The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by Halberstam David

Author:Halberstam, David [Halberstam, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2007-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

IF THERE WERE historic forces working against a true alliance, the relationship was made much more difficult by Stalin’s megalomania and by the fact that both men ruled nations where there was no opposition party, and where sycophancy was something of an art form. By 1949, Stalin was already the Great Stalin, and the beneficiary, as it were, of a relentless, all-encompassing cult of personality, while Mao was a relative ingenue in the creation of such a cult: the Soviet cult of personality had already been in effect for at least twenty years. According to the historian Walter Laquer, it had started in December 1929, at the time of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday. Leonid Leonov, a prominent Russian writer of the time, typically wrote of the great man that “the day would come when all mankind would revere him and history would recognize him as the starting point of time, not Jesus Christ.”

But Mao would soon rival him in the art of totalitarian self-glorification. He might at the beginning have had his doubts about the cult of personality, but he soon came to understand the greatest truth of self-glorification: like so many other dictators, he discovered that what was good for the leader was good for the revolution as well. Besides, as he emerged ever more clearly as China’s sole leader, he came to see himself as nothing less than a modern Chinese emperor. His favorite among his imperial predecessors, according to his doctor, Li Zhisui, was Emperor Zhou, a mythical tyrant supposedly much despised by most Chinese because of his appalling cruelty, a man who liked to mutilate and then display the bodies of potential rivals as a warning to other enemies. About his own special role in history and about his own greatness Mao was absolutely sure. It was something he spoke of constantly. “He was the greatest leader, the greatest emperor of them all—the man who had unified the country and would then transform it, the man who was restoring China to its original greatness,” as Dr. Li wrote.

In some ways he would prove to be very much like Stalin. The more he schemed against those around him, the more he came to believe that they were already scheming against him. He gradually got rid of all potential rivals, no matter their loyalty to him, to the Party, or to the revolution. As the cult grew, as the ordinary peasants of China came to revere Mao ever more, he became ever more distanced from them in lifestyle. No head of a capitalist society could have lived with more privilege or with more of his country’s resources diverted to him. Each province chief built a villa for him—he was always on the move, fearing he would become too much of a target for his enemies if he stayed in one place too long. No head of state in a free society could have lived as a comparable sexual predator, relentlessly devouring young peasant women, who were eager to serve their leader and thus their nation in whatever way he suggested.

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