destabilizing, and put a stop to it at home.

Although, however, there were

those within the Soviet political elite who wished to rehabilitate Stalin, this
did not happen, and between the fall of Khrushchev in 1964 and the death
of Mao in 1976, Stalin was lauded much more in Beijing than in Moscow.
Moreover, in a number of his actions – not least in his (pyrrhic) victory over
party officialdom which was at the heart of the Cultural Revolution – Mao
seemed to be following in Stalin’s footsteps. Certainly, in China’s ‘Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, there were echoes of Stalin’s purges of
the late 1930s in which so many party members of long standing perished.
There were disagreements between the leaderships of the two Communist
states on the way the economy should be run, with Mao despising the highly
bureaucratized nature of the Soviet state and concerned to combat such
tendencies in his own country. In addition to the real ideological differences
must be added Mao’s personal ambition to be the leading theorist in the
Communist world and his aspiration to make a transition to communism,
in the utopian sense of the term, ahead of the Soviet Union. After the fall
of Khrushchev, Soviet leaders paid no more than occasional lip-service to
the very notion of this supposedly final stage of development of society, so
Mao had that field to himself.
The Cultural