The Sino-Soviet split

SERGEY RADCHENKO

By 1962, the once robust Sino-Soviet alliance had cracked up, revealing serious conflicts beneath the facade of Communist solidarity. This split was a remarkable development in a Cold War context. It was not the first time that the Soviets had fallen out with their allies: the Yugoslavs were thrown out of the "camp" in 1948; Hungary had tried but failed to leave in 1956; Albania quarreled with Moscow in 1961. But, in spite of their intrinsic importance, these issues were small compared to the red banner of Sino-Soviet unity, the symbol of the power and appeal of socialism worldwide. The demise of the alliance represented the broken promise of Marxism. Ideological unity and conformity were so essential to the Soviet-led socialist world that a quarrel between its two principal protagonists - the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China - undermined the legitimacy of the socialist camp as a whole, and of the intellectual notions that underpinned its existence.

So inexplicable did the split appear from a Marxist perspective that both Chinese and Soviet historians in retrospect would blame the debacle on the other side’s betrayal of Marxism.486 But fTom a realist perspective, Marxism had nothing to do with the rift: the Soviet Union and China were great powers with divergent national interests. No amount of Communist propaganda could have reconciled these competing interests, so it was not surprising, indeed it had been predictable, that the Soviets and the Chinese would fall out and the alliance would crumble. 487 The realist perspective is simple and convenient; yet it does not fully explain the extremely intricate process of the Sino-Soviet split: how it was influenced by key personalities, how it related to the domestic environments of the Soviet Union and China, and how it was affected by cultural contexts of policymaking. These complex matters

Are addressed in this chapter - not to refute but rather to refine the realist paradigm, and to do justice to the twists and turns of the road, which, from 1962 to 1969, took the Soviet Union and China fTom a troubled alliance to a violent military confrontation.