Was ideology a key factor in the Sino-Soviet split?

Introduction
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There is an ancient Chinese proverb, "Never are there two suns in the heaven, Never should there be two emperors on the earth." Though the days of the Chinese monarchy were over a long time ago, the ambitions of the Chinese rulers never vanished. Chairman Mao Zedong was the epitome of a modern Chinese emperor but in a communist garb.
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The classical Marxism called for the workers' revolution in the world. A section of the Russian proletariat did bring out a revolution in Russia in 1917, under the leadership of V.I. Lenin. But China was a different case. The Chinese society was dominated by peasants. Besides that, the communist regime established in 1949 came into being after a gruesome civil war. The Chinese application of communism was different from the European idea of a Marxist revolution, and this was going to play a major role in the domestic as well as in foreign policies of China.
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The Sino-Soviet Relations
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The Soviet Union, which was formed in 1917, provided both moral and material support to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the war against Japan and during the Chinese Civil War. After the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao Zedong declared that China would 'lean-to-one-side'. In a long article titled "On People's Democratic Dictatorship", he announced Communist China's special relationship with the Soviet Union. He said revolutionary China must "unite in a common struggle with those nations of the world that treat us as an equal and unite with the people of all countries - that is, ally ourselves with the Soviet Union, with the People's Democratic Countries, and with the proletariat and the broad masses of the people in all other countries, and form an international united front... We must lean to one side." [1]
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In the early 1950's, to build the Chinese economy Mao Zedong wanted help and aid from the Soviet Union. The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin wanted good relations with China. He did not only provide military assistance, technology, and economic support to China but also recognized the newly formed communist state. The United States has refused to recognize China. But Stalin did not treat Mao as an equal. For the Soviet dictator, Mao was an "inferior" friend, which Mao never liked. Though both countries were based on the Marxist-Leninist ideology (with China going one step forward and adding the Mao Zedong Thought to it), differences were generating between them. Mao Zedong wanted to promote the communist revolution in the world, which was also in the interest of China. But it was in the Soviet Union's interest to promote stability. Mao accused the Soviet Union of distracting itself from the path of Marxist-Leninist ideology. The Soviets blamed the Chinese for encouraging instability in the world and thus endangering the countries where revolution has taken place.
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The Korean War
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Stalin used to put Russia's national interest first. he did not want to confront the United States directly in a war. China felt betrayed when Stalin refused to help the communist regime of North Korea. The North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung attacked South Korea to expand his territory. The Korean War eruption on June 15, 1950 and the US president Harry Truman promptly decides to come to the rescue of Syngman Rhee's South Korean regime and to dispatch the Seventh Fleet to "neutralize" the Taiwan Strait, a decision that turned the Korean War into an international crisis. [2] China wanted to show its determination to support the world revolution. It sent 2,50,000 troops to North Korea to fight against the Americans. China also wanted to prevent the American soldiers from reaching its own borders.
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Khrushchev's Secret Speech
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Joseph Stalin died in March 1953. Nikita Khrushchev succeeded him. The Soviet Union moved from one man leadership to collective leadership. Stalin considered Mao as his junior but Mao refused to accept Khrushchev as an equal. This was disadvantageous for the Sino-Soviet relations.

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A turning point came in February 1956, when the CPSU held its Twentieth Congress. Toward the end of the meeting, Khrushchev delivered a lengthy speech criticizing Stalin and his personality cult in a secret session, to which the CCP delegation to the Congress has not been invited. The Soviets did provide the Chinese delegation with a copy of Khrushchev's speech afterwards, but the fact that they failed to consult Beijing in advance greatly offended Mao and his fellow CCP leaders. [3] The Chinese leaders did not agree with Khrushchev. They said that the Soviets want to de-Stalinize the Soviet Union. Mao also wanted the tough image of Stalin for himself to further consolidate his position as the supreme leader of the CCP.

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The differences between China and the Soviet Union further deepened when Mao alleged that the Soviets were not providing enough assistance in nuclear technology to the Chinese.

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Early 1960s

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The chasm between China and the Soviet Union increased in the early 1960s. China was afraid of a US attack from Taiwan. The border tension with India was growing. At the same time, the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. Mao was facing criticism in the CCP due to the failure of the Great Leap Forward. 1962 was a critical period for the world. When Mao was convinced that the US had no intention of invading the mainland China, he concentrated his attention on India in October 1962. Mao wanted to show the world the strength of China and he also wanted to shut the mouths of his critics in the Party. The Soviet Union did not support Mao in the Indo-China War. The Soviets remained neutral officially, but promised to help India. After the war, India became the first non-communist country to receive military assistance from the Soviet Union, especially in providing facilities for the indigenous production of the Mig-21 fighter air crafts.

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Conclusion

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The Sino-Soviet relations were based on two objectives. Firstly, they wanted to spread the communist revolution. Secondly, they wanted to fight the imperialist powers like the United States. But they did not agree on how to achieve these goals. Both China and the Soviet Union took different paths based on their separate national interests. At the climax of the Sino-Soviet close relations, Mao Zedong alleged that the Soviet union has become capitalist, and accused it of becoming a socialist imperialist power. Nikita Khrushchev agreed on the fact that the Soviets and the Chinese couldn't agree on anything. By 1964, the China-Soviet relations deteriorated so much that defeating each other became more important than defeating imperialism.

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It is said that ideology was everything for Mao Zedong because it was the ideology that made the CCP victorious in the Chinese Civil War. But Mao was a nationalist first and also an expert in the inter-state relations. It would be right to say though the ideology of the Chinese regime was Marxism-Leninism, its foreign policy was strictly based on the Chinese state interest. Besides that, Mao wanted crises in the world so that he could control the rebels at home.

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Both for China and the Soviet Union, their national interests were primary. China was very critical of Yugoslavia, which was an ally of the Soviet Union. Similarly, the Soviet Union used to criticize Albania, an ally of China. The Chinese supported the Soviets to crush the Hungarian Revolution. But during the uprising in Poland, it advised the Soviet Union not to send forces there because it was a nationalist movement. Also, China did not send troops to Cuba and Armenia to support revolution but sent soldiers to North Korea and Vietnam to fight against the Americans.

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In nutshell, ideology cannot determine foreign policy and state action. And though foreign policy circumscribes ideology it does not negate it. A political philosophy cannot counter the national interests. It was the communist ideology that brought China and the Soviet Union close to each other but it was the national interests that led to the Sino-Soviet split.

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Footnotes

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[1] Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War, The University of North Carolina Press, chapter 3: Mao's Continuous Revolution and the Rise and Demise of the Sino-Soviet Alliance 1949-1963, page 50

[2] ibid, page 55

[3] ibid, page 64

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Bibliography

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1. Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill & London

2. Jonathan D Spence, The Search for Modern China, Second Edition, 1990, WW Norton & Company, New York, London

3. Roderick Macfarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, 2 - The great Leap Forward, 1958-1960, Oxford University Press, 1983

Review of Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History (2003)

Gulag - A History
By Anne Applebaum
Anchor Books, 2004
Pages 677
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Review
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What was the Gulag? I never heard of it. Though the famous Indian anti-communist writer Sita Ram Goel, in his biography ‘How I became a Hindu’, defined the erstwhile Soviet Union as a slave empire, I couldn’t fully understand what he exactly meant. There are many people who still don’t know about the slavery that was practiced in Russia between 1920s and 1980s. And what is more shocking? This gross ignorance, about the human rights in the world’s largest country, exists not only in the developing nations but also in the developed states.
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Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History is not only a light of knowledge but is one of the finest pieces of non-fiction literature of the 21st century. In fact, it is because of this the Washington D.C.-based columnist and editor’s magnum opus won the coveted Pulitzer Prize in 2004. Applebaum has also taken forward the cause of the millions of Russians who suffered the state repression in the former USSR.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago shook the whole world when it was published in 1973. Even before this historical record, he wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, a novel based on the life of a Soviet prisoner in the Gulag. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.
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Applebaum’s book is an eye opener on the mental, physical, psychological, and moral conditions of the people in the Soviet labour camps. She describes the history of the Gulag as “a history of the vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, from the islands of the White Sea to the shores of the Black Sea, from the Arctic Circle to the plains of central Asia, from Murmansk to Vorkuta to Kazakhstan, from central Moscow to the Leningrad suburbs. Literally, the word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word “Gulag” has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labour itself, in all its forms and varieties: labour camps, punishments camps, criminal and political camps, women’s camps, children’s camps, transit camps. Even more broadly, “Gulag” has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the “meat-grinder”: the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labour, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early unnecessary deaths.”[1] The book is divided into three parts:
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Part One: The Origins of the Gulag, 1917-1939
Part Two: Life and Work in the Camps
Part Three: The Rise and Fall of the Camp-Industrial Complex, 1940-1986
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The first labour camps were born out of the Bolshevik coup in 1917. Three weeks before the October Revolution, Lenin himself was already sketching out an admittedly vague plan to organize “obligatory work duty” for wealthy capitalists. By January 1918, angered by the depth of the anti-Bolshevik resistance, he was even more vehement, writing that he welcomed “the arrest of millionaire-saboteurs travelling in first- and second-class train compartments. I suggest sentencing them to half a year’s forced labour in a mine.”[2] Later, Lenin also issued hand-written orders instructing the Communists operating in the Penza area to publicly hang at least one hundred better off peasants (kulaks); to publicize their names; to confiscate their grain, and to designate a number of hostages.[3]
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The first camps of the Gulag were constructed in the Solovetsky islands in 1920 in 1920. Besides other works, the prisoners worked cutting worked cutting trees, with no breaks, no respite, and little food. Desperate for a few days’ rest, they cut off their hands and feet[4]. The well-known novelist Maxim Gorky visited these camps. And may be out of sheer pressure of the Soviet government, or out of ignorance, or perhaps voluntarily he praised the conditions of the prisoners.
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In 1929, the Soviet regime accelerated the process of forced collectivization in the countryside, a vast upheaval which was in some ways more profound than the Russian Revolution itself. Within an incredibly short period of time, rural commissars forced millions of peasants to give up their small landholdings and to join collective farms, often expelling them from land their families had tilled for centuries. The transformation permanently weakened Soviet agriculture, and created the conditions for the terrible, devastating famines in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1932 and 1934 --- famines that killed between six and seven million people.[5] Millions of peasants resisted the policies of the authorities and were labeled kulaks. Most of them were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Hundreds of thousands were arrested and transferred to the Gulag.
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The author eloquently explains the expansion of the slave camps, especially in the Arkhangelsk region of the north-west to the country’s north and central parts of Kotlas, Ukhta, Vorkuta, the Vaigach Islands in the far north, and the Kolyma area in the far north-eastern corner of Siberia, on the Pacific Ocean. She gives separate coverage to the White Sea Canal in northern Soviet Union which was also the one of the big dreams of Stalin. Applebaum has given regional and national maps of the Soviet Union to show the exact locations of the camps of the Gulag.
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The writer articulates that in the history of the Gulag 1937 does mark a genuine watershed. For it was in this year that the Soviet camps temporarily transformed themselves from indifferently managed prisons in which people died by accident, into genuinely deadly camps where prisoners were deliberately worked to death, or actually murdered, in far larger numbers than they had been in the past. Although the transformation was far from consistent, and although the deliberate deadlines of the camps did ease again by 1939 --- death rates would subsequently rise and fall with tides of war and ideology up until Stalin’s death in 1953 --- the Great Terror left its mark on the mentality of camp guards and prisoners alike.[6]
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The second part of the book deals with the arrests, prisons, transport, arrival, and selection of the prisoners. Their life and work in camps as well as punishments and rewards. Detailed discussions on the guards and the prisoners with the women and the children have been done. The chapters on the dying inmates, strategies of survival are touching and effective, whereas the accounts of rebellion and escapes are interesting and motivating.
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Applebaum elaborates that the living conditions of Gulag laborers was poor, their food inadequate, their clothing insufficient, their treatment barbaric, and concern for their medical needs non-existent. Why? It was cheaper to bring in new bodies than to keep the existing ones healthy. In some camps - such as Siberian gold mines - the conditions were so bad that the laborer death rate was upwards of 100%. During the 20 months it took to construct the White Sea Canal in the early 1930s, 25,000 laborers died – a rate of over 40 per day. The murderousness of those deaths is emphasized by the fact that there was no shipping demand for the White Sea Canal to be built, so it was a gigantic blunder by Stalin that contributed nothing to boosting the Soviet economy. It is also estimated that over 200,000 laborers died from 1949 to 1953 working on the even more blundering Danube-Black Sea Canal. The uncompleted project was abandoned after Stalin’s death in 1953, so all of those people died from exposure, disease, unsafe equipment, malnutrition, accidents, consumption, over-work, and a myriad of other ways digging what amounted to a big ditch. In contrast, 11 workers (10 in one 1936 accident) died during the five years (1933 to 1937) it took to build the Golden Gate Bridge – then the world’s longest suspension bridge, and five workers died during the 16 months (January 1930 to April 1931) it took to construct the Empire State Building – then the world’s tallest building.[7]
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There are numerous gruesome details about the Gulag in Applebaum’s nearly 700-page book that could be recounted – such as the gang rape of female laborers by both staff members and male laborers that were so brutal that some of them not only died, but Applebaum described the attacks as something out of “Dante’s Hell.” Another is that in the summertime, a recalcitrant laborer in Siberia subjected to capital punishment would be strapped naked to a tree so the person’s exposed flesh would be an inviting meal for millions of vampire like mosquitoes the size of horse flies.[8]
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It is said that a picture speaks a thousand words. The book also contains photographs of the Gulag, the prisoners arriving at the transit camps, armed guards, prisoners working with handmade tools, digging coal, hauling timber, women working in the fields and sowing logs, camp commanders, punishment cells, and starved children. There are different pictures of Stalin and Yezhov visiting the White Sea Canal, Maxim Gorky at the Solovetsky. There are some posters of shock-workers and of the NKVD propaganda. These photographs a window in the life of the Soviet slave camps.
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Anne Applebaum estimates the total number of forced labourers in the USSR around 28.7 million.[9] But she does not give a precise number of the people that have died citing the lack of completely satisfactory death statistics for either the Gulag or the exile system that have yet appeared.[10] She, though, reluctantly says that 2,749,163 people had died in the camps of the Gulag and in the exile villages but claims that this number is incomplete.[11]
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The book is loaded with the first hand accounts of camp survivors and memoirists like Varlam Shalamov, Isaak Filshtinsky, Gustav Herling, Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Janusz Bardach, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, Anatoly Zhigulin, Alexander Dolgum, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The author also provides the official Soviet records and the archival documents. The book is based on extensive research on the modern history and literature of Russia. Applebaum’s personal visits to the former camp sites, prisons, and other places of relevance show her passion for the subject of the Gulag. Her interviews with the camp survivors and those who endured the Communist regime increase the intellectual vale of the book.
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Gulag: A History is also a brief history of the evolution of the Soviet secret police, from Cheka, to GPU, to OGPU, to NKVD, and finally to KGB. The book also compares the Stalinist Russia with the Nazi Germany and draws parallels between the concentration camps of the two totalitarian systems. Ultimately, the Gulag prove to be more cruel and horrible than Hitler’s death camps.
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Anne Applebaum concludes her book saying, “This books was not written ‘so that it will not happen again,’ as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the ‘objective enemy,’ as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why --- and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.”[12] These are perhaps some of the finest lines of the book.
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References
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Books
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1. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Anchor Books, 2003, New York, United States
2. Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900, Cambridge University Press, 1992, Cambridge, United Kingdom
3. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1982, New York United States
4. Edward Hallett Carr, The Russia Revolution: From Lenin to Stalin (1917-192), The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979, London, United Kingdom
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Websites
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1. http://quotes.isp.tw/
2. http://www.booknotes.org/
3. http://forejustice.org/
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/
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Movies
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1. The Saint (1997)
2. Rocky IV (1985)
3. Nicholas and Alexandra (1971)
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Notes

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[1] Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, pp. XV-XVI
[2] Ibid., p. 5
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin's_Hanging_Order
[4] Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, p. 23
[5] Ibid., pp. 46-47
[6] Ibid., p. 93
[7] http://forejustice.org/we/gulag_applebaum.html
[8] Ibid.
[9] Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, p. 581
[10] Ibid. p. 582
[11] Ibid. p. 583
[12] Ibid. p. 577

Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar' said...

रामधारी सिंह 'दिनकर'
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साहस की ज़िंदगी सबसे बड़ी ज़िंदगी होती है. ऐसी ज़िंदगी की सबसे बड़ी पहचान यह है कि वह बिलकुल निडर, बिलकुल बेखौफ़ होती है. साहसी मनुष्य की पहली पहचान यह है कि वह इस बात कि चिंता नहीं करता कि तमाशा देखने वाले लोग उसके बारे में क्या सोच रहे हैं. जनमत कि उपेक्षा करके जीने वाला आदमी दुनिया की असली ताकत होता है और मनुष्यता को प्रकाश भी उसी आदमी से मिलता है. अड़ोस-पड़ोस को देखकर चलना, यह साधारण जीव का काम है. क्रांति करने वाले लोग अपने उद्देश्य की तुलना न तो पड़ोसी के उद्देश्य से करते हैं और न अपनी चाल को ही पड़ोसी की चाल देखकर मदधिम बनाते हैं.
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साहसी मनुष्य उन सपनों में भी रस लेता है जिन सपनों का कोई व्यावहारिक अर्थ नहीं है.
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साहसी मनुष्य सपने उधार नहीं लेता, वह अपने विचारों में रमा हुआ अपनी ही किताब पढ़ता है. झुंड में चलना और झुंड में चरना, यह भैंस और भेड़ का काम है. सिंह तो बिलकुल अकेला होने पर भी मगन रहता है.

The Brihadaranyakopnishad 1.3.26

असतो मा सदगमय.तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय.मृत्योर्मा अमृतं गमय.-बृहदारण्यकोपनिषद (१.३.२८)
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हे इश्वर! मुझे कुमार्ग से सन्मार्ग की और ले जाएँ. अज्ञानरूपी अन्धकार से ज्ञानरुपी प्रकाश की ओर ले जाएँ. मृत्यु से अमरता की ओर ले जाएँ. -बृहदारण्यकोपनिषद (१.३.२८)
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O Ishvara! Take me from the wrong path to the right direction. From the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge. From the death to the immortality. -Brihadaranyakopnishad (1.3.28)

Then they came for me...

First they came for the Afghan Hindus,
and I did not speak out because I was not an Afghan;
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Then they came for the Pakistani Hindus,
and I did not speak out because I was not a Pakistani;
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Then they came for the Bangladeshi Hindus,
and I did not speak out because I was not a Bangladeshi;
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Then they came for the Kashmiri Hindus,
and I did not speak out because I was not a Kashmiri;
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Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

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Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...