After Khrushchev was removed, the new collective leadership reconsidered the USSR relationship with China. China seemed poised to usher in the beginning of multipolarity on the international stage - by emerging as a challenger both to the Soviet Union and the United States. The Chinese detonated their first nuclear device in the fall of 1964 and successfully tested a ballistic missile in 1966. In the same year, responding in part to this development, the USSR began deploying the first elements of an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system around Moscow.
At the heart of the Sino-Soviet split, which began under Khrushchev but grew deeper in the late 1960s, was the struggle for ideological leadership of the Communist bloc, with the Third World being the main target of that competition. The Chinese leadership came to believe that the Soviet Union was abandoning the purity of the Marxist-Leninist teaching and the idea of world revolution for the benefits of cooperating with the imperialists. Yet, several members of the post-Khrushchev leadership sought to mend the relationship. While Brezhnev was not overly enthusiastic about reaching out to Mao, Kosygin saw improvement of relations with the Chinese as one of his personal
Kosygin anticipated that a rapprochement with China would be easier because of the growing American involvement in Indochina, which underlined the need for the two Communist states to defend their common ally. During a February 1965 trip to Hanoi, with a stop along the way in China, Kosygin failed to persuade the Vietnamese Communists to abstain from open hostilities against the South once the United States got involved, and failed to reach any agreement with the Chinese. It did not help that while Kosygin was in North Vietnam, the United States bombed Hanoi and Haiphong. The Chinese criticized the Soviets for their "revisionism" and declined to attend the XXIIIrd Party Congress in March of 1966. Later the same year, China officially launched its Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and relations with the Soviet Union dramatically worsened.233
Mao made no secret of his extensive territorial claims to Soviet Siberia. Alarmed by these demands, as well as by the radical character of the Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union began a massive buildup of forces along the Chinese border. This buildup, which continued through the end of the 1960s, suggested to the Chinese that Soviet forces might be used in a preemptive attack. In 1969, major border clashes erupted between the Soviet and the Chinese forces on Damansky Island. Responding to the Chinese attack, Soviet troops made a short but deep intrusion into Chinese territory. Moscow’s last illusions about the possibility of improving relations with China were dispelled by the Damansky hostilities.
During the same year, the administration of Richard M. Nixon began trying to open channels to Beijing through Pakistan and Romania. In July 1971, Henry Kissinger made a secret visit to China, where he explicitly discussed the Soviet threat with the Chinese and even provided them with some sensitive intelligence information on Soviet military activities. President Nixon himself visited China in February 1972.
The Soviets repeatedly urged the United States not to exploit the Sino-Soviet split, but the very possibility that Washington might do so prompted Moscow to try to improve relations with both the Americans and the Chinese. On October 20, 1969, the same day that Dobrynin informed Nixon of the Soviet agreement to open Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) talks, the USSR and China resumed talks on their disputed border. By the early 1970s, with Sino-Soviet relations seeming beyond repair for the time being, Moscow moved to prevent a possible US-Chinese rapprochement by proposing just such a detente between itself and Washington.
World History
