MAO: Then I think it was a very bad idea that you went to Yenan … Yenan is only poor and backward. It was not a good idea that you went to a village there.
MYRDAL: But it has a great tradition — the revolution and the war — I mean, after all, Yenan is the beginning—
MAO [interrupting]: Traditions — [laughing]. Traditions — [laughing].
Control of guns was watertight. An Austrian doctor kidnapped by the Communists in the later 1940s observed that if you heard wolves, you knew you were in a Red area. No one we interviewed recalled hearing a shot in Yenan throughout the war. One night, when a Russian radio operator on the outskirts of Yenan shot a wolf that had killed one of their two guard dogs, Mao’s guards immediately appeared to complain that the sound of the shots had “very much unsettled” Mao. Another time, Russian liaison Vladimirov shot a rabid dog (rabies was common) that was attacking his guard dog. A group of Mao’s guards instantly descended, saying that Mao “was very agitated” and that the shooting “had interrupted his work.”
IN FEBRUARY 1945, at Yalta in the Crimea, Stalin confirmed to Roosevelt and Churchill that Russia would enter the Pacific War two or three months after Germany’s defeat. This meant the Soviet army would enter China, and thus give Mao his long-awaited chance to take the country. Mao had made a shrewd assessment as far back as 1923: communism, he had said then, “had to be brought into China from the north by the Russian army.” Now, twenty-two years later, this was about to become reality.
Stalin did not have to persuade Roosevelt and Churchill to let him tail-end on the war against Japan. They wanted him involved. At the time, the US atomic bomb had not been tested, and the feeling was that Soviet entry would hasten the defeat of Japan and save Allied lives. The two Western leaders accepted Stalin’s demands for “compensation,” neither seeming to realize that Stalin needed no inducement at all to come in. They agreed not only to accept “the status quo” in Outer Mongolia (in effect, allowing Stalin to keep it), but to turn the clock back decades and restore the Tsarist privileges in China, including extraterritorial control over the Chinese Eastern Railway and two major ports in Manchuria.
Stalin used the excuse of fighting Japan, at the very last minute, to invade China and create the conditions for Mao to seize power. A hint came right after Yalta, on 18 February, when Russia’s governmental mouthpiece,
Mao was ecstatic, and his goodwill towards the Russians extended to their sex lives. Within days, he was trying to fix them up. “Haven’t you liked a single pretty woman here?” Mao asked Russian liaison Vladimirov on 26 February. “Don’t be shy …” He returned to the theme a week later: “Well, there are attractive girls, aren’t there? And extremely healthy. Don’t you think so? Maybe Orlov would like to look around for one? And maybe you, too, have an eye for someone?”
Vladimirov wrote:
towards evening a girl appeared … She shyly greeted me, saying she had come to tidy up the house …
I took out a stool, and placed it under our only tree, near the wall. She sat down, tense, but smiling. Then she amiably answered my questions, and was all the while waiting cautiously, her legs crossed, small slender legs in woven slippers …
She was a smashing girl, indeed!
… she told me she was a university student, just enrolled. How young she was …
On 5 April, Moscow told Tokyo it was breaking their Neutrality Pact. One month later Germany surrendered. This came right in the middle of the CCP congress that ratified Mao’s supremacy. Mao fired up the delegates with the sense that victory was imminent for the CCP as well. The Soviet army would definitely come to help them, he said, and then, with a big smile, he put the side of his hand to his neck like an ax head, and announced: “If not, you can chop my head off!” Mao delivered the most effusive comments he ever made about Stalin in his entire life. “Is Stalin the leader of the world revolution? Of course he is.” “Who is our leader? It is Stalin. Is there a second person? No.” “Every member of our Chinese Communist Party is Stalin’s pupil,” Mao intoned. “Stalin is the teacher to us all.”
