward, with the Soviet army in occupation, Romania’s relatively weak communist party found itself launched into power. (Page 50)

COMMUNISM IN ASIA (Page 53)

October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in front of some 200,000 people gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. (Page 54)

China is one of the world’s most ancient civilizations. The country was first unified politically in 221 BCE, and for a long time it was among the richest countries of the world. Then, in the 19th century, China became a victim of imperialism. Britain fought a series of Opium Wars to force China to accept their drug trade, and in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, they forced the creation of treaty ports where foreigners were active under their own laws. The British also grabbed Hong Kong, which they would hold until 1997. (Page 54)

From 1850 to 1864, the Taiping Rebellion took perhaps 20 million lives. A profoundly depressing sense of weakness set in when even Japan started conquering China in 1894. During the Boxer Rebellion of 1899 to 1901, European imperialists, Japan, and the US intervened to crush a nationalist uprising. (Page 54)

Then, in the aftermath of Lenin’s 1917 seizure of power in Russia and the creation of the Soviet Union, a new formula for rapid progress appeared internationally. This was the alluring formula of a shortcut to modernity. A small group of young Chinese radicals followed it, among them Mao. The communists saw the answer to China’s problems in a new ideology imported from the West: Marxism and its program of scientific socialism, which would, it was promised, eliminate class exploitation by establishing the dictatorship of the working class. (Page 55)

With Comintern encouragement and financial help, Chinese radicals founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in July 1921. Among them was Mao, who was a young assistant at the Peking University library at the time. At first, the Guomindang and the CCP worked together on the orders of the Comintern. The Comintern’s judgment was that China was not ready yet for a proletarian revolution but needed first to undergo much more development. (Page 55)

The communists needed to pull back to peasant regions. Mao became chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic established in Jiangxi in 1931. But when the Guomindang encircled the communists in 1934, they were forced to undertake a retreat all the way across the country to Yan’an. To escape the nationalists and pursue their rival program of modernization, the communists undertook a so-called Long March from 1934 to 1935. Some 60,000 died on the yearlong march, and only several thousand survived. (Page 56)

Estimates of Chinese deaths in the Second SinoJapanese War range from 15 to 35 million. Historians stress the trauma of this war as a factor in leading to the success of communist revolution. (Page 56)

Whereas traditional thought had valued order, harmony, and stability, Mao praised turmoil and revolution. In propaganda, he was presented as having adapted Marxism-Leninism to Chinese realities. Rather than dogmatically and slavishly following earlier models, Mao was said to have Sinified Marxism in a pragmatic way. (Page 57)

transition to imposing new communist rule over so vast a country and civilization was wrenching. Mao later admitted that 800,000 people were “liquidated” in the first five years: nationalists, landlords, and officials. Some estimates run to nearly 2 million. (Page 57)

peasants were ordered to denounce and attack their more prosperous neighbors and landlords. Large meetings were held to denounce and beat these targeted people. Their property was seized, and they were labeled class enemies. (Page 57)

Activists agitated for radical social change, working to eliminate illiteracy, foot-binding among women, and traditional medicine. They also launched attacks on the past and traditional life, banning songs and opera, destroying temples, and plowing over ancestral graves. Western missionaries were expelled. Waves of purges in the cities and among government offices took place. Endless meetings communicated the new expectations. Mao felt he needed to have constructive criticism and to be sure of the total loyalty of his party. In the Hundred Flowers (Page 58)

Campaign of 1956 to 1957, he encouraged open discussion. This seeming liberalization lured forth dissidents whom Mao then attacked. A million party members were purged in the repression that followed (Page 58)

By 1960, famine was raging, and cases of cannibalism were recorded. Desperate farmers stripped bark from trees, stole grain or sweet potatoes to devour in secret, or even ate clay to fill starving stomachs. This cataclysm left up to 40 million dead, starved, or killed in repressions. It has been estimated that the Soviet Union and China together account for 80% of the famine deaths of the 20th century. (Page 59)

Mao keenly resented being treated as a junior partner. After Stalin’s death, he increasingly despised the Soviet Union and was convinced that the revolutionary torch had been passed to China. And Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech appalled Mao. If collective leadership became the new model in communism, he would be downgraded. (Page 59)

In 1960, Khrushchev withdrew all of the hundreds of Soviet advisors from China. China denounced the Soviets as revisionists. (Page 59)

China’s Cultural Revolution Lecture 9 (Page 61)

Cultural Revolution that gripped China officially lasted from 1966 to 1976, when Mao died. Historians often divide it into two phases: the first from 1966 to 1968, involving tremendous upheavals and instability, and then a longer phase of consolidation. (Page 61)

A series of ferocious campaigns focused on traces of the past. The Four Olds— old thought, old culture, old customs, old habits—were to be obliterated. In a total break, centuries of traditional culture and Confucian values were to be replaced by Mao Zedong Thought, which would be a brand-new modernity. The regime did not speak of a separate Maoism as such but rather presented Mao Zedong Thought as the correct Chinese culmination of MarxismLeninism. (Page 62)

Across the country, suspects were denounced and arrested. Killings became common. The laogai camps filled with a million people who were to be reeducated and reformed through hard labor. Elsewhere, ordinary people were forced to participate in public rituals of self-criticism to show the proper revolutionary consciousness. (Page 63)

Schools and universities were shut down, and teachers and professors were ritually humiliated. Ji Xianlin, a professor at Peking University, gives testimony in his book The Cowshed, named after the campus prison where he and his colleagues were confined for nine months and brutalized by students. (Page 63)

In Hong Kong, then still a British colony, corpses could be seen drifting downstream from China, a dire hint of what was unfolding. (Page 64)

Mao presided over this surging chaos, feeling that the turmoil would ultimately be productive, whatever the cost. At a remove from the disorder, he enjoyed a life of luxury. Some historians have compared his self-indulgent rule to that of the very Chinese emperors who were condemned by communist ideology. (Page 64)

After Mao’s death, leaders sought stability. Copies of the Little Red Book were shelved. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping introduced a reform era which pressed the so-called Four Modernizations: agriculture, industry, military, and science. He sought to unleash China’s economic potential while retaining political control for the Communist Party. This brought new global trade with China and a flood of Chinese students studying abroad. (Page 65)

Lecture 10 Dynastic Communism in North Korea (Page 66)

Korea was formed in the premodern period from a band of contending states. Earlier, it had often been in China’s cultural orbit, from which it got its Confucian philosophical background. Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910 as part of Japan’s foray into modern imperialism. Brutal occupation was followed by war and liberation. (Page 66)

After World War II, Korea was to become again a unified independent country, but with the Cold War came division along the 38th parallel. As in the German lands, two separate states were declared. In 1948, South Korea emerged under American patronage. North Korea was established with Soviet guidance, with the official title Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. (Page 66)

Then, with Stalin’s go-ahead, North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung invaded the south on June 25, 1950, to forcibly unify the country. When US and United Nations troops repelled the invasion and advanced northward, China intervened. Before the ceasefire in 1953, the war claimed 3 million dead, lead to untold devastation, and left the border again at the 38th parallel, as before the conflict. (Page 66)

with natural disasters and the breakdown of the government-controlled economy and distribution system, in the mid-1990s, famine wracked the land, killing an estimated 2 to 3 million. (Page 67)

North Korea is the most extreme example of personality cult on record. (Page 67)

Lecture 11 Ho Chi Minh and Vietnamese Nationalism (Page 72)

would later work to drive out the French imperialists and then to defeat the American superpower to establish communist rule in his native land. (Page 72)

Vietnam has a fascinating history of resistance, determination, and selfassertion. In the ancient period, it was under Chinese imperial rule for 1,000 years. It regained independence and became a state in the 10th century, under the name Dai Viet. The kingdom was renamed Vietnam in 1802. (Page 72)

Nine hundred years of independence was ended with French invasion and colonial rule in 1858. The French called the larger area they had seized— including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—Indochina, which was quite inaccurate, as people in the region defined themselves as distinct from India or China. The harshness of French rule produced nationalist movements in Vietnam, recalling past glories and seeking to reestablish them. (Page 72)

When peace came, he petitioned the Treaty of Versailles negotiators for reforms in Indochina but was entirely ignored. How much of what followed could have turned out differently if US president Woodrow Wilson and his colleagues had taken note and applied self-determination more evenly and broadly? (Page 73)

Even before Maoism, Ho was stressing the revolutionary potential of peasants. (Page 73)

Japan conquered Vietnam and undermined French colonial rule. Vietnamese communists rallied a guerilla movement called the Viet Minh, which rolled into Hanoi the moment Japan surrendered in 1945. To the astonishment of his countrymen, who thought he was dead, Ho materialized in the role of leader. (Page 74)

In the Geneva Accords that year, the warring parties agreed that Vietnam would be divided along the 17th parallel until elections to be held in 1956 to unify the country. Ho’s communists were established in power in the north. (Page 74)

The countrywide elections planned in the Geneva Accords did not take place, and the US stepped in to support the vulnerable South Vietnamese state against communist expansion. It first sent advisors and then massive numbers of troops to fight the insurgency of the Viet Cong, the communist guerillas in South Vietnam supported and directed by the North Vietnamese Army. (Page 75)

The Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive of January 1968 was meant to demonstrate the invincibility of communist efforts. Viet Cong attacks commenced all around the country and were meant to produce a general uprising against the government. While it did not achieve its military aims, its impact on American opinion was crushing, overturning confidence that the communists had been ground down in the conflict to date. It intensified a domestic rift, undercutting support for the intervention which seemed to have no end. (Page 75)

Beginning in 1978, a seemingly impossible scene unfolded as communist countries went to war. First, after Cambodia scorned Vietnamese plans for a union of Indochina under Vietnamese leadership, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978. Then China invaded Vietnam in the next year to support its Cambodian ally. The fighting between China and Vietnam lasted for three weeks at the borders before dying down. (Page 76)

Rapprochement with the US was also welcomed as a balance against growing Chinese power in the region. Full diplomatic relations with the US were reestablished in 1995, and Vietnam joined the World Trade Organization in 2007. The results produced epic transformations in psychology and policy. (Page 77)

Lecture 12 Pol Pot and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge (Page 78)

The formidable Khmer Empire ruled in Indochina from the 9th to 15th centuries, but then the country came under Thai rule. Cambodia became a French colonial protectorate in the 19th century and then was occupied by Japan in World War II. It became an independent kingdom in 1953, under Prince Norodom Sihanouk. (Page 78)

Given that Cambodia was still quite underdeveloped, communist hopes focused on radicalizing the peasantry. The communist guerrilla movement came to be called the Khmer Rouge, or “Red Khmer.” From the late 1950s, they tried to wage guerrilla campaigns against the royal government of Prince Sihanouk, but the royalty remained popular with the peasants. (Page 78)

By a certain grim inevitability, Cambodia was drawn into the Cold War. Though Cambodia declared neutrality in the Vietnam conflict, it was infiltrated by the Vietnamese Viet Cong, with sections of the Ho Chi Minh Trail running through its territory. The Khmer Rouge also received substantial aid from North Vietnam. On the other side, American and South Vietnamese forces intervened secretly. (Page 79)

Instability grew. In 1970, the monarchy was overthrown by an army coup led by Lon Nol. Where earlier Sihanouk had tried to keep Cambodia neutral in the war raging just next door, Lon Nol turned to the Americans for help. As a result, the Khmer Rouge aligned themselves with Prince Sihanouk against the new military government, in a truly strange alliance between royalty with communists. From the early 1970s, American bombing raids directed against communist forces in Cambodia also took a toll on civilians and destabilized the society. (Page 79)

Cambodia was renamed Democratic Kampuchea. Its new government was steered by the mysterious leader figure Pol Pot. If there are gaps in our understanding of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, there are more gaps than facts about Pol Pot, who was secretive in the extreme. (Page 79)

The Workers’ Party of Kampuchea had been founded in 1960 at the behest of Vietnamese comrades, and in 1963 Sar became its general secretary. (Page 80)

Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 until its overthrow in 1979. In contrast to other dictators, Pol Pot remained obscure, and no cult of personality was constructed around him. It took an entire year for outside experts to find out who he really was. His family members were shocked to realize who was ruling their land. (Page 81)

The regime followed radical measures to purify the society while cutting the country off from the world and seeking autarky. Money was abolished in one week. Markets were shut down, and private property was banned. Children were put into separate work brigades away from their parents. All Cambodians were ordered to wear black clothes. Religion, writing, and education all disappeared. Only arranged marriages approved by the Khmer Rouge were allowed. (Page 81)

The results of these policies proved chaotic. For Pol Pot, Mao’s China was a compelling example. The aim of his policies was not only to imitate Mao’s Great Leap Forward but to surpass it, with more thorough radicalism and record rice harvests. In fact, the collapse of agriculture led to famine and cases of cannibalism. Suspecting sabotage, the Khmer Rouge movement began to purge itself of alleged enemies, and prisons filled with former members. (Page 81)

In the opening campaign for ruralization, cities were ordered to empty out in 24 hours. Thousands of the displaced died in the forced marches. Former city dwellers were labeled as New People and were segregated from the peasantry, who were seen as the new elite, called the Base People. Through repeated deportations, the New People were decimated. (Page 81)

Schools, monasteries, and hospitals were all shut down. Those who were educated, spoke foreign languages, or wore glasses were slated for execution as enemies of the people. Buddhist monks as well as members of minority religions and ethnic minorities were also eliminated. At least 100,000 executions took place. An estimated 1.7 million out of a total population of 7 million—or nearly a quarter of Cambodians—died as a result of the Khmer Rouge’s policies, through killing, hunger, and abuse. (Page 81)

In the end, Pol Pot and his comrades provoked their own collapse by clashing with and even raiding into neighboring Vietnam. Pol Pot and his regime were carried away with triumphalism, believing their revolution was so successful that it would inspire international support and emulation. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, and the Khmer Rouge government was overthrown by January 1979. The Vietnamese set up a puppet regime friendly to Vietnam. (Page 82)

Even after their overthrow, Khmer Rouge forces continued to fight in border areas and from within Thailand. They got aid from China to continue their struggle. (Page 82)

What was most important in this strange interlude was the very fact of the war between former allies. One communist country had invaded another communist state, leading in turn to a third communist country’s armed intervention. This was a pivotal turning point, as it undermined a key promise of communist internationalism and fraternity within a global movement. (Page 82)