Mao, Women and China

Thousands of Women Used and Discarded by Mao

Translated from Kanzhongguo (10/11/2009)

Mao Zhedong’s licentious life may be well known by many people, especially overseas Chinese who are able to talk freely among their acquaintances. Recently, as there are many people talking on the web about the adultery of Mao and his daughter in law, I recalled what I had known about Mao, and hope it may help those women who had suffered and maybe help release some of their sorrow.

I recall in the 90’s, that when I was working in China, a friend told me that there was a very beautiful girl (let me call her G) who was secretly selected from a section of the army posted in Baoding, who was sent to be Mao’s secretary, or some similar position. When G was sent there, after she was introduced to Mao, Mao told G that his marriage to Jiangqin was not very good, etc. and he hoped to sleep with G, but would like G to agree. G refused persistently. So G was sent back to the army. My friend told me that G’s superiors in the army were very angry with G as they feared that G may have destroyed their chances for promotion. G immediately faced severe persecution and disappeared. Later I found that this was just a “little incident among thousands of women” that Mao tried to possess. Let me put a few cases here:

Mao had about 15 places for his dalliances with women, other than Zhongnanhai, that were well know by his close guards and many top leaders of the Communist party.

These cases are only a drop in the ocean. For those women who were well known before being raped, they still struggled to have a life afterwards, but the unknown girls that were selected from the masses, after being seduced and sexually exploited, they were either sent to the remote corners of China, or to isolated islands, to remain anonymous for the rest of their lives. It might be possible that some of them may think that their story should be told.

All of you would know, I hope, is that for those girls, who were born later than 1950, I will only talk about their cases, but will not reveal their names.

From those who researched the history of Mao from sources other than publications by communist China, you may know that Mao’s first wife, Ms Lee, was 6 years older than Mao, and was chosen by both senior members of the family. They were married according to Chinese tradition, and bowed to heaven, earth and their parents, the proper process for a traditional marriage. But Mao left her without explanation a few days after the wedding.

Even when that miserable American journalist, Edgar Snow, thought to please Mao and asked about Mao’s first marriage, Mao did not even bother to answer him. Mao never showed any respect, compassion or tolerance to ordinary people, and he left his small village and his first wife for good shortly after the marriage.

The first lover Mao encountered was Miss Tao Siyong, who came from Xiangtan county, Hunan province. She was from a very wealthy and famous family, a well educated, very gentle and compassionate lady. She was a classmate of Mao in Changsha First Teacher’s college, and they were from the same province. From 1919 to 1920, Mao and Tao opened a bookshop together, and they were very much in love during that time. But in the summer of 1920, Tao could not bear the attitude of Mao on rebellion and violence, and besides, Mao had turned his attention to Yang Kaihui.

Yang Kaihui’s father, Yang Jichang was Mao’s teacher in the college. Yang Jichang was a very famous scholar and was invited to teach in Beijing. So Yang Kaihui and her mother lived in Beijing for a while although Yang Kaihui knew Mao, but did not take any interest in him.

On 17th January 1920, Yang Jichang died so Yang Kaihui and her mother returned to Changsha. Mao then visited Yang Kaihui often while supposedly still “in love” with Tao. Mao and Yang Kaihui decided to get married in mid 1920.

Ms Tao left Changsha for Shanghai. She opened a school called “Lida School”. Tao died in 1932 when she was only in her early thirties.

Between 1922 and 1926, Yang Kaihui had two sons with Mao, Mao Anying and Mao Anlong. But soon after giving birth to Mao Anlong, Yang discovered that Mao had raped the wife of his comrade, Li Lisan. Yang and Mao had a big quarrel because of this.

Mao had started looking for a political career at an early age, and joined the communist party in it's early stages. The Chinese Communist Party had been established with the guidance and funding of the Russian Communist Party.

In the autumn of 1927, as directed by the Russians, Mao took part in a rebellion which was crushed by the nationalist army, so he fled to Mount Jinggang in Shanxi.

Two days after Mao arrived in the mountain, Mao started to live together with a famous woman of the area, Ms He Zhizheng, a young woman who made a living as an armed robber in the mountain area, and who could fire two guns at the same time. Ms He give birth to a daughter in 1928, while Yang Kaihui was living in Changsha trying to avoid being arrested by the nationalist army because of Mao’s student activities.

Yang had lived through a very hard period and asked Mao to let her come to Mount Jingggang , but Mao refused to allow her and their two sons to come. During this time Mao and other communists in Mount Jinggang, had committed many robberies and killings, so that many people asked help from the government, to purge Mao’s gang and stop their crimes.

In the winter of 1929, Yang Kaihui was arrested by the government, but as the governor was a friend of Yang’s father, he asked Yang to end her marriage with Mao, so that he could help her case. But Yang refused to renounce her marriage to Mao and she was executed on 14th November 1930.

In October, 1934, Mao was chased out of Jiangxi province by the Nationalist army. Mao and his communists were running for their lives in remote areas for more than a year, but Mao had made Ms He pregnant three times in one year and she had 3 abortions which caused her health to deteriorate badly.

Soon after that they arrived in Shanbei, Yanan area, where, away from the main Nationalist force, Mao’s situation became easier. But Mao had his new prey, the American journalist, Ms Agnes Smedley and her English interpreter, a young student, Ms Wu Guanghui. One day Ms He witnessed Mao’s adultery, and was so enraged that she said: "I will get my people to kill these two slugs". Mao then had his people force He Zhizheng out of Yanan.

So that is why many Chinese communist leaders would say nowadays: “I have conquered this country, so playing with a few women is not some big deal.”

After Ms He was forced out of Yanan, she went to Moscow in the spring of 1938 where she gave birth to Mao’s sixth child. When the baby was born it had pneumonia, but rather than receive treatment it was sent to the morgue while still alive. Ms He was treated badly by the Russians who understood Mao’s intentions. Ms He begged Mao to let her go back to Yanan, but Mao sent their three year old daughter to Moscow in return to Ms He’s request. Later, He Zhizheng argued with the hospital in Moscow about her baby being thrown in the morgue, but the hospital locked He Zhizheng in a psychiatric hospital for 6 years!

In the summer of 1938, while Ms He suffered in Moscow, Mao met actress Jiangqin (aka, Lan Ping or Li Yunhe). Jiang had four husbands or lovers during that time. Mao invited Jiang to chat and dine with him, and Jiang slept with Mao that evening.

During that period, there were four beautiful and famous actresses in the Yanan Theatre - they were Feng Fengming, Shun Shiwei, Zhang Xingfang, and Guo Lanying. Mao had his eye on Feng Fengming while sleeping with Jiangqin. Ms Feng had travelled overseas and was a well educated and talented actress, also very beautiful.

One day Mao invited Feng and Jiangqin and other friends to join him for a late night snack after watching the performance. When all the guests were about to leave, Mao asked Ms Feng to stay to discuss the development of culture, but instead, he raped Feng that evening. Ms Feng was very angry and traumatised. She left Yanan and continued her career in Japan and Hongkong, and was very successful there.

In December, 1949, after the communist takeover of China, Mao and Zhou Enlai went to Russia with the Chinese communist leadership team, and Miss Shun Weishi, the adopted daughter of Zhou Enlai, was the translator for Mao. One evening, Mao locked the door as he was taking Russian language lessons from Miss Shun and the next morning, Miss Shun was shocked to find herself waking up naked in Mao’s bed. Miss Shun was so distressed and frightened, she told Zhou Enlai, and certainly Zhou was not shocked.

After they returned from Russia, Mao asked Zhou if Mao should divorce Jiangqin and marry Shun Weishi. Zhou did not agree, and he married Shun Weishi to the theatre playboy, Jing Shan, who also slept with Jiangqin. Later, Mao said to people around him, “well, me and Jing Shan, we don’t owe each other anything.”

But when Jiangqin heard that Mao had slept with Shun Weishi, she tried to seek revenge on Shun. In 1966, at the beginning of the "Great culturural revolution", Jiang had Ms Shun arrested and sent to jail. The torture of Shun Weishi was well recorded. Shun had been severely beaten, and was not allowed to wore any clothes in jail. She was executed by punching a long nail into her head. The execution order was signed by Zhou Enlai. She was only 38 years old.

In 1951, the Chinese communist army was helping the North Koreans to set up a communist state and split the Koreas. But the three armies of communist China stationed in South Korea, were facing annihilation. General Peng Dehuai went back to meet Mao urgently, but was stopped by Mao’s guard outside of the door. General Peng was very angry, and pushed past the guard to see that Mao was with a young nurse in bed.

In 1953, the performing troupe which was set up to entertain the army during the war was renamed the performing troup of Zhongnanhai, which meant that the troupe would stay inside Zhongnanhai. In fact, the girls in the troupe had to sleep with Mao in turn every night.

Sometime, Mao liked to change a few dance partners during just one song, and his manner was rude and disgusting. Some girls went to General Peng for help as they could not stand the humiliation. General Peng disbanded the troupe after receiving complaints from the girls.

In the summer of 1956, after Mao arrived in Qingdao, two of the best dancers, Miss A & B of the Qingdao performing troupe were chosen to have a special talk with the minister of the culture department in Qingdao city. After meeting with the minister, Miss A was chosen to work for a State leader as a private assistant. Miss A was sent by car (to use a car was rare in that period) which had all windows covered in black cloth. The driver purposely made many detours during the journey, and finally, they arrived at a mansion with well kept gardens and red carpet underfoot.

The first thing Miss A experienced was being medically checked by two female doctors “thoroughly”. Miss A was embarrassed as she was a virgin. She asked what type of leader needed such a check to be carried out? The female doctor answered her, “you will know, he is famous and always in the newspaper.” So Miss A was asked to go to help this leader have a bath while she was naked. She really had no idea what was going on, did not dare to enter the bathroom. Soon, that “central leader” came out from the bathroom. It was Mao. Miss A was not excited, but cried hysterically in shock. Mao said loudly, “who asked you to come?! Then Mao made an excuse and asked people to take Miss A back. The driver told Miss A in the car: “remember, nothing happened today!” The next day, Miss B was sent in her place, but Miss A was also sent away, to Mount Xinanling in Heilongjiang province, where she had to work as a woodcutter. She was raped frequently by many woodcutters while working there.

In 1978, two years after Mao’s death, Miss A was 42 years old, but she looked over 60. She was granted permission to return to Qingdao under the condition of “forgetting everything”.

Miss B who agreed to “serve the great leader” was sent to the remote mountain of Wuzhishan, on Hainan island, to live a seclusive life after being “used up” by Mao.

In 1961, after successfully starving 30 million people to death, Mao went to Shanghai to attend a meeting of seven thousand people. Mao stayed in the Xijiao hotel and thought of the famous actress C. Miss C was the most beautiful actress in Shanghai at that time. One evening after the dance party, the Minister for Culture, Zhang Chunqiao asked Miss C to stay, and told her that Chairman Mao had invited her for a late evening snack and to discuss with her about issues relating to the movie industry. Minister Zhang also told Miss C that the relationship of Mao and Jiangqin was not very good, and that it interfered with the national interests and development.

The central leaders in Beijing were all looking for a person more suitable for Mao, who would be beneficial to the future of the country. So Miss C started sleeping with Mao from that night. She stayed with Mao in that hotel for the rest of the week. She was also called to Beijing to stay at Zhongnanhai for a short time. From then on, Miss C refused any proposal from other men, and hoped to become the wife of the great leader Mao. But soon after that, the Cultural Revolution started. Miss C was facing the same fate as Shun Weishi, who was persecuted to death under instructions from Jiangqin.

In 1965, Mao went to Mount Lu. An actress from Jiujiang performing troupe, Miss D, played the Chinese instrument, Pipa. Mao liked her after watching her play, and was sleeping with her during his stay in the Mount Lu region.

Mao died on 9th September 1976. In October 1976, officers came from Beijing and took D away with them. No one knows where about D was sent. The workers in Mount Lu believed that D was sent to a place to be silenced, or to live a seclusive life.

In October 1965, when Mao was staying in Hangzhou, the local army officers found him a very beautiful girl, who was only 28 years old. Ms E was divorced and she was slim and tall. She massaged Mao every morning. Soon, she was pregnant. Mao gave her two thousand dollars and asked her to leave. There was no trace of E later on.

After E left, there was another young massage nurse F.

Mao liked F very much and called her "a fish from Wuchang province". But F was not as obedient as E. Mao’s personal assistant, Zhang Yufeng (I think everyone known about Zhang Yufeng’s relationship with Mao, so I do not talk about that here again.) remembered that F had run out of Mao’s bedroom on a few occasions, crying. Later, F was taken away by the army and no one knows her whereabouts after that.

In 1973, Mao was about to meet the leader from an Africa country. The camera man went to the meeting room a bit earlier than the arranged time to set up the camera and lighting. He found Mao holding a naked woman. The camera man was shocked and so was the woman. She quickly ran to the back of the screen in the room. But soon Mao and that African leader commenced their meeting while the women stayed behind the screen naked during the whole meeting. It was a cold night and if the air-conditioning failed, how would that naked woman stand the cold? Or if the screen had fallen it would have become the most infamous diplomatic meeting in the world.

According to those people who were close to Mao there were thousands of women or young girls who were raped and discarded by Mao.

Source:https://www.ifjc.org/node/1907

Third International

source:http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/int/comintern.htm

COMINTERN Communist International

 Third International

The COMINTERN (Communist International) was a Soviet-controlled organization that conducted liaison with the national communist parties of various countries, including the United States, in order to further the cause of revolution. Moscow issued guidance, support, and orders to the parties through the apparatus of the COMINTERN. Also called the Comintern or Third International, it was founded in Moscow in March 1919 to coordinate the world communist movement. Within a few years, communist parties existed in nearly all the countries of Europe and by 1930 in most countries of the world. These generally small, often illegal parties looked to Comintern headquarters in Moscow for support and guidance until the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943.

Officially disbanded in 1943, the Comintern was replaced from 1947 to 1954 by the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), in which only the Soviet and the ruling East European communist parties (except for Yugoslavia, which was expelled in 1948) and the French and the Italian communist parties were represented. The Cominform was dissolved in 1956.

1919-1922 - War Communism

Bolshevism calmly assumed wholesale class warfare of the most ferocious character on a world-wide scale for an indefinite period, as a normal phase of its development and as necessary for its success. George Frost Kennan noted that "The circumstances of the immediate post-revolution period - the existence in Russia of civil war and foreign intervention, together with the obvious fact that the Communists represented only a tiny minority of the Russian people - made the establishment of dictatorial power a necessity. The experiment with "war Communism" and the abrupt attempt to eliminate private production and trade had unfortunate economic consequences and caused further bitterness against the new revolutionary regime.... Their particular brand of fanaticism, unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any permanent sharing of power. From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities ofpermanent and peaceful coexistence of rival forces. Easily persuaded of their own doctrinaire "rightness," they insisted on the submission or destruction of all competing power."

The responsible leaders of the Bolshevik regime frequently and openly boasted that they were willing to sign agreements and undertakings wilh foreign Powers while not having the slightest intention of observing such undertakings or carrying out such agreements. This attitude of disregard of obligations voluntarily entered into, they based upon the theory that no contract or agreement made with a non-Bolshevik Government can have any moral force for them.

The Bolshevik Government was itself subject to the control of a political faction with extensive international ramifications through the Third International, and this body, which is heavily fubstdiied by the Bolshevik Government from the public revenue of Russia, had for its openly avowed aim the promotion of Bolshevik revolutions throughout the world. Leaders of the Bolsheviki had boasted that their promise of non-interference with other nations would in no wise bind the agents of this body.

The Bolshevik triumph in Russia was really a powerful stimulant to the "world revolution," because it proved the ability of a determined, ruthless minority to impose its will upon a disorganized society devoid of capable leaders, and thus encouraged revolutionary minorities everywhere to hope that they might do the same thing-especially with the Russian backing upon which they could henceforth rely. As a matter of fact, Bolshevik revolutions had been tried in many lands since 1917, were actually successful for short periods in Hungary and Bavaria, and seemed certain to be attempted in the future, since in every part of the world Bolshevik agitation was persistently and insidiously going on.

The Soviet Government of Russia was not recognized by the United States because its leaders openly announced that they did not regard any agreements which they might make with non-Bolshevik governments as binding upon them and because it was known that the Soviet Government was subsidizing Bolshevik revolutions throughout the world.

1922-1928 - New Economic Policy

The New Economic Policy (NEP) lasted until 1928. It was in the NEP period that Chicherin persuaded most of the great powers and a good many small ones to recognize the Soviet Union. Soviet policy in this era was conducted on two levels: While Chicherin was seeking de jure recognition of the Soviet Union as a state of the traditional type, the Comintern, financed by, dominated by, and housed in Moscow, was striving to subvert the very governments that the Soviet Union was "coexisting" with.

1928-1935 - Third Period

Until the birth of the Popular Front, communists the world over lived in the so-called Third Period of Moscow's game: capitalism was presumably about to expire, and the faithful shouted ultra-revolutionary slogans. The Third Period was the policy adopted by the Comintern at the end of the Soviet Union's New Economic Policy in 1928, and remained in place until the adoption of the Popular Front policy in 1935. In the Soviet Union, the Communist leadership announced in 1928 the start of collectivization, which was essentially about establishing major state-run farming associations to always keep the public granaries full. The Third Period policy was based on Stalin's theory of class struggle in which the "First Period" that followed World War I saw the upsurge and defeat of the working class, and the "Second Period" was a time of capitalist consolidation. The Third Period was conceived by the Comintern in 1928 as the time for working class revolution.

1935-1939 - Popular Front

The Third Period policy came to an end with the inauguration of the Popular Front policy in 1935. The Seventh Congress of the Comintern, meeting in Moscow in July 1935 called for the establishment of a united front (Popular Front) with moderate socialists, liberals, and other political forces that resisted fascism and aggression. This step was a radical departure from the Comintern's earlier opposition to "reformist and bourgeois" parties.

Suddenly, orders came through to drop the revolutionary line and enter the citadels of "bourgeois democracy" in order to carry on a "war against fascism." The Comintern congress in Moscow adopted a policy towards a popular front against fascism and directed Communist movements around the world to collaborate with anti-fascist forces regardless of their orientation towards socialism. The Popular Fronts were the result of the widespread realization by the leftwing forces of the fact that the spread of fascism posed a deadly threat to democracy and the working movement. The socialists and communists formed a united workers' front which became the core of a broader-based coalition of democratic and antifascist forces. However, the traditional animosity existing between the socialists and communists was a big problem and was playing right into the hands of the fascists whose victory in Germany and their subsequent destruction of the communist and social-democratic parties there provided a horrifying vision of what this split might eventually lead to.

The 180° turn in the policy of the Comintern caused considerable confusion among those workers who had been drawn in by the rhetoric during the Third Period. During the 'Hate Week' in George Orwell's book 1984, the alliances have suddenly changed, but the speaker of the Inner Party not being put off by this in any way: "Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work!

Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible."

The order went forth to the proletariat to close up their ranks and present a common front against Capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Communists, non-Communists, Socialists, and Christian trade unionists are now urged to unite against the common foe. Those who had been anathematised as traitors to the Labor movement, as blacklegs, as tools of the capitalists because they refused to submit to Slav tyranny and allow their movement to be nobbled by Moscow, were invited to forget the past and join together in making a common front.

The stunned comrades dutifully put on neckties and proceeded to pass themselves off as liberals and progressives. Seemingly few outside the Communist Party knew what was going on. The professional red-baiters, more concerned with scaring additional funds out of frightened capitalists than with following Communist Party developments, had failed to take the hairpin turn from the Third Period into the Popular Front. They were furiously shadow-boxing, swinging over the communists' heads, hitting noncommunists in liberal and labor circles.

As the depression brought poverty, misery, and despair to millions of people, some of them turned to Communism. To them the economic systems of the western democracies did not seem to be fulfilling their promise or to hold out hope. Of the great powers only Great Britain, France, and the United States were able to avoid authoritarianism, and even in these countries revolution was avoided perhaps only because they were relatively rich and because leaders, like Franklin Roosevelt, held out hope and inspired confidence.

Popular Front governments came to power in France and Spain in 1936. On one hand, the introduction of the Popular Front strategy demonstrated Moscow's long-term commitment to cooperation with democracies. On the other hand, by promoting broad antifascist coalitions, it widened political support inside Western Europe for Soviet collective security initiatives.

A serious attempt to establish Marxian communism occurred in Spain in 1936. The communists had profited by their failures in Germany and Italy, and this later attempt was better organized. A major measure was to first prepare the way for revolution by removal by murder of probable competent opponents. Then revolt came, and had a temporary success. Property was seized and confiscated, owners were put to death, religion was persecuted. A 3-year civil war followed which was won by the establishment of a Dictatorship under General Franco, which is still in power and has completely suppressed communism. Portugal during this period was threatened with communism. It headed this off by the installation of a Dictatorship under Salazar. It too extinguished communism.

In the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, Stalin ordered the Comintern volunteers in Spain to adopt an extremely moderate, non-revolutionary line. Stalin tried to convince Britain and France to join in the struggle against Hitler. Without such an alliance, Soviet vital national interests were threatened. Communist ideology or Spanish democracy had little to do with it; the security of Soviet territory was what Stalin cared about most.

In March 1938, following the Anschluss (union) of Germany and Austria, and despite Western passivity, Soviet Foreign Ministare Maxim Litvinov declared the Soviet Union's readiness to begin discussions with other powers about practical measures to punish the aggressors. But Britain and France, hoping to appease German leader Adolf Hitler, failed to respond to the Soviet initiative. At that time, the utterly inept Soviet military faced abundant limitations, later displayed against the Finns during the Winter War (1939-1940). Throughout the Czechoslovak (Sudeten) Crisis of 1938, the Soviet government repeatedly affirmed its willingness to support all decisions and recommendations of the League of Nations to combat aggression and preserve peace. Critics of official British and French policy at the time, such as Winston Churchill and Joseph Paul-Boncour, insisted that unique opportunities to stop the Nazis were lost when the Soviet offers of cooperation were rebuffed. The years 1935-1939 were the period of anti-Fascism and the Popular Front, when Winston Churchill was the blue-eyed boy of the Daily Worker.

1939-1942 - Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Negotiations between the Soviets and the West dragged on during the summer, inconclusively. With the evident failure to to halt German aggression, Stalin removed Maxim Litvinov from the Foreign Ministry and ended the pro-Western policy identified with him.Stalin stopped excoriating Nazi Germany in 1939 because he couldn't get sufficient support from Britain and France to secure his western borders; he turned to Hitler to get a deal for the same end. This shift culminated in the Soviet-Nazi Pact of August 1939.Meanwhile, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop appeared in Moscow and was able to negotiate an agreement with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov in a single day.

When Britain and France went to war against Germany the following month, the Soviet Union was already a virtual ally of the latter. General COMINTERN directives defined the war between Germany and the West as a basically imperialist conflict and appealed to the workers to refrain from any participation in military activities.

Stalin expected that a war that pitted France and Britain against Germany would turn into another costly bloodletting such as occurred on the Western Front during the Great War. Stalin believed this war would cause the collapse of social structures in those nations. Once they had ravaged their armies and caused unrest among their populations, these countries would have been ripe for the Red Army to assist revolutionary forces in seizing power. Stalin had not anticipated the rapidity with which the French collapsed in the face of the German onslaught in 1940.

1941-1945 - Great Patriotic War

After the invasion of the USSR by Germany in June 1941, the Soviets urged the CPUSA to agitate for US intervention in the war to save the USSR. This was a reversal of position for the American Communists who had opposed any potential intervention after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was greeted with joy by the CPUSA, whichforesaw salvation for the USSR, by the US declaration of war against Germany and Japan. From this point on, the American Communist Party engaged in what was known as the "united front" effort. This meant, at least publicly, dropping anti-Americanrhetoric and actions. Strikes in defense-related sectors were discouraged. However, Soviet espionage and the CPUSA's role in supporting those activities never was suspended, even though the American Communist Party went through the charade of disbanding and renaming itself the Communist Political Association. Now, th emotivation for participating in espionage was "fighting facism."

1943 - The End of the COMINTERN

Stalin publicly disbanded the COMINTERN in 1943. The question of how the apparatus and the whole mechanism of directing Communist parties should go on functioning was discussed at a meeting between Georgi Dimitrov and Joseph Stalin on June 12, 1943. The decision was made to set up an International Information Department (IID) at the CPSU(B) CC and entrust it with directing anti-fascist committees, illegal national broadcasting, links with foreign countries, the SUpress news agency and the Foreign Languages Publishing House. The department under Dimitrov retained all the services of the dissolved Comintern. They were disguised as institutes bearing numbers instead of names. The Comintern's successor also retained all foreign communication posts.

A Moscow message to all stations on 12 September 1943, message number 142, relating to this event is one of the most interesting and historically important messages in the enter corpus of VENONA translations. This message clearly discloses the KGB's connection to the COMINTERN and to the national Communist parties. The message details instructions for handling intelligence sources within the Communist Party after the disestablishment of the COMINTERN.

After the end of World War II, the alliance between the United States and USSR quickly faded. The CPUSA reconstituted itself and resumed its strident pro-Moscow anti-US stance. The era of the united front was over. On Moscow's orders, the head of the CPUSA, Earl Browder, was dumped. His crime had been to follow Moscow's orders in 1941 and "disband" the party in a show of unity with the USGovernment. Now, that policy was in disrepute, and he had to go. The Soviet Union's actions in Eastern Europein establishing subservient puppet regimes increased tensions with the United States.

Mulk Raj Anand: Novelist and Fighter

Source: http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=60&issue=105
International Socialism:A Quarterly Journal of Socialist Theory

Mulk Raj Anand: Novelist and Fighter

Talat Ahmed

The Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand passed away at the grand old age of 98 last September. He was arguably the greatest exponent of Indian writing in English, whose literary output was infused with a political commitment that conveyed the lives of India’s poor in a realistic and sympathetic manner. He had been involved in India’s freedom movement, been impressed by Marx’s letters on India and his general political framework and had been a co-founder of India’s greatest literary movement in the 1930s. I had the pleasure of meeting with him at his home in Khandala, outside Bombay, in March last year. Despite illness and fraility he was able to recall some of his earlier memories of life in London and India vividly.

Born into a family of metal workers with an army background in Peshawar, he witnessed the bloody reality of colonial rule with the Jaillinwalla massacre at Amritsar in 1919. Like most Indians of his generation he threw himself into Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. This led him into student agitation against the British for which he received 11 stripes on his back and was briefly jailed. The experience had a deep impact on the young Anand and he concluded that notions of ‘Empire’ and ‘Freedom’ were complete opposites:

I had grown up in the ferment of a great moral and political movement in which I had learnt that alien authority constricted our lives in every way. I can’t say there was no bitterness in my hatred of imperialism, because I remember how often waves of fury swept over me to see hundreds of human beings go to jail daily after being beaten up by the police for offering civil disobedience.1

It was partly to escape further arrest, but also to avoid the petty bourgeois ambitions of his soldier father, that Anand came to study at University College London in the autumn of 1925. Unlike most Indian students at the time he had to work in Indian restaurants and later for a publishing firm to earn his keep as his family were not in a position to fully finance his studies or maintenance. But he also became part of the literary crowd known as the ‘Bloomsbury group’. Here he met writers such as T S Eliot, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, E M Forster and John Strachey among many others. This literary elite both impressed him and left him feeling quite perplexed and uncomfortable. London at that time was the centre of the English-speaking intellectual world and Anand had hoped to meet with like-minded individuals who shared his anti-colonial liberal views. To his surprise he discovered that, according to Eliot, Gandhi was an ‘anarchist’ and that Indians should concentrate on cultural aspects of their society and leave the politics of governance to the British! Many of these writers had not visited India and so their impressions were formed by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, which to Anand was typical of colonial fantasies of India. It was partly in response to these perceptions that he wanted to write.2 As an Indian student in London, Anand found himself popular with the literary set and, fortunately for him, not all writers were as parochial as Eliot. He soon found himself drawn to the Woolfs and, more importantly, E M Forster. Anand held A Passage to India to be the best fictional writing on his homeland, as this went beyond the orientalist conceptions of the ‘natives’ and attempted to depict the complex, often contradictory and mostly confrontational impact of colonial rule in India. He had wanted to write about the ordinary, the mundane, everyday life experiences of Indians who were not kings and gods.

James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man impressed Anand greatly as it was a new literature infused with Irish nationalism. In 1927 Anand went to Ireland and enjoyed the writings of Yeats because his works represented the lives of ordinary people in villages and towns.

This was to be his model as he set about writing his first novel, Untouchable, published in 1935. It is a story based on the life of the most downtrodden, despised and oppressed section of Indian society, the outcastes – those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. This story is based on a single day in the life of Bakha, a latrine cleaner and sweeper boy. We follow him round on his daily chores cleaning up the shit of the rich and powerful, who despise him because of strict social rules governing ideas of purity and pollution. When he walks down the streets he has to signal an alarm with his voice as he approaches so that the ‘pure’ are forewarned to avoid even allowing his shadow to be cast upon them. On one occasion he does ‘pollute’ a caste Hindu and is chased, abused and attacked all day long for this defilement.

Anand was born into the kshatriya warrior caste, which is placed one below the top caste of the Brahmins priests. He had always befriended and played with the children of sweepers and as a child he had been shocked and disgusted by the suicide of a relative who had been disowned by his family for daring to share her food with a Muslim, for this too was regarded as pollution. Anand had always been disgusted with and opposed religious sectarianism, communalism and caste society. His soldier father had been involved with a Hindu reform movement, Arya Samaj. But Anand kept his distance, for despite its opposition to child marriage and the prohibition of widow remarriage, the movement was also quite evangelical in its attempts to ‘re-convert’ Muslims to the ‘true faith’. To Anand it harboured deep anti-Muslim sentiments with which he would have no truck.

With the publication of Untouchable, Anand had firmly associated himself with that brand of writers who saw ‘political, social and human causes as genuine impulses for the novel and poetry’.3

For Anand literature should be an interpretation of the truth of people’s lives. It should be written from felt experience and not books. It was for this reason that he returned to India briefly in 1929. Being influenced by Gandhi, he came to his ashram in Ahmedabad, where he showed Gandhi drafts of his novel. Gandhi was extremely critical because he claimed there was too much of the ‘Bloomsbury’ feel to it, on which he was probably right. While in Ahmedabad Anand lived like a disciple and did his share of cleaning the toilets – an act seen as defilement for a caste Hindu. In this period Anand revised his book considerably and when Forster read it his retort to those who complained about the ‘dirt’ in the novel, was that “the book seems to me indescribably clean…it has gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it”.4

Though this is his best known and most widely read novel, it was no easy job getting it published in the 1930s. Some 19 publishers had rejected this story for ‘its dirt’. In despair Anand was on the brink of giving up when the twentieth publisher accepted the novel on the basis that E M Forster had agreed to write the preface. Anand praised Forster for his support as it was not only unusual for an Indian writer to have his central character be a latrine cleaner; many European writers would not touch a subject like this either.

Anand displays compassion for the plight of untouchables but never sentimentality. In many ways the novel represented his thinking beyond the limits of Gandhi’s idea of untouchables as harijans – children of god. For Anand this is far too patronising and it is for this reason that his fictionalised account depicts a debate between a Gandhi-type figure espousing the oneness of humanity and simple living on the land and a poet who poses a modern solution to the problems of untouchability flushing toilets!

Anand’s second novel also illustrated his compassion and concerns for the poor of India. In Coolie he portrays the life of young Munoo, kshatriya by caste but a peasant boy who travels from his mountainous village through north India and eventually finds himself in Bombay. He is an orphan and so is forced to take whatever work he can in order to survive. He works as a servant, in a mine, a factory and as a coolie – black men who empty their bowels in the fields. In each of these situations Munoo is subjected to harassment, beatings and financial exploitation at the hands of employers, moneylenders, and his so called betters. But the story is also about the development of a young boy who begins to learn about the world around him and attempt to make some sense of it. This novel was written in 1936 and has a fictionalised account of a Bombay riot, which clearly represented Anand’s thoughts on those agents who fuelled communalism in their desperate attempts to keep the country divided, but also to keep the poor and workers in their place. So the riot as witnessed by Munoo is deliberately engineered to break a potential strike through the use of communalised tensions between Hindus and Muslims.5 In some ways the failure of progressive and left forces to counter rising communal tensions left Anand feeling that perhaps partition could not be avoided after the growth of the Muslim League and the inability of Nehru to counter the right wing elements within Congress.6

While in London Anand was conscious not only of colonial racist stereotypes of Indians that were prevalent among some British intellectuals but also the contempt in which they held British workers. A year after he arrived in London the 1926 General Strike took place, and was to have a profound effect upon him. His natural sympathies were with the strikers and their supporters for he found himself comparing the position of the English worker with that of Indians under colonial rule and found ‘British democracy’ seriously lacking. He believed there to be ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark’.7 His outrage at the way the state treated the strikers was only outstripped by his astonishment at the attitudes of the majority of his fellow students who were happy to scab and volunteer to help run trains, trams and tubes. Anand saw this as treachery and he quickly associated himself with a small group of students who ‘refused to be bullied by the others’. For his pains he was attacked in Gower Street by fellow students.8 He had no regrets, stating that ‘in life there are some things worth getting beaten up for’.9

London was home to many students from India throughout the 1930s and 1940s and Anand soon found himself gravitating towards the group of writers who would meet in people’s living rooms to recite poems and short stories, and above all to discuss the struggle in India and the international crisis with the forward march of fascism in Europe. Anand was invited to represent India on the platform at the World Congress of Writers against Fascism in Madrid in 1935. Anand was acutely aware of the threat fascism represented for writers in Europe and the mortal danger it held for humanity.

After seeing the way writers and intellectuals in Europe were organising, on his return to London, along with the writer Sajjad Zaheer, an Indian Communist, he set up the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA) in 1935. He penned the first draft of their manifesto which with minor adjustments was adopted at the first conference of the association in Lucknow in April 1936. This was a pan-Indian organisation that represented all the major linguistic regions of India and was staunchly secular in outlook and politically committed to the project of an independent united India with social justice and equality. At its height it probably had over 30,000 members writing literature in all the Indian vernaculars. That this literary association was also a social and political movement closely aligned to the Communist Party of India and influenced by Nehruvian nationalism is in no small way to be credited to Anand. Though he never joined the Communist Party, claiming the party would never have been able to tolerate him, he was very much a ‘fellow traveller’, aligning himself with the best elements of the left tradition in India.

Anand’s anti-fascist commitment led him to travel to Spain in 1937 to fight with the Republicans in the civil war. He felt it was his duty to show physical support because he was in Europe. He returned to India briefly in 1938 to address the second AIPWA in Calcutta, where he spoke about his experiences in Spain and insisted that writers use their craft as a means of exposing injustice and exploitation.

While in Spain he drafted another novel, Across the Blackwaters. This is the middle novel of a trilogy published in 1939. It is based on the experiences of Indian sepoys who are transported to Europe to fight in the First World War. The central character is Lalu, a young Hindu boy who has already broken with strict practices of Hindus by eating at Muslim shops while at home. In Europe we see how the soldiers are treated by their English masters within the army, but Anand also depicts the strict hierarchies among the Indians themselves in terms of caste, class and rank. Lalu not only flouts Indian conventions but in having an on-off flirtation with a French girl he challenges colonial morality under the very noses of the English officers.

The novel is full of compassion and humanity as well as humour for the thousands of mostly peasants from the Punjab who died in the trenches of France and Flanders.10 The roots of this story are in Anand’s childhood. As a boy he had seen hundreds of men go off to Europe from his town and surrounding villages but only a handful returned. This novel achieved such critical acclaim that in 1998 the British Council adapted it as a play to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the end of the First World War.

Anand was pivotal to internationalising the experience of Indian writers to the outside world and he helped to bring an international dimension to the progressive writers’ movement in India. He is brilliant at satirising the bigotries and orthodoxies of his times, but his novels also celebrate

the spirit of human rebellion which embodies all his central characters. Today Salman Rushdie is credited with popularising Indian writing in English. But 50 years earlier Anand had pioneered the writing of Indian literature which was accessible to the English-speaking world. And unlike Rushdie his works were inspired and informed by the lives of real people in unglamorous situations, warts and all. In addition his writings demonstrate a keen desire for political change and social transformation that remained with him throughout his life. The best tribute that readers of this journal could pay Mulk Raj Anand would be to read his novels and be inspired by the dedication and commitment he had.

NOTES

1: A Anand, Apology For Heroism: A Brief Autobiography of Ideas (Kutub-Popular, 1946), pp53-54.

2: See A Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (OUP, 1995).

3: S Cowasjee, Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand (Writers Workshop Publications, 1973), p1.

4: See Preface to Untouchable (Penguin, 1939), pv.

5: See A Anand, Coolie (Penguin, 1993).

6: Interview with Anand, 8 March 2004.

7: Apology, as above, pp32-35.

8: As above.

9: Interview with Anand, as above.

10: See A Anand, Across the Blackwaters (Orient Paperbacks, 2004), and also The Village and The Sword and the Sickle.