The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (53 page)

11. U
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an especially cruel irony in what happened next, it was that the very same doubts the State Department’s China Hands had reflected in their reporting (which had so angered the China Lobby)—not just their certainty that Chiang was failing, but their doubts about Mao’s long-term loyalty to the Russians—turned out to be shared by none other than Joseph Stalin. Stalin, the most important player on the Communist side from the fall of Chiang to the start of the Korean War, the man who skillfully manipulated the needs and fears of his two Communist allies, did not in fact trust Mao. He preferred a unified Communist Korea, one that was grateful to him, and utterly dependent upon him, to a divided one. He also wanted as strong a Korean counterforce as he could muster to the Japanese—a nation the Russians had historically feared and that he was sure the Americans would now seek to rearm. Because he distrusted Mao, he was also eager to maximize the tensions between China and the United States, and a war in which they found themselves on opposite sides worked to his advantage.

In 1949, Joseph Stalin was the dominant figure in the entire Communist world. He had controlled Russia for more than a quarter of a century. Of the leading architects of the Russian Revolution, he was the last one standing. Others might have been more brilliant, more charismatic, better speakers, more original strategists, but he was the greatest apparatchik of them all, the man who seemed to understand best the single enduring truth of that particular revolution: that when it came to the consolidation of power—sustaining it, and making sure that no one did to you what you had just done to your enemies—ideas did not matter much, but police power did. In the world as Stalin knew it, you were either the hunter or the hunted.

He survived and succeeded because he was the one with the fewest illusions (and perhaps the greatest paranoia), the man who understood best when stage one of the revolution was over and stage two—the consolidation of power—had begun. He was the one who broke the system down to its most elemental truth: there were enemies everywhere, and you removed them not only before
they struck at you, but before they even grasped that they were your enemy. It was his greatest strength, the sheer darkness of his soul, that he understood this more quickly than others, and pursued it more cold-bloodedly, with fewer restraints.

There was a certain inevitability to the darkness that existed between the two superpowers in the years immediately after World War II—two essentially isolationist countries propelled involuntarily to great power status, with vastly differing political and economic systems, each with its own historical strain of paranoia and each now living in a nuclear world. But no small additional part of the tension was the fact that the Soviet leader was Stalin, and he made everything in the Cold War seem infinitely more dangerous and more threatening, so marginal was his innate humanity, and so cruel a man was he. What he ran was a terror machine. It did not matter if you had committed a crime; a suitable crime could always be found for you. It did not matter if you were a completely loyal Communist and a completely faithful Stalinist, a true believer in the cult of his personality. Someone was always listening, ready to betray you, if only to save himself. It was government run by fear and, finally, madness. In the late 1930s, with a Slavophobic Hitler on the rise, Stalin had purged and virtually destroyed the officer corps and leadership of the Red Army, getting rid of 3 of 5 marshals, 15 of 16 army commanders, 60 of 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 division commanders. Essentially he stripped his country’s defenses and prepared the way for the German invasion to come in 1941. His crimes against his own people were so great as to be essentially beyond measurement. How many people had actually died? Was it a few million, 10 million, perhaps even 40 million? “He was one of those rare terrible dogmatists capable of destroying nine tenths of the human race to ‘make happy’ the one tenth,” wrote Milovan Djilas, the former Communist vice president of Yugoslavia, and heir apparent to Tito, who broke with the Communists, spent time in prison, and eventually wrote one of the most penetrating early insider portraits of Stalin. Djilas saw him as the greatest criminal of all time: “Every crime was possible to Stalin for there was not one he had not committed. Whatever standards we use to take his measure…to him will fall the glory the greatest criminal in history. For in him were joined the criminal senselessness of a Caligula with the refinement of a Borgia and the brutality of a Tsar Ivan the Terrible.”

The relationship between Stalin and Mao, going back to the early days of China’s civil war, had been one of almost total distrust and abiding mutual suspicion. These two men would eventually be considered among the leading mass murderers produced by a brutal system in an unusually violent age. That they disliked and distrusted each other was not surprising. Of Stalin, it could
be said that he was the ultimate example of how dark the human spirit could become. Of Mao, it could be said that his leadership of a weak political faction in the 1920s, destined, it seemed, to be destroyed by far more powerful enemies, his bringing it to power, was one of the most remarkable political accomplishments of the twentieth century. But the skills of his leadership in ascent were in time exceeded by the harshness, cruelty, and finally, increasing madness he displayed during his years in power. “Revolution is not a dinner party,” he once said. He would in time give ample evidence of that and of the personal corruption as well as the derangement that came with total power.

Each leader thought of himself as a Communist, but each was very much a nationalist as well. There might be, on the occasions they got together, talk of fraternal Communism and how it bonded two great nations and the world’s masses, but the truth was that each looked at the other and saw a potential enemy. From Mao’s perspective, the Soviets had almost always seemed an insular, conservative force, favoring only what helped Russia, with little interest in aiding potential fraternal allies who did not yet hold power. As early as the 1920s, when he was struggling unsuccessfully against Chiang’s forces, Mao believed that the Soviets favored Chiang Kai-shek, and then, as he gradually came to power, Mao had hated their special sponsorship of Gao Gang, a member of the Chinese politburo and regional leader of Manchuria. The Chinese Communists had, he liked to say, repeatedly asked the Russians for arms during the civil war and gotten, in Mao’s phrase, “not even a fart.” To Mao, the Soviets might be Communists, but they were first and foremost
Russians
. Stalin had liked Chiang, Mao believed, because he was weak, and thus sure to preside over a weak China. To Stalin, Mao might be a Communist, but a most unlikely one, lacking a connection with the proletariat, of which China had little; he was too much like a peasant himself. In the end Stalin simply did not trust the Chinese Communists; they were, he said during World War II, too much like radishes: red on the outside, white on the inside.

Each of them carried a long list of grievances against the other. It was symbolic of their relationship that whatever one partner wanted was invariably inconvenient for the other at that moment, although more often than not in those years the needier partner was Mao. The fact that the Soviets were not giving the Chinese much in the way of aid during World War II was known in America at the time, because Communist officials in Yenan complained quite openly about the lack of help to Western visitors, diplomats, journalists, and members of the Dixie Mission, the American military intelligence operatives from the Office of Strategic Services who had been sent to work with the Chinese Communists, and to push them to do more against the Japanese. (The members of the Mission generally admired the Communists for their military
abilities and were privately contemptuous of Chiang’s forces.) Since the end of the Cold War, a great many secret documents—studies ordered up by Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet first secretary during the worst years of the Sino-Soviet split—have become public, and they reflect even greater early tensions in the Mao-Stalin relationship than expected and, on the surface at least, seemingly greater opportunities for American foreign policy, had the United States not been so locked into Chiang.

Was it inevitable at that moment in the history of the two nations, the United States and China, that the chances for peace would be missed? Perhaps Truman’s Washington and Mao’s Beijing, with greater wisdom and just a little geopolitical luck, might have stumbled into an uncomfortable, uneasy accord in that period, buying some time until the nerve ends were less sensitive. Perhaps the cruelest irony of all was that the main consensus American foreign policy conclusion at the time was that the Communist world was monolithic. If anything, the miscalculations of both sides at this moment helped make the Communist world seem more monolithic than it really was. If there was a sad epitaph for that period it was that to some degree the Americans and the Chinese had both ended up for a time playing Stalin’s game.

The tensions between Stalin and Mao and their two countries, always considerable, had grown ever larger as Mao came closer and closer to taking power. Stalin was never in any rush to risk Soviet resources, Soviet interests, or Russian blood in the cause of the larger Communist family. He trusted only what he conquered with his Army and controlled once he had put his secret police in place. The idea of a vast Communist state on his border, flowering in a historically alien country, under a regime that had come to power without his help and owed him nothing, did not thrill him. Thus Mao was a potential rival even before there was a real rivalry. Stalin had long kept Mao at arm’s length; he had first invited him to Moscow in July 1947, not by chance at the moment when Chiang’s armies were still on the offensive and Mao seemed, to outsiders at least, at the low point of his fortunes. Mao quickly declined to go, believing that if he went, Stalin would try to extract unwanted concessions from him.

Then in late 1947, as the tide steadily began to turn in favor of the Communists, Stalin began to back Mao more openly, but gave him virtually nothing in the way of aid. By January 1948, Stalin confided to Milovan Djilas that he had been wrong earlier in pushing Mao to work out an accord with Chiang. The Americans, Stalin added, were preoccupied with Europe, and while they would never let the Greek Communists win in their then ongoing civil war, Asia was a secondary sphere for them. The Americans would be unlikely to invest their military forces on the Asian mainland, he said. In May 1948, Mao, sure victory was at hand, sent word that he finally wanted to come to Moscow
and meet with Stalin. What he desired was recognition from the Soviet bloc at the moment when Chiang finally collapsed. Stalin instead replied that “the revolutionary war in China is in its decisive phase, and that Chairman Mao, as its military leader, would do better not to leave his post.” Hopefully, he added, “Chairman Mao will reconsider his intentions.” As Goncharov, Lewis, and Xue wrote, “To Mao, Stalin’s ever-so-polite letter was a rebuke. As Communist military commander, he could be presumed to know much better than Stalin if this was a good time for a journey to Moscow, and he needed no instructions on the matter.”

In late 1948, Mao pushed for a meeting in Moscow on several occasions, and each time Stalin held back. Instead in January 1949, Stalin sent Anastas Mikoyan, one of his most trusted aides, to China, but only under a cloak of absolute secrecy. Stalin still feared what might happen in case the Americans lashed out in the final days. What Mao sensed of Stalin, right down to the final warning that he should go slowly as his forces crossed the Yangtze, was more than anything else his timidity.

Mao was all too aware in those years that Stalin was suspicious of him. Privately he would joke—if that is the word—that he did not enjoy Stalin’s trust, and that he was considered a rightist and opportunist by Moscow. Still, he needed Stalin’s approval and wanted to be received with some form of honor in the Soviet capital. In April 1949, Mao again passed the word to Lieutenant General Ivan Kovalev, Stalin’s personal representative in China, that he wanted to visit. This time, though Stalin again turned him down, the response from Moscow was much warmer and there was praise for him as the leader of a great Communist revolution. Kovalev later noted that Mao seemed quite relieved by the warmer tone of the answer. According to Kovalev, Mao raised his hands and shouted out, “Long live Comrade Stalin! Long live Comrade Stalin! Long live Comrade Stalin!” Finally, in December 1949, he got the coveted Moscow invitation, but only as one of many leaders in the Communist world and not to celebrate his victory in China, extraordinary though it was, but to commemorate Stalin’s enduring rule on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.

Part of the problem was that Mao was hardly what the Soviet leadership wanted. He was too proud of his accomplishments and of being Chinese, too independent-minded, seeming to believe that, by leading this great revolution, he was already a major figure, not a supplicant. His very victory had demanded independence, but that same independence made Moscow nervous. If he came to Moscow, would he be sufficiently grateful? The Russians were not even sure he was by their reckoning a real Communist. He was, Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov reported back to Stalin after one meeting, clever, but a peasant: “Of
course he is far from being Marxist—he confessed to me that he had never read
Das Kapital
.” Reading the translation of Mao’s theoretical views, Stalin had been appalled: “What kind of Marxism is this! This is feudalism!” Privately Stalin believed that Mao might harbor what he termed “rightist tendencies” that might one day lead him to be soft on the Americans.

As Mao came closer to taking power, a good deal of jockeying continued between the leaderships of the two countries. The Soviets were trying to find out what Mao felt about Tito, the Yugoslav leader who was about to be drummed out of the Communist family for his perceived dissidence and independence. The Soviets feared there were parallels between Tito, who had already broken with Moscow, and Mao. Moscow, in fact, always suspected Mao of being a closet Titoist, and in time he would indeed become the greatest Titoist of them all. But whatever Mao’s reservations about Stalin, the Chinese badly needed some form of international recognition, someone to legitimize them on the world stage, and there was no one else to turn to. Though Stalin privately continued to hold back on other aspects of friendship, on October 2, 1949, the day after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Soviets became the first nation to recognize the new Communist regime.