Not long ago Arne Westad, now at Harvard's Kennedy School, did us all an exceptional service in unravelling the interstices of the Soviet Union's rivalry with the United States in the Third World during the 1970s and 1980s; above all by keenly exploiting newly available Russian and South African archives.Footnote ¹ Relatively speaking a novice, Jeremy Friedman, also newly hired at Harvard, has gone one step further. He has charted the course of Soviet rivalry with China, by exploiting the even more exotic Chinese Foreign Ministry archives in a book that might equally have been entitled “Parallel Cold War.” The only major missing piece in the full Cold War mosaic is now Cuba, from the Cuban archives; which, I understand, some are already working on.

Friedman has produced a fascinating book marred only by the omission of both primary and secondary literature. It is easily forgotten that the Sino-Soviet dispute had its soil turned over repeatedly and highly productively in the days before the international relations of the Cold War had become the subject of archival history, when the close reading of newspapers became an arcane skill and when those working the ground as professors were strictly confined to political science departments.

The topic was then a hotspot for those such as Donald Zagoria, John Gittings, and William Griffth over half a century ago. It has subsequently returned as a favored topic for historians armed with the requisite languages; in itself no mean feat.Footnote ² Access to new archives is always to be welcome, but Cold War historians should never overlook what was already done before the archives opened and what insights were already available therefrom. In this particular case, one should not forget the extraordinary benefit of specialist training in language and area studies from the US government (RAND), and Rockefeller foundation funding made available from the early years of the Cold War. As a result, an unusual amount of expertise already existed before now to tell the story of Sino-Soviet relations from both sides. Those early accounts, especially from those with access to CIA or bureau of intelligence and research reports, are still well worth revisiting.

Friedman, however, appears unaware of that rich heritage. He confidently asserts that the Sino-Soviet dispute was “very difficult for contemporaries to decipher” (215). This is a big claim, but it is not one borne out by the facts. It was not at all difficult to decipher; rather it was difficult, if not impossible, to act on the basis of that understanding. America's key ally, Great Britain, was well aware very early on how awkward relations would be between Beijing and Moscow. The communists had captured the Chinese capital, Beijing, in October 1949 and they had, after awkward negotiations, signed an unequal alliance with the Russians in February 1950. The North Koreans, aided and abetted from Moscow, then invaded the South in June. With the Korean war at its height, Yakov Malik, then Soviet ambassador to the UN, lectured his British counterpart at length and in private “on the tendency of the Chinese to regard all foreigners as devils, not only those who ‘come by sea’ but also those who ‘come by land.’”Footnote ³ From 1953, with the Korean War effectively over, the British mission in Beijing under Humphrey Trevelyan was primed to sense the slightest differences that arose between the Russians and their new Chinese allies.Footnote ⁴ The dispute that arose may have looked like the US Government did not easily decipher it only because, out of sheer prejudice, Washington chose not to draw the consequences of expert analysis from both sides of the Atlantic.

It has always been a big mistake to treat American foreign policy as if it were European, the product of executive fiat, as George Kennan had always wished it would be and as Henry Kissinger did his best to make it become. That is why researchers should never sensibly confine themselves to the politics of the administration and ignore the impact of Congress, as usually reflected in the press. Until as late as 1969 the United States, under President Richard Nixon, never accomplished the obvious by driving a wedge between Beijing and Moscow—which Secretary of State Dean Acheson, for one, advocated—despite what some historians would have you believe; and for good reason. Cold War policy, particularly in East Asia, was never exclusively in the hands of the administration but also in the hands of those on the Hill. The McCarthyist political climate just made a purely executive-led foreign policy impossible; certainly on somewhere as sensitive as China. Instead, Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson, a Chiang Kai-shek man to the last, insisted that “the interests of the two countries lie together,” and told his boss Secretary of State Foster Dulles in 1955 that “there is no hope whatsoever of Mao Zedong becoming a ‘Titoist.’”Footnote ⁵ Because Robertson had political reach way beyond that of Dulles, his word carried weight. Although Eisenhower was temperamentally more sanguine and CIA chief Allen Dulles was on the mark as early as 1957, his more influential brother Foster, advised by Robertson, was unpersuaded for ideological reasons that recognition of communist China was an option, as the National Security Council minutes clearly demonstrate.Footnote ⁶ There was, furthermore, far too much support on the Hill for Chiang Kai-shek to do anything else. The implications for a policy of viewing the dispute as serious were too much for the administration to bear.

Friedman's originality is in dealing with the consequences—where he is on the right track—rather than the causes of the dispute. The consequences worked themselves out from the early sixties through to the end of the Brezhnev era. Friedman sees rivalry between Beijing and Moscow for the Third World as essentially between an Asiatic China, self-consciously representing the anti-imperialism of the Third World against a metropolitan and “European” Russia that could not actually identify itself fully with the Third World. This ethnic and developmental divide always lurked at the core of the Chinese revolution. Indeed, from his lofty perch in the Kremlin, presiding over the first communist revolution, Stalin saw China as an asset but not necessarily a communist one. Viacheslav Molotov had once described Mao Zedong's men as “margarine” communists. Stalin made a point of addressing Mao as “Mr.” rather than “comrade.” In turn, sensitive to the most trivial slight, Mao saw it as an implicitly insulting demotion of the revolution from being socialist to merely anti-imperialist.Footnote ⁷

The crucial arena for competition between the two Communist heavyweights was the Third World. Two decades after Mao seized power, the Russians won the argument against Maoist ultra-leftism that emerged from the so-called Cultural Revolution. It also won hands down the battle of resources in competition against the Chinese in the 1970s by backing the insurgencies against western influence in the Third World. Yet, as Friedman ably documents, the Russians lost the war. This became blindingly obvious after four modernizations that pulled China out of economic stagnation from 1978, well before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–92. A vast amount of Soviet money was squandered on the Third World under both Khrushchev and Brezhnev to no lasting effect, economic or political. Under Boris Yeltsin Russia retreated to the Kremlin towers, as Chinese state capitalism began truly successful penetration in the 1990s, this time in greedy search of primary commodities and markets. Yet Moscow had great difficulty reconciling itself to treating China as the rising star, as a pioneer in opening up a stagnant command economy to the headwinds of the market worthy of imitation. This indicates the huge journey of the mind separating these two countries for centuries.

Detailing these events is no mean task, since the entire range of detailed subject matter is not easy to encompass. Its scope is nothing less than global. Inevitably we learn more about some regions—Africa as against Latin America (nothing was apparently found in Chilean archives despite their listing)—than others; and where the archives yield little, memoirs and a plethora of secondary sources fill some of the gap. Thus, it would be a surprise if the results were definitive.

Plenty of room still exists for others to follow down paths untrodden. In particular, the whole area of policy making and debate is now much easier to research than it once was, as I found in writing my own account of these years, which Friedman appears not to have read.Footnote ⁸ Other lacunae need mention. For example, Friedman uses a few published writings of the Central Committee apparatchik Karen Brutents, who is a far from reliable witness; yet he fails to make any use of the unpublished diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev, who worked alongside him. These are primary documents of first-rate importance. Volumes of Chernyaev's diaries for years crucial to Friedman's account (1972–1976) are freely available on the website of the National Security Archive in Washington DC (www.nsarchiv@gw.edu) in Russian and in translation, a veritable treasure trove of material that encompasses Latin America as well as Russia.

Although Chernyaev specialized in Europe (most notably Germany), he was inevitably drawn into global issues, especially during policy discussions at Zavidovo, the Party General Secretary's country retreat. To give just one example: we have an account from him about the beginning of 1976 of how Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko wanted to cancel his visit to Japan on the grounds that nothing would be gained as the Russians had no intention of returning the northern territories seized in 1945. Chernyaev and others persuaded General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev that he had to go, however, not least to stop Japan from moving completely to the side of China. Moreover, there is hardly anything in Friedman's book on the role of Yuri Andropov who, before taking over the KGB, played a crucial role in amplifying the importance of the socialist countries, including China, for Soviet policy, and greatly expanded research in this neglected area. Here we would have benefited from some coverage of Mikhail Titorenko and the Institute of Far Eastern studies set up in 1966: very much a creature of Andropov's, which gained ever more influence during the Cultural Revolution and after Andropov's ascent to the KGB a year later. Although it is not a big story, Soviet attempts to outflank Chinese patronage of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1966 were one of the factors leading up to the Six Day War in June 1967. Consulting the two volumes of documents from the Soviet Foreign Ministry for the fifties and sixties would have revealed as much.Footnote ⁹

Intellectually, Shadow Cold War could have amounted to little, despite all the toil in the archives, if the author had merely followed the practices of others who tend to be totally immersed in the recent past to the detriment of the longer term. They are hypnotized by the intricate web of diplomacy detached from the fundamentals of domestic policy; aware, at most, of the importance of foreign languages sufficiently to employ translators, perhaps to work in foreign archives, but oblivious to the roots of alien cultures. Friedman has instead taken the trouble to think through the distinctive nature of both the Russian and Chinese revolutions and the complexity of their interaction. It is here that the fine-grained history he writes distinguishes itself from the more pedestrian and moralistic accounts of international relations in the Cold War. It is also very well written. His judgements are always carefully balanced and, for all the reservations made above, Friedman's reliance upon existing secondary sources is cautiously nuanced.