The Sino-Soviet Split / Luthi, Lorenz M.

1 Front Matter
Table of Contents
Maps
Acknowledgments
5 Abbreviations and Terms
Transliteration and Diacritical Marks
Introduction
1Before Oleg Troyanovskii left his position as the last Soviet ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, he met Wu Xiuquan for a chat about old times. The former vice-head of the Central Committee Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party remarked to the past adviser of Nikita Khrushchev: “When you now read the messages that our countries exchanged at a time not too long ago, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”¹ The pettiness and hyperbole of the Sino-Soviet polemics and their impact on the foreign and domestic policies of both countries, from the Great Leap Forward to
CHAPTER ONE Historical Background, 1921-1955 19
The October Revolution in 1917 was Vladimir Lenin’s opening shot for world revolution. Once power was consolidated, the Bolshevik party faced two new tasks: deepening the revolution at home and extending it abroad. Socialist construction was supposed to make the revolution irreversible in Russia. As described in the first part of this chapter, it promised a socioeconomic development alternative to the allegedly exploitative characteristics of capitalism. From 1921 to 1941, three major development models emerged: theNew Economic Policy(NEP) in the 1920s,Revolutionary Stalinismin the late 1920s and early 1930s, andBureaucratic Stalinismafterward. The last was the

9 CHAPTER 2 The Collapse of Socialist Unity, 1956-1957 46
After the formal end of the twentieth CPSU congress, the delegates had just begun to relax when they were notified to attend immediately another, previously unannounced session. On February 25, 1956, past midnight, the first secretary of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev, spoke for more than four hours about terrible things that most of them remembered: terror, deportations, and summary executions. But the delegates were stunned to hear that these horrific events happened on the personal directives from the man most of them revered: the late Stalin.¹
The twentieth congress established the ideological foundation for the disagreements that would rock the

CHAPTER 3 Mao’s Challenges, 1958 80
In late August 1958, the Frontline Commune came under crossfire during the artillery battles between the People’s Liberation Army and Guomindang troops stationed on Jinmen Island at the center of Xiamen Bay. Chinese Communist propaganda blared across the water, demanding the surrender of the enemy troops stationed on the islet. During the intensive artillery exchanges of the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, villagers took cover in shelters carved into the rock. In combat pauses, the commune members followed Mao’s call to build the communist future. Public mess halls and communal quarters replaced individual living arrangements. Peasants turned into rural proletarians working

CHAPTER 4 Visible Cracks, 1959 114
After the Wuhan conference in early December 1958, Hunan’s party boss Zhou Xiaozhou invited Mao to Changsha to attend the operaThe Board of Life or Death. The plot concerned Hai Rui—a Ming dynasty official (1514-87)—who challenged the verdict of the Jiajing emperor (reign: 1522-67) by saving a falsely accused woman from execution. Peng Dehuai had liked both the opera during his inspection tour a short time before and Zhou’s openness about the problems of the Great Leap Forward. The provincial party leader saw himself as an honest official willing to face an imprudent ruler. It

CHAPTER 5 World Revolution and the Collapse of Economic Relations, 1960 157
The Soviet specialist Mikhail Klochko arrived in Beijing in April of 1960 on his second tour to China. While he enjoyed the gigantic Labor Day spectacle in the Chinese capital, the Soviet downing of an American spy plane ruined the May 1 celebrations in his home country. Klochko also visited the new impressive government buildings erected since his departure two years prior. The Great Leap Forward seemed to have achieved miracles. Early in May, he took up his duties at the Kunming Institute of Metallurgy and Ceramics. On July 23, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing called by phone

CHAPTER 6 Ambiguous Truce, 1961-1962 194
In early 1961, Wu Han’sHai Rui Dismissed from Officewas staged for the first time in the Chinese capital, following several works by other authors who dared to criticize, however implicitly, Mao’s shortcomings. Wu’s play, which depicts Hai Rui standing up for a poor peasant family against the oppressive gentry, was an indictment of Mao’s personality cult and its cancerous impact on China. At the time, the Chairman paid little attention to the play or to Wu’s contemporaneous historical sketch that depicted a heroic defense minister who was dismissed and eventually executed for trying to redress popular grievances. But

CHAPTER 7 Mao Resurgent, 1962-1963 219
In late 1962, theNew York Timesreported that Zhao Fu, a twenty-seven-year-old security officer for the Chinese delegation in Stockholm, had defected and been debriefed by West German intelligence. According to his testimony, Mao had recently asserted that “whoever is against Stalin is against Mao.” Zhao further claimed that the Chairman was hoping for an uprising in the USSR against the anti-Stalinist and anti-communist Khrushchev, “leaving the way free for China to take over as leader of world Communism.”¹
At the late summer of 1962 Beidaihe meeting, Mao staged a brilliant comeback in daily policy making. He used this

CHAPTER 8 The American Factor, 1962-1963 246
On October 2, 1964, theNew York Timesprinted an article, probably based on U.S. governmental leaks, about the Soviet-British-American nuclear test ban talks from the previous year. It reported that, in the summer of 1963, Washington had proposed cooperation to Moscow in order “to prevent the Chinese Communist nuclear-weapons development, but received a cold response from Premier Khrushchev.”¹ For years before, the U.S. government had been concerned about the dangers of a nuclear PRC. In 1962-63, in an attempt to undermine Sino-Soviet relations, U.S. President Kennedy courted the Soviet leader in the field of nuclear arms limitation. Despite

CHAPTER 9 Khrushchev’s Fall and the Collapse of Party Relations, 1963-1966 273
Educated in the U.K. and the United States, Wu Ningkun decided to follow the call of the new regime to return to China in 1951. After running afoul of the Anti-Rightist and anti-American Campaigns of the 1950s, he was lucky enough to find a teaching job in the English Department of Hefei (Anhui) Teachers College. In late 1965, newspapers began carrying articles denouncing Wu Han for his 1959 attacks on the “Great Leader.” When Wu entered the Liberal Arts Building to teach his class on June 1, 1966, he passeddazibao(big-character posters) attacking an English and a Russian professor

17 CHAPTER 10 Vietnam and the Collapse of the Military Alliance, 1964-1966 302
In the mid-1960s, American historian Douglas Pike interviewed over one hundred North Vietnamese officials and ordinary communist guerilla fighters who had been taken prisoner or had deserted. In one of the interviews, he asked: “You don’t feel the Chinese and the Russians are supporting you and your war sufficiently?” and got as a reply: “No, they are not. They don’t care about us.They are only interested in their arguments.”¹ Although the answer simplified Sino-Soviet-Vietnamese relations, it pointed to one of the major problems vexing the Vietnamese conduct of war: the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute. Even low-level guerilla fighters and officials

Conclusion 340
Buttressed by the Soviet-Outer Mongolian alliance of January 1966 and following the final deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations shortly thereafter, the USSR stationed troops, heavy weaponry, and even missiles at the Chinese border. By 1968, six divisions were stationed in Outer Mongolia¹ and another sixteen were stationed at the Sino-Soviet border. They faced forty-seven lightly armed Chinese divisions.²
In November 1967, border skirmishes occurred on the frozen rivers of the eastern sector.³ After the first (Chinese) fatalities on January 5, 1968,⁴ the CCP MAC cabled instructions to the Shenyang military region on the planning of a “counterattack in self-defense”