The making of the
Cold War
Potsdam on Germany
• The Conference was organised in a Berlin suburb between July 17th and
August 2nd, 1945.
• The division of Germany and Austria into four respective occupation
zones (US, British, French and Soviet) was sealed.
• In addition to returning to post-Versailles borders, Germany would lose
a number of territories: Silesia, Pomerania and parts of East Prussia to
Poland and the rest of East Prussia with Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) to
the USSR. German population was about to be forcefully resettled from
those territories into Germany.
• Germany was also tasked with paying reparations for the war
• Policy toward postwar Germany was agreed on to be based on 4Ds:
• Denazification – removing Nazi people and instutions from public
life, making Nazi leaders answer personally for the war
• Demilitarisation – completely disbanding Nazi armed forces
• Decartelisation – disbanding or dividing big industrial
conglomerates, public or private, that were responsible for
running Nazi war economy
• Demoracratisation – imposing a political system on Germany that
would make it a stable democracy; a part of it was
decentralisation (sometimes called the 5th D) – creating a federal
government with strong powers at provincial level, just like in the
US
Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials
• As a a part of denazification, a special military tribunal was set up in 1945
to try Nazi leaders for war crimes, as well as crimes against peace (crime
of aggression) and crimes against humanity that were defined for the first
time in Nuremberg Charter, which meant that international law was
made to act backward in time.
• 12 out of 22 Nazi leaders, including Goring, Ribbentrop and Frank, were
sentenced to death by hanging. Some had committed suicide before the
sentence or before the execution. A few of the indicted expressed
repentance.
• In 1946, a similar International Military Tribunal for the Far East was
created in Tokyo, sentencing 7 Japanese to death by hanging for the
same set of crimes as above, including two former prime ministers, Tojo
and Hirota.
• Similar trials were held for Nazi allies (e.g. Norway tried and executed
Quisling in 1945 and Romania did the same with Antonescu in 1946). The
hunt for Nazi war criminals who had escaped continued long after the
war, mostly by Israeli services. Their greatest success would the capture
of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. He was then tried and executed
in Israel.
• No war crimes committed by the Allies, like the bombing of Dresden or
the firebombing of Tokyo, were tried.
Creation of the United Nations
• Before the war was officially over, on June 26th, 1945 in San Francisico a global organisation
was created by the Allied countries – the UN. It replaced the League of Nations as the most
important. But while the League had the headquarters in Geneva, the UN had it in New York.
• The UN focus was peace and security, though it covered also socio-economic issues like human
rights (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948). The UN became a
parent organisation for a whole number of organisations, including important economic ones
like International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, called the World Bank) and
International Monatary Fund (IMF), both created earlier, in 1944 in Bretton Woods.
• Membership in the UN meant being a part of the global community. States not in the UN had
problems with being recognised by other states. Enemy states like Germany, Japan, Romania,
Hungary etc. weren’t part of it at first. They had to make an effort to join, and their acceptance
wasn’t automatic. It depended largely on joint support of the ‚Five Policemen’ – the US, the UK,
the USSR, China, and France.
• They were called the Parmanent Five or P-5 because only they held positions on the Securiy
Council of the UN all the time with the right to veto. The Security Council had the biggest
responsibility and the biggest power to impose various sanctions, including use of force. The
General Assembly, where all countries, big and small, were represented, had less power.
• It created a system in which international action depended on agreement between P-5.
Countries that had to wait to enter the UN or became powerful only after 1945, like Japan,
Germany, India or Brazil, have never been given that special position, they could only be
elected as non-permanent members of the Security Council, without the right to veto. As of
2023, even though the world has changed very much since 1945, this situation stays the same.
The Soviet strategy toward the
postwar order
• The USSR participated in creation of the new order, but at the same time
it tried to turn as many countries as possible into Soviet satellite states,
preparing for the expected clash between Communism and Western
democracies – World War 3. It also continued the buildup of its armies.
• In countries the Red Army occupied in Central and East Europe it put
Communists in power, introduced reforms mostly popular among
workers and farmers like land reform, and acted to brutally eliminate all
internal opposition to Soviet rule. The promise to hold free elections in
countries under Soviet control like Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary
made by Stalin in Yalta was not fulfilled.
• The Soviet Union also infiltrated the West. It supported Communist
parties in Italy, France and Germany which had large support and were
close to winning elections because of popularity of leftist ideas in Europe
destroyed by war. The USSR also built a spy network in the US to steal the
groundbreaking technology of producing nuclear weapons, which were a
game changer for any future war. Soviet efforts to have their own atomic
bomb would succeed in 1949. It was detonated in Semipalatinsk in
today’s Kazakhstan.
Poland as a case of Soviet policies (I)
• In Poland, Stalin was more careful in building a Communist regime because unlike most of countries in Central Europe Poland was not a
Nazi ally and an important member of the Allies, so the West at least pretended that it cared what would happen to it.
• Guerilla warfare against the Communist takeover continued by radical remnants of the Underground State and the Home Army (often
called ‚forsaken soldiers’) was being physically eliminated, its leaders imprisoned and executed, including the Polish war hero who had
infiltrated Auschwitz to bring truth about it to the world – Witold Pilecki. New Ministry of Public Security was key in the effort and
became infamous for its ruthless brutality. By 1947, most armed opposition in Poland was gone.
• On the other hand, the USSR encouraged land reform by giving its property from landowners to peasants and nationalising key sectors of
the economy. It also as supported postwar reconstruction (having already plundered Poland of most of its industrial capacity in 1945),
though the most effort came from Poles themselves, especially in rebuilding Warsaw as the capital from complete devastation.
• The USSR also supported social engineering – removing Ukrainians and Germans from their homes within Polish borders and forcefully
resettling Poles who had been leaving in areas annexed by the USSR. The most massive wave of resettlements was done during Action
‚Wisła’ in 1947.
Poland as a case of
Soviet policies (II)
• Poland was still technically operating on its prewar
constitution.
• Only parties representing workers, peasants and accepting
leftist ideas had any right to operate in Poland after 1945.
• Polish democratic opposition represented mostly by Polish
Peasant Party (PSL) of Mikołajczyk wasn’t immediately banned,
but its ability to act was heavily limited.
• Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) headed by Władysław Gomułka
was forcing PSL and Polish prewar socialists to unify.
• To test their ability to control Polish public life and rig
elections, a referendum was held by Communist authorities in
1946 over seemingly less controversial questions (on
abolishing the Senate, accepting western borders, and
introducing socialist economic reforms). While the official
results reported ‚Three Times Yes’, the real results were only in
favour of border change.
• The 1947 elections, already in conditions of censorship and
repression, were also rigged. They gave whole power to the
Communists. They were followed by a partial constitutional
change the same year, which made Poland a ‚people’s
republic’.
• Sejm elected Bolesław Bierut, the only candidate (and a Soviet
agent) as President.
Western reaction
• Western societies, especially the Americans, didn’t want
another global conflict, they expected that the USSR could be a
reasonable partner. On the other hand, some US elites wanted
to use the advantage they had after the war to break off from
traditional isolationism and take up a global role as a leader,
creating relationships with states in both Europe and Asia that
the USSR was taking as encirclement.
• The Big Three kept their uneasy cooperation (at the level of
foreign ministers) in the UN and in occupation policies until
roughly 1947.
• The first description of the new reality came from an insider –
Winston Churchill. In 1946 in Fulton in a speech he tried to
convince American audiences that ‚From Stettin in the Baltic,
to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across
the continent’, though he had been trying to convince US
president Harry Truman about it privately since 1945.
• In Europe, Churchill was trying to start the creation of the
United States of Europe to let European countries resist being
turned into Soviet satellite states (this effort would lead to
something less than a federation – the creation of an
international organisation called Council of Europe in 1949).
The Truman Doctrine:
Containment
• What contributed more to the change of US policy toward the
USSR was the so-called Long Telegram sent in 1946 by George
Kennan, US diplomat in Moscow. In it, he accurately described
Soviet totalitarianism and Stalin’s global goals colliding
completely with US interests.
• It was soon supported by rising conflicts in countries which the
USSR and the Soviets occupied together – Germany, Austria,
and Korea, but also everywhere where there was a domestic
conflict with the Communist forces trying to take over the
power, like in Italy, France, China, and the Philippines.
• Finally, in 1947 Truman declared a complete change: the USA
was about to support every country in which Communism was
about to spread to prevent it from happening, by any means
necessary. The focus was not on countries already lost to
Communism, like Poland – the USA was about to mostly contain
Communism, not push it back. Stalin responded by speeding up
efforts for ongoing Communist takeovers.
• The Cold War started.
The Marshall Plan
• One of the first policies to stop the spread of Communism
was not military, but socio-economic. In June 1947 the USA
started a massive plan, announced by US State Secretary
George C. Marshall, to help European countries to rebuild
their market economies after the war. Non-European
countries supported by the US like Japan would later receive
similar benefits through the World Bank.
• The offer was extended to European countries under Soviet
control like Poland, but the USSR made their governments
reject it. This is one of the reasons of difference in welfare
between Western and Central-Eastern Europe today – the
latter were rebuilding slower from the war.
• The Marshall Plan was controlled by the USA, but its
coordinating body was Organisation for European Economic
Co-operation (OEEC), created in 1948. In 1961 it changed its
name into Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) continuing to advise advanced market
economies how to develop further, this time globally. As
such, it exists today, having expanded after the end of the
Cold War to include 38 countries.
The Berlin Crisis, 1948-1949
• To stop Communists from taking over jointly occupied states, the
Western camp was leaning toward effectively splitting them by
organising free elections where they could. This would happen in South
Korea in 1948 and in West Germany in 1949.
• In June 1948, to blackmail the West into dropping the plan for dividing
Germany, Stalin blocked land access to West Berlin through
Soviet-controlled territory of East German, creating a humanitarian
crisis for the West Berliners to make them turn to the Soviet side.
• The West didn’t give up and began supplying West Berlin through airlift
called the air bridge – large planes were bringing food and other
necessities to the city for 11 months before the USSR restored the
transit. It was the first direct confrontation between the USA and the
USSR.
• The problem of split Berlin would continue, as people from Soviet side
would try to flee to the West there. In 1961, the USSR (under Nikita
Khrushchev) built a massive concreto wall dividing both parts of the
city, called the Berlin Wall.
Germany divided
• In September 1949, the Federal
Republic of Germany was created,
with temporary capital in Bonn, and
an anti-Communist politician, Konrad
Adenauer, became its first chancellor.
• In reaction, the Soviets created
German Democratic Republic in
October 1949, with capital in
(eastern) Berlin. Eastern Germans
would revolt against this in 1953 with
over a milion demonstrators, but
their revolt would be brutally put
down by the Soviets.
• Germany was split into two states.
West Berlin remained occupied by the
Allies and turned into a foothold of
the West in the Soviet Bloc.
Responding to the Soviet
military threat: WEU and
NATO
• In addition to Churchill’s failed project of United States of
Europe, alliances returned to Europe. In 1947, France and
the UK signed a new alliance treaty at Dunkirk, extended to
the Benelux countries in the Treaty of Brussels in 1948. This
was the start of the Western European Union (not to be
confused with the European Union, WEU was a military
alliance). But even together, European powers couldn’t
stand up to a possible Soviet attack.
• In April 1949 in Washington, despite isolationistic pressures
in domestic politics, the USA decided to abandon its
long-standing policy of not committing to parmanent
alliances in Europe and sign an alliance with 10 European
countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK)
and Canada, or the so-called North Atlantic Treaty. This was
also the birth of the international organisation around the
alliance – NATO.
NATO’s Impact on
the Cold War
• The creation of NATO ensured that American
troops would remain in Europe. It also extended
the so-called ‚nuclear umbrella’ to European
countries – if the USSR invaded Europe, the US
would respond with nuclear strikes. In addition,
NATO became the organisation of what we today
called the West, representing common values and
policies of countries on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 1952, Turkiye and Greece joined, and in 1955 West Germany. Making a lot of former enemies
allies (against the Soviets) within NATO was a
major achievement of US foreign policy.
• This way the West committed to the policy of
DETERRENCE – being strong enough militarily
together to discourage the USSR from attacking it.
• This was ensured by Article V of the North
Atlantic Treaty which states that an attack on any
member of the alliance will be treated like an
attack on all of them. Article V applied only north
of the Tropic of Cancer, so it extended only to the
original territories of the members, not to their
colonies.
The consolidation of the
Eastern Bloc
• The USSR saw these European developments as encirclement and
responded with their own consolidation, both at international and
domestic levels.
• In 1947 Stalin created Cominform – a coordination bureau for all
Communist parties across the world.
• In 1949 the USSR and its satellites formed an ‚alternative’ to the
Marshall Plan – the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
(COMECON). Its goals were less economic and more political – to
channel assets from the satellites to the USSR and to strengthen
political control over them.
• In 1955 a military alliance called the Warsaw Pact was created, as
a counterweight to NATO, including the USSR, Poland, East
Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Albania and
Bulgaria. Armies of the whole Pact were under Soviet military
command. At this point the Iron Courtain Churchill had preditcted
became a reality – Europe was split between two opposed
military blocs and economic zones.
The special case of
Yugoslavia
• Yugoslavia had liberated itself from the Nazis through guerilla
warfare in 1945 before the Red Army would ‚assist’ them.
Yugoslavian communists under Josip Broz-Tito (a Croat)
formed a socialist state without direct Soviet supervision.
• Stalin wanted Yugoslavia to join the Eastern Bloc anyway. The
original placement of Cominform was in Belgrade (later it was
moved to Bucharest). But Tito resisted. He only agreed to
associate membership in COMECON and rejected being part of
the Warsaw Pact, officially choosing the policy of neutralism
toward the East-West divide (along with many non-European
states).
• This created the Soviet-Yugoslavian split, the first important
crack in Communist unity across the world. The US were
actually secretly supporting Tito with arms and money for
Yugoslavia to stay out of Soviet contol. Tito remained very
critical of the Soviet model of communism.
• In the picture: Tito with Kennedy.
Inside the Soviet Bloc
• The USSR had little tolerance for its satellites to seek their own
models of Communism. They all had to follow the Soviet model.
• This involved Soviet-like constitutions, political parties and other
institutions, as well as persecuting any opponents to such changes,
real or imagined. Atheism and the cult of physical work were
promoted, and any religiosity discouraged.
• Their economies had to become nationalised (controlled by the
state) and centrally governed, with as little share of private
property as possible. In agriculture, it meant collecitivisation i.e.
creating large state-run farms from farmers’ private land. In the
picture: the modern border between Czech Republic and Austria the effects of collectivisation of farmland are visible in comparison.
• All relationships with the West had to be cut off. The only foreign
language to be taught in schools was Russian.
• This model was called people’s democracy, though it had very
little to do with democracy. It was harsh authoritarianism, even
totalitarianism as long as Stalin lived.
Poland as a case of
Soviet policies (III)
• In September 1947, Stalin called a conference of
European communist leaders to Szklarska Poręba.
Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s chosen successor for Soviet
leadership, presided over the meeting. It was then that
Cominform was created , to fill the void for 2nd
Comintern dissolved in 1943.
• But it was also when it was decided that Władysław
Gomułka should be removed from the position of
party leadership in Poland and eventually put under
house arrest. Bierut replaced him in 1948, becoming
the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party
(PZPR), forcefully made into a single party from Polish
socialists and communists during a unification congress
in December 1948.
• Gomułka’s ‚fault’ was that like Tito, he was a local
long-time Polish communist leader who opposed
Sovietisation and wanted Poland to have its own
national path to communism.
• He was imprisoned in 1951, with an unofficial death
sentence. But his life was saved by Stalin’s death in
1953. After Bierut’s death in 1956 he would return to
the position of the First Secretary until 1970.
Poland as a case of Soviet
policies (IV)
• In 1949 the leadership of the Polish People’s Army (LWP)
was given to marshal Konstanty Rokossowski, a Soviet
officer with Polish roots. He purged c. 10k officers to make
Polish armed forces compliant with Soviet plans of
attacking Western Europe. In planned World War 3, Poland
as a part of the Warsaw Pact was meant to invade
Denmark, northern Germany, and the Netherlands.
• LWP would reach the number of c. 400k troops. In
addition, c. 300k Soviet troops were permanently
stationed in Polish territory. Poland was a near-frontline
state, only East Germany was a more militarised Soviet
satellite in Europe. In 1969, Soviet nuclear assets were put
in western Poland.
Poland as a case of
Soviet policies (V)
• On the economic front, postwar reconstruction and modernisation in Poland
was supposed to happen in a centrally planned economy, according to the
6-Year Plan (1950-1955).
• Collectivisation in Poland didn’t exactly work, despite renewed campagins
against independent farmers called kulaks in Soviet propaganda. Farmers’
resistance was too great. In the end, only c. 10% of land was collectivised. The
planned targets of agricultural productivity were never reached.
• Soviet-like plans were more successful in heavy industry, especially arms
production. It caused mass migration from the countryside and Poland for the
first time in history became an urbanised and industrialised country. One of the
positive effects was emancipation of female workers. Communist cult of work
was more important than patriarchal traditions.
• On the other hand, these industrial policies were at the cost of consumers.
During that time there were shortages in delivering basic goods to people, but
this was about to be a constant and recurrent flaw of Communist economies.
Poland as a case of Soviet
policies (VI)
• In July 1952 Poland adopted a Communist constitution, in
which the country’s name was officially changed to People’s
Republic of Poland. The Senate was abolished, alongside the
office of the President – it was replaced by 15-member Council
of State, though Bierut stayed in control as First Secretary. In
Communist states position in the party is more important than
any public office.
• The years until Stalin and Bierut’s deaths were the worst times
in Poland in terms of propaganda, terror, indoctrination
(especially children and teens) and repression. Stalinist security
apparatus was imprisoning, torturing, and executing any
opposition to Soviet-style communist rule in Poland.
• The ideological attack was also targeted at the Catholic Church
in Poland, at least for two reasons: it was an institution
independent from the Communist regime and it resisted
official Atheism. In 1953 cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, the
Primate of the Church in Poland, was arrested, and the clergy
was forced to swear loyalty to the Communist regime,
otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed to preach.
• After the war, c. 12 mln Germans and c. 7 mln Japanese were repatriated
from territories they had lost or occupied.
• While all Allies were responsible for repatriations, forceful displacement of
populations had been a Russian strategy to deal with social dissent reaching
back to tsarist times and under Stalin it became a systematic policy .
• The USSR created a mostly ethnically uniform Poland by:
• annexing its eastern territories,
• giving Poland western territories (the so-called Restored Lands) from
which c. 3m Germans were expelled or left on their own. This included
parts of partially Germanised native populations of Silesia, Mazuria
and Pomerania.
• moving c. 0.5m Ukrainians, Belarussians and Lithuanians still within
new Polish borders into the USSR
• resettling c. 1.5m Poles from the USSR into the Restored Lands and
dispersing there those Ukrainians who had remained in southeastern
Poland
• Similar social engineering was happening across the Eastern Bloc.
• Soviet-annexed part of Eastern Prussia (today’s Kaliningrad) was completely
purged of Germans and settled with a mix of Soviet ethnicities. Its German
identity disappeared.
• The same was done to the Japanese part of Sakhalin . Soviet repatriations of
the Japanese reached c. 0.5m, but additional 200k ‚disappeared’ in East
Siberia. Their fate is unknown until today, but we can assume they were
mass-murdered, amounting to ten ‚Katyns’.
• In the Baltic state s, to break the resistance against annexation (which lasted
until 1950s), part of the population were moved deep into the USSR while
their place was taken by ethnic Russians or other Soviet ethnicities. This is
why today Latvia and Estonia have big Russian minorities.
• All this was done with complete disregard for private property . Most of this
was nationalized and redistributed as Communist authorities saw fit. This
approach was also applied to property of Jews exterminated by the Nazi.
Soviet
postwar
ethnic
cleansings
Cold War, or Hot
War?
• In Europe, the postwar division into two blocs
didn’t result in major international crises other
than the Berlin Crisis or the Communist coup in
Czechoslovakia in February 1948 where
democratic forces had held the longest under
Soviet occupation.
• Outside Europe, it was different. Violent wars
broke out. While many of them had an
anticolonial reason and were wars of
independence against Western colonisers,
because of East-West split they were soon
becoming ideological struggles as well because
both blocs were choosing and supporting sides
in them and because Communism was a
popular ideology among anticolonial freedom
fighters.
• This is why we often call them proxy wars –
independence wars or civil wars in Asia, Africa
and America which both blocs used instead of
fighting World War 3 in Europe.
• However, proxy wars often had the potential to
change into a full global conflict. While in the
end it didn’t happen, several times the risk was
real.
Postwar China
• During the war, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang
and Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party
halted their earlier fight and tried unified fronts
against the Japanese, but they kept betraying
each other. Kuomintang, in control of the state,
did most of the fighting, while the Communists
waited the war out in the northwest of the
country.
• Thanks to this, Republic of China gained control
of Manchuria and Taiwan in 1945, purging local
autonomy and Japanese influences in those areas
(the so-called White Terror). It even occupied
North Vietnam. However, Tibet and East
Turkestan (Xinjiang) remained in fact
independent as Kuomintang couldn’t impose its
rule there.
• Generalissimo Chiang was promoted by the US
as their most important ally in Asia and a pillar
of the UN, with a permanent seat in the Security
Council.
• However, in 1945 civil war restarted as both Mao
and Chiang wanted full power even though USA
tried to mediate between them.
Chinese Civil War
• Until 1947, Kuomintang had mostly been winning, but the
support of rural masses was moving to CCP because Mao
promised agrarian reform.
• In winter 1947/1948 Chinese Communists, with support from the
USSR, counterattacked from Manchuria. To American shock,
within the next year Kuomintang regime kept losing and mostly
collapsed.
• By summer 1949 Chiang along with his government and c. 1m
Chinese fled to Taiwan.
• On October 1st 1949 in Beijing Mao proclaimed the creation of
the People’s Republic of China, marking it as the end of China’s
‚century of humiliation’, counting form the Opium Wars.
However, this also created a situation which lasts until today in
which the party owns the state, and party interest comes first.
• However, the government of Communist China got international
recognition only from the Eastern bloc and anticolonial states.
The West was slow to abandon supporting Chiang. It was
Chiang’s government on Taiwan which would hold Chinese seat
in the Security Council until 1971.
Final Stage
of Chinese
Civil War
Mao’s international
policies
• Mao initially adopted the strategy of ‚leaning on one leg’ – relying on
the alliance with the USSR in both domestic and foreign policies.
• For domestic reconstruction and modernization early 1950s China relied
on Soviet financing and expertise . Mao replicated Stalinist model in
China to a great extent , building a cult of personality around himself. He
kept purging all remaining elements of Kuomintang regime and its
supporters. He also betrayed the promises to the farmers made during
the civil war and collectivised land rather than divided it between
them.
• In 1949-1950 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the military arm of the
CCP, invaded and occupied East Turkestan and Tibet , ending their
independence. It was also readying to invade Taiwan, but it was
prevented by USA moving its navy into the Taiwan Strait.
• In 1950s, the PRC initiated two serious military crises in the Taiwan Strait
but they didn’t succeed. From Chinese Communist perspective, the civil
war has been unfinished – Taiwan, regardless of the opinions of the
Taiwanese, must be ‚reunified’.
• In global politics, Mao tried to build coalitions with anticolonial forces
and postcolonial states, but also tried building special relationships with
Soviet satellite states like Poland or Albania. Chiang remained a US ally.
Mao’s domestic policies
• In the 1950s, in addition to purges of Kuomintang
supporters, real or imagined, private owners and
intelligentsia, Mao was also targeting his Communist
comrades who disagreed with his about policy. He
sidelined Deng Xiaoping, the very leader who would take
over China in 1978 and start the reforms that would put
China on the path to skyrocketing growth.
• His most infamous policy was the Great Leap Forward – a
plan for breakneck industrialisation that was meant to
happen by moving rural labour away from agriculture
and to heavy industry. It was a genocidal catastrophe –
between 1958 and 1962 from 15 to 55 million people died
because of famine the food shortage caused.
• In the picture: improvised steelmaking in rural furnaces.
• In result, other Chinese Communists sidelined Mao for a
few years, but he was plotting his return. To do so, in 1966
he started the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural
Revolution
• Mao used his status to promote a radical version of Communism,
called Maoism after him, written down in the „Little Red Book”.
• It was targeting Four Olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs, old
habits. It meant destroying the cultural heirtage of China,
including Confucianism, artwork and historical architecture, and
creating a completely new Communist society.
• His ideas radicalised masses of young people – hunweibin, who
were destroying everything Mao targeted and killed those who
resisted. Intellectuals were sent to the countryside for
‚re-education’ – hard manual labour. Deng Xioping’s son was
killed during those events.
• But in early 1970s Mao was increasingly ill and the Gang of Four,
led by his wife Jiang Qing, took real power. They would only be
removed after Mao’s death in 1976.
• China wanted to export this revolution. Chinese diaspora in
Southeast Asia was receptive to Maoism and became energised
in their fight with local governments. But Maoism became a
successful ideology across the post-colonial world, mostly in
Africa and Asia.