When the communists took power in China, their alliance with the USSR seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. However, relations between the red powers did not go as expected. Mainly because Stalin was not at all happy with the victory of his brother party.
Mao strove for a long time to meet the leader of the world revolution. He wanted to go to Moscow as early as 1947, before his crackdown with the Kuomintang was over. But then he heard from Stalin that - as he put it in the book "Mao. The Empire of Suffering "Torbjørn Færøvik -" should stay in China until the end of the civil war. " "Mao was not happy with this answer," adds the author.
Even when the victory over Chiang Kai-shek's troops was a foregone conclusion, the Soviet dictator found more reasons to postpone the meeting. On January 10, 1949, he wrote to the Chinese leader:
Regarding your trip to Moscow, we think that (...) you should unfortunately postpone it once again, as the trip to Moscow in these conditions will be used by our enemies to discredit the Chinese Communist Party and to suggest that it is not independent but dependent on Moscow, which would naturally be inconvenient for both the CCP and the USSR.
Mao strove for a meeting with Stalin for a long time. Photo from a trip to Moscow in 1940.
It was not until the summer of the same year that Stalin welcomed Mao's deputy, Liu Shaoqi, and assured him that the Soviet Union fully supported communist China. The first summit meeting took place after the proclamation of the People's Republic of China, on December 16, 1949. And it didn't go well.
"It has to be something not only beautiful but also tasty"
He had already met the Chinese commander's affront at the Jarosławski Railway Station, where he arrived on December 16 at exactly 12 o'clock. He was admitted by important Soviet dignitaries, including Vyacheslav Molotov, but the host himself was missing. Moreover, the greeters declined the invitation to eat together on the train.
Equally - if not more awkward - was the 6 pm "audience". This is how Torbjørn Færøvik describes its beginning in the book Mao. An empire of suffering ” :
Stalin started the conversation, congratulating Mao and the Chinese communists on their victory in the civil war. “You are a good son of China. We hope you will always be healthy and strong. " Mao thanked him, but instead of emphasizing the positive side of the meeting, began to complain that he had been sidelined for a long time , referring to the fact that Stalin had long been suspicious of him.
"Winners are untouchable," replied the Soviet dictator . - Victory is decisive. […] It is always like that ”. Mao paused, and Stalin asked what Mao expected from his visit to Moscow. "It has to be something not only beautiful but also tasty," replied Mao.
The leader of the Chinese communists, who was fond of metaphors, wanted to signal to Stalin that he wanted the meeting not to end with clichés, but to bring about specific solutions. But he was not understood. Worse, his suggestion that the USSR and the PRC should conclude a cooperation agreement was omitted in Stalin's plethora of vague deliberations on world peace.
The last bitter pill of the day turned out to be ... the place of accommodation. Mao did not receive peace in the Kremlin, but was taken to Stalin's dacha near the city. And there, surrounded by Soviet guards, he spent the next days.
The Chinese delegation's visit was so protracted that it aroused suspicion in the West. The press has even speculated that Mao is in fact imprisoned. He himself was not far from that thought. “I have three tasks here. Firstly, sleep, secondly, eat, and thirdly, shit ” - he complained.
During the visit, Mao took part in the celebration of Stalin's seventieth birthday. Picture from the book “Mao. An empire of suffering ”.
The world according to Stalin
Why did Stalin accept the leader of the brotherly power with such disrespect? First of all, the victory of the communists in China was very unfit for him. As the post-war order was settled at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, he promised US and UK leaders that he would not support the CCP. The Big Three also agreed that the Kuomintang should rule in the Middle Kingdom. In return for this concession, Stalin obtained permission to reattach to the USSR the lands lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.
As a result, as early as August 1945, the USSR signed an alliance treaty with representatives of the Chiang Kai-shek government. He did not even bother to inform the communists who had been fighting the Kuomintang earlier. It was only after the fact that they found out that they could not count on any support from Moscow.
Stalin, using his position as leader of the world revolution, even tried to actively counteract the emergence of a strong people's China. As Mao's biographer Maurice Meisner writes:
On the eve of the victory of the Chinese communists, [Stalin - ed. A.W.] advised that the Chinese People's Liberation Army should not cross the Yangtze River and that the civil war should end with the establishment of a communist regime in the north of China and a Kuomintang state in the south. The indicated goal of such a solution was to avoid provoking direct US intervention.
Stalin still defended the Kuomintang in 1947, dissuading the Chinese communists from continuing the offensive in the south.
Indeed, there are many indications that Stalin feared that any friendly gestures towards Mao could provoke protests in the West and disturb the already fragile post-Yalta balance of power. Meisner adds another important factor to this. He believes that the Kremlin dictator was afraid of Mao's competition as the leader of the communist regime in a united China. Earlier, there had been a split in the Eastern bloc when the domination of the USSR was questioned by the leader of Yugoslavia, Josif Broz Tito. The Chinese president, who was the head of a huge state, could become a much more formidable rival.
"Margarine communists"
Stalin's personal antipathy undoubtedly contributed to the bad reception that the leaders of the Communist Party of China received in Moscow. He never really supported Mao in his quest for power. In his place, he would prefer, for example, Wang Ming, who has openly presented pro-Soviet orientation for years. However, all attempts to build a "Bolshevik" faction and remove Mao have failed. The unwanted partner strengthened its position for good after the Long March at the turn of 1934 and 1935.
Also not without significance was the fact that the Soviet dictator did not actually consider the CCP activists to be true communists . Even Mao saw that his party lacked workers, that is, if we believe Marx and Lenin, the main revolutionary force. It was based mainly on the peasantry.
But it is one thing to admit imperfections on your own, and another to hear about it from others. "Mao was offended by Stalin's suspicions that the Chinese communists are a bunch of peasants who have no idea of Marxism-Leninism ”Writes Torbjørn Færøvik in his book “ Mao. An empire of suffering ” .
Stalin expressed himself even more forcefully in talks with representatives of the American administration. To William Harriman, the US ambassador to the USSR, he told the Chinese that the Chinese were not real, but "margarine" communists - whatever that meant. Molotov echoed him, declaring that the Middle Kingdom fighters described themselves as communists, but "are in no way associated with communism."
The mocking did not end there. Apparently, the Red Tsar also compared Chinese activists to… a radish, red on the outside but white on the inside. Among his closest colleagues, he called Mao "Pougatcheff", referring to the leader of the unsuccessful 18th-century people's uprising.
Mao's visit to Moscow was commemorated with an occasional series of stamps.
In December 1949, when Mao came to Moscow, all these sentiments were still alive. The Kremlin hosts went so far as to invite their guests to a ballet showing a fragment of the history of the Chinese Civil War. The problem is that, according to the authors of the play, the communists were saved by ... Soviet sailors! “The performance had nothing to do with historical facts, Chen Boda, Mao's secretary, felt offended. He jumped up suddenly and marched out of the hall at the head of the rest of the Chinese delegation, "says Færøvik.
Despite these insults, however, Stalin had to recognize the victory of the Chinese communists in the end. For this reason, Mao's humiliating visit resulted in a cooperation agreement signed in February 1950. On paper at least, the two red powers have become allies. Not for long. The events of the following years showed clearly - as Mao put it in 1958 - that the Russians "never had faith in the Chinese people, and Stalin was the worst at it.
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