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Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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leadership played in the advent of the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s. He finds that Khrushchev's changing geopolitical thinking prevented Moscow from seeing the opportunities that existed for continued cooperation with China despite Mao's radicalism. Khrushchev's emerging hopes for Soviet-American dé-tente increased his, and other Soviet leaders', impatience with Beijing's unwillingness to subscribe to their view of geopolitical realities and prepared the ground for the final break with China in the early 1960s.
Chapter 8, written jointly by Chen Jian and Yang Kuisong, sums up the links the authors find between Mao Zedong's ideological development and the alliance's collapse. The authors argue that understanding Mao's mind-set is essential to grasp why the Sino-Soviet break happened when and how it did. Mao's view of the Chinese revolution grew increasingly pessimistic at the end of the 1950s. The chairman started to search for cadre within his own party who allegedly had sabotaged the progress of socialism in China and began to believe that their existence was connected to the advice China had received from the Soviet Union on its domestic policies. By 1959, after the first phase of the Great Leap Forward, Mao had become convinced that he needed to jettison the close alliance with Moscow if his ideas of a continuous revolution were to triumph in China.
Taken together, the individual chapters offer a collective snapshot of current scholarship with regard to the history of the Sino-Soviet alliance. The volume should, however, be used together with some of the earlier accounts, which despite being based primarily on ''open" sourcesare still important for our understanding of what took place between the two Communist giants during the 1950s. The surveys that this volume presents also should be supplemented by more specialized works on important issues that cannot be presented in full here, such as the outbreak of the Korean War, the Taiwan Straits crises, or, for that matter, Sino-Soviet cultural or educational cooperation.
The editor and the authors wish to thank scholars and archivists in China and Russia who made this book possible. A special thanks is due to the former head of the Foreign Ministry Archives in Moscow, Dr. Igor Lebedev, and the head of the Institute of American Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, Professor Wang Jisi. Thanks also to the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Hong Kong University (especially Priscilla Roberts), and the Louis Cha Fund for East-West Studies for organizing and funding a conference in Hong Kong in January 1996 at which several of the chapters were presented in draft. In Oslo, the Norwegian Nobel Institute provided a genial institutional base for the editor and, at different stages, for several of the other scholars involved. A special thanks to Anne Kjelling, the head of the Nobel Institute Library, who, in usual

 

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fashion, went out of her way to provide some of the harder to get at published sources for the volume.
The editor is also grateful to the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, who gave him refuge during the last stage of the editing process. Special gratitude is due to James G. Hershberg and his two successors as heads of the Cold War International History Project, David Wolff and Christian Ostermann, who all, in innumerable ways, contributed to the publication of this book. Finally, I wish to thank the editors at both our presses, Joseph Brinley at the Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Muriel Bell at Stanford University Press, who did an outstanding job with an unwieldly and recalcitrant manuscript.
Notes
l. The most important early works are G. F. Hudson, Richard Lowenthal, and Roderick MacFarquhar,
The Sino-Soviet Dispute
(New York: Praeger, 1961); Donald S. Zagoria,
The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956-1961
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962); William E. Griffith,
The Sino-Soviet Rift
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963); John Gittings,
Survey of the Sino-Soviet Dispute: A Commentary and Extract from the Recent Polemics
(London: Oxford University Press, 1968).
2. The recent works that come closest to providing a comprehensive survey are Gordon Chang,
Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1972
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), and Lowell Dittmer,
Sino-Soviet Normalization and Its International Implications
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992). Their main foci are, however, on the United States and on the 1980s respectively.
3. For some of the difficulties connected with research into new sources, see Odd Arne Westad, "Secrets of the Second World: Russian Archieves and the Reinterpretation of Cold War History,"
Diplomatic History
21, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 259-72, and Michael H. Hunt's introduction in
The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

 

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Introduction
Odd Arne Westad
One early morning in the fall of 1993, as all of Moscow was awash in rumors about the impending confrontation between President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament, I came across a group of workers who were busy moving huge paintings from one of the downtown buildings of the former Soviet Ministry of Culture. Curious about the fate of Russia's art treasures and eager for a break from the street life of Moscow, I asked them whether I could have a peek at the unwrapped paintings lined along an interminable corridor behind the side entrance. "Please," they said, "go ahead, but these paintings are worthless,
ustarevshii
[outdated]."
The second to last painting a work in the most ponderous social-realist style depicted the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship on February 14, 1950. In the Hall of Vladimir in the Kremlin, Andrei Vyshinskii is alone at the table, signing the protocol (while Wang Jiaxiang is watching him intently from afar, peeking over Molotov's right shoulder). But the attention of everyone else in the hall is toward the back, below the great statue of Lenin, where a grandfatherly Stalin, flooded in light, shakes hands with a swarthy-looking Mao Zedong, patting him on the back with his left hand. Behind Mao stands a small group of simply dressed Chinese, led by Zhou Enlai, while Stalin's companions Molotov, Lavrenti Beriia, Kliment Voroshilov, Mikhail Kalinin, Anastas Mikoyan stand around applauding. The scene is remarkably similar to those in many paintings in the same genre depicting Stalin presenting awards to Soviet or foreign prize winners the leader bestowing the honor of recognition on a subordinate who has proved his worth.

1

The author wishes to thank Frederick Teiwes and Chen Jian for comments on a draft version.

 

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The Soviet public image of the alliance with China at the time and since has been that of an industrially advanced state helping a developing nation by transferring technology, resources, and social and economic models. The Chinese image, on the other hand, stresses shared security and economic benefits as well as cooperation in a global struggle against imperialist domination. These lasting images, stored in the memories of millions of Chinese and Russians, and in paintings, posters, and songs from the 1950s in both countries, need to be present in any attempt to reinvestigate this period. They help us see both the rise and the fall of the alliance. They also help us see the fervor that sustained and shaped it and that left important legacies in both countries.

2

Marxism-Leninism the theory of state-building and social change that framed both the Chinese and Russian revolutions provided the language and the symbols that contained this fervor. Over the past decade, as another revolution that of the market has transformed both countries, the erstwhile intensity of the dedication to this theory among the elites and a great number of ordinary citizens has quickly faded from view. But for the purposes of this volume it is important to resurrect that fervor the pride of having found a theory that combined rapid economic progress with social justice, a shortcut to modernity for backward countries, a way of showing that their people counted for something. For its adherents, the best proof of the theory' s validity was the very scorn and hostility it engendered among Western leaders. In the view of the faithful, those powers that had looked down on Russians or attempted to dominate China now they hated and feared these "new" states because of their strength, their independence, their communism. It is difficult to find more potent amalgams of nationalism with a specific social theory in any historical epoch.
3
It was the invertionary policies of the alliance partners that made the union seem natural to most Soviet and Chinese leaders and that made it such a formidable enemy in the view of the West. The Sino-Soviet alliance was the greatest antisystemic power assembled so far during the capitalist era and probably the greatest power to challenge the political supremacy of the Western capitals since the final expansion of the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century. The geographical space of the alliance covered nearly a quarter of the earth's landmass, and the size of its population made it dominant on two continents. It was intended to be and served as a threat that could not be ignored. With Cold War tensions already running high in Western capitals, the signing of the alliance set off acute alarms. President Dwight D. Eisenhower noted in the spring of 1950: "I believe Asia is lost with Japan, P[hilippine] I[slands], N[etherlands] E[ast] I[ndies] and even Australia under threat. India itself is not safe!"
4
Throughout its existence, the men in charge of the alliance had to devise ways to translate the symbols, the sense of achievement and unity, into political aims.

 

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