Brothers in Arms (83 page)

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Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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Page 237
the difficult explanation to Moscow would have to come anyway.

46
Zhou Enlai asked Gromyko to inform Khrushchev plainly that during the crisis, the Chinese leaders had deliberately provoked the rage of the Americans upon China, were ready to sustain all harsh counterreactions "up to atomic bombings and the destruction of our cities," and expected the Soviet Union to come to China's rescue during the decisive phase of the conflict.
47

As a result, Khrushchev faced Chinese ridicule and threats to both his strategic détente plan and his tactical muscle-building. Mao proved unwilling to embrace Khrushchev's ideology of stability and his concurrent strategy of leasing China's coastline for geopolitical maneuvering. The disagreements between Mao and Khrushchev had become so basic that in 1959 the Kremlin ceased all aid to the Chinese nuclear program.
In September 1959, after a visit to the United States that he regarded as a diplomatic breakthrough, Khrushchev announced the unilateral reduction of the Soviet armed forces. (Even earlier, in March 1958, Soviet nuclear testing had been unilaterally suspended.)
48
Pursuing primarily propaganda goals and not intentionally weakening the Soviet military buildup, Khrushchev was still sending a message to the West that he was serious in his détente advances.
Nevertheless, the Soviet leader made one last personal attempt to get the Chinese onboard. Immediately after his autumn trip to the United States and his Camp David talks with President Dwight D. Eisenhower whom he liked and believed (at the time, at least) to be a sincere champion of peace Khrushchev tried to discuss foreign policy with Mao in Beijing. This time Khrushchev's renewed enthusiasm about détente and his inability to understand Mao's reservations further aggravated the situation. Khrushchev never could appreciate Mao's need to establish his reputation as a unifier of the country an essential image of any new Chinese ruler by military expeditions against the separatists on Taiwan. Khrushchev told Mao that he should not worry about Taiwan, for the great Lenin himself had let the Russian Far East be independent for a while. It was also unnecessary, Khrushchev argued, to clash with India, referring to the August 25 Chinese occupation of the frontier post of Longju.
49
The same great Lenin had had to tolerate the loss of Russian territories after the civil war and later the territories had been won back.
50
The atmosphere of the summit was darkened also by the Peng Dehuai episode: Khrushchev had met Marshal Peng Dehuai, the Chinese defense minister, earlier that year, and Peng allegedly had conferred with him on the ideological rectitude of Mao's domestic policies. But the pro-Soviet Peng was replaced by Lin Biao two weeks before Khrushchev visited Beijing in late September 1959 a slap in the face for the Soviet leader.
51
No understandings whatsoever were reached in Beijing at what turned out to be the last meeting between Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong.

 

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Breakup: 1960-1964
By late 1959 it was obvious to the Kremlin that the concrete difficulties in Sino-Soviet relations were not ad hoc nuisances but the manifestation of basic ideological disagreements between the two parties. By April 1960 a consensus had emerged among Soviet foreign policy elites that the ideological deviations of the Chinese comrades were going too far, especially after the leading Chinese journal,
Hongqi,
published the article "Long Live Leninism!" They felt it was time to punish the Chinese leadership by publishing in the Soviet press authoritative articles on the theory of contemporary Marxism-Leninism.

52
Up to a point the ideological warfare went hand in hand with the deterioration of state relations.
53

The Kremlin was amazed to note how great the ideological differences between Moscow and Beijing were. Not only were the Chinese unwilling to embrace the course of peaceful coexistence and underline the potential for disarmament, but they were uncompromisingly against any détente with the United States. With respect to relations with capitalist countries, the conflict with India showed that Mao opposed the Soviet Union's foreign policy in toto. The Chinese asserted that world war was inevitable and insisted on preserving the violent course of the revolutionary movement. Mao's adventurist economic policy had resulted in widescale starvation. All in all, to Moscow, Chinese policy indicated a classic leftist deviation from Marxism-Leninism.
54
Mao's unwillingness to let the Soviets control China's coast by establishing naval bases added injury to the theoretical insults.
55
In Sino-Soviet relations of the early 1960s, geopolitical disagreements strengthened ideological differences, while the latter undermined the fundamentals of the geopolitical alliance. This fatal interaction of geopolitical and ideological factors led to the final split between the two powers. But the timing of the split was ironic. First, the basic ideological disagreement was actually on the pace and methods of promoting the socialist cause. Due to Khrushchev's détente, this disagreement took the form of an argument on how to deal with the imperialist powers and whether peaceful coexistence was a revisionist deviation from Marxism-Leninism. Second, starting about 1960, Khrushchev, while accusing Mao of revolutionary adventurism, had himself started promoting revolutions in the Third World. Encouraged by the stabilization of Soviet positions domestically and internationally, Khrushchev believed that he could afford to push rivalry with the West in the huge zone of national liberation movements that he saw as booming in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But by 1961 Khrushchev saw China as a rival, not an ally, in developing these policies.
In early summer 1960, the Chinese leaders launched a quiet campaign that might have triggered Khrushchev's decision for a complete break with China.

 

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In their talks with the Soviets and East Europeans, the Chinese leaders started maintaining that the only way the Soviet Union could secure global peace was to transfer nuclear weapons to China and other socialist countries.

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Nothing could have hurt Khrushchev more. Not only did the Chinese still insist on sharing Soviet nuclear secrets, they also were trying to whet the nuclear appetites of other socialist countries. In August the Kremlin withdrew its advisors and technicians from China.

As Khrushchev proceeded with the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union with the twenty-second CPSU Party Congress in October 1961 taking an unprecedented anti-Stalinist stand the Chinese started a propaganda campaign that defended Stalin, Mao's bête noir from five years earlier.
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The Chinese leaders began clearly ignoring any foreign policy actions by Soviet leaders.
58
By mid-1962 the Soviet leadership had come to see China as a possible geopolitical threat even along the common border in Central Asia. In 1961-1962 at least 60,000 Chinese Muslims had crossed the Sino-Soviet border, fleeing the violence and famine of the new upsurge of Mao's revolution.
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The specter of a new great game emerged: the fight between Moscow and Beijing for influence among the Central Asian peoples divided by the Sino-Soviet border. It was the first hint of the great territorial dispute that was to come during the 1960s.
But in spite of the unrest at the border, the Soviet leaders seem to have been unprepared for Mao's raising of the issue of territorial claims, aiming at lands acquired by imperial Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union, in East Asia, Siberia, and Central Asia. At least in the first phase of the new border dispute, the Kremlin acted with restraint, although its fears of the consequences of the Chinese claims were obvious. Boundary negotiations between the People's Republic and the Soviet Union started in February 1964. In July, talking to a Japanese Socialist Party delegation, Mao upped the ante by raising the issue of "Outer Mongolia": the Mongolian People's Republic, since 1924 a vassal of Moscow.
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The geoideological divergence between Communists in Moscow and Beijing, having begun under Stalin as a dispute on how to make socialist revolution in an Asian peasant society and Soviet "rights" in Manchuria, by 1964 had divided the world's leftist movement into pro-Moscow and pro-Beijing factions and raised the question of a complete geopolitical repartition in the East.
Khrushchev had been alerted to the possibility of a strategic military rivalry between Moscow and Beijing as early as 1961. The sole Chinese ally worldwide Albania in the Mediterranean had banned Soviet submarines from its bases at that time.
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In the summer of 1962, Khrushchev decided to deliver a dozen MiG-21s to India, a new foe of China after the October 1959 border clashes.
62

 

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The successful October 1962 Chinese offensive in Ladakh laid the foundations for a Soviet-Indian anti-Chinese entente. The Soviet policy of befriending China's neighbors had started, a policy that would culminate in February 1979, when Moscow supported Vietnam during the Sino-Vietnamese border war.
Because of his failure in China, Khrushchev had to rely solely on Soviet efforts in his naval strategies. By the time he was ousted from power in 1964, new Soviet submarines carrying submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) had begun patrolling the Atlantic and a new fleet to defend the SLBM submarines had been created.

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But his strategy of seeking overseas bases had failed, a fact that seriously weaked the Soviet Union in its global military rivalry with the United States. In the process of seeking what ultimately eluded him, Khrushchev had done his part to ruin the Soviet alliance with the world's most populous country. Whatever strategic successes his successors could claim, they could not put that alliance back together again.
64

Notes
1. Gordon H. Chang,
Friends and Enemies: The United States, China and the Soviet Union, 1948-1972
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 249.
2. Such is the point of view of the authors of an excellent book on Stalin and Mao: Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai,
Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 219. It is indisputable that certain acts of Soviet foreign policy were purely geopolitical. But with the exception of the
force majeur
situation of World War II from 1939 to 1945, ideology was never downplayed by the Kremlin until the Brezhnevites came to power in 1964. See also the analysis of "revolutionary imperial paradigm" in Constantine Pleshakov and Vladislav Zubok,
Inside the Kremlin's Cold War
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
3. Ernst Neisvestny's talk at Khrushchev Centenary Conference, Brown University, Providence, R.I., December 3, 1994.
4. For an analysis of Stalin's attempts to use realpolitik in East Asia in 1945 to avoid conflict with the United States, see 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), 31-56.
5.
Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament,
ed. Strobe Talbott (London: Andrew Deutsch, 1974), 240.

 

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