Question

Write a 1,200-2,400 word essay that explores and analyzes the two regimes of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong and the violence they perpetrated against their own citizens. The essay will have four distinct parts:

Part 1. Give an overview of both countries and the violence that happened under these two leaders. Pay careful attention to the method, the manner, and the meaning behind the violence. Include evidence of who was targeted and the reasons they were targeted.

Part 2. Use the ideas of Stalin and Mao to justify the violence. Put yourself in their position, explain why they were doing what they were doing, and argue why the violence was necessary.

Part 3. Using the experience and writing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered under the communist regime, re-create a Soviet gulag or prison camp with you in it. Give details of what the prison camp is like, the guards, the other prisoners, and you.

Part 4. Finally, give your opinion on the violence. Was it justified? Why or why not? How did these leaders get away with it? What can be done now to deal with these two countries? What about countries that do the same thing to their own people now?

Answer 1

-Joseph Stalin was a Soviet dictator, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1952 and president of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1953.

He was part of the revolutionary Bolsheviks who promoted the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and later occupied the position of general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until the office was formally suppressed in 1952, shortly before its death. While the position of general secretary was officially elective and was not considered as the highest position within the Soviet state, Stalin managed to use it to monopolize more and more power in his hands after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 and to gradually quell all opposition groups within the Communist Party. This included Leon Trotsky, a socialist theorist and the main critic of Stalin among the first Soviet leaders, who was first banished from the Soviet Union in 1929 and then assassinated in Mexico in 1940 by order of Stalin.

In 1928, Stalin replaced the New Economic Policy of the 1920s with a highly centralized planned economy and five-year plans that initiated a period of rapid industrialization and economic collectivization in the countryside. As a result, the USSR went from being a majority agrarian society to a great industrial power, this being the basis of its appearance as the second largest economy in the world after World War II. As a result of rapid economic, social and political changes from the Stalin era, millions of people were sent to the Gulag labor camps as punishment, and millions were deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union. In 1937, a campaign against alleged enemies of his government culminated in the Great Purge, a period of massive repression in which hundreds of thousands of people were executed.

By staying in power until his death in 1953, Stalin led the USSR during the period of post-war reconstruction, marked by the predominance of Stalinist architecture. The successful development of the Soviet nuclear program allowed the country to become the second world power in nuclear weapons.

-Mao Zedong was the top leader of the Communist Party of China and founder of the People's Republic of China. Under his leadership, the Communist Party seized power in mainland China in 1949, when the new People's Republic was proclaimed, following the victory in the Chinese Civil War against the forces of the Republic of China. The communist victory caused the flight of Chiang Kai-shek and his followers of the Kuomintang to Taiwan and made Mao the maximum leader of China until his death in 1976.

On the ideological level, Mao assumed the approaches of Marxism-Leninism but with its own nuances based on the characteristics of Chinese society, very different from the European one. In particular, Mao's communism gave a central role to the peasant class as the engine of the revolution, an approach that differed from the traditional Marxist-Leninist vision of the Soviet Union, which saw the peasants as a class with little capacity for mobilization and awarded urban workers the central role in the class struggle.

The stage of Mao's government was characterized by intense campaigns of ideological reaffirmation, which would cause great social and political upheavals in China, such as the Great Leap Forward and especially the Cultural Revolution, at which time its power reached its maximum levels as an intense cult of personality took place around his figure. Even today, Mao's historical role is surrounded by great controversy. Years after his death, in 1981, the Communist Party of China published an official analysis of Mao's responsibility for social and economic problems stemming from his policies, in which he was blamed for serious errors.