imagine how the fabric of a country could have been more thoroughly
shredded from within and without.
Almost as soon as Stalin died, in 1953, the untenable nature of the
Soviet empire began to reveal itself to the outside world, and it wasn’t
long before the fraternal solidarity that had existed between the Soviets
and the Chinese since 1949 began to break down as well. The stresses
began to tell in the late 1950s, after Mao accused Stalin’s more moderate
successor, Nikita Khrushchev, of betraying Marx’s vision. China, then in
the throes of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, was mimicking some of Lenin’s
and Stalin’s most disastrous policies and programs with one result being
that the country suffered the worst famine in its history—perhaps in all of
history. Between 1958 and 1962, China strove to create an illusion of
industrial progress by producing ton upon ton of useless low-grade steel,
but it did so at the expense of basic food production. Not only did the
massive project draw countless workers away from the fields, it claimed
their tools as well: in a futile effort to reach unattainable production
quotas, even shovels and plowshares were melted down. Hoping to save
face and conceal the true costs of this Great Leap Forward, China
continued to export grain (to Russia, among other countries) with the
result that tens of millions of peasants starved to death.
In an effort to deflect the blame for this catastrophe, Mao chastised
Khrushchev for recalling China’s Soviet advisors and for calling in the
substantial debts China had incurred during the Korean War. In fact,
China’s Communist Party was in the midst of a vicious power struggle,
which Mao would win, but at enormous national cost. Many in the
Kremlin, still recovering from thirty years of Stalin, saw a frighteningly
familiar scenario developing with Mao’s own cult of personality, and this
was one of several reasons the Soviets sought to distance themselves
from their communist “little brother.” As relations deteriorated, the
tension manifested itself along contested sections of their shared border,
which, at the time, was 4,650 miles long. The scabs Mao chose to pick at
were more than a century old, but they served his purpose well.
The wounds Mao sought to reopen had been inflicted during the
nineteenth century when the future superpowers were grinding against
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