Everyone who studies either Russia or China, or both, is familiar with the split that cleaved these two communist giants apart. It was not a clean break, nor did it happen overnight. The seeds of the split were contained in the main conclusions from the USSR's 20th Party Congress, which, in hindsight, was riven with unintended consequences for the fate of the socialist world. The Chinese were very unhappy about Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalin and his terror tactics of governing, but they also disagreed with the new emphasis on “peaceful co-existence” with the West, the Soviet insistence that it was possible to achieve a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism, and the idea of collective leadership. Jeremy Friedman has beautifully illuminated how these unanticipated consequences played out in the Third World in his book Shadow Cold War.
Until the end of the Second World War, the USSR had been the world leader of socialist revolution. But around the time of that fateful Party Congress in 1956, interest in helping the developing world became the rage. Decolonizing the Third World quickly turned into a competition between China and the USSR as the two largest communist countries each fought to dominate the socialist world by spreading its own vision of development. As Friedman writes, the Chinese and the Soviets “saw it as their task to reestablish the unity of revolutionary forces around the world by promoting their respective models of revolution” (p. 13). He chronicles a dichotomy of beliefs that fueled this “socialist competition” in the developing world. The Soviets advocated the eradication of capitalism by promoting heavy industrialization and de-emphasizing light industry, a willingness to accept foreign investment, the suppression of private trade and the encouragement of collectivized agriculture. In other words, the Soviets were touting the very same model Stalin had exported to China just a few years before this Third World competition began. The Chinese, in contrast, put forth anti-imperialism, stressed the rejection of foreign influences and the construction of a strong, cohesive new society. This meant raising living standards immediately, promoting light industry and small-scale private trade while eliminating foreign economic presence.
Friedman argues that the conclusions of the USSR's 20th Party Congress in 1956 revealed a clash in vision over revolutionary programmes. At its most basic, the Soviets stood for anti-capitalist revolution, whereas the Chinese promoted anti-imperialist revolution. While both the Soviet Union and China appeared to agree on the necessity of ending the linkages of capitalism and imperialism, each of them saw the mechanisms of this global system as refracted through their own experiences and traditions. That is, based on China's long relationship with imperialism, the Chinese were more motivated for change by anti-imperialism, whereas the Soviet goal was simply that of replacing capitalism with socialism. In this book, the competition is played out all over the globe in a struggle over these revolutionary agendas. This book is a wonderful compendium of what actually took place throughout the developing world as the Soviets and the Chinese rushed in to promote separate visions that promised to remediate imperialism's oppression and inequalities.
Was the Soviet 20th Party Congress the beginning of the famous Sino-Soviet split? This is a story that is complex and difficult to tell. Some scholars of modern China like Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia in “A political duet: the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, the Eighth Congress of the CCP, and Sino-Soviet relations” (Modern China Studies 22[1], 2015), argue that the 20th Party Congress was not a turning point in the Sino-Soviet relationship, while others like Jian Chen in “The beginning of the end: 1956 as a turning point in Chinese and Cold War history” (Modern China Studies 22[1], 2015), who feels absolutely that the seeds of the conflict grew from this very Congress. It is true the Chinese could not trust the Soviets, given Stalin's blatant geo-political policies that favored the USSR over Chinese communism. Nevertheless, once Stalin died in 1953, Soviet leader Khrushchev began to fund and support the much-vaunted “Sino-Soviet Friendship,” sending thousands of Soviet experts and advisors placed all across the country to “build socialism” in China (Deborah Kaple, “Agents of change: Soviet advisors and high Stalinist management in China, 1949–1960,” Journal of Cold War Studies 18[1], 2016). Whether there was mutual trust or not, Soviet assistance was instrumental in restarting the Chinese economy and setting China on the path to socialist modernization. Why at this point did the competition between China and the USSR in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East begin? Looking back, it is difficult to believe that the Chinese would risk losing the massive Soviet aid, expertise and advice to promote an ideology that differed from the USSR's ideology in the developing world. Friedman's discussion of the importance of ideology is excellent, but without more detailed documentary evidence, it is difficult to tell if the Soviets and Chinese began competing in the developing world because of ideology, their shared history, or specific events (such as the USSR support for India over China in the 1959 border conflict). What we do have in Friedman's Shadow Cold War is a very thoughtful and rich chronicle of the “behind-the-scenes” Sino-Soviet relationship of the 1950s that asks the questions we need to ask, and illuminates the importance of the developing world in the history of the Cold War. This is a very welcome addition to the existing literature.
