Book Reviews: Stalin and Mao: A Comparison of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. By Lucien Bianco,. Trans. Krystyna Horko,. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2018. xxv, 448 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00, hard bound.

Stalin and Mao: A Comparison of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. By Lucien Bianco. Trans. Krystyna Horko. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2018. xxv, 448 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00, hard bound.

At Berkeley, we read Lucien Bianco's tour de force, a book entitled The Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949 (Gallimard, 1967; Stanford, 1971) in the first week of the late Frederic Wakeman, Jr.’s graduate course on Republican China. Bianco was one of the best books we read, logically constructed with meaty footnotes providing both documentation and additional counterpoints, brilliantly translated by Muriel Bell of Stanford UP. Bianco combined sweeping narrative, historical arguments, social science comparisons, historiography, and primary documentation seamlessly. Only in the footnotes could we sense Bianco's ongoing battle against the French Maoists, almost as vituperative as the Beijing struggles of those years.

In 2014, Bianco's newest book appeared in French as La récidive. Révolution russe, révolution chinoise, coming out of Pierre Nora's famed Gallimard publishing house, just as Les origines had done forty-seven years earlier. If Mao Zedong was a practical man of action in Les origines, as he worked his way toward dictatorship, now Bianco has evaluated him more fully with...