Cold War, Ch 22 pp. 675 - 689

Despite China and Russia having tendencies toward totalitarian interpretations of communist ideologies, they were wrought with internal conflicts that vexed them both. Both under Mao and Stalin, there seemed to be an internal search for enemies of the state that had consequences for both societies. Both China and Russia felt that their ideologies and state mechanisms hadn’t gone far enough to removes “bourgeois ideas” from their respective societies. These people who were accused of retaining these ideas were deemed “class enemies” who had betrayed the ideals of their communist revolutions. There was a paranoia that these class enemies wished to restore capitalist institutions. In the Soviet Union, for example there were a series of purges, also known as “The Great Terror” as late as the 1930s in which tens of thousands of communist, including the first generation of Lenin’s party leadership were purged from society, in addition to millions more ordinary people. These people were usually arrested, sometimes without warning or provocation after others had sometimes denounced them simply to save their own skins. Many were guilty by association. The state held “show trials” in which the accused were made examples of what class enemies were. Close to 1 million people between 1936 – 1941 were executed. Between 4 – 5 million people were sent into gulags. The state security apparatus was totally consumed by interrogations, arrests, and executions under the supposed laws. Interestingly by contrast, while the state in the Soviet Union executed the law with government officials handing out punishment, Mao instigated open rebellion against his own party by formenting civilian antagonistic tactics against the state, more like vigilante justice to some extent during their Cultural Revolution. These attacks from ordinary Chinese were agitated by huge rallies calling for young people to go out and rid the country of state enemies on “capitalist roads”.

While The Soviet Union agitated world revolution, this however, had to be put on hold because World War created some strange bedfellows in terms of unlikely alliances with the U.S. and Great Britain against Nazi Germany. The Cold War in the beginning remained mostly maligned as a European phenomenon until events such as the Korean War and the Vietnam War began to shift some of the focus of the ideological conflict to the sphere of Asia. Europe had NATO and the Warsaw Pact alliance along the Iron Curtain, Asia didn’t have these kind of military blocks with the exception of the shortly lived S.E.A.T.O. (South East Asian Treaty Organization). Vietnam began as an internal civil war with America supplying in the beginning, only 50,000 troops and advisers to the South Vietnamese government. The war itself lasted until 1975, but the saber-rattling would last at least until the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, which would turn into the Soviet Union’s own version of Vietnam due to high casualties. Perhaps the most dangerous moment of The Cold War was during the Cuban Missle Crisis, when Soviet brinkmanship placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, causing a blockade that nearly brought the world to nuclear war. This was averted by America agreeing to remove missiles it had in Turkey if the Russians would do the same in Cuba.