Mao Zedong And Stalin Similarities

With almost thirty years between the start of their dictatorships, it seems unlikely that Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin would hold many similarities. While they seem very different, similarities between the two stem from their childhoods. Joseph Stalin, born in 1879 to a poor family in Gori, Russia, later became dictator of the Soviet Union from the 1920s until his death in 1953, where he was responsible for upwards of twenty million deaths through his purges (Biography in Context). Mao Zedong was born in Shaoshan China in 1893, fourteen years after Stalin. Later in his life, he was head of the Chinese Communist Party between the years 1949 to 1976, the year of his death. Their differences are clear through their actions; Stalin was hostile to the peasantry of the Soviet Union, while Zedong believed that he was an ally.

Despite these differences, historians remember them as having incredibly bloody regimes. Historians call Stalin “one of the bloodiest tyrants in the history of the world” because of his purges (Daily History), and Zedong “the greatest mass murderer in world history” because of the millions of deaths that occurred during his regime (Akbar). Looking at their individual rises to power, the similarities become more evident. Even their individual upbringings were different, but somehow lead to similarities in their leadership. Through the changes he pushed to change China’s culture, he caused the death of about forty-five people (World History in Context). Zedong and Stalin have obvious differences, but those differences lead to more similarities because of the parallel origin of these