Brothers in Arms (44 page)

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Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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munist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee (CPSU CC), which provide the official, written chronicle of the relationship. These archives, like any in the world, present the researcher with various problems and questions, which are detailed below, so I have augmented the official record with interviews with Soviets who actually worked for the program in China. This often includes both the person who administered the program for the Soviet government and a number of the advisers themselves.
In this chapter, the archival information, the interviews, and advisers' unpublished memoirs are all used to sketch the outlines of the Soviet Advisors' Program. The sources are combined and checked against each other as much as possible, and the result is rather like a bumpy, handmade weaving. Since this is a slightly unusual approach, the next sections detail the problems and opportunities that each source presents.
Sources
The documentary evidence for this chapter comes mostly from the CPSU CC International Department, which oversaw and managed the Soviet Union's relationships with other countries.

1
In using these files extensively, three problems arose.

First, there is the problem of bias and omission. The Communist Party's very structured hold on Soviet society during the 1950s ensured that reports filed to the CPSU CC would be biased. Almost all sources of information in the archives emanated from Communist Party members, whether diplomats, both Soviet and from other socialist countries, government officials, officers of the Committee of State Security (KGB), journalists, members of youth groups, or trade union officials. In the 1950s the Communist Party carefully selected and screened the people it sent abroad, and moreover, all of the chosen understood what could and could not be reported back to the CPSU CC.
The situation is best illustrated by looking at the period we now know as the beginning of the demise of the Sino-Soviet friendship, the mid-to late 1950s. Sometime after 1956, the Chinese began to discuss openly and frankly in the press the problems they had with the "Soviet model" and its implementation. While this type of discussion no doubt bothered the Soviet Communist Party, little evidence of it appears in the Central Committee files from the same period. Instead, the reports filed to the CPSU CC reported "business as usual." It is not clear to researchers whether this indicates a simple lack of honest information on the part of the Central Committee's informants, or whether the files were altered before scholars gained access. In any case, whole periods of time pass without mention in the files, while in other files, memoranda are alluded to but not available.

 

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The second problem with relying on the files of the CPSU CC is the very bureaucratic organization of the Central Committee itself. At various times several committees, departments, and subdepartments existed, all with roughly the same area of responsibility. These administrative divisions slowed communication between departments and involved them in much needless paperwork. Any small problem that needed to be resolved grew cumbersome if it involved the CPSU CC and some department from another interested party, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition, those who worked in the various departments were extremely circumspect and loath to make a decision, which often hampered their bosses' ability to obtain a realistic appraisal of the situation in China.
Third, judging by the organization of the CPSU CC, China was not a major priority in the 1950s. In 1949 the Soviet Union made a big show of recognizing China as the People' s Republic of China (PRC). However, within the CPSU CC apparatus, China did not rate the same departmental status as the other people's democracies for several years. China was shelved into departments and subdepartments with other non-Communist countries, while the other people's democracies had a department devoted exclusively to each. In March 1953 the Central Committee International Department was reorganized, and China appeared collectively with Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Only in May 1957 was China elevated to the status of a people's democracy in the CC apparatus, and by that time the relationship was already deteriorating.

2

Revelations
3
Despite their problems, the Communist Party files do expand the existing historical record, which until now has consisted mostly of oft-repeated, CPSU-sanctioned information. For work on the 1950s Sino-Soviet relationship, the Communist Party archives can help to illuminate the historical record in three important areas. These three, which are discussed in detail below, concern the actual beginning of the program, its scope, and the effect of CPSU management on Sino-Soviet relations.
Almost all Soviet sources that document the Sino-Soviet friendship present the decade of the 1950s as a period of Soviet assistance to a needy ally. Recent Western scholarship has postulated that substantive Soviet assistance did not begin until after Stalin's death in 1953. The new work on this period suggests that in most fields, during the first three years of the existence of the People's Republic, the Chinese relied not on Soviet advisors but mostly on books and articles translated from Russian into Chinese.
4
Evidence in the Soviet Communist Party archives seems to confirm this hypothesis, for there is little in the archives about the program until 1954.

 

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While it is clear that the Soviet presence in China increased immediately after the signing of the pact in February 1950,

5
most of the visitors were artistic delegations and Communist Party officials.
6
The Sino-Soviet alliance was not as friendly as both countries wanted the outside world to believe. The relationship between Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin was fraught with mutual suspicion and even hostility, and Soviet assistance to China remained minimal.

With Stalin's death and Nikita Khrushchev's ascent to power, the personal encumbrances of the relationship were lessened, at least for a few years, and the dynamic between the countries altered drastically. A genuine program to help China reconstruct itself with Soviet assistance began, and advisers from nearly all major Soviet ministries arrived in China to begin work. Thus in 1954 began the bulk of the labor for which the Soviet Advisors' Program is remembered, that of building roads, industry, bridges, and factories throughout China.
Another claim that sources in the Communist Party archives calls into question is the Soviet-era assertion that the Soviet Union sent more than 10,000 specialists to China between 1950 and 1959. While this figure is always quoted, without attribution,
7
to demonstrate the seriousness of the Soviet Union's commitment to China, the truth is that there appears to be no official count of the number of advisors in China or how many months or years each spent there.
8
(Likewise, there also have been many Soviet calculations of the economic impact of Soviet assistance to China, yet sources are not clearly cited.)
9
The archives present evidence of the level and type of Soviet commitment to China during the first quarter of 1954. We can see where the 403 Soviets were placed, for instance, but there is no mention of how long each spent in China. Soviets were working at the following Chinese ministries and administrations:
Advisers
Location
49
Ministry of Fuel Industry
45
Ministry of Heavy Industry
3
Ministry of Construction Work
22
First Ministry of Machine-Building
3
Second Ministry of Machine-Building
9
Ministry of Geology
6
Ministry of Light Industry
2
Ministry of Textile Industry
5
Ministry of Agriculture
4
Ministry of Water Economy
(
vodnoe khozyaistvo
)
11
Timber Industry
18
Ministry of Railroads

 

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6
Ministry of Communications
14
"GAS" (interpreters)
8
Gosplan
1
Political-Judicial Committee
1
Ministry of Finance
6
Ministry of Trade
2
All-China Cooperation ("
Kooperatsiya
")
2
People' s Bank
17
Ministry of Health
127
Ministry of Higher Education
13
Ministry of Education
22
Central Committee CCP
3
Ministry of Culture
1
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
2
"NOA" (Spanish language teachers)
1
Committee of the Affairs of Physical Culture and Sport
Of these 403 Soviet specialists in China in early 1954, almost 80 percent (318) were in Beijing; 43 Soviets worked in Harbin, 8 in Shenyang, 7 in Anshan, 4 in Tianjin, 3 in Dalian, 3 in Shanghai, 9 in southern China, and 8 in Urumchi. Broken down very roughly, about 45 percent of the Soviet Advisors worked in industry, transport, and communications; 35 percent worked in educational establishments; and 20 percent were placed in various government and party bureaucracies.

10

The third aspect of the Sino-Soviet relationship on which the CPSU files shed light is how the management style of CPSU advisers in China affected its relationship with that country. An excellent example of the unintended benefits of reading unexpurgated files is provided by a report filed in 1954
11
by Soviet diplomat Nikolai Fedorenko.
12
Fedorenko's description allows an inside look at the Advisors' Program and at the scope of Soviet involvement in China. Not surprisingly, the Central Committee's approach to foreign policy was exactly the same as its management in the Soviet Union. In both cases, the CPSU issued centralized directives from above, showed almost complete disregard for those whom its decrees and decisions affected, exhibited a mania for security, and displayed a general lack of supervision of workers at the lower levels.
Fedorenko discusses the inner workings of an unnamed group of high-level bureaucrats, who are referred to as the Senior Soviet Advisors. Following the party habit of issuing decrees from the top, he writes about how the advisers dis-

 

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cussed improving the quality of the experts' and technicians' work and establishing closer, more businesslike relations with the leaders of the various Chinese ministries and departments. Then they turned their attention to what they considered China's pressing problems. The deliberation ranged from the role of the Soviet Union in China's first Five-Year Plan, the possibilities for developing several sectors of industry in particular, copper production, chemical production of coke (
kokskhimicheskaya
), and the production of bulk plastics to the development of electric power stations.
The senior advisors also discussed the many problems to be solved in various areas in which they thought China particularly weak, such as in project planning (
proektirovanie
) and geological scouting (
razvedki
), which were blamed for slowing down construction in many places. They targeted these areas, plus efforts in the People's Republic in city planning, to expedite work that they had planned for future projects. In other areas they discussed methods to improve the sale of industrial products and ways for creating a single plan for rail and water transport development.
The report stated that the senior advisors listened to an account of Soviet specialists who had been sent to Xinjiang Province to look into the problems of animal husbandry. They also heard a talk detailing the activities of a group of Soviet energy experts in China that discussed various problems and criticisms of their work. The senior advisors then made some suggestions for improvement.
Following the CPSU habit of issuing decrees with little regard for their effect, the report implies that all of these decisions were made by upper-level Soviet advisors, and few, if any, Chinese were involved in the discussions. Not one Chinese participant is mentioned. The report simply states that the Senior Soviet Advisors, after discussing China's various problems, made their recommendations and immediately dispatched them to the heads of the relevant ministries in the People's Republic. The Soviets sent the proposals for what they considered China's most urgent problems immediately to the directors of government administrations. Fedorenko reported that the senior advisors felt that this would guarantee quicker implementation of the suggestions.
Fedorenko also included examples of how well the procedure worked. Evidently this group of Soviets had earlier pinpointed Chinese labor as an area that needed reform. So, according to Fedorenko, in January 1954 the Soviet advisors recommended that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) CC order its Ministry of Labor, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, and other relevant ministries to collaborate on labor issues.
According to this account, the Chinese government immediately directed various agencies to work on strengthening labor discipline among Chinese workers and to create a system of payment of wages, social security, and labor protec-

 

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