| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Odd Arne Westad, editor. Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963. (Cold War International History Project Series.) Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif. 1998. Pp. xxii, 404. $45.00.

About half a century ago, the Western world was shocked by the Soviet acquisition of atomic bomb and the Communist victory in China. To make the situation worse, Joseph Stalin's USSR and Mao Zedong's China formed a military alliance early in 1950. The threat of the overthrow of Western civilization by Communism, as depicted by President Harry S. Truman in 1947, seemed ever real. Before long, however, the seemingly monolithic world Communist movement cracked. The split between the two Communist giants started before the end of the 1950s, and the alliance was all but dead by the early 1960s. Within another decade, the world witnessed the Sino-Soviet military confrontation and the Sino-American detente: Richard Nixon, the most staunch anticommunist politician, went to China to form an unlikely anti-Soviet "united front" with Mao, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 1

The rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance was clearly one of the most dramatic developments on the stage of world politics in the twentieth century, and yet, studies of Sino-Soviet relations have yielded few satisfying results thus far. We have been told that the Chinese Communists were actually nationalists by nature, and that, facing intrusive Russian imperialism, Mao was never a comrade but an antagonist of Stalin; he even tried to form a workable relationship with the U.S. to counterbalance Russian pressure as early as in the 1940s. Washington, however, unwisely pushed Mao away, and the Sino-Soviet alliance was never genuine; it was in part a result of a wrong-headed U.S. policy toward the CCP. Thus, when Stalin's successors became intrusive, threatening China's national interest, Mao naturally kicked. In short, the rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance was part of a long history of Chinese nationalism vis-à-vis the Russian imperialism. . . .

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