Mao bit off more than he can chewIn the years during and after World War I, the dramatic change in the global political atmosphere allowed many radical leaders to emerge into power. Numerous far-right fascist and far-left communist leaders were able to take advantage of the turmoil of the Great War and took control of the governments of their respective countries. While each of these leaders has unique aspects of their rise, rule, and fall, it becomes apparent that fascist regimes often bear striking similarities to each other, as do communist governments. Two of these communist governments were the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, otherwise known as the Soviet Union or USSR, ruled by Joseph Stalin's Bolshevik Party, and the People's Republic of China, ruled by Mao Zedong's Communist Party of China. The regimes of Stalin and Mao shared many key similarities, such as their use of fear as a tactic to control the population, their harsh industrial policies, and their lack of concern about famines in their countries. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Both Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong came from rather humble beginnings; Stalin, born in 1878, was the son of a shoemaker, while Mao, born in 1893, was the son of a farmer. Mao developed Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist beliefs early in his life, quickly growing resentful of the discrimination he faced due to his rural accent and lack of a high-status job (Schram 48). His views then became increasingly left-wing, until he joined the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1920s. After joining with another political party, the Kuomintang, to fight the Japanese, the Communists, now led by Mao, were plunged into civil war. The Communist Party emerged victorious from the bloody conflict, with Mao at its head. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when Mao became the leader of the Communist Party, but it is clear that his rise to power was slow and steady, probably taking many years for his ultimate plan to be realized. Similarly, Stalin also became politically involved at an early age; he joined Lenin's Bolshevik communist party as a young man and became an active member, even organizing a bank robbery (Montefiore). Stalin was a Bolshevik from humble party origins at the beginning of the 20th century, but, although his intelligence was evident from the beginning, he remained in the shadows with the rest of the communists until the Russian Revolution. Soon after the Communists took control of Russia, the original leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin, died, leaving some of his high-ranking officials, including Stalin, in an intense power struggle for control of the party. It is from this point that Stalin begins to implement his strategy to obtain the then empty seat of power. Stalin achieves his goal of ruling the USSR through devious tactics and cunning manipulations. From the time of Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin's plan to take control developed relatively quickly, and within a couple of years he was even able to begin implementing his own policies; this was very different from Mao's gradual rise to power, which took many years to accomplish. Both Stalin and Mao came to power through different channels, but both had to use underhanded tactics, such as scaremongering, to achieve their ultimate goals. . A few years after Lenin's death, Stalin began his purges to eliminate anyone who might pose a threat to his power. These mass murders were initiallyfocus on the other leaders of Stalin's communist party. Of the 139 members of the Central Committee, 93 were executed. He then turned to the members of the Communist Party, of whom about a million died, and then to the general population. By the end of the 1930s, Stalin's Great Terror had spiraled out of control and left tens of millions of bodies in its wake. The fear of Stalin's betrayal had spread among the Russian people; citizens began reporting each other to the secret police, who would then arrest the victim and send them to the Gulag, where they would likely die ("Stalin - Purges"). Although people lived in a perpetual state of paranoia, fear allowed Stalin to take complete and absolute control of the country. Mao's version of this alarmism was the "Cultural Revolution," which was considerably less bloody than Stalin's purges, but caused just as much terror. It was primarily an "effort to eliminate those in the leadership...who dared to cross him", but it was also a way of trying to "solve" his party's problems ("Schram "The Cultural Revolution"). He wanted to achieve this objective by not only destroying much of China's cultural heritage, but also publicly humiliating, torturing, and killing anyone they deemed "impure" (Mao Zedong). The number of deaths is estimated to be between 800,000 and 3 million people over the course of the year. (Johnson 156) He brought many cities to the brink of anarchy, but he managed to bring them back by sending his army (Mao Zedong). Most of the people who committed the murders were Mao's Red Guards, composed mainly of young people from working-class families. They targeted anyone who came from a “bourgeois” background, such as teachers and landowners. Even after the Cultural Revolution was technically over, anyone who had an education or came from a middle-class family or High lived in fear that Mao's Red Guards might attack at any moment. It was through this alarmism that Mao managed to maintain control for the next decade, just as Stalin did. Both Stalin and Mao saw the lack of strong industry in their countries as a humiliation and wanted to push their countries into the ranks of the European Union. world powers. They saw the improvement of heavy industry as an important factor in achieving this goal (Strayer 1041). Stalin created “five-year plans” that introduced huge quotas for the industrial production of industrial materials, such as coal and steel. Although factories rarely, if ever, met these quotas at the end of each five-year segment, and the quality of materials was much worse than before, the presence of quotas did, in fact, push workers to produce drastically higher quantities. quantity of materials. Stalin gathered the most talented and ambitious people from the countryside and put them to work in the city's factories (Strayer 1042). Together with other rural peoples, Stalin created massive collectivized farms designed “primarily to redistribute agricultural production rather than to increase it” and to feed workers in urban factories (“Stalin 1928-2933”). Mao did not approve of Stalin's model, as he saw it as another way to separate society into classes. Therefore, Mao decided to implement his own industrial policies. The primary of these was called the “Great Leap Forward,” and was Mao's attempt to industrialize China without creating huge urban areas, since the presence of cities would have created inequality within China. Mao wanted to create small-scale “people's communes” to produce materials, which proved to be a failure without any of the highly trained technical experts.