Iosif Stalin, Letter to Molotov and Bukharin on the Situation in China. July 9, 1927

[In the upper right-hand corner, the date written by Stalin is 9 July 1926, although the events mentioned in the letter occurred in 1927. At the top of the letter there are the following notations: "I've read it. Bukharin. Read it. A. I. Rykov, A. Andreev, M. Tomskii, Voroshilov, A. Mikoian."]

To Molotov and Bukharin,

Damn the both of you: you misled me a little bit by asking my opinion on the new directives (about China) and not providing me with concrete fresh material. The draft of the new directives talks about both T'ang Shen-chih and disarming the workers (the "virtual disarming," T'ang Shen-chih "virtually became the tool of the counterrevolutionaries," and so on). But first, no concrete facts are provided there, and second, neither the press nor the coded telegrams (which I had at the time) said anything about the existence of such facts. And not only did you mislead me a little bit, but I also misled you, perhaps, with my long and quite angry reply by coded telegram.

After I received the draft of your new directives, I decided: so, the opposition has finally worn Bukharin and Molotov down with a flood of new "theses," and they have succumbed, finally, to blackmail; so, Klim [Voroshilov] will be glad now that he is freed from the payments to Wuhan, which is why he was only too happy to vote for the new directives. And so forth and so on in the same spirit. Now I see that was all wrong. Yesterday I spent the whole day reading the new materials brought by the courier. Now I am not worried that new directives have been sent but rather that they have been sent too late. I don't think that leaving the national government and the Kuomintang can ease the plight of the Communist Party and "put it on its feet." On the contrary, leaving will only make it easier to beat up the Communists, create new discord, and perhaps even prepare something like a split. But there is no other way, and, in any event, in the end we had to come to this. This period has to be gotten through, absolutely.

But that is not the main thing now. The main thing is whether or not the current Chinese Communist Party can manage to emerge with honor from this new period (the underground, arrests, beatings, executions, betrayals and provocations among their own ranks, etc.), to come out hardened, tempered, without splitting up, breaking into pieces, disintegrating, and degenerating into a sect or a number of sects. We cannot exclude this danger at all, nor can we exclude the possibility of an interval between this bourgeois revolution and a future bourgeois revolution--analogous to the interval that we had between 1905 and 1917. Moreover, I believe that such a danger is more real (I mean the danger of the disintegration of the Chinese Communist Party) than some of the seeming realities so abundant in China. Why? Because unfortunately, we don't have a real or, if you like, actual Communist Party in China. If you take away the middle-ranking Communists who make good fighting material but who are completely inexperienced in politics, then what is the current Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Nothing but an "amalgamation" of general phrases gathered here and there, not linked to one another with any line or guiding idea. I don't want to be very demanding toward the Central Committee of the CCP. I know that one can't be too demanding toward it. But here is a simple demand: fulfill the directives of the Comintern. Has it fulfilled these directives? No. No, because it did not understand them, because it did not want to fulfill them and has hoodwinked the Comintern, or because it wasn't able to fulfill them. That is a fact. Roy blames Borodin. That's stupid. It can't be that Borodin has more weight with the CCP or its Central Committee than the Comintern does. Roy himself wrote that Borodin did not attend the CCP Congress since he was forced to go into hiding... Some (some!) explain this by the fact that the bloc with the Kuomintang is to blame, which ties the CCP down and does not allow it to be independent. That is also not true, for although any bloc ties down the members of the bloc one way or another, that doesn't mean that we should be against blocs in general. Take Chiang's five coastal provinces from Canton to Shanghai, where there is no bloc with the Kuomintang. How can you explain that Chiang's agents are more successful at disintegrating the "army" of the Communists, than the Communists are at disintegrating Chiang's rear guard? Is it not a fact that a whole number of trade unions are breaking off from the CCP, and Chiang continues to hold strong? What sort of CCP "independence" is that? ... I think the reason is not in these factors, although they have their significance, but in the fact that the current Central Committee (its leadership) was forged in the period of the nationwide revolution and received its baptism by fire during this period and it turned out to be completely inadaptable to the new, agrarian phase of the revolution. The CCP Central Committee does not understand the point of the new phase of the revolution. There is not a single Marxist mind in the Central Committee capable of understanding the underpinning (the social underpinning) of the events now occurring. The CCP Central Committee was unable to use the rich period of the bloc with Kuomintang in order to conduct energetic work in openly organizing the revolution, the proletariat, the peasantry, the revolutionary military units, the revolutionizing of the army, the work of setting the soldiers against the generals. The CCP Central Committee has lived off the Kuomintang for a whole year and has had the opportunity of freely working and organizing, yet it did nothing to turn the conglomerate of elements (true, quite militant), incorrectly called a party, into a real party... Of course there was work at the grass roots. We are indebted to the middle-ranking Communists for that. But characteristically, it was not the Central Committee that went to the workers and peasants but the workers and peasants who went to the Central Committee, and the closer the workers and peasants approached the Central Committee, the farther away from them went the so-called Central Committee, preferring to kill time in behind-the-scenes talks with the leaders and generals from the Kuomintang. The CCP sometimes babbles about the hegemony of the proletariat. But the most intolerable thing about this babbling is that the CCP does not have a clue (literally, not a clue) about hegemony--it kills the initiative of the working masses, undermines the "unauthorized" actions of the peasant masses, and reduces class warfare in China to a lot of big talk about the "feudal bourgeoisie" (now it has finally been determined that, as it turns out, the author of this term is Roy).

That's the reason why the Comintern's directives are not fulfilled.

That is why I'm afraid of letting such a party float freely on the "wide-open sea" before it has to (it will crash before it has managed to harden itself ... ).

That is why I now believe the question of the party is the main question of the Chinese revolution.

How can we fix the conglomerate that we incorrectly call the Chinese Communist Party? The recall of Ch'en Tu-hsiu or T'an Ping-shan will not help here, of course, although I don't object to recalling them and teaching them a thing or two. Other measures are needed. A good Marxist-Leninist literature must be created in the Chinese language--fundamental, not made up of "little leaflets"--and the necessary funds must now be allocated for this, without delay (you can say to Klim that this will cost much less than maintaining one hundred of his hemorrhoidal bureaucrat/counterrevolutionaries for half a year). Furthermore, we have expended too much effort on organizing a system of advisors for the armies in China (moreover, these advisors turned out not to be on the ball politically--that is, they were never able to warn us in time of the defection of their own "chiefs"). It's time to really busy ourselves with the organization of a system of party advisors attached to the CCP Central Committee, the Central Committee departments, regional organizations in each province, the departments of these regional organizations, the party youth organization, the peasant department of the Central Committee, the military department of the Central Committee, the central organ, the federation of trade unions of China. Both Borodin and Ray must be purged from China, along with all those opposition members that hinder the work there. We should regularly send to China, not people we don't need, but competent people instead. The structure has to be set up so that all these party advisors work together as a whole, directed by the chief advisor to the Central Committee (the Comintern representative). These "nannies" are necessary at this stage because of the weakness, shapelessness and political amorphousness, and lack of qualification of the current Central Committee. The Central Committee will learn from the party advisors. The party advisors will compensate for the enormous shortcomings of the CCP Central Committee and its top regional officials. They will serve (for the time being) as the nails holding the existing conglomerate together as a party.

And so on in the same spirit.

As the revolution and the party grow, the need for these "nannies" will disappear.

Well, that will do.

Regards to you, J. Stalin

P.S. Report back on receiving this letter. Report your opinion as well. If you find it necessary, you can give it to the other Politbiuro members to read.

J. Stalin

Source: Lars T. Lih, O. V. Naumov, and O. V. Khlevniuk, eds., Stalin's Letters to Molotov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 139-142.