By the end of the 1960s, the Sino-Soviet split transformed international politics. Fear of facing conflict on both the Western and Eastern fronts prompted Soviet leaders to choose the lesser of two evils, and by the turn of the decade the United States was seen as a more limited threat. Many factors shaped Soviet thinking. Moscow interpreted American setbacks in Vietnam and the US economic recession as sure signs of Washington’s decline. Meanwhile, China’s military buildup and displays of nuclear power served as constant reminders to Moscow of the Soviet Union’s vulnerabilities in Siberia and the Far East. Despite their differences, Moscow and Washington could reach agreement on many issues of importance; for example, substantial progress was achieved in strategic arms-limitation talks. Negotiations with China proved more difficult; China was unpredictable and unstable. The lack of progress in the Sino-Soviet border talks suggested to Soviet leaders that China was not genuinely interested in a compromise. A Soviet reassessment of external threats underpinned Brezhnev’s efforts - first subtle, and then increasingly blatant - to recruit the United States as an ally, or at least a fellow traveller, in the struggle against China. Similar developments occurred on the Chinese side. After the 1969 war scare, internal assessments in Beijing concluded that the USSR was China’s greatest external threat. Mao moved swiftly toward a rapprochement with Washington, seeking improved relations with the United States as a measure of security against perceived Soviet expansionism.
These policy changes involved more than a simple change of threat perception. Since the early years of the Cold War, the United States had not only been the USSR’s primary strategic opponent but its ideological adversary. The Cold War had been a struggle of ideas, not merely a confrontation of great powers. Previously, the Soviet Union had allied itself with ideological adversaries to counter a more immediate danger - during World War II, for example, the Kremlin embraced its capitalist foes to withstand the assault from Nazi Germany. In times of crisis Soviet policymakers were capable of
26. Soviet border guards at the Chinese border on the Ussuri river, May 1969. Skirmishes with China encouraged Soviet leaders to opt for detente with the United States.
Shelving ideological prescriptions and acting on the basis of strictly realist calculations. The Sino-Soviet conflict created that kind of crisis. Ironically, Moscow played power politics against a former comrade in arms still bound to the Soviet Union by a treaty of alliance. The Chinese now also placed considerations of national interest above the revolutionary dimensions of their foreign policy. Devaluation of a common ideology as a meaningful point of reference in Beijing and Moscow marked a turning point for the Cold War and, as Chen Jian argues, possibly the beginning of its end.530
The forces that brought about this remarkable transformation had deep roots. The Sino-Soviet alliance contained the seeds of its own destruction. Shared Marxist ideology - the strength of the alliance - proved insufficient to hold it together. The principles of equality and fraternity that the alliance stood for were in practice difficult to achieve. Pretense of equality did not compensate for staggering inequalities: China was of course the underdog in the alliance. But whereas the Soviet leadership considered this state of affairs entirely natural, the Chinese resented bitterly such a state of perpetual subordination. Moreover, in place of fraternity, Chinese leaders too often encountered Soviet arrogance and great power pressure. It did not take a leap of imagination to connect Soviet blunders with Russia’s historical record of expansion and imperialism in Asia. Meanwhile, Soviet leaders blamed the Chinese for monstrous ingratitude.
The importance of these fundamentals was not immediately apparent when Sino-Soviet relations turned sharply for the worse in the early 1960s. The larger problems were buried beneath a barrage of ideologically charged polemics. In retrospect, Deng Xiaoping, who had passionately defended Mao’s revolutionary ideals in the polemical clashes with Moscow, characterized the rhetoric of the 1960s as "konghua" (empty words). As he told Mikhail Gorbachev on May 16, 1989, when the Soviet leader visited him in Beijing to mend fences: "From the mid-1960s, our relations deteriorated; they were practically broken off. It was not because ofthe ideological disputes; we do not think now that everything we said at that time was right. The basic problem was that the Chinese were not treated as equals and felt humiliated."531 Deng thus pointed to what was the most important reason for the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance - its inequality.
The problems created by the inequality in the relationship were exacerbated by the cultural sensibilities of policymakers in both Beijing and Moscow. Soviet leaders occasionally made blatantly racist remarks about China. Khrushchev and Brezhnev cited the writings of early Russian explorers of China to illustrate how the Chinese had always been "sly" and "perfidious."532 The impact of these stereotypes on policymakers in Moscow cannot be quantified with precision, but their recurrence in Politburo discussions and memoranda of conversations between the Soviet leaders and foreign dignitaries suggests that subtle racism was a factor in policy formulation. Chinese stereotypes of Russia as aggressive and arrogant, though probably confirmed by Soviet actions in some instances, on other occasions precluded clear understanding of Soviet motives and policies.
Finally, the Sino-Soviet split was intrinsically related to the domestic context of policymaking in Beijing and Moscow. China was a factor in the Soviet power struggle, just as the Soviet Union was a factor in the Chinese power struggle. Mao’s campaign against Soviet leaders and against Liu Shaoqi were closely connected. Soviet policymakers did not have the same dilemmas, but they, too, played the China card in internal political maneuvers; after Khrushchev’s fall, a rapprochement with China briefly promised untold political dividends to anyone who could bring it about. The Sino-Soviet split also made it necessary for the Soviets to distinguish with greater precision genuine (or Soviet) socialism from a Chinese "perversion." Mao, for his part, employed his struggle against "Soviet revisionism" to effect a revolutionary transformation at home. In turn, upheavals in China made Sino-Soviet reconciliation very unlikely so long as Mao remained in control.
But this is not the same as to say that domestic politics drove foreign-policy decisions. Mao’s revolution was only a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end was to bring to a close the Chinese "century of humiliation," to make China a great power in its own right. The Sino-Soviet alliance initially helped, but eventually hindered progress toward this goal. Over time, both Chinese and Soviet leaders came to realize that a true great power cannot have allies of equal rank.
World History
