It is important to understand the extent of Russia's infiltration of societies around the world:

http://wunc.org/post/former-spymaster-three-decades-cia

A central theme in his books is that spies have often been successful in the U.S. because Americans are consistently loath to believe their countrymen would betray them. "You certainly see in the first hundred years or so [of American history], they are totally blind to this," Sulick told host Frank Stasio on The State of Things. "But even on into the 20th century, in the 1930s and 1940s when the Soviets basically riddle the FDR administration and the Manhattan Project with - now they're estimating - about 500 spies."

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/14/obama-russia-election-interference-241547

As early as 2014, the administration received a report that quoted a well-connected Russian source as saying that the Kremlin was building a disinformation arm that could be used to interfere in Western democracies. The report, according to an official familiar with it, included a quote from the Russian source telling U.S. officials in Moscow, "You have no idea how extensive these networks are in Europe ... and in the U.S., Russia has penetrated media organizations, lobbying firms, political parties, governments and militaries in all of these places."

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-us-has-more-to-lose-than-russia-in-spy-expulsions

“There are more Russian operatives, declared and undeclared, in the United States now than at any other time in the past fifteen years,” the official told me. “They’re here in large numbers, actively trying to penetrate a whole host of sectors—government, industry, and academia.”

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/andrew-sword.html

THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE

...The facts, however, are far more sensational even than the story dismissed as impossible by the SVR. The KGB defector had brought with him to Britain details not of a few hundred but of thousands of Soviet agents and intelligence officers in all parts of the globe, some of them "illegals" living under deep cover abroad, disguised as foreign citizens.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jan/26/plan-c-top-secret-cold-war-battle-plan-bring-unite/

http://www.businessinsider.com/here-was-the-fbis-secret-plan-in-case-nuclear-war-broke-out-2015-1

The United States government made extreme, top-secret plans for preserving national security in the event of a nuclear attack during the Cold War, according to documents recently released to transparency journalism organization MuckRock.

The FBI created "Plan C" in 1956, the same year the Red Army shut down the Hungarian Revolution, and if activated, Plan C would have put the nation under martial law and allowed for nearly 13,000 people to be detained for having links to "subversive organizations."

The FBI held a briefing with three top officials from every department to distribute papers outlining Plan C, which was later given to FBI field offices. The plan was ordered to be destroyed in July 1957.

Although the plan was never released, MuckRock's memos from closed meetings with high-ranking officials give readers an idea of what could have happened. Plan C would have gone into effect "after a war has begun in which the U.S. is involved or may become involved and prior to an actual attack on the U.S. itself," according to the documents.

...In an emergency, the government would also have activated a detention program that would have led to arrests for "individuals whose affiliations with subversive organizations are so pronounced that their continued liberty in the event of national emergency would present a serious threat," according to the documents. The exact number of people who would be affected was set at 12,949.

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86T00586R000400490007-7.pdf

The Soviets in India: Moscow's Major Penetration Program

...the Soviets ... continue to manipulate and exploit selected issues and politicians. More important, through a wide range of overt and covert activities conducted during the last three decades, the Soviets have built up substantial influence capabilities in India.

...we believe Moscow has undertaken activities to penetrate virtually every sector of Indian society:

- Moscow provides substantial financial support to the ruling Congress-I Party, the two Indian Communist parties, and individual politicians of various parties ...This funding has helped ensure significant Soviet access to Indian Government and political leaders.

- The Soviets enjoy nearly unfettered access to the pages of Indian newspapers, largely through the efforts of the Soviet Information Department. ...Moscow overtly and covertly placed more than 160,000 items (original articles plus replays) in the Indian press, widely regarded as the freest in the Third World. Access to Press Trust of India, the largest English language news service, has become so automatic that some Soviet officials have come to call it "Press TASS of India."

...These Soviet activities constitute a massive assault on the Indian political process

...These activities are extensive and include: exploitation of a broad network of contacts among Indian politicians, government officials, and the military;

...Given what we know of Soviet intelligence presence elsewhere, we believe that the intelligence presence is substantially larger than these figures suggest.

...Soviet diplomats have extensive contacts with both cabinet-level officials and the middle and upper levels of the various ministries of the central government in New Delhi.

...Some key officials, including cabinet ministers, ambassadors, and prominent Congress-I politicians, have been active in promoting Soviet activities

...as many as 40 percent of the Congress-I MPs in Mrs. Gandhi's last government had received Soviet political contributions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB939677043623027864

ROME -- Ending weeks of suspense, an Italian parliamentary commission made public the list of more than 200 alleged KGB spies and collaborators who infiltrated the nation's establishment during the Cold War.

The dossier, part of an archive smuggled into Britain by KGB defector Vassily Mitrokhin, includes Armando Cossutta, head of a splinter communist party that belongs to Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema's government, and Jas Gawronski, a senator who served as a spokesman to center-right Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 1994.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/terrorism/1989-andrew.pdf

Like much else in the study of contemporary intelligence, KGB and GRU foreign operations are commonly interpreted with almost total disregard for historical perspective. "Active measures" are widely believed to be an invention of Soviet intelligence. In reality, though the KGB has been responsible for an enormous expansion in the use made of them, their effectiveness was at least as great in Tsarist times. There is no convincing evidence that any KGB-inspired press campaign in the West as been as effective as the tsarist attempting to persuade Western investors, all of whom later lost their money, to ignore the risks of investing in Russia. Before World War I, every Paris newspaper of note save for the socialist L'Humanite was successfully bribed to support tsarist government loans. By 1914, 25 percent of France's foreign investment was in Russia

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2009/07/17/declassified-documents-reveal-kgb-spies-in-the-us

...newly released documents from U.S. and Soviet archives show that hundreds of people, from the famous to the obscure, crossed paths with Soviet intelligence during the pre-World War II years. They include the country's most famous physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, novelist Ernest Hemingway, and civil servants like Hiss. There were journalists, too, like Walter Lippmann, I. F. Stone, and Bernard Redmont, a former correspondent for U.S. News who has been denying spying allegations for more than a half century.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-israeli-officials-were-part-of-kgb-spy-ring-report/

KGB files reportedly revealed the existence of an extensive Soviet spy ring in Israel, encompassing Knesset [the national legislature of Israel] members, senior IDF officers, engineers, members of the Israeli intelligence community, and others who worked on classified projects.

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4870004,00.html

...But the IDF major general was not the only impressive agent the KGB had in Israel's defense establishment.

The Mitrokhin documents also mention the code name "Malinka," who is one of two agents the KGB had in the "Counterintelligence Division," apparently from the Shin Bet. If the KGB did indeed have agents in the Shin Bet, it would be the kind of achievement any intelligence agency dreams of: planting a spy in the place where they catch spies.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/soviet-documents-said-to-reveal-abbas-was-kgb-agent-in-syria/

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 television reported Wednesday, citing information it said was included in an archive smuggled out of the USSR.

According to Channel 1’s foreign news editor Oren Nahari, the famed Mitrokhin archive, kept by KGB defector Vasily Mitrokhin, revealed that Abbas was a Soviet mole in Damascus in 1983.

https://archive.org/stream/TheWorldWasGoingOurWayTheKGBAndTheBattleForTheTheThirdWorld/The%20World%20Was%20Going%20Our%20Way_djvu.txt

In 1970 Haddad was recruited by the KGB as Agent NATSIONALIST. Andropov reported to Brezhnev in May:

The nature of our relations with W. Haddad enables us to control the external operations of the PFLP to a certain degree

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4874089,00.html

Thirty-one years before the 9/11 terror attacks, Haddad had already managed to carry out an attack that included the simultaneous hijacking of several jet airliners. This attack was one of the triggers of Jordan's big confrontation against terror organizations—known as "Black September"—and changed the course of history in the Middle East.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/04/kim-philbys-stasi-tape-reveals-secrets-of-his-success-as-cold-war-spy

Kim Philby, Britain’s most notorious cold war traitor, told an audience of East German spies after his defection that he was able to avoid being rumbled for so long because he had been “born into the British governing class”.

...During the second world war and the subsequent decades, and despite periodic suspicion over his political loyalties, Philby rose through the ranks of MI6, eventually becoming the chief of the service’s anti-Soviet department. However, throughout this time he was filing reports to KGB handlers. His treachery was only unearthed in 1963.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11949194/mi5-blunders-russian-spy-kim-philby.html

A series of MI6 blunders allowed Kim Philby to eradicate the greatest threat to his secret life as a Russian agent and missed a chance to expose him, newly released secret papers reveal.

Konstantin Volkov, a senior intelligence officer in Turkey, was about to reveal agents in the British establishment and around the world, including Philby himself.

But the MI6 agent managed to persuade his bosses to let him take the case and then tipped off his Soviet masters who immediately bundled Volkov back to Russia where he is believed to have been killed shortly after.

...Among the information he offered were the details of some 250 Soviet agents working in Britain and another 314 in Turkey as well as those in Palestine, the Balkans and Iran plus photographs of them.

The Tsarist Okhrana, from which the Checka, NKVD, and KGB can trace their culture and tactics, were known for recruiting the criminally minded:

http://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/crimintern_how_the_kremlin_uses_russias_criminal_networks_in_europe

It was perhaps inevitable that an especially strong connection between the security agencies and organised crime would arise in Russia. This is nothing new. For a start, from the tsarist Okhrana to the various Soviet agencies, the political police looked to the underworld for sources and recruits. The prevailing culture of Russian officialdom – in which political authority is there to be monetised – combined with the powers and impunity of the security apparatus, led to endemic corruption. On the whole, officers from the security and intelligence services did not join gangs or even necessarily form them, even though there were a few so-called ‘werewolves in epaulettes’. Rather, they usually conspired with organised crime networks or provided services for money − primarily protection or information.

http://uselessdissident.blogspot.com/2008/11/interview-with-yuri-bezmenov-part-three.html

Bezmenov: ...This was my instruction: try to get into large-circulation, established conservative media; reach filthy-rich movie makers; intellectuals, so-called ‘academic’ circles; cynical, egocentric people who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruitable people: people who lack moral principles, who are either too greedy or too much suffer from self importance. They feel that they matter a lot. These are the people who KGB wanted very much to recruit.

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=ohiou1398772391

Studying the changes between the Tsarist Okhrana and the Soviet Cheka is significant as well, as it accurately highlights the major difference between Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Under the latter regime, the secret police force, and the state’s use of it for political subjugation, changed drastically in both scale and intent. The brutal police repression seen during the Bolshevik’s first few years surpassed the most violent days of Russian autocracy. The state justified every action the Cheka took as necessity to protect the revolution. For the Bolsheviks, the end justified the means – but the means used were barbaric. Lenin did not see the implementation of terror in terms of morality; in a speech given in February 1920, he stated bluntly, “for us this question is one of expediency.

The same type of people who don't have a conscience, or any qualms killing millions and betraying their country, excel at manipulating and influencing others:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/spot-psychopath/

Professor Robert Hare is a criminal psychologist, and the creator of the PCL-R, a psychological assessment used to determine whether someone is a psychopath. For decades, he has studied people with psychopathy, and worked with them, in prisons and elsewhere. “It stuns me, as much as it did when I started 40 years ago, that it is possible to have people who are so emotionally disconnected that they can function as if other people are objects to be manipulated and destroyed without any concern,” he says.

...“A high-scoring psychopath views the world in a very different way,” says Hare. “It’s like colour-blind people trying to understand the colour red, but in this case ‘red’ is other people’s emotions.”

At heart, Hare’s test is simple: a list of 20 criteria, each given a score of 0 (if it doesn’t apply to the person), 1 (if it partially applies) or 2 (if it fully applies). The list in full is: glibness and superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, cunning/manipulative, lack of remorse, emotional shallowness, callousness and lack of empathy, unwillingness to accept responsibility for actions, a tendency to boredom, a parasitic lifestyle...

These are the people Russia's special services go out of their way to recruit. If their motives and methods seem alien to us, it's because their members don't think the way most people do.

These Russian operatives are especially interested in manipulating public opinion:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/russian-spies-eye-golden-prize-white-house-source/story?id=45531117

“They always targeted political figures,” David Major, a retired FBI counterintelligence agent explained to ABC News. “They want to know who is a mover and shaker in our society, who affects it.”

...U.S. intelligence officials say the Russians are engaged in a massive campaign to infiltrate and disrupt American politics.

http://uselessdissident.blogspot.com/2008/11/interview-with-yuri-bezmenov-part-three.html

Bezmenov: ...Most of the activity of the department was to compile huge amount of information on individuals who were instrumental in creating public opinion: publishers, editors, journalists, actors, educationalists, professors of political science, members of parliament, representatives of business circles. Most of these people were divided roughly in two groups. Those who would toe the Soviet foreign policy, they would be promoted to the positions of power through media and public opinion manipulation.

They use this influence to manipulate groups of people into destroying themselves:

https://archive.org/stream/YuriBezmenovBlackIsBeautifulCommunismIsNot/YuriBezmenovBlackIsBeautiful_djvu.txt

I describe the process in which I took part, the process of ideological subversion, which has nothing to do with espionage. It has something to do with your perception of reality. Why does the KGB want to mess up your minds? Very simple. Soviet or international communists realize perfectly well they cannot defeat United States economically or militarily.

...The principle of subversion was formulated by a Chinese philosopher 2,500 years ago. Sun Tzu said, "All warfare is based primarily on deception of your enemy. To fight on the battlefield to achieve your goals is the most primitive and barbaric to achieve your goals. The highest art of war is not to fight at all, but to subvert anything of value in your enemy's country." Which includes religion, moral principles, traditions, and natural established relationships between people, families, groups, classes, races. Turn the blacks against the whites; turn the teachers against students; turn Ralph Nader against the government; labor unions against business; homosexuals against heterosexuals; and keep on fighting, my dear friends, until you demoralize and destabilize yourself and then you flop like a rotten apple and the enemy will take you over. You will invite the enemy.

This is the essence of subversion, and it is not new.

https://archive.org/stream/BezmenovLoveLetterToAmerica/YuriBezmenov-LoveLetterToAmerica_djvu.txt

The main principle of ideological subversion is TURNING A STRONGER FORCE AGAINST ITSELF. Just like in the Japanese martial arts: you do not stop the blow of a heavier more powerful enemy with an equally forceful blow. You may simply hurt your hand. Instead you catch the striking fist with your hand and PULL the enemy in the direction of his blow until he crashes into a wall or any other heavy object in his way.

But, with the exception of defectors like Bezmenov, few tell us how these spies might try to use their influence, and toward what end. Knowing this is very important: it's much harder to stop a Russian influence operation if you don't know what a Russian influence operation looks like.

If the FBI or the media can't or won't tell us how these operations work, we can still learn from history. Probably the best example of a Russian influence operation is the campaign to spread Lysenkoism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism), combined with other operations targeting agriculture policy, in the early to mid 20th century, especially the operations targeting Ukraine and China. The episode shows how influencing policy and public opinion to "turn a stronger force against itself" can work, and that the goals of at least some Russian influence operations are far different from what most might have imagined:

https://books.google.com/books?id=5vgBaLfd9XsC&pg=PA170&lpg=PA170

Mao's blind faith in the communes was match by his adherence to false science. He gave his imprimatur to the ideas of Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist and protege of Stalin, who claimed to have discovered ways of developing 'super-crops', which would grow in any soil in any season and provide a yield anything up to sixteen times greater than the harvests produced by traditional methods. Mao accepted all this, declaring 'in company grain grows fast; seeds are happiest when growing together.' He had convinced himself there was such a thing as 'socialist science', which could be used to reshape nature and produce abundance. In his attack attack on the intellectuals during the Hundred Flowers campaign he had demanded the dismissal of those scholars who still clung to the bourgeois notion that scientific research was a matter of objective observation rather than socialist enlightenment. He seemed not to appreciate that this demand contradicted his earlier and oft-repeated admonition that the comrades should 'seek truth from facts'.

In 1958, Mao gave instructions that Lysenkoism was to be strictly followed in the planning of agriculture. An eight-point programme modelled on Lysenko's theories and covering all aspects of crop production was made mandatory in the countryside.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Trofim-Lysenko

Trofim Lysenko, in full Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, Soviet biologist and agronomist, the controversial “dictator” of Communistic biology during Stalin’s regime. He rejected orthodox genetics in favour of “Michurinism” (named for the Russian horticulturist I.V. Michurin), which was begun by an uneducated plant breeder fashioning explanations for his hybrid creations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Vladimirovich_Michurin

On September 11, 1922, Mikhail Kalinin visited Michurin at Lenin's personal request.

https://books.google.com/books?id=m4kJDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA147

There were also, inevitably, images such as Michurin and Kalinin, 1949 (Fig 6). Mikhail Kalinin, nominal Soviet head of state 1919-1946 and the only "old Bolshevik" no to be "purged" by Stalin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Conference

...Kalinin was suspected of being an Okhrana agent

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Trofim-Lysenko

After Michurin’s death in 1935, Lysenko led the movement and transformed it into an assault on orthodox genetics.

...The Soviet chiefs began to support Lysenko during the agricultural crisis of the 1930s. On the basis of rather crude and unsubstantiated experiments, Lysenko promised greater, more rapid, and less costly increases in crop yields than other biologists believed possible.

...Between 1948 and 1953, when he was the total autocrat of Soviet biology, he claimed that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment produce seeds of rye, which is equivalent to saying that dogs living in the wild give birth to foxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

...On August 7, 1948, the V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced that from that point on Lysenkoism would be taught as "the only correct theory". Soviet scientists were forced to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenko's research. Criticism of Lysenko was denounced as "bourgeois" or "fascist", and analogous "non-bourgeois" theories also flourished in other fields in the Soviet academy at this time. Interestingly, perhaps the only opponents of Lysenkoism during Stalin's lifetime to escape liquidation came from the small community of Soviet nuclear physicists: as Tony Judt has observed, "It is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess their calculations. Stalin may well have been mad but he was not stupid."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Lepeshinskaya_%28biologist%29

Olga Borisovna Lepeshinskaya born as Protopopova (August 18, 1871 – October 2, 1963), was a Soviet biologist, a personal protegée of Vladimir Lenin, later Joseph Stalin, Trofim Lysenko and Alexander Oparin. She rejected genetics and was an advocate of spontaneous generation of life from inanimate matter.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ul5THCLL6roC&pg=PA119

...though [I. I. Prezent] began his career as a partisan of Mendelian and Morganist theories of heredity and speciation, he had reversed that position by the time he established a power base in a variety of academic positions. He aided Lysenko's rise to dominance in Soviet biology and provided him with the trappings of ideological legitimacy--a dialectical materialist and properly socialist rationale for attacking and rejecting classical genetics.

http://ludus-vitalis.org/ojs/index.php/ludus/article/viewFile/4/4

Paradoxically, only five years earlier, Prezent and Lysenko had actively supported the very concepts of genetics against which they later battled so vigorously, asserting the affinities between Marxism and Morganism (Medvedev, 1969).

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Zhores-Aleksandrovich-Medvedev#ref275700

In the 1960s Medvedev wrote a history of Soviet science with the aim of discrediting the doctrines of T.D. Lysenko, the charlatan who dominated Soviet biology during the reign of Joseph Stalin ...The Soviet authorities refused to publish Medvedev’s book ...The Soviet government denied Medvedev opportunities to attend scientific conferences abroad despite his growing reputation as a scientist, and he underwent constant harassment from the KGB from the mid-1960s on.

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01426R010400040001-5.pdf

The reply of N.S. Khrushchev: "The staff must be looked over. Evidently, people who were selected as editors are against Michurin's science. As long as they remain there nothing will change. They must be replaced, others, real Michurinites, must be appointed. Therein lies the radical solution of the problem." The wrong direction taken by the editorial board of the "Botanical Journal" [Botanicheekii Zhurnal] has been voiced in a number of articles. They do not bear the character of an occasional, isolated incident, but characterize a position that pursued the objective of censuring the fundamental propositions in the works of Academician Lysenko.

https://books.google.com/books?id=vTswH3fLLdgC&pg=PA188

...Soviet authorities also used various international gatherings to propagate Michurinist biology all over the world. At the 1949 World Congress for Peace in New York, a prominent Soviet biologist, Aleksandr Oparin, took the stand to express his Michurinist convictions. In summer 1950 one of the most ardent Lysenkoists, Glushchenko, passionately glorified his master and his ideas at the International Botanical Congress in Stockholm.

...All possible means of propaganda were deployed in the Michurinist campaign. In December 1948 the Soviet film industry produced a new color film, Michurin. The author of the screenplay and director of the film was one of the country's most famous directors, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, the music was composed by Dimitrii Shostakovich, and the starring role was played by one of the most popular actors of the time, Grigorii Belov. ...As one might expect, this film was shown not only in the Soviet Union but also abroad.

...The propaganda of Michurinism, then, occupied a considerable place in Soviet activities in the international scene in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

https://books.google.com/books?id=vTswH3fLLdgC&pg=PA188

...Such propaganda was focused on Bulgaria, East Germany, Czechoslovokia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, but was not limited to the "fraternal" socialist countries.

...In late 1948 and early 1949 the Michurinist campaign quickly spread not only over Europe but also, to some extent, the Middle East, Eastern and Southern Asia, and South America. The results of the campaign in East European countries most resembled those in the Soviet Union: Lysenko's doctrine replaced formal genetics in curricula of agricultural schools and universities, existing genetics laboratories were closed or reorganized, and textbooks on Michurinist biology were published.

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01426R010400040001-5.pdf

...A tendency to revise a serious of principles of contemporary genetics in the light of Michurin's teaching has been observed in foreign science. The teaching on the independence of heredity from external conditions and the problem of hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics are becoming increasingly subjects of doubt. Thus, the basic principles of Michurin's genetics increasingly attract the attention of and exert their influence upon West-European science.

https://books.google.com/books?id=vTswH3fLLdgC&pg=PA188

...There are some indications that, as in the Soviet Union, the leadership of local scientific communities in Eastern Europe was deeply involved in spreading the Michurinist campaign and in the import of Michurinist biology.

https://books.google.com/books?id=9Lq2DAAAQBAJ&pg=PT46

The Canadian wheat pool", Williams writes, "sent on of its most promising officials, Andrew Cairns, on a serious of trips through European and other areas of Russian, in 1930 and 1932. His brief mission was to examine the state of the Russian wheat crop, which he was able to do with an expert eye. The results of these visits give a fascinating insight into the disastrous polices, not only of collectivization, with its liquidation of the 'Kulaks', but also of the effects of Soviet agronomist Lysenko's crackpot agricultural techniques. The second visit, during May 1932, organized under the auspices of the British embassy in Moscow, produced three reports of quite unprecedented detail on the decline of Russian agriculture, and especially on the massive destruction of cereal crops in Ukraine."

https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine/The-famine-of-1932-33#ref404577

The result of Stalin’s policies was the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33—a man-made demographic catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime. Of the estimated six to eight million people who died in the Soviet Union, about four to five million were Ukrainians. ...its deliberate nature is underscored by the fact that no physical basis for famine existed in Ukraine. The Ukrainian grain harvest of 1932 had resulted in below-average yields (in part because of the chaos wreaked by the collectivization campaign), but it was more than sufficient to sustain the population. Nevertheless, Soviet authorities set requisition quotas for Ukraine at an impossibly high level. Brigades of special agents were dispatched to Ukraine to assist in procurement, and homes were routinely searched and foodstuffs confiscated.

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01426R010400040001-5.pdf

...The estimate of losses that individual Michurinite scientists and, in particular, Academican T.D. Lysenko had, allegedly, caused the State are completely inaccurate and unrealistic, which has been justly described in the editorial in the newspaper "Pravda".

https://books.google.com/books?id=ne31X9gDmIYC&pg=PA331

In 1949, few Chinese biologists were familiar with Lysenko's work before it was incorporated into a full-blown ideology. Thus, the Chinese science community in general was quite unprepared to deal with the militant promotion of Michurin biology by Chinese and then Russian Lysenkoites within months of the CCP's formal accession to power on October 1, 1949.

https://books.google.com/books?id=eswo_SMNwzAC&pg=PA49

Even though the CCP did not issue any policy statement on Lysenkoism until 1952, Lysenkoism's quest for monopoly and the status of orthodoxy had already been achieved, de facto, with the license and encouragement afford by the CCP's comprehensive pro-Soviet policy of "learning from the advanced experience of the Soviet Union."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong#Quotes

Stalin is our greatest father and teacher. In the name of Chinese people and Chinese Communist Party, we celebrate comrade Stalin's seventy birthday. May he be in the best health and live a long life! Leader of both the world's working class and Communist Internationale — Ten thousand years of life to Stalin! --Speech on the seventieth birthday of Stalin (21 December 1949)

https://books.google.com/books?id=y3PGCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT110

...so strong was the influence of the USSR in the early years of the PRC that Chinese agricultural researchers were taught that Lysenko was infallible. A Beijing doctor recorded: "We were told that the Soviets had discovered and invented everything; we had to change textbooks and rename things in Lysenko's honour.'

https://books.google.com/books?id=eswo_SMNwzAC&pg=PA49

As early as October 1949, Lysenko's representatives were in China, helping Luo Tianyu's campaign.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ul5THCLL6roC&pg=PA286

Luo Tianyu (1900-1948). Lysenkoite. CCP cadre. Promoter of Yan'an "rectification" program in biology, 1944-1945. Dean of Beijing Agriculture University and leading promoter of Soviet Lysenkoism in China, 1949-1952.

https://books.google.com/books?id=LY4YDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT257

In the charged atmosphere of cheng-feng, the study of theory and the quest for basic knowledge were held up for ridicule, while those who pursued such objects were scorned. ...by June Mao's supporters were in fully cry, and the unfortunate targets of their anger sought shelter.

...the first attack came from within, in an article in the July 23 issue of Liberation Daily by the chairman of the biology department, Lo T'ien-yu. Lo charged that his comrades at the NSI had failed to place practical application ahead of abstract theory. They had clung to a "dogmatic" reliance on foreign textbooks, rather than going "up the mountain to collect specimens or into the factory to do work." From these books students learned meaningless abstractions like the "size of the universe," "four or five dimensional space," and the "electron" and "atomic" theories, none of which served any useful purpose. "In some courses," Lo charged, students "simply recite the Classics"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_mathematics

In the third century Liu Hui wrote his commentary on the Nine Chapters and also wrote Haidao Suanjing which dealt with using Pythagorean theorem (already known by the 9 chapters), and triple, quadruple triangulation for surveying; his accomplishment in the mathematical surveying exceeded those accomplished in the west by a millennium. He was the first Chinese mathematician to calculate π=3.1416 with his π algorithm. He discovered the usage of Cavalieri's principle to find an accurate formula for the volume of a cylinder, and also developed elements of the integral and the differential calculus during the 3rd century CE.

https://books.google.com/books?id=eswo_SMNwzAC&pg=PA53

...the Soviet pattern planned S&T research in coordination with production goals. This contributed to a Chinese preoccupation with immediate and demonstrable production applications to justify research. Often, basic research was denigrated.

https://books.google.com/books?id=eswo_SMNwzAC&pg=PA49

[Luo] had written that "the fields are a laboratory; nature is a classroom." Moreover, he set mass science above that of the intellectuals, saying that the People are genuine materialists, who grasp the answers to things directly, because, if they do not understand and live by the laws of nature, they die. Since scholars do not operate this way, they are idealists.

https://books.google.com/books?id=eswo_SMNwzAC&pg=PA49

...First came V.N Stoletov, Minister of Higher Education and Chair of the Department of Genetics at Moscow University. He lectured at Luo's University, and was soon followed by other Lysenkoist luminaries, such as N. I. Nuzhdin and A. P. Ivanov. These visiting experts traveled extensively throughout China, giving introductory lectures which were rapidly transformed into college textbooks in the Chinese language. The Russians also preached to key scientists about Lysenkoism's scientific validity and effectiveness.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ul5THCLL6roC&pg=PA127

Zhu Xi became perhaps the earliest example of a Chinese biologist directly criticized by a Soviet Lysenkoite. In response to his recently published article on variation in the evolutionary process, Zhu was paid a visit by I.E. Glushchenko, who was lecturing and consulting in China. Glushchenko, the director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Institute of Genetics, took offense at the "Morganist" implications in this piece ...Glushchenko faulted Zhu for failing to express an awareness of Michurin fundamentals, and warned him that no matter how good Chinese experimental technique might be, conclusions would continue to be lacking unless Chinese studied the dialectical materialism of Engels, Stalin, and Chairman Mao (especially Mao's essay "On Contradiction")

...Zhu Xi's piece is among the earliest examples of...lightly veiled criticism of Soviet arrogance and the CCP's "learn from the Soviets" policy.

...Tan Jiazhen reports that when Nuzhdin's tour took him south, he visited Zhejiang University, specifically to convince Tan of the merits of Michurin biology and to ask Tan to convert. At this time, Luo Tianyu's campaign was largely confined to the northeast and to agricultural science institutions. ...He was therefore quite comfortable telling Nuzhidin politely to go peddle his papers elsewhere. When Tan moved to his new position at Shanghai's Fudan University, in 1952, Lysenkoism had moved into the south and was there to greet him with a vengeance.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ne31X9gDmIYC&pg=PA331

...a national campaign to make Lysnkoism immediately the exclusive orthodox of agricultural biology, and eventually all biological science. To implement this ambitious plan, the Party appointed Luo Tianyu (1900-1986)

...Luo added mandatory study of Michurin biology. Furthermore, he required that all faculty formally renounce classical genetics and embrace Michurinism. The university's three distinguished program heads, however, refused to follow this requirement ...Not only did they challenge Luo's authority, they also denied him distinguished converts who could serve as models for the rest of the faculty and the forthcoming national pro-Soviet campaign to "learn from the advanced experience of the Soviet Union." The fate of these three is instructive.

...Li became so intimidated by Luo that he and his family soon fled China

...Wu Zhongxian...protected himself by not expressing his dissent publicly and by shifting his teaching and research out of genetics

...After Luo removed him from his co-directorship, he subjected Tang to a humiliating public "thought remolding" session before the entire school ...Tang was then ostracized from the school for criticizing and resisting the Party's policy of learning from the Soviets.

...The Lysenkoist campaign was almost impossible to assail from any solid institutional base. There were not yet any centralized science-planning agencies nor any science plan to which anti-Lysenkoists could appeal. Leaders of the Ministry of Agriculture, while not necessarily themselves Lysenkoists, nevertheless were strongly attracted to the doctrine because of their empirical and pragmatic bias. ...The leadership of the CAS was sufficiently subservient to the CCP to accept the Lysenkoist juggernaut as one more element of the pro-Soviet policy.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Ul5THCLL6roC&pg=PA127

Meanwhile, Nuzhdin's lectures were translated into Chinese, anthologized, and distributed widely, making it one of the earliest textbooks in Michurin biology. Many more Lysenkoite visitors would follow him, and many more such textbooks would be published.

https://books.google.com/books?id=eswo_SMNwzAC&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49

...on the eve of Russia's massive assistance with China's 1st Five-year Plan, the putative success of Soviet science, including Lysenkoism, seemed to be the surest guide.

...By the mid-1950's, thousands of advanced Chinese students were studying in a variety of disciplines in various Soviet universities. Hundreds of Soviet scientists came to Chinese universities to offer introductory courses in their specialties and to give state-of-the-art colloquia to research in the institutes.

Throughout the 1st Five-Year-Plan period, as Soviet-inspired S&T reforms were being implemented, the "Michurin line" flourished. A constant stream of Soviet experts shaped the biology curricula of colleges and universities. In cytlology, the crackpot work of Olga Lepeshenskaya was used to support Lysenko's transformist beliefs by supposedly showing that living cells could be created out of non-living organic material. A. V. Dubrovina lectured to huge audiences on Lysenko's version of Darwin, and introduced that there was neither rivalry nor "mutual aid" among organisms within a specious. I. E. Glushchenko, leader of Lysenko's international program, and other agricultural experts gave extensive lectures explaining the relationship between Lysenko's "New Darwinism" and plant cultivation programs.

Except as the target of nasty epithets, classical genetics disappeared from podium and print.

https://books.google.com/books?id=3VeLKJyRzuQC&pg=PA68

Mao became greatly taken with the theories of Williams, Lysenko, and Michurin. He read Williams' book on soil while still in Yanan and later frequently quoted both him and Lysenko. Mao, too, wanted the Chinese to plant seeds close together because, as he told colleagues, 'with company they grow easily, when they grow together they will be comfortable'. Lysenko's theories meshed perfectly with Mao's obsession with class struggle. He readily believed that plants from the same 'class' would never compete against each other for light or food.

http://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/trofim-lysenko/

Mao’s ‘Eight Point Charter of Agriculture’ (1958) was strongly influenced by the theories of Lysenko. Chinese peasant farmers were ordered to embrace ‘Lysenkoism’ and to abandon techniques they had used for centuries. Farmers were ordered to ‘close plant’ seeds and seedlings, being assured by government officials that plants of the same species would not compete for water or nutrients. Lysenkoist theory claimed that deep ploughing the soil would encourage faster, deeper root growth.

https://books.google.com/books?id=dl4TRDxqexMC&pg=PA88

The agricultural techniques [Mao] endorsed at Beidaihe--a mix of Tan Zhenlin's indigenous methods, Lysenko's deep plowing and close planting, and so forth--made him euphoric about a plentiful future.

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/03/obituaries/tan-zhenlin-is-dead-in-china-held-high-positions-in-party.html

[Tan Zhenlin], a longtime political commissar with the Communists' guerrilla army before they took power in 1949, "made major contributions to the development and growth of the revolutionary armed forces, the victory of the Chinese people's revolution and the prosperity and powerfulness of the socialist motherland," the press agency said.

He was purged and denounced in the Cultural Revolution, a decade of civil strife inspired by the radical directives of Mao Zedong. Leftist radicals accused Mr. Tan, along with other prominent leaders, of plotting a coup and having "illicit relations with foreign countries."

https://books.google.com/books?id=dl4TRDxqexMC&pg=PA88

...Grain production would increase 69 percent and cotton 100 percent over 1957, the Beidaihe Communiqué claimed. The Chairman marveled: "In the future we'll destablish a global committee, [and] make plans on global unification. Then wherever grain is short, we will supply it as a gift."

...at the first day of the Beidaihe Conference, Mao particularly emphasized deep ploughing, which, he said, was the principal direction for agriculture, as without it large quantities of fertilizer could not be added. ...After three year's hard work, Mao maintained, two thirds of all farmland could be sufficient to support the population, and one-third could be used for afforestation.

https://books.google.com/books?id=14A1qPQOgQMC&pg=PA133

Pushing villagers to work around the clock, the party leaders organized Da Fo's school-age children to march and demonstrate in the streets, shouting slogans: "We will work during the day, we will work during the night; we will work all day and all night!" By late 1959 many villagers barely had the energy to walk or hold their heads up, and yet in the months to follow they were ordered to dig half mu of and in the day and half mu at night, as part of the deep plowing campaign, which was undertaken in the mistaken belief that the deeper the farmers plowed, the larger the root systems of their crops would be. The result was predictable: only those who cheated survived. Pang Renjing was not one of them. Zheng Jintian recounts the story:

Pang Renjing died during the Great Leap Forward. He died of exhaustion, not starvation. He was sixteen years old at the time. The Liangmen People's Commune leaders selected young and capable people to do the deep digging of the soil. Everybody tried to cheat. Instead of deep digging, most villagers would simply dig up part of the soil and then cover up the rest with dirt to make it look like they had done the deep digging. Pang Renjing was not smart enough to do that. He was honest, and he dug earnestly. As a result, he fell behind others. He worked harder and harder. In the end, he suffered from overexhaustion and an intestinal disorder. People tried to send him to Dongle County hospital, but he died on the way there.

https://books.google.com/books?id=9pPxwn6EvR4C&pg=PA142

Mao's idea was that ALL farmland should be deep ploughed once within two to three years, and then the cycle would be repeated again. ...This directive, apart from the decision to double steel output in 1958 and to form communes, was perhaps the most influential, and it was to quickly set in motion a massive campaign involving hundreds of millions of people in the winter/spring of 1958/9.

https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1959/PR1959-01.pdf

Peking Review January 6, 1959

Temporary shortages of some non-staple foods is a problem now claiming considerable attention. The shortages have arisen notwithstanding a 49 percent increase in live pigs and the doubling of aquatic products. A recent Renmin Ribao editorial (December 28, 1958) gave the following analysis: On the supply side, considerable manpower has been concentrated in recent months on steel production, the harvesting of the tremendous crops, deep ploughing the land and extending irrigation works. This has had some effect on the production of raw materials for some non-staple foods.

...With the establishment of community dining-rooms in the people's communes, the peasants are eating more and better food than ever before. As a result, demand is running ahead of supply.

https://books.google.com/books?id=sR6BAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT160

Some rural cadres, in their determination to achieve total compliance with directives from Beijing, even required peasants to plough under crops that had already been planted in the traditional fashion, in order to plant again using the methods of deep ploughing and close planting. These crops, planted too late in the season, did not have time to mature before the following winter arrived.

https://books.google.com/books?id=9pPxwn6EvR4C&pg=PA142

By winter 1958, some mess halls in the communes had run out of food, leading to outward migration oedema, and abnormal deaths. Peasants were fleeing, begging, and battling for food. By early 1958, spring famine had already occurred

...Mao thought that the food shortage problem was restricted to only a few provinces, and transfers from the centre or from other provinces would take care of the problem.

...At the initial stage of communization in early September, Tan Zhenlin reassured Mao with a rosy report that claimed that communes had been formed rapidly and smoothly, and that only in a minority of places had the peasants resorted to slaughtering and selling of livestock, felling trees, and grain concealment.

https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1959/PR1959-01.pdf

Peking Review January 6, 1959

Liu Shao-chi, greeting the conference on behalf of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, gave the meaning of last year's victory. "In agriculture," he said, "we have found the way to develop production at high speed, begun to to change its backward condition and doubled the output of grain, cotton and some other crops. It must be considered a great achievement that the annual output of grain reached about 1,200 jin per capita in a country as big and populous as ours."

https://books.google.com/books?id=NrOKDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA490

They were urged to eat their fill as China would soon by overflowing with food. Minister of Agriculture Tan Zhenlin asked, 'After all, what does Communism mean? ...First, taking good food and not merely eating one's fill. At each meal one enjoys a meat diet, eating chicken, pork, fish, eggs.'

https://books.google.com/books?id=9pPxwn6EvR4C&pg=PA142

However, an anonymous letter dated 5 September reached Mao in early October informing him that food shortages at several xiang in Anhui had killed over 500 people, and that many had become ill. The food shortages were attributed to natural calamities, false-reporting, and administrative commands which forced the conversion of dry land into rice paddies.

https://books.google.com/books?id=5NsMWCHDStQC&pg=PA63

But deliveries of grain to the state had to be made according to yields that local cadres had officially declared. ...Punitive extractions based on entirely fictitious figures could only create fear and anger in the villages. The stage was set for a war on the people in which requisitions would plunge the country into the worst famine recorded in human history. Tan Zhenlin was blunt, addressing some of the leaders of South China in October 1958: ‘You need to fight against the peasants . . . There is something ideologically wrong with you if you are afraid of coercion.’

https://books.google.com/books?id=9pPxwn6EvR4C&pg=PA142

At about the same time (10-29 September), Deng Xioping, Li Fuchun, and other top leaders inspected the Northeastern provinces (Lianing, Jilin, and Heilongjiang) which were said to be lagging behind ...According to Deng's diagnosis, these provinces had fallen behind because their leaders had not implemented Mao's 'eight-point charter'; instead they were said to have followed the 'same old stuff' of 'wide spacing and shallow ploughing' ...Deng urged that a 'revolutionary campaign' be launched in agriculture.

At the Happiness and Rising Sun communes, Deng went a step further and instructed that they should experiment with high yields, and reduce the present cultivated areas so that all efforts could be concentrated on close planting and raising the output/mu. This, he maintained, would increase grain production

https://books.google.com/books?id=sR6BAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT160

Thee actual result of deep ploughing was often to bury the topsoil and bring to the surface worthless clay and sand. The Party also ordered that seeds were to planted more closely ...The result almost always was that the growing plants died or were stunted due to overcrowding.

https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1959/PR1959-01.pdf

Peking Review January 6, 1959

How They Did It

The reasons for the record crops in 1958, Liao Lu-yen, Minister of Agriculture, told the conference, may be summed up in three points.

First, putting politics in command. This, in essence, means strengthening leadership by the Communist Party. Only with politics in command, can the general line for building socialism be correctly carried out and the communist spirit of bold thinking, speech and action be developed.

Secondly, the mass line. ...the participation of functionaries in manual work...

...Thirdly, the "Eight-Point Charter of Agriculture"

...Speakers at the conference told how, by following these principles, a number of provinces doubled or even trebled their grain output last year and achieved similar increases with other crops.

https://books.google.com/books?id=5NsMWCHDStQC&pg=PA310

Baozi, a commune of 15,000 people known as ‘Fuling’s grain storage’, produced such abundant harvests that it usually sent half of its produce as tribute to the state. Along the main road up to 400 people could be found on any one day, busy bringing grain, vegetables and pigs to market. But by 1961 grain output had plummeted by some 87 per cent. The fields were overgrown with weeds, and half of the population had vanished.

https://books.google.com/books?id=9pPxwn6EvR4C&pg=PA142

Meanwhile, another disastrous decision--the 'three-three' system--illustrates the impulsive and haphazard manner by which a general idea and a long-term aspiration of Mao's could be snowballed into a major national policy. Many zealots, in particular Mao's lieutenant, Tan, vied eagerly in giving it substance. There was little planning or consideration of alternatives, fervour and intuition alone guiding all the decisions. In October and early November, a series of regional conferences were convened to discuss the plans for 1959 agricultural production, leading to a far-reaching decision to reduce the cultivated acreage for 1959 summer crops, which contributed greatly to the serious food shortages and famine in 1959.

...Mao had single-handedly imposed the communes by following his instincts. ...As previously mentioned, only by October/November did Mao begin to realize the full effects of the 'communist winds' and the universal concealment of grain and slaughter of livestock among the peasants. Coercive grass-roots cadres who exaggerated reports of yields had led to high procurement, which in turn deprived the peasants of grain, leading to deaths. Mao's confidence began to be shaken, but he still cherished the utopian ideal.

...According to reports by certain central ministries, as early as April 1959, 25 million people in fifteen provinces did not have enough to eat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

Yang Jisheng would summarize the effect of the focus on production targets in 2008:

In Xinyang, people starved at the doors of the grain warehouses. As they died, they shouted, "Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us". If the granaries of Henan and Hebei had been opened, no one need have died. As people were dying in large numbers around them, officials did not think to save them. Their only concern was how to fulfill the delivery of grain.

https://books.google.com/books?id=5vgBaLfd9XsC&pg=PA170

Lysenkoism did not multiply China's harvests, it destroyed them. At the very time when a bewildered peasantry were struggling to come to terms with the disruption of collectivisation, they were made victims of an imposed pseudo-science that caused their crops to wither in the field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

As a result of these factors, year over year grain production dropped in China. The harvest was down by 15% in 1959. By 1960, it was at 70% of its 1958 level. There was no recovery until 1962, after the Great Leap Forward ended.

...Yu Dehong, the secretary of a party official in Xinyang in 1959 and 1960, stated,

I went to one village and saw 100 corpses, then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people.

It is widely believed that the government seriously under-reported death tolls: Lu Baoguo, a Xinhua reporter in Xinyang, told Yang Jisheng of why he never reported on his experience:

In the second half of 1959, I took a long-distance bus from Xinyang to Luoshan and Gushi. Out of the window, I saw one corpse after another in the ditches. On the bus, no one dared to mention the dead. In one county, Guangshan, one-third of the people had died. Although there were dead people everywhere, the local leaders enjoyed good meals and fine liquor. ... I had seen people who had told the truth being destroyed. Did I dare to write it?

...Unofficial estimates vary, but scholars have estimated the number of famine victims to be between 20 and 43 million. Historian Frank Dikötter, having been granted special access to Chinese archival materials, estimates that there were at least 45 million premature deaths from 1958 to 1962

https://books.google.com/books?id=1fSy7tFlTycC

The horror of mass destruction was first encountered by the party leadership in Xinyang: it reduced Li Xiannian, a tough veteran of the Red Army, to tears.

...There are, indeed, vast numbers of villages where death claimed more than 30 per cent of the population in a single year – in some cases entire hamlets were wiped out. But counties are much larger political entities, their populations typically ranging from 120,000 to 350,000. A death rate of 10 per cent in one year across an entire county, composed of many hundreds of villages

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-famine-book-tombstone

...the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years. In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown. In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village's 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.

...Page after page – even in the drastically edited English translation, there are 500 of them – his book, Tombstone, piles improbability upon terrible improbability. But Yang did not imagine these scenes. Perhaps no one could. Instead, he devoted 15 years to painstakingly documenting the catastrophe that claimed at least 36 million lives across the country, including that of his father.

...He had little idea of what he would find when he started work: "I didn't think it would be so serious and so brutal and so bloody. I didn't know that there were thousands of cases of cannibalism. I didn't know about farmers who were beaten to death.

"People died in the family and they didn't bury the person because they could still collect their food rations; they kept the bodies in bed and covered them up and the corpses were eaten by mice. People ate corpses and fought for the bodies. In Gansu they killed outsiders; people told me strangers passed through and they killed and ate them. And they ate their own children. Terrible. Too terrible."

For a moment he stops speaking.

"To start with, I felt terribly depressed when I was reading these documents," he adds. "But after a while I became numbed – because otherwise I couldn't carry on."

https://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/the-enduring-legacy-of-chinas-great-famine/

‘‘When I was doing research I realized how taboo this subject still is,” she said. “It was so difficult to access materials. I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to find out what really happened.”

Importantly, for all the horror she discovered in her trek through dozens of archives, many very hard to get into, she also found something else: extraordinary courage among ordinary Chinese.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-famine-book-tombstone

He is, she points out, part of a generation of quietly committed scholars. Despite its apparently quaint title, Annals of the Yellow Emperor is a bold liberal journal that has repeatedly tackled sensitive issues. But writing Tombstone was also a personal mission. Yang was determined to "erect a tombstone for my father", the other victims and the system that killed them.

...It was, he says, a gradual awakening. He continued to work for Xinhua, a task made easier by the country's reform and opening process and his own evolution; by the third decade of his career, he says, "I had my independent thinking and was telling the truth." That was when his work on Tombstone began: "I just had a very strong desire to find out the facts. I was cheated and I don't want to be cheated again."

..."The textbooks don't mention this part of history at all," says Yang. "At every festival they have propaganda about the party's achievements and glory and greatness and correctness. People's ideology has been formed over many years. So right now it's very necessary to write this book; otherwise nobody has this history."

...Some hope that the new generation of leaders taking power may be willing to revisit the country's history and acknowledge the mistakes that have been made. Others think it will be easy for them to continue smoothing over the past. "Because the party has been improving and society has improved and everything is better, it's hard for people to believe the brutality of that time," Yang notes.