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Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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10. Perhaps the most striking indication of the latter impact is the rapid translation into Chinese of conference materials, especially Russian documents provided by the project, and the preparation of a new Chinese-language account of China's intervention in the Korean War reflecting the information contained in the Russian documents.
11. For findings published by the CWIHP on the Cold War in Asia, see, in particular, materials in
CWIHP Bulletin
6-7 (Winter 1995/1996): 1-265;
CWIHP Bulletin
8-9 (Winter 1996/1997): 220-69;
CWIHP Bulletin,
10 (Winter 1997/1998), on Deng Xiaoping and the Sino-Soviet split.

 

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Preface
Odd Arne Westad
This volume introduces new multiarchival research on the history of the Sino-Soviet alliance its rise in the late 1940s, high point in the 1950s, and collapse by the early 1960s by a group of international historians from several different countries. It exemplifies a trend in post-Cold War writing of international history that underlines scholarly cooperation across borders as necessary for making full use of evidence available in different languages and within different cultural or political paradigms. It also underlines the challenges that a dramatic widening of the database and a sudden internationalization of research bring to post-1945 international history in terms of approaches and interpretations.
Until recently the Sino-Soviet alliance the one major bid by the two most powerful Communist regimes to combine forces against capitalism has been perhaps the most underresearched major topic in Cold War history. After a few early and very useful attempts at a postmortem of the alliance, written mostly during the early or mid-1960s, interest in the once so mighty compact seemed virtually to dry up.

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In spite of the intrinsic importance of the subject, which most Cold War scholars acknowledged, the Sino-Soviet alliance received short shrift in all but a few general histories, and no more comprehensive treatments were forthcoming.
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There were many reasons behind the death of interest. Obviously, few scholars possessed either the requisite languages or cultural skills to deal with the alliance from both the Soviet and the Chinese angles. And even if a scholar did surmount these requirements, he or she faced the seemingly insuperable problem of gaining access to primary sources. Until only a few years ago, the Moscow and Beijing archives remained special preserves of the party elites, heavily guarded and shielded behind draconian laws on state secrets.

 

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But as if secrecy and language barriers were not enough, the evident apathy appears also to have stemmed from the belief among many Western scholars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that they already knew and understood the reasons behind the alliance's rise and demise. In the first decades of Chinese and Russian communism, it was believed, sufficient ideological attraction existed between the two to make the countries they controlled natural allies. Then, as the new states came better to recognize their national interests, they drifted apart, and the traditional pattern of rivalry and mistrust between Russia and China recommenced. Often linked to general presumptions about modernization and state behavior, this realist paradigm dominated the field across political and parochial divides within the scholarly community.
In the late 1980s, however, as the Cold War drew to a close, the database for studying the foreign relations of Communist countries suddenly changed. Gorbachev's glasnost and the stunning liberalization that took place in China under Deng Xiaoping burst the shackles of secrecy and, for the first time, allowed Russian and Chinese scholars to begin serious work in their archives. Since then the trickle of new documents has turned into a flood. While ten years ago barely enough inner documents of the Sino-Soviet alliance existed for me to fill the normal space of a classroom lecture, today we have considerable access to a vast amount of archival documents, printed collections, briefing books, and manuscripts throughout China, the former Soviet Union, and the Eastern Bloc. In addition, as this volume demonstrates, wide-ranging opportunities have opened up to interview former policymakers and participants involved in the bilateral relationship.
While in no way unproblematic from a scholarly standpoint, the recent flood of documents has opened up possibilities for a reevaluation of the main issues of the alliance.

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This reevaluation has been heavily influenced by new opportunities for scholarly cooperation across national boundaries. Working with colleagues from China and Russia has allowed European and American scholars to benefit from their insights into the mentalities of the Communist regimes. Likewise, scholars working from within the geographical space of the former alliance have learned to question their established troths and to employ new methodologies and approaches.

This volume gathers writings by some of the foremost younger experts on the history of the alliance from China, Russia, the United States, and Western Europe. Our cooperation began in 1994, when the contributors, on my invitation, agreed to write for the volume. Since then the project has developed in many different ways. We have shared information and documents, have helped each other gain entry to archives, and, of course, have read and commented on draft

 

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versions of the chapters. Some of us have met fairly regularly at conferences and meetings, while others have kept in touch mainly through that most wonderful of inventions for long-distance scholarly cooperation, the Internet.
We have frequently disagreed on the interpretation of much of the formerly top-secret material to which we have gained access. Although all the contributors to this volume distrust the realist paradigm, we point in very different directions in search of an alternative and comprehensive approach. For instance, in chapter 9, Chen Jian and Yang Kuisong emphasize the domestic policies and perceptions of the Chinese Communist leaders as the key to understanding the development of the alliance. Constantine Pleshakov, on the other hand, uses Soviet materials from the Khrushchev era to suggest, in chapter 7, that it was changes in the Moscow elite's worldview that presaged the rapid breakdown of the alliance in the late 1950s.
Beyond heated discussions among the contributors, we have made no attempts at harmonizing the differing views of the authors. Several of the contributors plan more comprehensive discussions of the Sino-Soviet alliance in forthcoming books, and the evolving historiography will no doubt see much debate on the central issues included here. This volume is by its very nature preliminary a joint effort at a first assessment of massive amounts of new information. It provides new insights on many aspects of the alliance between Mao's China and the Soviet Union: its creation, its aims and instruments, and its final collapse. But it does not pretend to come up with any unified view of the causes of these developments.
The chapters are ordered in a rough chronological sequence according to the issues upon which they focus. My introductory essay presents the topic and some of the main issues of interpretation as well as a chronological overview for the benefit of new students of the alliance. It does not represent the views of all the contributors but argues strongly in favor of the tools I have found most useful in attempting to disentangle the history of the Sino-Soviet compact.
Chapter 1, by Niu Jun, deals with the origins of the alliance during World War II and the ensuing civil war in China. It emphasizes the close cooperation that developed between Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders and Moscow during the civil war, in spite of long-term differences between the two sides. Niu stresses the gradual increase in the importance of Soviet advice and models to Chinese Communists during this period. Although policy disagreements between the two parties persisted, the CCP in 1949-1950 was considerably closer to Moscow in word and deed than at any other time during the preceding twenty years.
In chapter 2, Kathryn Weathersby looks at the importance of the Korean War in the creation of the alliance and especially on how the negotiations to end the

 

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war influenced the Sino-Soviet relationship in the late Stalin era. Although both the general sense of purpose and the practical cooperation of the alliance was strengthened during the war, Stalin's ambivalent approach to the peace talks worried both the Chinese leaders and his own lieutenants and probably prolonged the war by months, if not years.
Chapter 3, by Deborah A. Kaple, reports on her interviews with former Soviet advisors who served in China during the 1950s. The interviews illuminate both. the sense of solidarity and ideological purpose that imbued the young advisers and the problems, both political and personal, that sometimes hampered their work. The chapter also underlines the magnitude of the assistance program by far the largest such program ever undertaken by the Soviet Union.
Sergei Goncharenko, in chapter 4, explores Moscow's programs of military assistance to the People's Republic. It shows one of the main Soviet predicaments throughout the lifetime of the alliance: On the one hand, the Soviet Union and particularly its top generals were cautious about providing the Chinese with the latest technology in offensive weapons, believing that Beijing's possession of such weapons would reduce Soviet leverage in forming joint strategies against the common enemy. On the other hand, Soviet political leaders of the post-Stalin period, driven by ideological motives or political expediency, often in the end agreed to provide the Chinese with exactly the technologies they wanted, including, in many cases, nuclear technology.
Chapter 5, by Odd Arne Westad, concentrates on the alliance's principal foreign relations challenge: the relationship with the United States. Throughout the alliance's existence, the desire to confront Washington and its policies formed a central part of its raison d'être. However, in spite of numerous attempts to integrate their views of the American threat, Chinese and Soviets tended not to see eye to eye in their Marxist understanding of U.S. intentions. As a result, Mao's view of the United States as a rapidly declining power in the late 1950s diverged from the more prudent thinking of the Soviet leadership and became an important reason for the alliance's collapse.
Shu Guang Zhang examines the development of Sino-Soviet economic cooperation and trade in chapter 6, and especially the role the American embargo of China played in this relationship. It concludes that the problems of both sides in managing their respective economies caused more friction than rational calculations of cost and benefit. Both sides generally profited from the economic cooperation, although China obviously was the main recipient of goods. But perceptions of each other's economic strategies, including trade, in the late 1950s exacerbated ties and helped foster the split, even more than specific problems of the bilateral relationship.
In chapter 7 Constantine Pleshakov discusses the role Nikita Khrushchev's

 

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