"But the past, however much we may rebel against and seek to repudiate it, is not easily exorcised. The history of this century provides two striking examples of attempts to do just that, to abolish the past and make a new start. The first was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia, the second the communist revolution in Mainland China culminating in the establishment of the Communist China in 1949. Each was made at an incalculable cost in human suffering, not only in the initial seizure of power, and civil war, but in the second revolutions – Stalin's collectivization of agriculture and purges in the 1930s, Mao's Cultural Revolution and purges in the 1960s. The communist leaders had foreseen that there would be resistance to the changes they sought to impose on the Russian and Chinese peoples. They had made up their minds to use the most ruthless means to suppress it and to make the break with the past decisive. But the result was the opposite of what they wanted. Instead of liberating the masses and energizing them to create a new world, they cowed and alienated them. The methods they used had no less destructive an effect on the communist leadership itself, corrupting and distorting the revolution to a degree from which neither party was able to free itself. Far from abolishing the past, an ostensibly revolutionary regime – in practice, highly conservative – added an additional layer of history which made the task of adapting to change much more difficult. In the reform period, the 1980s, when I first visited Mainland China, President Li Xiannian (like Deng Xiao Ping, a veteran of Mao's Long March) told a group of us in private conversation that the mistake they had made was 'working against the grain of Chinese history'. In future, he added, they would work with it. In the ten years since, however, this is precisely what the Chinese Communist leadership, more and more isolated from the Chinese people, has shown itself incapable of doing – in contrast to the pragmatic and dynamic development of a potential rival alternative, the free enterprise version of the Chinese future in the southern province of Guangdong."