SHORTLY before he died in 1991, my father was a puzzled man. A lifelong socialist, he could not quite grasp why the Soviet Union was imploding.

Although he had lost his eyesight a few years earlier, his intellect retained its sharp edge right till the very end. And as he listened regularly to the radio, he was very well informed. My brothers and I read to him every day, and we often discussed the state of the world.

For him, the mighty USSR had been one of the major constants in his terms of reference, and to learn about its disintegration was a distressing reminder of the failure of socialism as a force for progress.

In fact, that entire generation of leftist intellectuals felt tremendously let down by the momentous events in Moscow and elsewhere in the Soviet empire. For them, the Marxist experiment initiated by Lenin and Stalin represented the most potent hope for the wretched of the earth. And in their idealism, they rejected the capitalist model because of its vast inequalities. Also to them, colonialism represented the ugly face of western capitalism. The socialist camp, on the other hand, had been a source of strength for the anti-colonial struggle across the globe.

This is not to suggest that my father had any illusions about the nature of the Soviet leadership. He had read many credible accounts of the system of gulags, the widespread displacement of populations, and the systematic slaughter of ordinary people. But in his heart of hearts, he felt that despite these excesses, the Soviet Union still represented the only hope for the Third World, and was a powerful counterweight to the United States and its allies.

Since my father’s death, a number of historians have stripped the Soviet Union of any illusions that might have lingered. I wonder what he would have made of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s masterly biography of Stalin that appeared last year. Meticulously researched, and based largely on Stalin’s personal papers, the book is a damning indictment of the scale of the Soviet dictator’s brutal treatment of his own people. Specifically, it details his personal responsibility in ordering and supervizing the series of purges against real and imaginary foes that decimated the ranks of generals, doctors and intellectuals.

If Stalin was an iconic figure for my father’s generation of leftists, Mao Zedong was a similar colossus for mine. Many of us admired his courage and his intellect. His fortitude in the Red Guards’ struggle against the Japanese, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies, and the Americans in Korea was the stuff of legends. And his seemingly successful transformation of China from a pathetic, backward country into a world power was widely applauded in the Third World.

But this myth, too, has been demolished. A devastating new biography by Jung Chang (the author of the bestselling ‘Wild Swans’) and her historian husband Jon Halliday shows Mao to be a ruthless egomaniac who butchered his people by the million. The authors have sifted through archives in Beijing and Moscow, and interviewed hundreds of people, including survivors of Mao’s inner circle, over ten years.

The conclusions they reach are harrowing. They have calculated the number of deaths caused by Mao’s misrule and cruelty at 70 million. Thirty-eight million of these died of starvation and overwork between 1958 and 1961, the period of the Great Leap Forward. During the first two of these four years, China actually exported millions of tons of grain to pay for industrial machinery and military equipment. And when reports of mass starvation reached Mao, he simply issued an edict: “Educate the peasants to eat less.”

But it was the Cultural Revolution that set China back by a generation. Hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, writers, artists and university professors were exiled to the countryside for ‘re-education’. Higher education all but ground to a halt. Research labs ceased to function. It was almost a death sentence to be accused of being an intellectual. And as radical party cadres rampaged through the cities, nobody was safe.

I remember arguing with friends at the time (1966-1976) that the policy was disastrous, but hardliners echoed the party line that the Cultural Revolution would purify the system and purge it of ‘the running dogs of capitalism’. In the event, anybody remotely critical of Mao was either killed or jailed.

Thus, in the case of both the USSR and Red China, great excesses were committed in the name of the revolution. The very people who were supposed to benefit from Marxism were the ones who suffered the most. The proletariat who were supposed to be in the vanguard of socialism were sacrificed by megalomaniacs in their quest for supreme and unquestioned power.

Even today, many will dispute the reality of this legacy, claiming that the critics are western propagandists. But this will no longer wash: Jung Chang was born and brought up in Red China, and her father was a senior member of the Communist Party. And now with the opening up of archives in Beijing and Moscow, it is possible for historians to gain access to previously unavailable documents. The more interesting question is what makes people so impervious to human suffering. Mao described himself as ‘a man without law or limit’. No doubt Stalin saw himself in the same light. Together, the two were directly responsible for around 100 million deaths. The mind simply cannot grasp the enormity of these crimes.

And yet, decent people are still in denial about these documented events. After all, we are hardly speaking about pre-history here. With the mania for maintaining records that is the hallmark of bureaucracies, the deaths and imprisonment of millions were carefully noted. Nevertheless, true believers continue to insist that either this is propaganda, or the victims were somehow responsible for their suffering.

Another argument given in Stalin and Mao’s defence is that in order to catapult two impoverished regions into the 20th century, industrialize rapidly, and build up a modern military machine, sacrifices were necessary.

To obtain an agricultural surplus to pay for modernization, the rural population had to be squeezed. As revolutionaries are prone to say, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

But how many eggs do you have to break? How many lives have to be sacrificed? How much longer before, like Saddam Hussein’s statue, other dictators are pulled off their pedestals?