Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

The fall of the monarchies in China and Russia ushered in a period of political unrest and civil wars. In 1911, the Qing dynasty collapsed, China’s central authority was fractured, and the country descended into chaos. In 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Romanov dynasty, which had ruled Russia since 1613, and Russia was engulfed in a civil war, which lasted until 1921. Meanwhile, China was also in the throes of a decades-long civil war, between the Kuomintang (KMT), led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the communists, led by Mao Tse-tung. During the interwar period Soviet-Chinese relations were complicated and sometimes contradictory. Some 200,000 anti-communist Russians fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution escaped to Harbin and Shanghai, plotting to overthrow the Bolsheviks. The Soviet communists, on the other hand, became involved in China via the Communist International (Comintern) and its chief emissary Mikhail Borodin. One of his main qualifications was that he had lived in Chicago for many years and spoke English—enabling him to communicate with the Republican leader Sun Yat-sen—but he did not speak Chinese. Borodin worked both sides of the street, with the Chinese communists and the nationalists, and this caused severe strains with Mao’s followers. Indeed, the Comintern decreed that “the Communist Party of China must exert all its efforts directly in alliance with the Left Kuomintang,” to which the Chinese communists replied, “Such an order is like taking a bath in a toilet.” 11The USSR had entered into an alliance with the KMT, and in 1927, Chiang’s forces took Shanghai with the help of the communists, only to turn on them and slaughter them. The Shanghai Massacre’s lasting lesson to Mao was that Stalin pursued his own interests, and fraternal solidarity with communist comrades was not his priority.

As the civil war intensified from 1945 to 1949, Stalin continued to hedge his bets, supporting both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung. A unified China under one ruler, in his view, could represent a potential challenge to Soviet interests. But in the end Mao succeeded in 1949 in forcing Chiang and the KMT to flee to the island of Taiwan, while Mao now ruled all of mainland China. He still admired Stalin as the leader of the international communist movement. The USSR was the first country to recognize the People’s Republic of China. But Stalin was ambivalent about Mao and, more than that, suspicious of his intentions. Thus began forty years of difficult and sometimes tense Sino-Soviet relations.

After his victory, Mao hoped to be recognized by Stalin as his equal, having won a long and brutal war and having created another communist great power. But Stalin took his time inviting him to Moscow. Mao finally arrived in December 1949, two months after the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China. On his way to Moscow, in a state of tension, he suffered a severe anxiety attack at the Sverdlovsk station. 12When he disembarked from the train in Moscow he was met not by Stalin but by Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, an obvious slight. 13Later that night the entire Politburo greeted him.

But things did not go smoothly. Mao wanted Stalin to abrogate the treaty the USSR had signed with Chiang Kai-shek, and Stalin was reluctant to do so. So he sent Mao to his own dacha outside Moscow for two weeks to cool his heels. As it turned out, Mao remained in Moscow for nearly two months while the Soviets negotiated in a dilatory fashion. He was isolated. According to Nikita Khrushchev, “During Mao’s stay, Stalin would sometimes not lay eyes on him for days at a time… and since Stalin neither saw Mao nor ordered anyone else to entertain him, no one dared go and see him.” 14Mao was humiliated and became increasingly furious. At last, Stalin allowed negotiations to begin. On February 14 the two countries finally signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance in case of an attack by a third power. But Stalin offered a niggardly amount of economic assistance to his fraternal ally. Nevertheless, relations remained outwardly cordial—at least while the Soviet dictator lived.

When Stalin died in 1953, Mao assumed he would now be recognized as number one, the leader of the communist world. After all, he was not only a guerrilla leader but also a prolific author of theoretical texts on the Chinese road to socialism. To his surprise, the uneducated (in his view) peasant Nikita Khrushchev managed to maneuver himself to become Stalin’s successor. Khrushchev had no intention of ceding leadership of the communist world to Mao. Worse still, in 1956 Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress without warning his Chinese comrades of what was about to happen. Foreign communists were not allowed in the room when Khrushchev made his speech, and they had to read the speech’s text from Chinese translations of the New York Times . 15Mao and Khrushchev ended up scorning each other. Interviews with the Soviet and Chinese translators who interpreted for the two leaders during their fraught summits depict two men who looked down on each other and believed the other to be reckless. 16At the end of the 1950s, the Soviets abruptly withdrew 1,400 technical specialists from China and ceased giving the PRC assistance for its nuclear program, leaving 600 scientific projects unfinished and forcing the Chinese to fend for themselves and build their own nuclear arsenal. 17

Although the Soviet Union viewed the United States as its main antagonist during the Cold War, China also represented a threat, albeit of a different kind. The United States, as the other nuclear superpower, was economically far stronger than its rival. It had alliances with the major European countries and Japan. It offered a competing ideology—capitalism and democracy—to that of Soviet socialism. China was much weaker militarily and economically than the Soviet Union. But it represented an ideological challenge. At the height of Maoism, China questioned the legitimacy of the Soviet Union as a socialist state, claiming that Beijing’s version of socialism was the only authentic one, whereas the USSR had abandoned socialism for state capitalism. “However hard Khrushchev tries to serve the US imperialists,” said one Chinese publication, “they show not the slightest appreciation…. They continue to slap Khrushchev in the face and reveal the bankruptcy of his ridiculous theories prettifying imperialism.” 18China appealed to countries in the third world and even within the Soviet bloc, claiming that Beijing, not Moscow, should lead the global revolutionary movement.

The Sino-Soviet split produced escalating mutual polemics—especially during the most acute phase of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969—border clashes, and the freezing of relations, culminating in a mini war on the Amur River in 1969. 19Thinly veiled racism was evident on both sides. The USSR engaged in a substantial buildup of nuclear forces near the Chinese border. According to Khrushchev’s memoirs, Mao claimed China would survive a nuclear war with the USSR and would soon start reproducing its population and taking back the territories in the Soviet Far East that rightfully belonged to Beijing. Periodic attempts by the Soviets to ease tensions were largely unsuccessful until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985.

As part of his goal of enhancing the USSR’s standing in the world, Gorbachev realized that it was incumbent on Moscow to take the first steps toward improving ties with China. Gorbachev’s rapprochement efforts culminated in a trip to Beijing in May 1989, the first Sino-Soviet summit in thirty years. A decade earlier, Deng Xiaoping had become China’s leader, and he too had begun a major economic reform program and was open to improving Sino-Soviet ties. Mao was long gone, and his successors were committed to working with the USSR. Deng had set several preconditions for normalizing Sino-Soviet relations, including a reduction in Soviet troop presence on China’s northern border and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and of Soviet-backed Vietnamese troops from Cambodia. Gorbachev agreed to all of China’s demands and traveled to Beijing on Deng’s terms. 20