Brothers in Arms (46 page)

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Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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it often did not trouble itself to check their implementation. In China, this meant that the advisers so carefully chosen were not very well supervised once they arrived. Most of the ex-advisers remember feeling that they were on their own in China.
In most cases, the Soviet advisors found that their workplaces were not well organized. Each handled this differently, of course, but most reported that they simply relied on their past experience and organized the work in China along the same lines. Many of them were pleased with the independence and general lack of supervision. One reported that he liked working in China because he felt free with his time, he respected himself and felt necessary, as if he were doing work that was valuable.

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The negative side to this lack of organization, of course, was quality control. Unlike at home in the USSR the advisers were not strictly supervised, nor was there any controlling organization in Moscow that forced the home enterprise or ministry to cooperate as they were supposed to by their agreement.
This lack of support and supervision was problematic and sometimes embarrassing. In November 1955 the secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol organization, A. Shelepin, wrote a note to the CC about a youth delegation that had gone to China. He reported in detail about several Soviet advisers he had seen while in China. Many were fulfilling only their technical duties and not worrying about the education of the Chinese with whom they worked. He said that some of them were so poorly informed about their supposed areas of expertise that it was shameful. At a meeting he attended, for example, he was mortified to see that the Soviet who was working as an adviser to China's minister of ferrous metallurgy seemed almost completely ignorant about leading labor methods in the Soviet Union, and he knew nothing at all about the situation of metallurgical factories in China.
He also reported that the Soviets working in a Shanghai shipbuilding factory had said that they were having trouble getting necessary parts and equipment sent to them from their home enterprise. They told him that they had received equipment with necessary parts missing and no technical documentation. They said that the last shipment sent from their Leningrad enterprise included a collective agreement of one of the factories, unneeded bolts, and lots of trash. And they complained that even when they sent questions back to the enterprise, they never received any answers.
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We Lived in Nice Soviet Complexes
For all of the rhetoric of friendship and brotherhood, close relationships between Soviets and Chinese were discouraged by both countries. At the work-site level, most respondents described cordial relations. Former advisers reported

 

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being pleased at how well the Chinese worked. One respondent said that he thought that it was simply a Chinese national characteristic to work and to set goals and achieve them.

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Many advisers liked the fact that at the factory or work site, the Chinese, no matter if they were workers, the director, or the head engineer, all wore the same clothing: cotton uniform, cotton cap, and cotton shoes. None of them wore a suit and tie.
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At the individual level, most Soviet advisers felt that friendship existed between China and the Soviet Union when they were working there. However, almost all felt that there was a limit to this friendship and that somehow it could not become a personal relationship. Oleg Glazilin, who was an interpreter for a group of geologists looking for uranium, said that even at the peak of friendship between the two countries, the Chinese were outwardly friendly, very much so, but at the same time, inside, somehow, they were on their guard. "We were all the same, well, they were Communists and we were Communists, for God's sake. When I was a student, we were one with, say, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Poles, and we all went out together in a normal way. But in China, that never happened, in fact, it was the other way around, some sort of estrangement (
otchuzhdennost'
), like some kind of wall stood between us, transparent, invisible, but some kind of wall. . . ."
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There was a limit to the personal contact each side had with the other. For one thing, all the Soviet specialists always lived with each other, in a hotel, and they took all their meals together in the hotel's restaurant, no matter what part of China they were in. Some felt this made things easier from the point of view of security,
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while others felt the reason was to limit real contact with Chinese people.
Some ex-advisers told about times when possible close relationships with a Chinese citizen caused trouble. Most of them blamed this on the Chinese Communist Party. One former adviser said:
The Chinese treated us honestly, but among the regular people, there were always party leaders who smiled on the outside, but with eyes that were just cold. They controlled everything, restrained everything. I remember being friendly with this young Chinese girl, such a nice girl, and I . . . didn't do anything, didn't even embrace her, we just flirted a little, but then they [the CCP representatives] worked her over until she cried.
30
Another remembered "a brave Czech woman there," who began seeing a lot of a Chinese man, and who ultimately got into trouble over it from both the Czech and Chinese officials.
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All of the advisers spoke of being followed while they lived in China. One

 

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said, "Mao gave an order that even if you go to the toilet, the guard must go and stand nearby." This person remembers that under no circumstances were the Soviets allowed to go out alone. It was obligatory that they be followed. He also remembered once leaving his room and realizing a bit later that he had forgotten something. Returning to his room, he saw somebody rooting through his suitcase, but he pretended that he had not seen him and left. Asked why he had pretended, he replied, "Well, because I knew that he was just doing his job, because it was no doubt a worker for state security, I was sure of it. Also, we had been raised in such a country where this was taken as absolutely normal." Continuing, he said, "Our work regime [in China] was absolutely like being in a prison, in general, like a prison with high wages. They didn't let us go anywhere, do anything, without surveillance, and that was it."

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A journalist in China also recalled that the Soviets were all followed, even openly. The Chinese made journalists submit their questions in advance, in writing. Not long into his term in Beijing, one of the Chinese comrades told him that they were required every week to write a letter about each of the Soviet journalists. He was told that they filed reports on what the Soviets were doing, what kind of questions they were asking, with whom they met, and so on.

One of his fellow Soviet reporters who specialized on China's developing economic transformation had a very unpleasant experience at a factory near Beijing. He was talking to the director about several things, "all within the realm of journalistic interest, nothing more," when suddenly the Chinese comrade who had accompanied him to the factory stuck out his hand, tore the correspondent's notebook from him, and shouted: "You are not allowed to know this or report on this!" He said that the Soviets were embarrassed and did not know what to do. They all simply pretended that there had been no such incident, and the reporter did not ask any more questions.
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Not all of the ex-Soviet advisers felt that the constant surveillance as negative. One of them who lived and worked in Harbin said that being accompanied was absolutely necessary. The "guide" helped them find their way and answer questions for them.
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Most of them needed a guide in any case, since they had not learned any Chinese.
Sino-Soviet Friendship in Question
All of the advisors who were in China after 1956 reported problems on the job as a repercussion of the changing Sino-Soviet relationship at the top. Many Russians who were in China at the time point to Khrushchev's so-called secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, at which he denounced Stalin. One highly placed CPSU member who worked at the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing attended the speech in Moscow and sat with Chinese Marshal Zhu De.

 

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After the speech he asked Zhu De how he felt about it, knowing that "of course, without talking with Mao Zedong, he could not give his opinion. But he did say, 'You know, Stalin was the head of the world Communist movement, so he belonged to all [Communist] parties. You criticized him without even consulting with us.'"

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Another adviser who was in China in 1956 remembers that the Chinese reaction was severely negative. He said that the cult of Mao was in full flower already and that it appeared to be "a copy, only a Chinese variant, a copy of the Soviet, Stalin cult. . . ." Such a grand, public denunciation made the Chinese uncomfortable, for how could they criticize Stalin's cult and continue building the same for Mao? He said that by this time:
The Chinese believed in communism, they believed blindly in Mao, blindly completely [believing] that this was god, a living god on earth. I saw how the Chinese people behaved at receptions that Mao was part of, once at a celebration at Tiananmen Square in honor of the founding of the PRC. He was a living god, a living Buddha, and if he said that if you pick up a rock and throw it up into the sky and that it would not fall back down, they said, yes, if Mao said so, it must be so
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Evident problems began to surface between China and the Soviet Union sometime after the secret speech. These were not public, of course, but they were a matter of concern for the CPSU CC. The Chinese began to say that they were not interested in closely copying "the Soviet model." For instance, a report dated July 16, 1957, detailing the work of scientific and technical personnel in China focused on this. It said that the Chinese recently had begun to complain that in their reform of the educational system of the People's Republic, the advisers were simply copying Soviet texts without paying any attention to Chinese characteristics. For example, the Soviets had come in and abolished the traditional Chinese grading system in the schools, replacing it with their own five-point system, which led to problems for those graduating and expecting to graduate.
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Perhaps in response to the more vocal Chinese criticism, the Soviet embassy personnel in China began to complain that the Soviet ministries that were selecting and sending advisors were doing a poor job. After 1957, the Advisors' Program seems to have merely become another bureaucratic task for the CPSU CC. The program was no longer such a priority that the Central Committee interviewed each and every prospective applicant.
A dispatch called "Overview of the Work of Soviet Specialists in Science and Technology" illuminated the problems of advisors in China. The report focused

 

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