Brothers in Arms (82 page)

Read Brothers in Arms Online

Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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

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power through a violent revolution. The Soviet Union could expand its power without risking attack from the outside.
The complete defeat of the diehard Stalinists such as Molotov was made possible by Khrushchev's getting the support of the party/state apparatus. Soviet elites, nurtured by Stalin, had grown up to be a Frankenstein for Stalinism, and the personal dictatorship could be replaced with a dictatorship of the apparatus. In terms of its organization, power in the Soviet state was diverging dramatically from the increasingly personalized control of Mao Zedong in China.
The real trouble in the Sino-Soviet relationship began when Khrushchev wanted Mao to move in his direction on foreign affairs and defense issues just as Mao's skepticism about Soviet internal developments peaked. Although inconsistent, Khrushchev's foreign policy lacked revolutionary appeal, while Mao still saw revolution abroad as a vital part of his concept of foreign policy. Besides, already in early 1950s the two societies were very different: The revolution in the Soviet Union was already bureaucratized and less violent than in China, where between November 1950 and July 1951, 500,000 people were shot.

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Mao and Khrushchev were dealing with two societies at different stages of revolution. Mao's was still to undergo the highest point of the revolutionary tide with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, whereas many of Khrushchev's backers were already tired of the physical effects of revolution and longed for domestic stability.

Just as in 1954, Khrushchev was too clever a policymaker not to combine a degree of acceptance of the Chinese Communist Party's policies with his request for support on foreign affairs in 1957-1958. In spite of his resentment of Mao's interference in East European affairs after the Polish and Hungarian crises of 1956, Khrushchev quickly abandoned his attempts to "correct" China's
domestic
revolution, even though his advisors told him that land reform and rectification were clear deviations from the Soviet model (which they hardly were in basic terms; they were just asynchronous). In 1957-1958, Khrushchev attempted to use the same approach to China that he had used in Poland, where Wladyslaw Gomulka had been allowed to take the lead on domestic matters. In light of the experience of the East European crises, Mao's revolutionary zeal must have struck Khrushchev as a lesser problem.
But some accord on international issues seemed essential to Khrushchev: China was crucial for maintaining the continental Eurasian socialist stronghold. In October 1957, after the successful launching of the two Soviet Sputniks and the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Khrushchev sanctioned an agreement with China on sharing nuclear arms and missile technology as part of a Kremlin attempt to integrate China in the Soviet military strategy.
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That implied delivering vast amounts of technological information to China, such as a sample medium-range ballistic missile minus its atomic warhead, a G-class ballistic missile submarine without its missiles, and TU-16 jet fighters. Chinese nuclear scientists were trained at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna.

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Soviet atomic weapons experts went to China, as did leading Russian theoretical nuclear physicists. Soviet geologists were dispatched to the People's Republic to locate deposits of nuclear raw materials.
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However, when Mao went to Moscow in November 1957 (immediately after the nuclear deal), Khrushchev was to learn that the results of the nuclear concord were counterproductive. Mao became so enthusiastic about the forthcoming nuclear prominence of the Sino-Soviet alliance that he publicly urged Khrushchev to cancel the peaceful coexistence approach.
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Mao repeated that advice during Khrushchev's visit to China in July 1958. The ideology of mature socialism in the Soviet Union pursued stability; the ideology of revolutionary (young) socialism in China advocated change. Mao was unhappy about Khrushchev's détente, just as Lenin had been upset by the Kremlin' s forced retreat to realpolitik in 1922. Both Khrushchev and Mao regarded their respective ideologies those of stability and change as truly Marxist imperatives that should have been shared by the other side of the Eurasian axis.
To make the matters worse, Khrushchev was simultaneously behaving like a dove and a hawk. Thus in his dealings with Mao Zedong, Khrushchev attempted to reach two rather contradictory goals. On one hand, Mao had to agree to lessening tensions with the West, for brinkmanship could happen only under Moscow's immediate control. Khrushchev's concern about the consequences of nuclear war was ambiguous but real. On the other hand if Khrushchev was ambivalent about his own policy of détente, Mao increasingly regarded it as harmful, both for ideological and for political reasons. Mao intended to consolidate society by mobilization against an external threat, much as Stalin had attempted to do in the 1930s. He believed that the international revolutionary movement (especially in the Third World) would prosper from Cold War instability. For Mao, Washington was an enemy; how could he possibly embrace détente when the United States was supporting Taiwan vs. the People's Republic? Finally, Khrushchev's deeper involvement in dialogue with the Western powers could in principle lead to a situation when Chinese policies would be discussed with Mao absent and the repetition of Great Power agreements á la Yalta was the last thing Mao wanted.
In spite of his stance on détente, Khrushchev sought a practical way to involve China in the Soviet bloc's military activities. Détente or not, the global geopolitical challenge of the United States had to be met. Khrushchev planned

 

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to secure peace through power, and China was geopolitically instrumental for his objective. However, the problem was to develop a fixed and mutually agreeable plan for how to employ the Chinese potential in the area.
Paradoxically enough, the Sino-Soviet alliance, the prominence of which was pronounced so pompously by the Kremlin and the Zhongnanhai and so deeply feared in Washington, Tokyo, and Taibei, was deprived of any concrete regional meaning beyond its own borders in the mid-1950s. True, together the Soviet Union and China controlled Eurasia's heartland. But they were doing that automatically, just by virtue of having a common border. No particular and deliberate East Asian agenda for strategic cooperation existed after the partnership of the Korean War, the Soviet Union and China had failed to devise a common framework for security and the expansion of socialism in the region.
Shared ideological values by themselves could not hold the alliance together. An alliance void of any concrete strategic cooperation soon becomes very fragile. Such strategic hollowness also raises the question whether so-called shared values are genuinely shared. Khrushchev was fight in trying to fill the alliance with concrete cooperation. But his means for doing so turned out to be disastrous.
Khrushchev ruled out any attempts to integrate the Soviet and Chinese armies. He was skeptical of s armies and decided in 1959 to reduce the Soviet army by one-third.

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He also saw few possibilities of concrete regional political cooperation. Moscow did not try, for instance, to push China toward extending the bloc's control over Indochina. Khrushchev was not sure whether he could afford a major offensive in the Third World.

But Khrushchev had one plan for the alliance up his sleeve: a naval plan. Basically a continental power, by the late 1950s the Soviet Union had found itself endangered by the nuclear oceanic capacity of the United States. Just like Russia before and after the Soviet era, the Soviet Union was oceanically challenged. Yet the only time when the country suffered a defeat because of its naval disability was during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. In all other conflicts whether the two world wars or the Napoleonic Wars the nation had found the Eurasian heartland to be protective as a womb.
But nuclear age geopolitics made the traditional continental invincibility of the Soviet Union seem problematic. The missiles and aviation launched from the seas in the mid-1950s had started to look like a ''winning weapon." The United States had successfully established its missile bases along the western oceanic periphery of Eurasia, in Britain, Italy, and Turkey. Nuclear-powered Polaris submarines with submarine-launched ballistic missiles cruised the seas.
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All components of the American strategic triad the Minuteman missile, Polaris submarine, and B-52 bomber benefited from overseas bases, but for the

 

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submarines the U.S. oceanic capacity was crucial and the challenge from the American-controlled ocean needed a symmetric Soviet response.
Obsessed with missiles, Khrushchev believed traditional navies to be expensive, old-fashioned, and ultimately useless scrap.

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Thus Stalin's "battleship concept" of a navy was abandoned.
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A "submarine" concept emerged, with the American Polaris viewed as the major threat to Soviet security.
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Khrushchev foresaw a glorious future for missile-carrying submarines and firmly believed them to be the "basis" of sea power.
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His defense minister, Admiral S. G. Gor-shkov, preached submarines, aircraft carriers, and amphibious forces.
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A blue-water navy as the way to gain ''dominance at sea" was the punchline of the Soviet leader's public and private approach.
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Yet the Soviet Union was lagging behind the United States in all these types of armament. In 1955 the Soviet submarine fleet was totally conventionally powered and armed.
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The Soviet blue-water navy, to say nothing about "dominance at sea," was curtailed by the lack of overseas naval bases. Having yielded naval bases in Manchuria in 1954, four years later Khrushchev decided to press Mao to proceed with naval cooperation.
China was the only Soviet ally with a strategically important and long coastline and the only major ally in the Pacific. The two existing Soviet naval bases in the Pacific Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok were virtually useless. Petropavlovsk had to rely upon supplies by surface ships, a link easily interrupted by an adversary in case of war. Vladivostok was locked in the Sea of Japan,
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with its straits (La Perouse, Tsugaru, and Tsushima) controlled by the U.S. fleet.
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Khrushchev did not like the exposed position of Vladivostok, the major submarine base, at all when he saw it in 1954 after his trip to China and believed that the base had to be moved.
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To make things worse, one of the other three Soviet fleets (the Black Sea) had been permanently constrained by the 1936 Montreux Convention, which limited the passage of warships through the Turkish-controlled Bosporus straits.
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Khrushchev believed that the Soviet Union had to free itself from being locked in Eurasia's heartland. Therefore he stationed twelve diesel submarines in Albania in 1958; in case of war, the squadron was to attack U.S. aircraft carriers in the area.
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But the North Pacific remained the primary problem on the naval agenda.
In July 1958 Khrushchev, visiting China for the second time, wanted to discuss two major naval issues with Mao Zedong: a radio communications station on Chinese territory for Soviet submarines in the Pacific and Indian oceans and a joint Sino-Soviet submarine fleet, with China donating the ports and the Soviet Union the vessels. Mao indignantly refused. He suggested that China could build its own joint long-range radio station if given Soviet equipment and technology. A joint fleet was also possible if the Soviets were willing to cede corn-

 

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mand over the warships to Chinese captains.

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The Chinese also rejected the Soviet proposal to start cooperation in antiaircraft defenses.
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Khrushchev had foolishly chosen forms of cooperation that would stimulate Mao's sense of being the underdog in the alliance. As Mao had told the Soviet ambassador, Pavel Iudin, in June 1958, when he had pushed Khrushchev's plan: "You never trust the Chinese! You only trust the Russians! [To you] the Russians are first-class people, while the Chinese are among the inferior who are dumb and careless."
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Mao's overall impression was that Khrushchev was trying to tie his hands and feet. He was proud of his resistance and called it "sticking a needle" up Khrushchev's ass.
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But he also must have been struck by the fact that Khrushchev suggested China advocate peaceful coexistence and at the same time planned to use China's geopolitical potential for improving Moscow's position vis-à-vis the United States in Mao's view, a double-standards policy.
Moscow was outraged by Mao's retort. Soviet elites believed that Beijing was "too preoccupied" with the "sovereignty and independence" of China.
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Thus by defending his strategic independence, Mao, in Moscow's eyes, was violating the basic tenets of "Communist internationalism." Khrushchev had his own secret concern: If Mao Zedong was unwilling to cooperate in the naval sphere, suspecting Moscow of intending to violate China's sovereignty, what would happen when Khrushchev would have to bring up the problem of the command of joint nuclear forces?
During the 1958 Jinmen and Mazu crisis, Mao pursued goals unacceptable to Khrushchev. Mao wanted to reassure the nation that he was taking his role as a reunifier of China seriously and was making this symbolic gesture to prove that Taiwan was indeed a part of China.
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On the other hand, he wanted to probe how deep was Khrushchev's commitment to the course of détente with the United States. At the beginning of the crisis, Mao said that if Khrushchev wanted to improve relations with Washington, China would congratulate him with its guns by bombarding the Taiwanese offshore islands. "Let's get the United States involved, too. Maybe we can get the United States to drop an atom bomb on Fujian. . . . Let's see what Khrushchev says then.
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Whether Khrushchev had been informed about the coming attack on Jinmen and Mazu remains unclear. Some evidence suggests that in principle Khrushchev knew about the planned operation.
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However, for the Soviet embassy in Beijing, the attack had come out of the blue; Ambassador Iudin believed that the top Soviet leadership had not been informed either.
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In any event, until the new Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, was hastily dispatched to China, the Soviet leaders definitely had had absolutely no idea what goals the Chinese side was pursuing during the crisis.
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It took Mao only one hour on September 5 to agree to the Soviet foreign minister's visit: He knew that

 

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