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Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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only by the murkiness, confusion, and controversy it aroused among those in the West charged with reacting to and analyzing.
In this volume, young scholars breaking into the new sources and out of old interpretive shackles (imposed by lack of freedom, lack of access, or, as Odd Arne Westad points out in his introduction, lack of interest) cast new light on the most secretive and important of relationships within the erstwhile Communist realm. It is a story at the heart of the "other side" of Cold War history that CWIHP was created to help integrate with more customary sources and interpretations from the Western side. And the volume's appearance in the series reflects the exciting, exhilarating, sometimes somewhat improvised nature of the enterprise of ripping aside the secrecy that once veiled the Communist world's archives.
One morning in Beijing in the spring of 1994, at the Hotel Minzu, about a mile west of Tiananmen Square, Odd Arne Westad (then director of research at the Norwegian Nobel Institute) and I had a discussion over breakfast that ultimately led to this book. The two of us, along with a third scholar, David Wolff (later project director), had journeyed to the Chinese capital to meet with local scholars and archivists to explore the feasibility of organizing an international conference at which Chinese, Russian, and Western researchers could present new evidence on the history of the Cold War in Asia. I was then the project's director, making a first reconnaissance trip to Beijing, while Westad, who had just published his groundbreaking study of the intersection between the Cold War and the Chinese civil war,

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had kindly agreed to show me the ropes, introduce me to his own cadre of contacts, and do what he could to facilitate my mission. Between slurps of congee (or was it mouthfuls of rice?), Westad and I discovered that we also had potentially competing or potentially complementary future plans. My own focus was on finding out whether it would be possible to organize a successful conference and commissioning papers from leading Chinese (and other) scholars; Westad, I found out, was already engaged in discussions with many of those same prospective participants regarding collection of essays for a volume on the Sino-Soviet alliance. Rather than gritting our teeth and rushing off to nail down commitments to contribute exclusively to one project or the other, or trying to extract two different chapters from each scholar rather than one (presumably better) effort, we quickly agreed that it would make the most sense if we coordinated our enterprises the chapters for Westad's planned book would be presented at the project's proposed conference, then revised for publication.

In fact, although neither of us knew it at the time, the genesis of this work dated back more than a year earlier, to the deep freeze of a Moscow winter. There, in January 1993, the Cold War International History Project had orga-

 

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nized the first major international conference on Cold War history since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the (still partial) opening of the Soviet archives. At that conference, held in cooperation with the archive holding the records of the now-outlawed Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), one of the many panels had featured reports from Russian archives and oral history sources on Soviet policy toward Asia during the Cold War and on the Sino-Soviet alliance and split in particular. These early glimpses from the formerly top-secret CPSU files captivated and excited the hundred or so scholars crowding the Russian Academy of Sciences conference hall, even the jet-lagged Americans. After hearing the panelists who included Kathryn Weathersby, Deborah A. Kaple, and Constantine Pleshakov, each of whom presented early versions of the work represented in their chapters in this volume

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Westad, one of three commentators (along with prominent U.S. Sinologists Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker), instantly voiced the most common reaction: now that, for the first time, high-quality Russian sources and scholarly analyses on the Sino-Soviet relationship were finally beginning to emerge to supplement Western ones, the logical next step was to complete the triangle and bring Chinese scholars and Chinese-language sources into the mix. Then and there the idea of bringing Russian, Western, and Chinese scholars and sources together for a three-way conversation jelled into a firm intention and led, inter alia, to that breakfast at the Minzu on Fuxingmennei Dajie sixteen months later.

Despite the tensions over trade relations and human rights then clouding Sino-American relations on the political level, our talks with Chinese colleagues in May 1994 went well, as did contacts with historians at Hong Kong University (where Westad was spending a semester as a visiting scholar). We reached agreement to hold the conference the project envisioned to be hosted by Hong Kong University, and with Chinese participation coordinated by the Institute of American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Over the next year and a half, work went forward on research, conference papers, and book chapters (not to mention frantic faxes and e-mail messages on logistical preparations between the Wilson Center and Hong Kong University historian Priscilla Roberts), culminating in Hong Kong in January 1996 with four days of presentations, revelations, interpretations, and disputations relating to the history of the Cold War in Asia, with several panels devoted to the Sino-Soviet alliance and split. Westad, Chen Jian, Niu Jun, Yang Kuisong, Sergei Goncharenko, Weathersby, Kaple indeed, all of the authors in this volume (with the exception of Pleshakov, who could not attend) were among those giving papers, and the intense exchanges of those days and nights not only in and between formal sessions but in long evening walks and sometimes queasy boat trips around the harbor forged new bonds of scholarly collaboration and per-

 

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sonal friendship and renewed old ones.

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The findings also attracted broader popular as well as scholarly attention, receiving extensive media coverage in major newspapers and on CNN, and with Russian-and Chinese-language publications causing shifts in entrenched historiography.
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Typifying the kind of international community of scholars that the project has tried to foster, the editor and authors of this volume have in many ways besides their written work contributed to the expanding relationship among scholars from both sides of the former Sino-Soviet alliance and both sides of the former Cold War. Since the Hong Kong meeting, groups of scholars in Beijing and Moscow have banded together to form Cold War study associations to promote research and organize exchanges and conferences with foreign colleagues. Many contributors to this volume also took part in a project-sponsored workshop in Beijing in October 1997 to discuss additional new evidence on the Sino-Soviet alliance. In addition to this volume, other fruits of these coordinated research efforts have included publication of Russian and Chinese documents and findings on the Cold War in Asia in the project's
Bulletin,
where some of the documents in the appendixes originally appeared and which scholars may consult for additional materials.
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Another result is a forthcoming volume in the Cold War International History Project Book Series containing additional research reports (from the Hong Kong conference and other project activities) on the Cold War in Asia not only on the Sino-Soviet relationship but on the Korean and Vietnam wars, Sino-American relations, and other issues. And meanwhile, "the network" of researchers continue to collaborate to share the latest leads and findings and to try to pry loose archival materials still off-limits in Moscow, Beijing, and elsewhere. The hunt goes on, with each new discovery as prone to raise new questions as to provide long-sought answers to old ones.
For survivors and scholars of the Cold War especially linguistically challenged ones such as myself-long dependent on (partial) access to one side's materials, the opportunity to delve inside the archives and memories of Communist world's giants, even vicariously through the reports of other researchers, offers an unparalleled and unexpected opportunity to relive, reassess, and reinterpret some of the most mysterious aspects of recent history. The authors would be the first to stress that these chapters are early and preliminary findings, subject to revision as further archives crack open and new materials emerge, in a search for understanding that will go on for decades. They have also frequently found that the newly available evidence has corroborated, at least to some degree, the analyses and speculations of scholars working at the time of the events in question or with far less access to materials than is now the case. But these findings are, nevertheless, significant harbingers of a new way of writing and understanding Cold War history from contrasting national, disci-

 

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plinary, cultural, and linguistic perpsectives and representative, in quality and originality, of the scholarship that I look forward to presenting in forthcoming volumes of the Cold War International History Project Book Series.
Notes
1. John Lewis Gaddis,
We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), vii, 281-2.
2. Gaddis Smith, "Glasnost, Diplomatic History, and the Post-Cold War Agenda,"
Yale Journal of World Affairs
1 (Summer 1989), 50.
3. Michael H. Hunt,
Crises in U.S. Foreign Policy: An International History Reader
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 425.
4. Stein Tonnesson, "Tracking Multi-Dimensional Dominoes," in Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jian, Stein Tonnesson, Nguyen Vu Tung, and James G. Hershberg, eds., "77 Conversations between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Indochina, 1964-1977," Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Working Paper no. 22 (Washington, D.C,: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, May 1998).
5. For an example of this kind of comparative analysis, see Shu Guang Zhang,
Deterrence and Strategic Culture: Chinese-American Confrontations, 1949-1958
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).
6. The author makes this argument at greater length for assessing one key Cold War juncture in "1958-1963 A Cold War Turning Point: New Evidence on the Importance of Communist-Side Domestic and Intra-Alliance Politics during the Crisis Years," paper presented at the Norwegian Nobel Institute symposium "Reviewing the Cold War," Lysebu, Norway, June 17-20, 1998.
7. Odd Arne Westad,
Cold War and Revolution: Soviet-American Rivalry and the Origins of the Chinese Civil War, 1944-1946
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
8. A revised version of Weathersby's paper for the Moscow Conference was published as CWIHP Working Paper no. 8, "Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945-1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives."
9. For the program of the Hong Kong conference, see
Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Bulletin
8-9 (Winter 1996/1997): 220-2.

 

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