The Soviet Union and China in the 1980s: reconciliation and divorce

This article developed from the paper presented for conference ‘Inviting Europe to Reform China? – Socialism, Capitalism and Sino-European Relations in the Deng Xiaoping Era, 1978–1992,’ Cambridge University, 13 December 2013. The author used the materials he obtained in 2013 during his stay at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, thanks to W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellowship.

Abstract

This article discusses Soviet and Chinese reforms and foreign policies in the 1980s in comparative perspective, in the light of recent archival findings. Ideological rivalry, the main driver of the Sino-Soviet tensions, disappeared and new interests of Beijing and Moscow pushed the two communist countries towards normalisation of relations. The role of geopolitics, security interests, and memories of the past played the role in the Sino-Soviet relations, but this role was secondary to the strategies of reforms and modernisation. Ultimately, the reformist aspirations in both countries pulled them towards the US-led global capitalist system, not towards each other. The article argues that key policy choices by Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev, which made possible China’s rise and the Soviet Union’s collapse, can be better understood in the comparative perspective.

Keywords:

• Sino-Soviet relations
• end of the Cold War
• Mikhail Gorbachev
• Deng Xiaoping
• Soviet reforms
• collapse of the USSR
• Tiananmen tragedy

Notes

This article developed from the paper presented for conference ‘Inviting Europe to Reform China? – Socialism, Capitalism and Sino-European Relations in the Deng Xiaoping Era, 1978–1992,’ Cambridge University, 13 December 2013. The author used the materials he obtained in 2013 during his stay at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, thanks to W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellowship.

¹ Elizabeth Wishnick, Mending Fences. The Evolution of Moscow’s China Policy from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2001); Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War. The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

² Gilbert Rozman, ed., Dismantling Communism: Common Causes and Regional Variations (Washington DC and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Centre Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Gilbert Rozman, A Mirror for Socialism: Soviet Criticisms of China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), and The Chinese Debate about Soviet Socialism, 1978–1985 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Christopher Marsh, Unparalleled Reforms. China’s Rise, Russia’s Fall and the Interdependence of Transition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Thomas P. Bernstein and Hua-Yu Li (eds.), China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949-Present (Plymouth, Lexington Books, 2010).

³ Boris Kulik, Sovetsko-kitaiskii raskol: prichiny i posledstvi’ia (Moscow: IDV RAN, 2000); G.V. Kireev, Rossiia-Kitai. Neizvestnyie stranitsy pogranichnykh peregovorov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006).

⁴ In particular, see Sergey Radchenko, Unwanted Visionaries. The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

⁵ Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Zhihua Shen and Danhui Li, with foreword by Chen Jian. After Leaning to One Side. China and Its Allies in the Cold War (Woodrow Wilson Centre Press and Stanford University Press, 2011), xiv-xv, 252–255.

⁶ Westad, Odd Arne (ed.), Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Sergey Radchenko, Two Suns in Heaven: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). On the role of cultural conflict see Zhang, Shu Guang, ‘The Sino-Soviet Alliance and the Cold War in Asia, 1954–1962’, in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol 1., ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 353–375; Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

⁷ See Friedman, Shadow Cold War, 218.

⁸ On this paradigm see Vladislav Zubok and Constantin Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War. From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

⁹ Kireev, Rossiia-Kitai, p. 167; A. M.Aleksandrov-Agentov. Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyie otnosheniia, 1994), 170–172.

¹⁰ James Hershberg, Sergey Radchenko, Peter Vamos, and David Wolff, ‘The Interkit Story: A Window into the Final Decade of the Sino-Soviet Relationship,’ February 2011, CWHIP Working Paper # 63, http://wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Working%20Paper_63.pdf; David Wolff, ‘Interkit: Soviet Sinology and the Sino-Soviet Rift,’ Russian History, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2003); also Gilbert Rozman, A Mirror for Socialism: Soviet Criticisms of China (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1985).

¹¹ A.M. Aleksandrov-Agentov. Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva, 173. In Brezhnev’s ‘journal’ for 15 February 1982, we find the note: ‘The speech [for Tashkent] is ready; com. Aleksandrov has it.’ Sergey Kudryashov, ed., Leonid Brezhnev. Rabochie i dnevnikovyie zapisi. V 3-kh tomakh. Tom 1 (Moscow: Istlit, 2016), 1139. On the context of the speech and resistance of Sinologists, above all Oleg Rakhmanin, see Radchenko, Unwanted Visionaries, p. 10–24. Strangely, Aleksandrov is not mentioned.

¹² Kenneth Waltz, ‘Conversations with History,’ Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/people3/Waltz/waltz-con5.html; Radchenko, Unwanted Visionaries, 31–32.

¹³ Xiaoming Zhang, Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979–1991 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Alexander V. Pantsov, with Steven I. Levine. Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Niu Jun in H-Diplo Roundtable XVII, 23 on Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life | H-Diplo | H-Net, on 6 June 2016, at: https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/128453/h-diplo-roundtable-xvii-23-deng-xiaoping-revolutionary-life (Accessed on 27 January 2017).

¹⁴ See this view in Radchenko, Op. cit., 42, 49.

¹⁵ On Andropov’s views see Aleksandrov-Agentov, Op. cit., 168; the author’s numerous conversations with Fyodor V. Mochulsky, KGB General and Andropov’s adviser on China, Moscow, 1991–92.

¹⁶ On the role of Eastern Europe see: Péter Vámos, ”A Hungarian Model for China? Sino-Hungarian relations during the first decade of the Chinese reform era”; also Bernd Schaefer, ‘GDR, FRG, and China between 1968 and the early 1980s,’; Margaret K. Gnoinska, ‘Domestic Changes in China and Turmoil in Poland: the Effects on Sino-Polish Relations, 1976–1983’; Niu Jun, ‘From “Fox’ to friend – China’s policy relations with the five Eastern European ‘fraternal states’ during the 1980s,” papers presented at the conference ‘Inviting Europe to reform China? – Socialism, Capitalism and Sino-European Relations in the Deng Xiaoping Era, 1978–1992,’ Cambridge University, 13 December 2013.

¹⁷ Fedotov, Polveka Vmeste s Kitaem, 500, 548.

¹⁸ On the Chinese students in the Soviet Union see Elizabeth McGuier, ‘Between Revolutions: Chinese Students in Soviet Institutes, 1948–1966,’ in China Learns from the Soviet Union. 1949-Present, Thomas P. Bernstein and Hua-Yu Li, eds., Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 359–381.

¹⁹ Aleksandr Pantsov, Deng Xiaoping (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2013), 411–412.

²⁰ Prisoner of the State, p. 120; V.P. Fedotov, Pol Veka Vmeste s Kitaem, 497.

²¹ Cited in Radchenko, Op. cit., 47.

²² Sergey Radchenko, ‘The Sino-Soviet Split,’ in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 2, Melvin P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds. (London: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 372.

²³ Hershberg et al. , ‘The Interkit story,’ 30. The author’s interviews with Fyodor Mochulsky, KGB general, and with Boris Morkovnikov, journalist in ‘Radio Russia’, who had specialised for years in anti-Maoist propaganda, Jan. 1989 and Feb. 1990.

²⁴ See the detailed analysis of these impressions and analytical papers from the leading Moscow-based academic institutes in: Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy. Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 46–51,.

²⁵ Radchenko, Unwanted visionaries, 98.

²⁶ Radchenko, Op. cit., 77–78.

²⁷ ‘O ramkakh vystupleniia vo Vladivostoke’ (Gorbachev to his assistants), undated (probably July 1986) memo. Anatoly Chernyaev Papers, Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre Archive, St Antony’s College, Oxford University, box 1, unsorted materials. (hereafter Chernyaev Papers, St Antony).

²⁸ More on this is in my Failed Empire. The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 309;.

²⁹ Robert Service, The End of the Cold War. 1985–1991 (London: Macmillan, 2015), 201, 378; the diary and the notes of T.G.Stepanov-Mamaladze, Hoover Institution’s Archive (HIA), Box 1 and Box 5.

³⁰ During his meetings with Gorbachev in March, June, and December 1987 Li Peng told him that there could be no normalisation until the Kremlin withdraw from Afghanistan and make the Vietnamese to withdraw its troops from Cambodia. Service, Op. cit., 380.

³¹ Gorbachev to his aides on 29 September 1986; Gorbachev to Chernyaev on 5 August 1988. The Anatoly Chernyaev Papers, St Antony, cited in Service, Op. cit., 385; see also the same point made in Vadim Medvedev, Raspad. Kak on nazreval v ‘morovoi sisteme sotsializma’ (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyie otnosheniia, 1994), 355.

³² The working notes of Anatoly Chernyaev, the Politburo minutes, 8 May 1987, Anatoly Chernyaev Papers, Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre Archive, St Antony’s College, Oxford University, box 1, 220.

³³ The Anatoly Adamishin Papers. Personal Notes, 25 April 1987, HIA, Box 1, p. 8.

³⁴ The working notes of Stepanov-Mamaladze, 11 and 18 May 1987, HIA, box 1, folders 19 and 20.

³⁵ The minutes of Anatoly Adamishin at the Collegium of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, undated (second half of May 1987), the Anatoly Adamishin Papers, HIA, Box 1; the diary of Stepanov-Mamaladze, HIA, cited in Radchenko, Unwanted Visionaries, 128.

³⁶ The effect of ‘the tail wagging the dog’ and the clout of ‘super-allies’ like the GDR in the Soviet bloc had long been explored by Hope Harrison in her Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). On the proposal of Gorbachev and Shevardnadze to Honecker, made during the meeting of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation’s meeting in Berlin see: Vladislav Zubok, ‘Gorbachev, German Reunification, and Soviet Demise,’ in Frederic Bozo, Andreas Roedder, Mary Sarotte, eds., German Unification: A Multinational History (Routledge, 2016) 90.

³⁷ Gilbert Rozman, ‘China’s Concurrent Debate about the Gorbachev Era,’ China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949-Present, ed. Thomas P. Bernstein and Hua-Yu Li , (Plymouth, Lexington Books, 2010) 456–458.

³⁸ Gilbert Rozman began to explore this in his ‘Sino-Russian Relations: Mutual Assessments and Predictions,’ in Rapprochement or Rivalry: Russia-China Relations in a Changing World, ed. Sherman Garnett, (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000), 147–174. For further development see Christopher Marsch, Unparalleled Reforms, 2–5.

³⁹ Radchenko, Unwanted Visionaries, 174 – 175.

⁴⁰ Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy. Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR, 52–54, 180–182; on other inconsistencies in Miller’s analysis see a review by Isaac Scarborough in ‘Reviews in History,’ http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/2066 (accessed on 14 March 2017),.

⁴¹ The evidence about it is cited in: Robert Service, The End of the Cold War, 56.

⁴² Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire. Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007); Nikolay Mitrokhin and Teresa Polowy, ‘“Strange People” in the Politburo: Institutional Problems and the Human Factor in the Economic Factor in the Economic Collapse of the Soviet Empire,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, No. 4 (Fall 2009): 869–960.

⁴³ Nikolai Ryzhkov. Desiat let velikikh potriasenii (Moscow: Kniga. Prosveshcheniie. Miloserdiie, 1996), p. 48–49; Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn i reformy, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 224–225, 334–335; Rudolf Pikhoia, a paper presented at the conference “Twenty-five years after the USSR,” The German Historical Institute, Moscow, 10 June 2016.

⁴⁴ Tatiana Koryagina, ‘Na konu istorii stoiala sudba strany’ in: Valentin Pavlov. Pervyi i poslednii Premier-ministr Sovetskogo Soiuza. Vospominania sovremennnikov, vyderzhki iz publikatsii i dokumentov (Moscow: Kraun, 2005), http://koriagina.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=31; also Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy (London: Pearson Education Ltd, 2003), 196–198.

⁴⁵ The paper by Russian historian Rudolf Pikhoia, a paper presented at the conference ‘Twenty-five years after the USSR,’ Moscow, 10 June 2016; Evgenyi Saburov, Reformy v Rossii. Pervyi etap (Moscow: Vershina-klub, 1997), at: http://www.saburov.org/economics/reforms (accessed on 19 January 2017).

⁴⁶ Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire. China and the World since 1750 (London: The Bodley Head, 2012), 373.

⁴⁷ For more on this see: Péter Vámos, ‘Only a handshake but no embrace: Sino-Soviet normalisation in the 1980s,’ in Thomas P. Bernstein and Hua-Yu Li (eds.), China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949-Present (Plymouth, Lexington Books, 2010), 84.

⁴⁸ Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kantorovich, eds., The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System. An Insiders’ History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1998), 18, 26.

⁴⁹ This process was analysed by Mikhail Bernshtam, Soviet dissident and later economist at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; in 1991–97 Bernshtam was unpaid economic adviser to the Yeltsin Administration. Bernshtam’s interviews with the author, Hoover Institution, 6 February, 12 and 21 March 2013. Also see Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kantorovich, eds., The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System. An Insiders’ History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1998); David Woodruff, Money Unmade. Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 45–55; Steven Solnick, Stealing the State. Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

⁵⁰ See the exceptionally brief and clear diagnosis of this problem by Mikhail Bernshtam in ‘V naibolshei stepenii gotova r reformam…’ Rossiisaia gazeta, 9 May 1991, 1–2, at: http://yeltsin.ru/uploads/upload/newspaper/1991/rs05_09_91/FLASH/index.html (accessed on 1 February 2017); compare to his recent interview on the roots of the Soviet collapse.

⁵¹ Leonid Abalkin, Neispolzovannyi shans. Poltora goda v pravitelstve (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1989); Stanislav Anisimov in: Petr Aven, Alfred Kokh. Revoliutsiia Gaidara. Istoriia reform 90-kh iz pervykh ruk (Moscow: Alpina, 2013). 204–205.

⁵² Fedotov, Op. cit., 493.

⁵³ G.N.Romanova, ‘Formirovaniie vneshneekonomicheskikh sviazei Kitaia v 80-e gody XX veka,’ Tamozhennaia politika Rossii na Dalnem Vostoke, 3 (2011), 113–114.

⁵⁴ Tiziano Terzani, Buonanotte, Signor Lenin, (Milano: Tea, 1992), 38, 57, 65–66.

⁵⁵ The working notes of Anatoly Chernyaev at the Politburo, 11 June 1987. Chernyaev Papers, St Antony; V Politbiuro TsK KPSS, 196–197.

⁵⁶ Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children. The Last Soviet Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

⁵⁷ Stephen Hanson wrote most perceptively about Gorbachev’s neo-Leninism as the initial foundation of his new thinking, “Gorbachev: The Last True Leninist Believer?” in Daniel Chirot, ed., The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), p. 33–59.

⁵⁸ Karen Brutents, Nesbyvsheesya. Neravnodushnyie zametki o perestroika (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyie otnosheniia, 2005), p. 228–229; Radchenko, Unwanted visionaries, 177–179.

⁵⁹ Gorbachev to his aides on 29 September 1986; Gorbachev to Chernyaev in 5 August 1988. The Anatoly Chernyaev Papers, St Antony, cited in Service, Op. cit., 385.

⁶⁰ Zhao Ziyang’s account tells of fears and dismay that these new phenomena arose in the Chinese leadership at the time, in Prisoner of the State, 127–133, 155–158.

⁶¹ Artemy Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko, The End of the Cold War and the Third World: New Perspectives on Regional Conflict (London & New York: Routledge, 2011); Artemy Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye. The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Sergey Radchenko, ‘Soviet Withdrawal from Mongolia: A Reassessment,’ The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Volume 25, Number 2, 1 April 2012, 183–203.

⁶² Hoover Institution Archive (HIA), Teimuraz Stepanov Papers, Box 5, Folder 5. Diary, 1 December 1989.

⁶³ HIA, Teimuraz Stepanov Papers. Box 5, Folder 6. Diary, 3 February 1989.

⁶⁴ HIA, Teimuraz Stepanov Papers. Box 5, Folder 6. Diary, 3 February, 1989, p. 231–235.

⁶⁵ HIA, Teimuraz Stepanov Papers. Box 5, Folder 6. Diary, 4 February, 1989, p. 237–254.

⁶⁶ Anatoly Chernyaev, Sovmestnyi iskhod. Dnevnik dvukh epoch. 1972–1991 gody (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008), p. 793.

⁶⁷ HIA, Teimuraz Stepanov Papers. Box. 2, Folder 24. Notebook for 12–17 May 1989.

⁶⁸ Péter Vámos, ‘Only a handshake but no embrace: Sino-Soviet normalisation in the 1980s,’ in Thomas P. Bernstein and Hua-Yu Li (eds.), China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949-Present (Plymouth, Lexington Books, 2010).

⁶⁹ Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i Reformy, Vol. 2, 439.

⁷⁰ HIA, Teimuraz Stepanov Papers. Box. 2, Folder 24. Notebook for 12–17 May.

⁷¹ Roi Medvedev, ‘Vizit M.S. Gorbacheva v Pekin v 1989 godu,’ Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, No. 3 (2011), 93–101, cited by Radchenko, Op. cit., p. 163.

⁷² More on this in Vladislav Zubok, ‘With His Back Against the Wall: Gorbachev, Soviet Demise, and German Reunification,’ Cold War History, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 4, 619–645.