Purges also followed Soviet procedures. As Stalin wrote to Hungarian party leader Matyas Rakosi in September 1949: 'I think that Rajkmust be executed, since the people will not understand any other sentence.' And so he was, two weeks later.[214] Moscow measured the effectiveness of campaigns in Eastern Europe as it had in the Soviet Union: by the numbers. Soviets monitored how many people were arrested, purged and executed, recommending more 'vigilance' if too few affairs were being pursued.[215] The 'liberal pacifistic' attitude ofCzech comrades was criticised because too many Czech deviants were allowed to emigrate, rather than be incarcerated or executed. Just as political prisoners in the Soviet Union were dragooned into slave labour to build the White Sea canal, Romanian deviants worked on 'socialist projects', such as the Danube-Black Sea canal.[216]
Stalinist fear of difference importing imperialist danger dominated relations with Eastern Europe. But relations with China were not fraught with a fear of difference, but were the external projection of the Stalinist hierarchy of centre and periphery, modernity and pre-modernity. China was the Soviet Union's oldest little brother, a revolutionary comrade-in-arms who aspired to become just like its elder and better. In the summer of 1949 Stalin met six times in Moscow with Liu Shaoqi, one of Mao's closest colleagues. At one meeting, Liu presented a six-hour report on China's political realities in which China was repeatedly described as on the road to becoming the Soviet Union. On Stalin's personal copy are a dozen 'Da!'s written in Stalin's hand after passages that acknowledge China's subordinate position.44 During these meetings an international division of revolutionary labour emerged. Stalin delegated to China leadership of the anti-colonial movements of Asia, while reserving for Moscow overall leadership of the world Communist movement, including Eastern Europe, and the working-classes of modern North America and Western Europe. China would be the surrogate vanguard for revolutions in places like Vietnam and Indonesia, while the Soviet Union would be China's vanguard. Mao agreed to this hierarchy in his December 1949 meeting with Stalin in Moscow.45
This division of labour got its first serious test in Korea. A month after Mao left Moscow, North Korea's leader, Kim Il-Sung, arrived with promises of a quick victory in a short war against South Korea. Stalin agreed to provide the necessary military assistance, but told Kim that no Soviet forces would fight, even if the US did intervene, but that China would. In June 1950, North Korea attacked with initial success. But the US-led counter-attack had, by late September, resulted in US forces approaching the Chinese border. On 1 October, Kim sent a telegram to Stalin warning of a North Korean collapse. Zhou En-lai visited Stalin in Sochi a week later where Stalin suggested that China could demonstrate its identity as vanguard of the Asian national liberation movement (NLM) by saving North Korea. Stalin told Zhou En-lai that it was China's war, but the Soviet Union would provide military equipment and fighter pilots.46
During Mao's only meetings with Stalin, the February 1950 treaty of alliance was signed, promising vast quantities of Soviet economic and military aid,
44 In Jun, 'Origins of the Sino-Soviet Alliance', p. 305. The original is in APRF, f. 45, oi, d. 328.
45 Goncharov Lewis and Litai, Uncertain Partners, pp. 46-74; Chen Jian, Mao's Chinaand the Cold War (Chapel Hilclass="underline" University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 50 and 120; Ilya V Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy towards the Indochina Conflict (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 2.
46 Goncharov Lewis and Litai, Uncertain Partners, pp. 137-44 and 188-95; Zubok and Ple- shakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, pp. 62-8; Chen Jian, Mao's China, pp. 121-55; and Danilov and Pyzhikov, Rozhdeniesverkhderzhavy, pp. 65-6.
along with an alliance against the US and Japan. At the same time, however, Mao had to swallow what he later called 'two bitter pills': continued Soviet control over Port Arthur and the Manchurian railroad, and a secret agreement to keep foreigners and foreign investment, other than Soviet, out of Manchuria and Xinjiang.[217]
Soviet relations with China also revealed relative Soviet indifference towards NLMs. At Chinese behest Ho Chi Minh arrived secretly (a Soviet condition) in Moscow while Mao was there. In his only meeting with Stalin, Ho was advised to work through China, and not through the Soviet Union directly. While China recognised the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) with great fanfare on 18 January 1950, the Soviet Union did not recognise Hanoi for two weeks, and then most quietly. Moreover, contacts with Ho were handled through the French Communist Party, reflecting the Eurocentrism of Stalin's foreign policy more generally.[218]
The politics of identity between the Soviet Union and its Chinese allies worked differently from the way it did in Eastern Europe. Increasing Soviet intolerance of difference resulted in purges, arrests and executions and the assumption ofpower in Eastern Europe of Communists with close associations withpatrons in the Kremlin. Mao, onthe other hand, independently and enthusiastically promoted the adoption of the Soviet model in China. At the March 1949 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plenum, Mao stated so explicitly.[219]Moscow found itself with a very close ally in its struggle against deviation.
Difference at home: allies abroad, 1953-6
Stalin's death buried the NSM. The 'us versus them' binarisation of the world was replaced by a continuum of difference, with a broad contested middle ground between the NSM and its dangerous deviant Other, including the possibility of being neither us nor them. The possibility of a 'private' self appeared, an individual personality unconnected to the public performance of being Soviet, socialist or Communist. The recognition of the possibility of irrelevant and innocuous difference entailed as well the acknowledgement of fallibility, of the possibility that errors might be made by even good Soviets. Tolerance for both mistakes and difference spoke of a new level of security and confidence felt by the post-Stalin generation of political elites in Moscow.
This said, two important elements of the Stalinist identity of the Soviet Union remained: hierarchy and the Russian nation. The Soviet Union remained the apex and the centre of the world communist community, and the teleo- logical endpoint for all modern humanity. Within the Soviet Union, Russia remained the vanguard for all other republics and peoples, with Central Asians deemed the most peripheral and needful of a vanguard in Russia and Moscow. The Russian nation remained the surrogate nation for a putatively supranational Soviet man.[220]
The political manifestations of these identity shifts in March 1953 were dramatic and almost instantaneous. Within a month, 1.2 million prisoners were amnestied andboththe Doctors' Plot and Mingrelian Affair were publicly declared over and mistaken. Within months, Ilya Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw was published and Zoshchenko was readmitted to the Writers' Union. All victims of the Leningrad Affair were publicly rehabilitated within a year of Stalin's funeral. In December 1954, the Second Writers' Congress was held, the first since 1938, at which all the issues of Soviet identity were debated publicly for five days. In September 1955, Molotov was forced to write a public recantation in the pages of the single most important theoretical publication of the CPSU, Kommunist, in which he admitted socialism had already been built in the Soviet Union, not just had its foundations laid, and so the Soviet system was far more secure than he had hitherto acknowledged. The capstone to the period was the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, where Stalin's excesses were revealed and publicly condemned.[221]
215
Volokitina, 'Istochniki formirovaniia', p. 157; and Murashko and Noskova, 'Institut Sovet- skikh sovetnikov', p. 627.
218
Chen Jian,
220
Ted Hopf,
221
Taubman,