USSR and China:Cultural Revolution and Intellectuals Destiny Comparison of Makxim Gorky and Hu Feng Zhang Jianhua (Beijing Normal University, School of History) In the first half of twentieth century both Russia and China experienced communist revolution: The October Revolution of 1917 and The Chinese Revolution of 1949, which are called Cultural Revolution aspired to overturning the traditions and building new system rather than bottom-up and upside-down political revolutions. The American famous political scientist Samuel P. Huntington named the two revolutions as Great Revolutions for their significant impact on development of human history, distinguished from meaningless “Violent Revolution” which wrecks a country and ruins the people. ① When revolution was accomplished and regime changed，two brothers experienced about a decade of political unrest and sharp transition of social system: In Russia it is from year 1917, when The October Revolution happened, to year 1929, when political line of Stalin （И.В.Сталин,1878-1953）won outright and the Soviet Union entered into Year of the Great Turn (Год великого перелома) ②; In China it is from year 1949, when the People's Republic of China founded, to year 1958, when socialist transformation was accomplished. Moreover, Lenin（В.И.Ленин,1870－1924）and Mao（1893－1976）, the new leaders of the two countries and the Communist Parties, tried to construct “the proletarian culture”, which is completely different from noble culture and bourgeois culture in this decade, as a historic significance: in Soviet Union to construct “Soviet Culture”, in China --- “New Chinese National Culture”. There are special concerns that intellectuals of the two countries endured mentally and physically an extraordinary experience in the “Cultural Revolution”. On the one hand, intellectuals were mentally kidnapped by soaring revolution fervor. They tried to realize their dream of political Utopia with the help of new regime. On the other hand, intellectuals always tried to keep their public space and their way of expressing their thoughts and very cautiously to keep a certain distance in time and space away from power. Moreover, intellectuals used to evaluate revolutionary results by double standards: “revolutionary morals” and “cultural morals”. When the time of great turn is coming, ① John King Fairbank , a prominent American academic and historian of China, in his book《The Great Chinese Revolution1800-1985》(New York, Harper and Row,1986)，gave a monographic study of The Chinese Revolution of 1949; And there are books The Russian Revolution. New York，1990, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution. New York: Vintage Books,1995, The Three "Whys" of the Russian Revolution. New York: Vintage Books,1995 written by Richard Pipes. ② Stalin's article "Year of the Great Turn", published on November 7, 1929, marked the beginning of a full-scale collectivization of agriculture countrywide. At this time Stalin had already been at the height of his power while his political line had become the Bible which whole party and whole county believed in after expelling Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin from the Party “revolutionary devil” which they longed for fostered fear into their heart. So they showed up in the mask of commentator and dissenter. Thus, the Soviet and Chinese intellectuals played three particular roles of comedy-serious drama-tragedy at the same time. At that time of passion, when everything devastated were eager for renaissance, intellectuals acted as multiple roles, like theory planners and practice explorer of new society and system, the benefited and the suffered from them. Gorky（А.М.Горький，1868－1936）and Hu Feng（1902－1985）are typical characters of intellectuals during the period of historical changes and regime changes. They are the symbol of the new intellectuals (soviet intellectuals and socialist intellectuals), who were re-educated and set up as examples deliberately by the new regime. They had experienced a very brilliant transformation from ‘knowledge elite’ to ‘political elite’ and the confusion and regeneration in the background of ‘Cultural Revolution’. Gorky, whose original family name was Peshkov (Пешков), was born in a poor worker’s family in Nizhny Novgorod of Russia on March 28, 1868. He lost his father at the age of 3. When he was 11 years old, he led a vagrant life and worked as an apprentice, porters, and baker and so on. Gorky began his literature career in 1892, when his short story Makar Chudra (Макар Чудра) was published. Gorky is a famous writer and one of representative characters of Silver Age in Russian literature. He devoted himself to exploring in artistic expression and taking part in many literary factions such as “Acmeism” (Акмеизм) and “God Creation” (Богостроительство). Since 1889, he was arrested and exiled by the czar government many times for participating in revolutionary activities. As the eyewitness of the incident of “Bloody Sunday” in 1905, he created January 9th (9 яванря) with full of indignation to crusade against the czar government’s the brutal shooting of workers marching with a petition for reform, and he joined in Bolsheviks and got acquainted with Lenin in the same year. At the same time, he began to create revolutionary literature, such as The Mother (Мать) and The Enemy (Враги), and was honored as “revolutionary sea swallow” by Lenin. Hu Feng, whose original name was Zhang Guangren①, was born in a peasant family in Ji-chun county of Hubei province, on November 2, 1902. He was enrolled in the English department of Qinghua University in 1926, and was enrolled in the English department of Keio University of Japan in 1931, “but he concentrated on the study of Marxism and Proletarian Literature and the revolution activities”.② In 1933, he was expelled from Japan for organizing progress literature group. Back to Shanghai, he became a professional poet, publisher, literary critics and literature translator. Since 1933, Hu Feng was propaganda minister and administrative secretary of League of the Left-Wing Writers in China. He published what does people require from literature? and put forward the slogan of “the popular literature of national revolutionary war” and got Lu Hsun’s highly award. Every coins has two sides , it resulted in more than half a country of resentment conflicted with “defense literature” by Zhou Yang, another leader of League of the Left-Wing Writers in China. At the beginning of 1945, Hu Feng worked as the chief editor of magazine Hope, which played an active role in cooperating with Rectification Movement in Yen’an. About Hu Feng Lu Hsun wrote in The answer to Xu Maoyong on the problem about anti-Japanese united front: “He is truly a talent young man, he never took part in any organizations against anti-Japanese ① He used Gu Fei, Gao Huang, Zhang Guo as his pen names. ② Memoirs of Hu Feng, Beijing: People's Publishing House, p.420. movement or a united front.”, “Therefore, I’d understood, Hu Feng’s uprightness is easy to incur hatred and the character made him accessible. By contrast the youth which always tries to frame others such as Zhou Yang made me doubt, even hatred” ①. The revolution succeeded finally and a new regime will be established, which may be very delighted and may be very disappointed for the intellectuals who used to evaluate revolutionary results by double standards: “revolutionary morals” and “cultural morals”. Revolution itself and regime change, which are often accompanied with sharp political unrest, social damage and negative phenomenon e.g. revolutionists’ conducts against traditional civilization and human ethics, are far from the intellectuals’ imagination. Therefore, the success of the revolution is actually the test of revolutionary outlook and moral outlook for the intellectuals, who devoted himself to the revolution. Gorky stuck to the socialist belief in his early years and joined the Bolsheviks in 1905, enthusiastically calling for arrival of the revolution with a ‘sea swallow’ image. However, he was confused politically around the October Revolution. In his eyes, “Cultural Revolution”, followed by the October Revolution, is nothing else but “cultural violence”. From May 1917 to June 1918 , Gorky took the charge of the newspaper‘new life’ （Новая жизнь）and opened a column Untimely Thoughts (Несвоевременные мысли) in his newspaper New Life (Новая Жизнь) to discuss about the October Revolution. He believed that the October Revolution is a Russian-style riot without any socialist mentality.② He said: I distrust the Russian in power, they are slaves of yesterday who could immediately turn into unscrupulous tyrant, once getting chance to master others. He criticized: The representatives of the People’s Commissar Government are rude. They treated the citizens same as defeated and just like the tsar police treated the people in the past. He stressed, “”In my opinion, the revolution is in vain and has no meaning unless the revolution immediately begin with the emergency work in culture construction all over the country. The newspaper New Life received lots of complaints about the evildoing such as pilferage, robbery, lynches and cultural destruction and so on. Newspapers published some typical letter, “” on April 3rd, about three hundred Red Guards members entered our village .They robbed all the rich people. Actually, they extorted from the villagers money in amount of from 1000 rubles to 6000 rubles, totally 85350 rubles…..③ In the autumn of 1918, a collection of essays of the columns Untimely Thoughts