Brothers in Arms (81 page)

Read Brothers in Arms Online

Authors: Odd Arne Westad

Tags: #Political Science, #International Relations, #General, #test

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making. Up until the mid-1960s, ideology had always played a primary role in Soviet foreign policy, contrary to what is often argued. But ideology was never separated from geopolitics; rather they were united in a stable and paradigmatic symbiosis.

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Geopolitics and ideology were "mutually promotive" for the Kremlin. Any geopolitical breakthrough (i.e., newly extended control over space) meant expansion of Soviet ideology in the country won through realpolitik or war, as was the case with Eastern Europe in 1945 to 1948, when the countries of the Baltic Black Sea belt were first occupied by the Red Army and then supplied with ideologically immaculate pro-Soviet regimes. Any major influx of Soviet ideology into a foreign country automatically strengthened the geopolitical stand of the Soviet Union in that area of the world (as in the case of Spain in the mid-1930s).

This mode of interaction between geopolitics and ideology, born in the early 1920s after the collapse of Soviet expectations of an immediate world revolution, had reached its maturity during Stalin's reign in the 1930s and 1940s. Vladimir Lenin had regarded the geoideological paradigm as a temporary retreat: The security needs and the international prestige of Soviet Russia could not be established in any other way. Although Lenin would have preferred direct revolutionary action, he was prepared to wait for the necessary social discord to occur. Joseph Stalin, to the contrary, found the duet of realpolitik and ideology very appealing, not least because of his distrust of unrestrained mass movements. He enthusiastically used these two swords to promote the growth of the Soviet empire.
The post-Stalin generation of the Soviet elite, separated from any revolutionary momentum by bureaucratic institutions and their own growing pragmatism, started to introduce innovations into Stalin's model of geoideological interaction. While under Stalin geopolitics and ideology were more or less equal partners, the ideological motivations had started to decrease by late 1950s, and for the leadership under Leonid Brezhnev, from October 1964 on, ideology was already limp. Yet all major expansionist moves of the later Soviet Union, up until the late 1980s, were still based on a weakened but nevertheless substantial interaction of imperial territorial expansionism and ideological proselytism.
Nikita Khrushchev was the last Soviet leader who was captivated by the classical Stalin paradigm; hence his inconsistent foreign policy. His exotic cocktail of nuclear age realism and revolutionary idealism, calculating brinkmanship and a utopian view of the future of humankind, can be explained only by the ideological luggage that Khrushchev was left by his predecessors. Khrushchev pursued the global triumph of socialism through projecting Soviet power abroad with an eagerness that dwarfed Stalin's halfhearted postwar efforts. But since Khrushchev was much more convinced of the coming political victory of so-

 

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cialism in the capitalist countries than Stalin ever was, he saw no reason for a permanent state of conflict with the West, and used his first years in power to prepare a policy of limited détente. Yet Khrushchev's attempts to be both a leader of a great power and a supreme priest of ideology "Communist #1" in his own terms proved to be exceedingly difficult during the 1950s and early 1960s.

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The Soviet tribulations during the Cuban Missile Crisis is just one example. Sino-Soviet relations fit the same pattern. Khrushchev's ideological estrangement from China contributed to the loss of Soviet geopolitical presence in the country, and the geopolitical devaluation of the Sino-Soviet alliance led in turn both the Kremlin and the Chinese leadership compound at Zhongnanhai to overt and acid polemics. Thus the geopolitical divorce facilitated a complete ideological breakup.

Stalin's Legacy
Stalin's mixed record of dealing with China left a complex legacy for his successors.
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After almost twenty years of vacillating on how best to gain influence within the politics of his giant neighbor, Stalin in February 1950 finally got some tangible results for his efforts: spheres of interest in Outer Mongolia, Chinese Central Asia (Xinjiang), and Manchuria that he believed to be secure. However, Stalin's successors were aware of the dubious nature of his legacy in dealings with Beijing.
For Khrushchev, the legacy of Stalin's China policy was extremely ambiguous. He regretted that under Stalin the Soviets had thrust themselves into China like Western-style colonizers.
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The arrogance shown by the Kremlin's viceroys in China troubled Khrushchev, particularly since he also knew of the personal tensions between Mao Zedong and Stalin, both during the years of civil war in China and at the early stage of the existence of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1952.
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The new Soviet leader found that the Soviet Union's geopolitical dominance in Manchuria and Xinjiang, obtained through Stalin's personal involvement during the civil war and in the early stages of the revolutionary state, could not be a lasting phenomenon: There was just too much coercion in the relationship.
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The secret protocols and agreements from 1950 concerning the political, military, and economic preeminence of Moscow in those two areas clouded the Sino-Soviet relationship,
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and Khrushchev already in 1954 decided that they had to go. As a result of Stalin's personal involvement, the Soviet control over those areas was regarded as a matter of strategic state interest: Even the Soviet embassy in China had no idea what was going on in the Soviet agencies stationed in Xinjiang, since the area was controlled "directly from the Center.
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The Soviet protectorate in northern China did not survive Stalin's death. Khrushchev stressed his belief in the alliance with China by yielding control of the Soviet military, political, and economic spheres of interest there. His 1954 concessions included not only the naval bases of Lüshun and Dalian but also the Changchun Railway, regarded by the Soviets as the most efficient railway of China, carrying around 40 percent of its goods traffic.

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Khrushchev also accepted Mao Zedong's cleansing of the ranks within his own party in the immediate post-Stalin era; among others, Mao killed the northeastern Communist leader Gao Gang, whom the chairman suspected of being able to manipulate Soviet support in his own interest.
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At the same time, although loaded with problems, Stalin's legacy in China contained much of value for Khrushchev. The Chinese ideological admiration for the Soviet Union, originating in the Comintern years between 1921 and 1943, looked promising as a future framework of the alliance. Cooperation between Moscow and Beijing, at least for the short term, also had been ensured by the Korean War, which had formed a blood bond. In global geopolitical terms, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic constituted a continental challenge to the oceanic might of the United States. In those many moments in which Khrushchev and Mao forgot the realities of the nuclear age, there seemed to be parity between the United States and the Sino-Soviet bloc in terms of traditional geopolitics: The former was invincible as an oceanic power and the latter as a continental alliance. Even though Khrushchev's perception of both geopolitics and ideology evolved during his years in power, his challenge was always to rescue the foundations of the Sino-Soviet relationship laid under Stalin to mend the alliance and therefore make it more useful to Moscow.
Stabilization: 1954-1956
Khrushchcv's policy toward China underwent a number of distinct stages, reflecting the shifts in his approach to world affairs in general. The years 1954 to 1956 were definitely the period of stabilization of bilateral relations, both with China and, in a somewhat different way, with the East European "people's democracies." There was also Marshal Tito's breakaway from the Soviet Union, which was very much on Khrushchev's mind in mid-1950s. He privately accepted Stalin's responsibility for the breakup with Yugoslavia and intended to prevent such happenings in the eastern flank of the "socialist camp."
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Any breakaway inside the camp was bad in ideological terms: Tito's example, for instance, was demonstrating that communism was actually not a universal phenomenon, remaining the same in any country wherever applied. Yugoslavia's independent survival proved that communism could be national, taking into account local specifics and also becoming independent from the cen-

 

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ter of world communism: Moscow. That was a heresy that could threaten not only the global position of the Soviet party, but also Khrushchev's domestic and international standing.
Khrushchev also had to consider the geopolitical consequences of the defections from the Soviet bloc. Yugoslavia's breakaway was bad enough, with the Eastern Bloc deprived of an outlet to the Mediterranean. In spite of Stalin's efforts between 1939 and 1946, the Black Sea straits (Bosphorus and Dardanelles) had remained Turkish. However much Stalin had wanted to give the Soviet state naval access to the Mediterranean, he failed even to preserve the alliance with Yugoslavia, the only chance to break the oceanic blockade of the Soviet Union in the southwest. Trouble with China could have even graver consequences.
The Soviet interest in Sino-Soviet border areas highlighted the mix of Marxist ideology with a form of geopolitical "ideology": By ousting capitalist competitors from these areas, the Soviet Union assured reliable security for the territorial core of the empire the Slavic lands. By the mid-1950s a new threat to the Soviet Union in Asia the United States was exerting pressure on Moscow from two flanks, Europe and the North Pacific. Moscow had little space for geopolitical maneuvering, since the major threat was embodied by the same power in the West and in the East. With no anti-American ally in the Western camp available, and with the Marxist concept of "interimperialist tensions" outdated, Khrushchev could not hope to divide the Western camp as Stalin had done between 1939 and 1945. The only option was to consolidate the Soviet continental stronghold, making Eurasia's heartland an invincible fortress. This uninterrupted control over immense space was possible only with China holding the eastern semicircular bastion of Eurasia in the security interests of the whole bloc. A paramount task was also to keep the United States away from the oceanic periphery of Eurasia in as many areas as possible, so that the Americans would have fewer geopolitical strongholds and springboards on the continent.
Holding the Americans back in Korea was one of these joint Soviet-Chinese tasks. But even more important to Khrushchev and Mao was a possible American challenge from the south. The 1954 Geneva accords on Indochina stabilized the south for the time being, while reserving the possibility that the leftist revolutionary movements of the region could be assisted through Chinese territory in the future. Thus for several reasons China had become indispensable to Moscow's strategy of continentalism making Eurasia's heartland unattainable to U.S. control.
Stalin had promised much but given little economic aid to China. Despite generous rhetoric, Stalin always remained stingy. He seems to have believed that northern China could become a Soviet treasure box. Rare nonferrous metals such

 

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as beryllium and lithium were already coming from there; Stalin hoped that rich oil depositories could be found too.

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Khrushchev reversed Stalin's plans and initiated large-scale economic interaction between the two countries, much of it in the form of Soviet aid, some in the form of loans or barter agreements that the Chinese paid for up to 1965. These adjustments were undertaken during Khrushchev's visit to China in 1954. This trip was like a debutante ball for Khrushchev as a leader. For the first time he was making strategic foreign policy decisions in a direct dialogue with a prominent foreign leader. The visit set the tone for the period of stabilization of Sino-Soviet relations.
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Throughout 1954 to 1957 Khrushchev sought to make Beijing feel comfortable within the confines of the Soviet bloc. Krushchev's decision in early 1955 to support the Chinese nuclear energy program for "peaceful purposes" was part of this campaign.
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Of course he understood that the step meant rapid Chinese progress toward attaining the atomic bomb. But unlike Stalin, Khrushchev was willing to build a nuclear relationship with the People's Republic comparable to that which the United States had with Britain.
The "new," revamped Sino-Soviet alliance had a real potential for being a long-term success. Even Khrushchev's criticism of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956 did not weaken cooperation at first. Mao may have been troubled by the implications of Khrushchev's speech in terms of revolutionary theory. But much more important was the chance the congress gave Mao to express his own personal grievances about the way Stalin had tried to manage and manipulate China; he accused the late Soviet dictator of imperialism.
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Abortive Adjustment: 1987-1959
The year 1957 was the turning point in Khrushchev's China policies. From mid-1957 on, the new Soviet leader attempted to adjust Sino-Soviet relations to fit his new priorities: a global Soviet-bloc military policy
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détente with the West. Having vanquished his political rivals inside the Kremlin (the "antiparty group" of Stalin's lieutenant Viacheslav Molotov and other old-timers) in July 1957, Khrushchev embarked on a revision of the standard Soviet approach to world affairs.
Some of these innovations had been introduced to the doctrine as early as the Twentieth CPSU Congress, but for a while the traditionalists inside the party prevented Khrushchev from transferring into practical policymaking his theoretical innovations: Peaceful coexistence with the West was possible. Word War III could be prevented. Leftist parties did not necessarily have to come to

 

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