You say, “genius and villainy are two incompatible things”? The fate of Mao Zedong will make you doubt this truth. A true GENIUS of POWER, the “Great Helmsman”, who turned backward, impoverished, fragmented China into a nuclear superpower (where life expectancy doubled, industrial production increased 10 times, and illiteracy dropped from 80 to 7%), Mao was at the same time one of the most brutal tyrants of the 20th century, who shed not rivers, not seas, but entire oceans of blood: even Stalin’s terror pales in comparison to the Chinese “record” of 100 million repressed, and the “Great Leap Forward” initiated by Mao is recognized as the worst social catastrophe after the Second World War . And the “Helmsman” himself paid an exorbitant price for power. As the Soviet Consul General, who knew him well, wrote: “The government is mutilating Mao Zedong, turning him into a dangerous aggressive personality, devoid of natural human emotions... Essentially, he is alone. Completely lonely. Dangerously alone..." Without hushing up achievements and not turning a blind eye to atrocities, this book pays tribute to a man who forever inscribed his name in history next to the names of such GENIUS OF POWER as Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin. Of particular interest is the extensive section on the extremely difficult relationship between Mao and Stalin (who nicknamed the Chinese leader the “margarine Marxist”) - the two greatest dictators of the 20th century, who refuted Pushkin’s aphorism about the “incompatibility” of Genius and Villainy.