they knew little about Chinese history, politics, or even the revolution, and none was required to learn even rudimentary Chinese before going.
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A few of them prepared by reading on their own. Dmitrii Krivozub, who was an academic, read Mao's articles on the dictatorship of the proletariat before he were. Most, however, were completely unprepared for what they encountered. Aleksandr Chudakov, who worked at a military arsenal in Shenyang, had the typical Soviet reaction to the Chinese people. He remembered thinking how dirty everybody was. He said, "They didn't even know what a bathhouse was." He recollects going to a rural area nearby, where each family "had around eight children," all of whom seemed to be naked, dirty, and snotty. His wife, upon seeing this, resolved to bring soap the next time and hand it out to them. She did this, and right in front of their eyes, they took the soap and began to eat it. ''They didn't know what soap was!" he said, shaking his head.
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Another, upon arrival in the Manchurian countryside, said about the Chinese villagers: "I first thought that they all looked alike, that they were all very dirty. I guess that I had a very bad first impression. They were poor. They all ate out of the same pot."
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Even those people who were sent to teach in Chinese educational institutions were poorly prepared. A report to the Central Committee of July 1957 noted this problem and suggested that in the future, the teachers should be told something about China before they arrived, such as what it was like and what sort of working conditions they would encounter. According to the report, the teachers being sent had not even read the summaries of work in China written by recently returned teachers. 31
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This ignorance on the part of the Soviet advisers inevitably caused friction between the peoples of the two nations. It did not emerge publicly, though, until the early stages of the split, with the Soviet decision to cut back on the number of advisers in China. On September 6, 1958, the Soviets called a meeting with Deng Xiaoping, who at the time was general secretary of the CCP, to give him a letter from the CPSU about decreasing the number of Soviet specialists in China. During the course of the meeting, Deng mentioned that there had been problems due to the advisers' ignorance about internal conditions in China and the peculiarities of the CCP's politics. He said that if the remaining advisers (after some were pulled out) could be better informed, this would help them to avoid mistakes and more correctly carry out their work." 32
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If the Communist Party chose to send only its best, and screened them carefully, why and how could there be problems? Just as in its control over Soviet society, the Communist Party was best at administering decrees from above, but
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