Book Review – Two Short Histories on Mao and Stalin

Only one thing can ever be learned from history – humanity never learns from history.

But, for those of us who want to understand our world and our place in it, the history books we must open. Why? To learn where we have come from is to know where we are – only then can we guess or plan where we’re going.

Our cultures rise and fall as we beg for great leaders to turn our daily existential confusion into the certainties of faith, and action based on that faith. With enough faith, we will bravely and wholeheartedly – sometimes literally – tear the hearts of those who have been named as our enemies, from their chests, and eat them.

Two new short histories from Black Inc – The Death of Stalin, by Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China, by Linda Jaivin – will have you cringing at the extremes of the collective human condition, our love of geat leaders – and our ability to eat the hearts of our ‘enemies’.

Fitzpatrick’s The Death of Stalin revolves around the events that director Armando Iannucci used for his comedic 2017 film of the same name. The fear of an unstable, erratic, wilful, paranoid and unpredictable leader prevented any of his staff or ministers attending to Stalin as he died, rather than risk a misstep.

Stalin had run a regime that executed tens of millions, with more millions sentenced to gulags.

He operated on chaotic decision-making that flipped between ideology and extreme paranoia, all of which ensured no-one dared to disturb Stalin in his final hours.

In Jaivin’s Bombard the Headquarters!,

Mao’s wilful fostering and enabling of widespread fear, hatred and vengeful chaos – all for ideologically ‘pure’ reasons, results in many tens of millions executed, or condemned to brutal lives of hard labour, paranoia and starvation.

Both books are succinct – around 100 pages, and both shine a light not just on global history but this era too. After reading them both, I know far better who Putin and Xi Jinping are, and why they operate as they do. Understand their past and you’ll understand their future.

Similarly, the insights extend to understanding other “Great Men” leaders, like Trump, who can be compared to both Mao and Stalin – as Putin and Xi Jinping understand well.

The rising fascist state of the US can be readily understood in this context as both corrupt and self-destructive. Putin and Xi may largely stand back and watch the US disintegrate, while our politicians fail to understand what they’re seeing, and instead attempt to curry favour with a doomed and brutal autocratic regime.

Were we to learn from history, we’d learn our love of Great Leaders will kill us more surely than any other form of government, even that worst of all forms – democracy.

Bombard the Headquarters! and The Death of Stalin are perfect, brief summaries that will tell you the future that our governments are determined to ignore.

B.P. Marshall is a scriptwriter and author.

Bombard the Headquarters – The Cultural Revolution in China, by Linda Jaivin, ISBN: 9781760645601, May 2025, 107pp, Black Inc Publishing

The Death of Stalin, by Sheila Fitzpatrick, ISBN: 9781760645090, May 2025, 97pp, Black Inc Publishing