Shadow Cold War

The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World

Jeremy Friedman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469623771
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has long been understood in a global context, but Jeremy Friedman's Shadow Cold War delves deeper into the era to examine the competition between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China for the leadership of the world revolution. When a world of newly independent states emerged from decolonization desperately poor and politically disorganized, Moscow and Beijing turned their focus to attracting these new entities, setting the stage for Sino-Soviet competition. Based on archival research from ten countries, including new materials from Russia and China, many no longer accessible to researchers, this book examines how China sought to mobilize Asia, Africa, and Latin America to seize the revolutionary mantle from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union adapted to win it back, transforming the nature of socialist revolution in the process. This groundbreaking book is the first to explore the significance of this second Cold War that China and the Soviet Union fought in the shadow of the capitalist-communist clash.

Chapter One: Divergent Agendas

Peaceful Coexistence versus Anti-Imperialism, 1956–1960

At the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev declared that “international relations have gone beyond the bounds of relations of states populated primarily by peoples of the white race, and have begun to adopt the character of truly global relations.”¹ At the same congress, Khrushchev formally announced the Soviet Union’s new foreign policy of “Peaceful Coexistence.” Arguing that the possibility of thermonuclear war had made military confrontation with the capitalist world too dangerous to contemplate, and that the increasingly strong position of the socialist camp in the post–World War II years allowed for it to overtake the capitalist world in peaceful economic competition, Khrushchev dispensed with the traditional Leninist notion that war between capitalism and socialism was ultimately inevitable. As a practical demonstration of the significance of the break with past Soviet foreign policy, Khrushchev disbanded the Cominform in April, both to establish a more open and egalitarian model of interaction between Communist parties and to combat the suspicion among new states of the USSR’s interference in their domestic affairs.² While the Twentieth Congress is most famous for Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin, the two points above are fundamental elements of de-Stalinization as well. Stalin’s foreign policy had been focused on conflict in Europe between the Soviet Union and the Western bloc, and it had largely ignored the colonial and postcolonial world, with the exception of China and Korea. After missteps in China in the 1920s, the Comintern’s policy in Africa and Asia had largely become a function of Soviet foreign policy vis-à-vis the fascist threat, and in the postwar years, Stalin did not value the revolutionary movements of East Asia very highly, even negotiating a deal with Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese government to preserve Soviet privileges in China rather than unequivocally supporting the Chinese Communist Party. A textbook on the international communist movement used in the CPSU’s party school explained: “The arbitrary policy of diktat associated with the cult of personality infringed Marxist-Leninist principles on relations between Communist parties and did serious harm to the whole Communist movement. It held back creative developments in the immediate problems of the international working-class movement and the national liberation movement.”³ Khrushchev was now signaling to the world that the scope, and perhaps the priorities, of Soviet foreign policy had changed in a way as would befit a confident new superpower rather than an isolated socialist fortress.

The concepts that underlay the change in foreign policy, however, were not new. Rather, Soviet foreign policy resurrected the concept of the “non-capitalist path of development,” a notion introduced by Lenin in the long-since practically abandoned resolution of the Second Comintern Congress of the summer of 1920.⁴ The “noncapitalist path,” a term that would be the subject of intense debate and analysis during the course of Communist engagement with the postcolonial world, initially meant simply a way of avoiding having to traverse the capitalist stage of development to reach socialism. This path, Lenin said, would be possible only with the aid and protection of established socialist countries. However, while conceptually the new Soviet foreign policy had its roots in the Leninist past, in practice it would be very much a function of the new role that the USSR would need to play on the world stage. The Comintern resolution had dealt primarily with communist participation in anticolonial nationalist movements, but the Soviet Union was now a recognized world power, a founding member of the United Nations, and a permanent member of the Security Council, and so the focus of its new policy, at least initially, would be to strengthen relations with the governments of the newly formed states and aid development of their societies. With the hopes for socialist revolution in the postcolonial world very low, the goal of the new Soviet policy was simply to find a way to weaken the connection between the newly independent countries and their former colonial masters, allowing for a more flexible and dynamic global arena.

While the Soviet Union was seeking to fill its role as the socialist superpower and an established part of the international order, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had much more modest ambitions. In the early 1950s, China had been the Soviet Union’s chief lieutenant in Asia, fighting the UN forces in Korea and aiding the struggle of Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh against the French in Vietnam, but its role thus far had been strictly regional, and it lacked the capacity to play a global role.⁵ Though the Geneva Conference of 1954 and Bandung Conference of 1955 had introduced the PRC on the world stage, they served largely only to break the cloak of fearful isolation in which China found itself among its Asian neighbors due to its radical posture. According to one scholar, the goal of the Bandung meeting was in large part an attempt by Asian countries to gain a commitment by China to peaceful interaction with its neighbors.⁶ On a global level, however, China was still excluded from the United Nations, not recognized by many countries, and, most importantly, economically weak and only in the initial stages of socialist development. In the first few years after Khrushchev’s speech, Beijing would generally defer to Moscow in public international fora, supporting its policies, including peaceful coexistence, and advertising Moscow’s aid to developing countries in lieu of its own rather meager efforts.⁷

This deference shown by Beijing toward Moscow, however, did not imply complete agreement or the lack of a vision of its own place in the revolutionary firmament. China’s own revolutionary self-conception and its potential implications for policy were revealed in an article written by Lu Dingyi, a top theorist of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shijie ZhiShi (World Knowledge) in June 1951. In the wake of Chinese decisions to aid both Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh the previous year, Lu wrote that while the October Revolution was a “classic example of revolution in the imperialist countries,” the Chinese Revolution presented a similar model for the “colonial and semi-colonial countries.” Furthermore, he asserted, the Chinese Revolution “remains a new contribution to the general treasure-house of Marxism-Leninism.”⁸ In particular, this new contribution related to the support of armed struggle in the context of anticolonial national liberation movements. The Korean and Vietnamese interventions then ultimately had potential significance for the Chinese global revolutionary posture outside the bounds of the Sino-Soviet alliance. While Chinese foreign policy in the wake of those interventions during 1954–55 seemed to imply the adoption of a policy akin to peaceful coexistence, and despite the Chinese failure to openly contradict the Soviet policy at the Twentieth Congress, the Chinese leadership did, in fact, express dissatisfaction with the new policy. In the wake of the Moscow conference of 1957, a gathering of world Communist Parties seeking to replace the Cominform as the venue for international communist discussion and cooperation, the Chinese delivered a secret memorandum to the Soviets emphasizing their disagreement with the doctrine of peaceful coexistence.⁹ Publicly, however, there was as yet no open split over the issue, as Shen Zhihua argues, because the Chinese were not yet sure how the rhetoric of peaceful coexistence would manifest itself in Soviet practice. Consequently, it would be presumptuous to read the later divide over approaches to foreign policy as having been evident from the time of the Twentieth Congress itself.¹⁰

As the process of decolonization, primarily in Africa, accelerated in the period from 1958 to 1960, however, Sino-Soviet divisions over foreign policy would become increasingly manifest. The Soviet strategy in foreign policy toward the newly emerging states focused on detaching them politically from their former colonial masters and opening them up to Soviet influence, which largely meant Soviet economic assistance and direction. This approach was in keeping with the broader Soviet policy of promoting peace to gain sympathy in Europe and lower the perception of Moscow as a threat around the world while asserting the practical superiority of the socialist system. For the Chinese, however, the increasingly radical rhetoric emerging from the developing world along with the rapid pace of decolonization contrasted sharply with the Soviet practice of peaceful coexistence. Beijing concluded that the Soviet Union had failed to adequately evaluate the revolutionary significance of movements in the developing world or, worse, that it was willfully prioritizing its own standing within Europe and vis-à-vis the West over the revolutionary aspirations of the peoples of Asia and Africa. China’s perceptions of the gap in revolutionary imagination between the so-called national liberation movements of Asia and Africa and the Soviet Union’s implementation of peaceful coexistence reached a crucial turning point in late 1959 and early 1960. Moscow’s failure to support the Chinese in the way that they felt they had a right to expect in the border conflict with India, along with its continuing support for Indian “neutralism” and “non-alignment,” demonstrated that the failure of the Soviet Union to follow a sufficiently anti-imperialist policy now posed a direct threat to China’s security. Peaceful coexistence implied geographic priorities that the PRC, and many others in the developing world, did not share. By 1960 then, Beijing felt it had no choice but to begin attacking Moscow’s line in the hopes of forcing it into adopting a more consistent and forceful anti-imperialist position.

First Impressions

In the months following the Twentieth Congress of 1956, little substantive change occurred in either Soviet or Chinese policy toward the developing world. The former was occupied for much of 1956 with events in Poland and Hungary while the latter was caught up with issues of domestic policy, primarily the aftermath of the socialist high tide and the subsequent “Hundred Flowers” movement. Though Soviet engagement with Asia and Africa had already begun in the fall of 1955 with an arms deal with Egypt and a visit by Khrushchev to India, Burma, and Afghanistan, the combination of domestic political upheaval and instability in the Eastern bloc kept the Kremlin busy. By 1958, however, a number of events combined to put the decolonizing world squarely on the agenda of the socialist powers. First, in March 1957, Ghana became the first majority-ruled sub-Saharan African country to attain independence since Liberia over a century earlier. Its new prime minister (later president), Kwame Nkrumah, a promoter of Pan-Africanism, saw Ghana as the bridgehead of a liberated, and perhaps united, Africa. “The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked with the total liberation of Africa,” announced Nkrumah at Ghana’s independence celebration.¹¹ Nkrumah immediately attempted to put this doctrine into practice, making Accra the center of sub-Saharan African political life, convening a Conference of Independent African States there in April 1958, followed by an All-African People’s Conference that December. Second, at the end of December 1957, the first conference of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) was held in Cairo. This conference emerged out of the Asian solidarity committee set up at a conference in New Delhi in May 1955, and it was intended to be a nongovernmental conference that would allow for more action and less diplomatic restriction than that evidenced at the rather proper Bandung Conference of April 1955. By the end of 1958, two new events had given tremendous impetus to socialist attentions: the revolutionary overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy and the rejection by Guinean voters of President Charles De Gaulle’s new plan for a French Union, leading to the independence of Guinea.

The evidence of the impact of these events on Soviet policy toward the developing world is clear. Soviet aid to the developing world had begun in 1954 with aid agreements with India and Afghanistan, and, starting in September 1955, with military aid to Egypt as well. Nevertheless, the year 1958 represented a sea change in Soviet aid policy. The total amount of Soviet economic and technical aid pledged to developing countries nearly doubled from 1957 to 1958, and by 1961 sums had reached nearly triple the 1958 figure at almost 2.5 billion rubles, or roughly $2.64 billion.¹² The number of countries receiving aid also expanded rapidly from five in 1956 to twelve in 1958 and twenty by the beginning of 1961.¹³ Early on, Soviet aid was largely focused on Afghanistan, India, and the United Arab Republic (UAR), but by 1961, major recipients of Soviet aid included Iraq, Guinea, Ghana, Indonesia, Ceylon, Cuba, and Ethiopia, and new agreements had just been signed with Mali and Pakistan. According to Chinese sources, in the year 1960 Soviet loan guarantees to “nationalist” (nonsocialist developing) countries eclipsed loan guarantees to socialist countries by over 50 percent.¹⁴ The Soviet Union directed its aid in large part at visible projects that would establish it in the eyes of the world as the real friend of the peoples of Asia and Africa once the West had shown its true face. When the United States and the United Kingdom turned down Nasser’s proposal for a dam on the Nile in the wake of his nationalization of the Suez Canal, the Soviets stepped in to construct what would become the Aswan High Dam. Similarly, when France cut off all aid to Guinea as a penalty for choosing independence, Moscow stepped into the breach. As Khrushchev declared at the United Nations General Assembly in September 1959, the socialist world, despite not being morally culpable in the sin of colonialism, nevertheless saw aiding the development of the newly independent states as its socialist duty.¹⁵

However, competing with the West for influence, in particular with the former imperialist powers, in the newly emerging nations of Asia and Africa would not be as simple as writing a check. Western countries had decades, if not centuries, of experience in dealing with the peoples of these regions, had imposed their languages on them, and had educated and, to a significant degree, created their elites. The Soviet Union found itself devoid of both scholars who understood the culture and history of the new states of Asia and Africa and experts who could be sent out to provide the needed technological and economic assistance that newly independent countries required. According to the Central Committee’s Commission on Travel Abroad, from 1955 through 1957, the Soviet Union sent only forty-eight specialists to underdeveloped countries through the United Nations, as compared with 924 from the United States, 1,143 from the United Kingdom, and 683 from France.¹⁶ This dearth of experts “does not accord with the role and significance of the USSR in international affairs and scale of our dues in the UN fund for technical assistance,” according to the committee. Not only were few Soviets being sent overseas, but even the ones that went were often unable to fulfill their tasks. Most of those sent to other countries had no previous experience abroad or in international organizations. They had little familiarity with the social and political conditions of the places to which they were sent, and a full two-thirds of the reserve of 352 experts ready for dispatch abroad, created by a Central Committee resolution of January 7, 1959, spoke no foreign languages. In conclusion, the report demanded that “in the interests of strengthening our position in underdeveloped countries, it is necessary to create a powerful reserve of specialist...