the party itself. At its First Congress in 1921, the party called for a purely working-class revolution-at a time when there were only a million and a half industrial workers in China.
Later in that decade, when the Kremlin played mentor to the Chinese party, Stalin vastly underestimated the peasantry's potential; he imag- ined that the Chinese revolution need only triumph in a few cities, as happened in Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power in Moscow and Petrograd. Stalin's dream turned into...