Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Vardy, Steven Bela
• Vardy, Agnes Huszar

Titel

CANNIBALISM IN STALIN'S RUSSIA AND MAO'S CHINA

Ist Teil von

• East European quarterly, 2007-06, Vol.41 (2), p.223-238

Ort / Verlag

Boulder: East European Quarterly

Erscheinungsjahr

2007

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Vardy and Vardy expose the rather shocking practice of cannibalism in several slave concentration and hard labor camps in the USSR as well as in China, highlighting the fact that the act is considered as part of the communist "class struggle", despite its atrocious nature. They stress that this kind of "class struggle" had been initiated some three decades earlier by Joseph Stalin in Russia, who rose from the role of a Caucasian brigand to the position of the "Communist Czar" of the Soviet Union. A quarter century later, a similar "class struggle" was initiated by Stalin's most faithful disciple, Mao Zedong, who in 1949 became the uncrowned "Communist Emperor" of China. Occasionally, Mao surpassed even the "achievements" of his Bolshevik teacher and master. The best example of this is his introduction of obligatory cannibalism in the form of "human flesh banquets" to the People's Republic of China. However, they clarify that in the Soviet Union, cannibalism was not the result of an official policy: it was the consequence of the rampant hunger in the Gulag slave labor camps, and of the officially induced famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. It was the unbearable and ever present hunger that drove people to give up their humanity and to eat their fellow human beings for the sake of their own survival. In contrast, in Mao's China, cannibalism became a tool for the punishment of the former ruling classes, and for the re-education of the ertswhile oppressed masses. In other words, the eating of human flesh was simply one of the methods used for reshaping the minds of peasants and the proletariat, but in particular the minds and attitudes of the leadership of the ruling Communist Party.