Challenge: Maoist Russia?

[ninebucks]

With a POD after Mao Zedong's birth, (so this has to be OTL Mao, not an ATL genetic 'brother'), how could Russia, (not necessarily the USSR), end up following a socialist doctrine based on the ideas and philosophies of Mao?

 

[I Guangxu]

This would be, IMO, a very difficult prospect. It would ultimately require a POD sometime after the Yennan period of the Long March, as this was Mao's most prolific period of writing and the point at which Maoism as we understand it really came into being. As such, the USSR's own brand of communism is by this point already firmly entrenched and will be difficult to supplant. A possible turning point could be if Khrushchev is historically replaced by a much weaker figure, allowing Mao to dominate the growing USSR/PRC competition and take leadership of the global communist movement.

This, however, all falls prey to a single, rather glaring fallacy, assuming that Maoism actually works. OTL one of the things that shot the PRC and Mao's bid for global leadership in communism was the complete and utter failure of the Great Leap Forward, touted as the great application of Maoism. Even assuming that Mao is in a better position politically to promote his ideas, it won't change the fact that they are almost all totally unworkable, and that their practical application is an almost instant recipe for disaster.

Obviously, one could have an earlier POD that would cause Mao's philosophies to be altered in some way to make them more workable. Such alterations, however, would have to be fairly extensive, to the point that it really ceases to be Maoism and becomes TLAuthorism, which I feel largely defeats the point of the exercise.

 

[Reekwind]

With a POD after Mao Zedong's birth, (so this has to be OTL Mao, not an ATL genetic 'brother'), how could Russia, (not necessarily the USSR), end up following a socialist doctrine based on the ideas and philosophies of Mao?

Almost impossible to my mind. You could see a form of peasant Marxism emerge in Russia as late as the 1930s but Maoism per se was a specific evolution of Marxist-Leninist thought. Remove Lenin et al and suddenly several central planks of Maoist thought have gone missing

So you do need the Russian Revolution to occur but the Bolsheviks were never anything but traditional, that is to say worker orientated, Marxists. They're not going to suddenly convert to Maoism and nor is an established USSR going to discard its own revolutionary heritage. So the Revolution occurs... but fails. The Bolsheviks are defeated and Russia Balkanises. In the meantime (assuming Leninism is still credible and things have not changed elsewhere) Mao's peasant orientated spin on Marxism becomes popular in China and is adapted by the successors of the Socialist Revolutionaries who, due to the failure of Bolshevikism and lack of industrialisation, have come to dominate the various states of the (former) eastern Russian Empire

Hope that makes sense, its the closest I can get. And even this is not possible while the USSR or Russian Empire exist

A possible turning point could be if Khrushchev is historically replaced by a much weaker figure, allowing Mao to dominate the growing USSR/PRC competition and take leadership of the global communist movement.

Nah. During the '50s and '60s, and beyond, the gulf between the USSR and PRC, by almost any measure, was unimaginably vast. There is simply no way that any leader in Moscow is going to be treated as a junior partner by Mao. Any General Secretary that did display such weakness would not last long in the job. Similarly any POD post-'45, when Moscow was at its peak and a true superpower, is not feasible

 

[I Guangxu]

Nah. During the '50s and '60s, and beyond, the gulf between the USSR and PRC, by almost any measure, was unimaginably vast. There is simply no way that any leader in Moscow is going to be treated as a junior partner by Mao. Any General Secretary that did display such weakness would not last long in the job. Similarly any POD post-'45, when Moscow was at its peak and a true superpower, is not feasible

I concur, I didn't honestly figure that was feasible. I was just idly tossing stray thoughts about.

So the Revolution occurs... The Bolsheviks are defeated and Russia Balkanises. In the meantime (assuming Leninism is still credible and things have not changed elsewhere) Mao's peasant orientated spin on Marxism becomes popular in China and is adapted by the successors of the Socialist Revolutionaries who, due to the failure of Bolshevikism and lack of industrialisation, have come to dominate the various states of the (former) eastern Russian Empire

I'm not really convinced that this is possible, either. The primary reason that many Chinese revolutionaries gave credence to Marx-Leninism as a revolutionary philosophy was because of the Bolsheviks' success in the Russian Revolution. Additionally, the CCP in its early days owed almost all of its success to support from the Soviet Union and the Comintern. Remove both the vindication of a successful revolution and the subsequent lack of support on the scale of that the Soviet Union provided, and the CCP fizzles. Given that Mao (contrary to propaganda) did not pop out of his mother with the Little Red Book in hand, and that his decision to join the CCP was largely motivated by its political viability, it becomes less and less likely that Maoism would occur at all without a successful Russian Revolution.