Reflecting the author's profound knowledge of the two revolutionary transformations, their horrors, and their human costs, this rich comparative study builds on scholarship concerning the rise to power of the Chinese communists and Mao's regime and overturns some of its cornerstones. First, Lucien Bianco in Stalin and Mao stresses the Soviet pedigree of Mao's agrarian policies. (Indeed, ubiquitous early Comintern policy suggestions regarding peasant organizing in China corroborate this insight.) In its Soviet context, Mao's unique peasant revolution thus appears to be more a development of than a departure from the Soviet model. Second, Bianco argues that after Mao voiced disappointment with the Soviet model in 1957, his regime increasingly resembled the Stalinist model. Mao's so-called innovations were exaggerations of Stalinist trends (pp. 53, 63), and the Great Leap Forward was a “disastrous replica of the negative aspects of the First Soviet Plan,” albeit with an East Asian dimension (pp....

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