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They appear on postage stamps, shaking hands in a companionable way.
They stand side by side in the stands, applauding.
Their heads complete the series of "great teachers" on posters, which begins with Marx, Engels and Lenin.
They sit together on a painting in intimate conversation.
"The great friendship" is the title.
And an exaggeration when you look beyond the official announcements at the words that Stalin said about Mao, that Mao said about Stalin.
Stalin called Mao a “caveman Marxist” and a “Marxist built on sand” who had not read “Capital” (the first Chinese translation appeared in 1938).
He described Mao's writings as "feudalistic", accused him of "a policy of Asian cunning out of flattery, deceit, faithlessness and cruel revenge".
Mao Tse-tung thus joined the ancestral line of communism
Source: picture alliance / CPA Media Co.
Mao, on the other hand, compared the relationships to one another with cat and mouse, because Stalin acted like an old mandarin towards the Chinese.
That is why “the Chinese revolution triumphed against the will of Stalin”.
In addition, the Russians “never trusted the Chinese, and Stalin was the worst”.
Mao's management style characterized Mao with the sentence: “There are fragrant and smelly farts.
One should not think that all Soviet farts are fragrant.
If others now say that something stinks from them, we also join in and say it stinks. "
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That was after Nikita Khrushchev's speech at the XX.
CPSU party conference in 1956 about Stalin's crimes.
But the mutual abuse did not stop there.
For Mao, Khrushchev was a "bald fool" and Mao for Khrushchev was a "Buddha who picks his theories out of his nose".
"The Great Friendship": Stalin (1878–1953) and Mao (1893–1976) 1950 - by Dmitri Nalbadanian
Source: picture alliance / United Archive
Mao, 15 years younger than Stalin, had a certain inferiority complex at play.
As long as Stalin lived, he felt like the “younger brother”.
"When Chinese artists painted portraits of me with Stalin, I was always a little smaller than Stalin, they blindly submitted to the intellectual pressure of the Soviet Union at the time," he said in a speech.
Stalin let Mao feel this when he first came to Moscow in 1949/50 for his 70th birthday.
He had to stay in a dacha for a good two weeks and wait for a call before an initial conversation took place.
In a conversation with Anastas Mikoyan, Mao described the fact that in the negotiations on the Soviet-Chinese friendship treaty Stalin was not prepared to grant China Outer Mongolia and to support it in conquering Taiwan as "two bitter pills" that he had to swallow.
14 days waiting on the phone: Mao at Stalin's 70th birthday in Moscow in 1949/50, Walter Ulbricht on the right
Source: picture alliance / ZUMAPRESS.com
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That wasn’t the only lack of brightness. Although he was still in Moscow, Mao only found out afterwards that Stalin had promised the North Korean Kim Il-sung that the Soviet Union would support him in an attack on South Korea. And of course Mao Stalin did not forget that he backed and supported Chiang Kai-shek during the years of the Sino-Japanese war, while he did not take the communists in their retreat around Yan'an very seriously.
On the other hand, Stalin's demands that the communist army should take action against the Japanese fell on deaf ears, so that Japan's Kwantung army would be tied up and thus unable to occupy the Russian territories in the Far East - like Manchuria before it.
Instead, Mao preferred to spare his military forces for the inevitable civil war against Chiang and the Kuomintang.
And just as Stalin refused to leave the Chinese with the plans for the atomic bomb, Mao refused to give the Soviet Navy a base that they urgently needed for radio communication with their submarines.
Who needs enemies with friends like these?
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
This mutual distrust, the effort to deceive the other, to take advantage of him, was characteristic of both.
They acted arrogantly, feared conspiracies, tolerated no contradiction and certainly no deviations from the general line of their policy.
That is why Stalin had the first Russian edition of Mao's “Selected Writings” crushed in 1949, because in one or the other text it was suggested that the peoples of Asia were building their own, Asian socialism / communism.
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He had previously prevented Anna Louise Strong's hagiographic book about Mao from appearing in Russia.
“You were only allowed to talk about good things, not bad ones;
you were allowed to sing praises, but not criticize anything;
Anyone who criticized something was suspected of being an enemy and risked imprisonment or execution. ”This was what comrades would have told him about the Soviet Union, Mao said in a speech.
Everyone who listened to him knew that it was no different in China.
Children can't be wrong: Propagana poster from 1951
Source: picture-alliance / Mary Evans Pi
They were also alike in the methods by which they came to power and secured their power. This was not only true for the millions of arrests and executions of alleged and imagined enemies after the seizure of power and the "purges" in the years that followed. This affected both disastrous economic policies with devastating famine as a result.
And that always included eliminating the comrades who had made their way to the top possible, and who, when the peak of autocracy had been reached, really or apparently stood in their way. So they were banished, imprisoned and liquidated. This was true for Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kirov and others, as well as for Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao and even more so for the cadre of the "28 Bolsheviks" who had studied in Moscow and, according to Stalin's intentions, were to lead the CCP .
When it comes to “post-fame” in one's own country, there are hardly any differences.
After a brief ideological "thaw" and the "scarred literature" with its critical reports on the reign of terror and its consequences, the formula that Deng Xiaoping coined in an interview with Oriana Fallaci in 1980 applies to Mao - and Mao used it in speeches to Stalin : “The ratio is 70:30;
30 percent error, but 70 percent merit. ”As far as Mao is concerned, not a few seem to share this opinion outside the Chinese borders, such as the series of Mao portraits by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, Eugen Schönebeck and Thomas Ruff shows.
Do you want to hear history too? "Assassin" is the first season of the WELT History Podcast.
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