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KHRUSHCHEV VS. MAO:

A PRELIMINARY SKETCH OF THE ROLE OF PERSONALITY IN THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT

by William Taubman

Traditional and historical differences, ideological arguments, economic and geo-political issues, even racial tensions these and other sources of the Sino-Soviet conflict have been analyzed along with the main episodes in the decades-long dispute. It has also been said that personalities of Chinese and Soviet leaders played a large role-how could they not given the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Khrushchev?—but that side of events has been less studied.

Chinese sources indicate that Mao took the Sino-Soviet conflict quite personally, that he did not have a high regard (to say the least) for Khrushchev, and that he even tried deliberately to demean the Soviet leader. As for Khrushchev, his own memoirs indicate quite clearly that Mao got under his skin. Khrushchev prefaces his account of the conflict by condemning those who imply that the split stemmed from a mere "clash of personalities." Yet he himself keeps coming back to that same cause. The trouble with Mao was his "unwillingness to consider anyone else his equal." When it came to the question of who would lead the world communist movement, “everything depends on personal characteristics, on how one or another leader feels about himself, and in which direction he directs his efforts."2

As the Communist saying goes, these and other similar references aren't accidental. Almost against his will, they register Khrushchev's conviction that the personal dimension, and in particular the clash between himself and Mao, was central.

But what was it about Mao that so irritated Khrushchev? Was Mao's ability to provoke him exceptional, or was Khrushchev in general easily provoked? What light does his conduct of SinoSoviet relations shed on Khrushchev as a leader? And how did Khrushchev's leadership affect Sino-Soviet relations?

Not all political leaders are equally

good candidates for psychological study. Those who cry out for such scrutiny (as Stalin, Mao, and Khrushchev all do) are distinguished by three traits. First, they have great power; to use Sidney Hook's well-known phrase, they are "event-making" rather than "eventful" men or women, the difference being that the former truly transform situations, whereas the latter merely attempt to cope with or respond to great changes already in progress. As paramount 3 leaders of totalitarian (or in Khrush

chev's case, perhaps, "post-totalitarchev's case, perhaps, "post-totalitarian") systems, all three men surely fit this description.

Second, all three were unique; although leaders, like ordinary citizens, are influenced by values and other ideas widely shared in their societies, Stalin, Mao, and Khrushchev nevertheless took actions and made decisions that no one else in the Soviet or Chinese leaderships would have. It is that fact that invites us to examine their personalities as a prime source of their actions.

The third criterion is a pattern of behavior that seems contradictory, irrational, and ultimately self-defeating. The importance of this is that it suggests a leader is not simply doing what a situation dictates, or what a culture encourages or allows, but rather is driven by some internal compulsion that influences his or her behavior.

Although all three traits characterize all three leaders, the focus here is Khrushchev. Not only was he extremely powerful, he was also distinctive among Stalin's potential sucessors. No one else in the Soviet leadership, I'd contend, would have (1) unmasked Stalin as Khrushchev did in his secret speech at the 20th Party Congress, (2) placed nuclear missiles secretly in Cuba, and (3) taken those same missiles out again as soon as he was caught in the act. In addition, he stood apart from his peers in three key elements of "political style": in his rhetoric (Khrushchev was as voluble, earthy, and informal as Stalin and his other colleagues were not); in his approach to work (he was hyperactive far beyond the Bolshevik norm); and in inter-personal relations (in which he counted on face-to-face encounters to gauge and to best his op

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ponents). Not only was this combination of characteristics unusual; in the end, all three traits were viewed as liabilities by Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues.

Khrushchev's rise from the humblest of origins makes his a success story. Yet almost as soon as he reached the top, his self-defeating behavior began-far from all his troubles were of his own making, of course, but many were brought on by his own actions. The Secret Speech itself triggered turmoil in Poland and then revolution in Hungary in 1956. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was the beginning of the end of Khrushchev's decade in power. And there were many other such instances in which Khrushchev's behavior ended up undermining his own position.

One of the them was the Sino-Soviet conflict itself. This article will look closely at several key episodes, focussing on Mao's behavior and Khrushchev's response, before trying to explain the pattern in terms of Khrushchev's personality.

At first, Khrushchev's relations with Mao went quite well. The Chinese need for assistance, even greater after the Korean War than before it, guaranteed Khrushchev would get a warm reception in Beijing in 1954, especially since he arrived bearing substantial gifts. Khrushchev claims in his memoirs that he returned from China warning his colleagues that "conflict between us and China is inevitable.”5 But the fact that those same memoirs misattribute to his 1954 visit the famous Khrushchev-Mao swimming pool encounter that actually occurred in the summer of 1958 suggests that he mistakenly read back into 1954 the alarm he clearly felt four years later.

Even in 1954, however, Khrushchev probably first felt experienced sort of irritation with Mao that would grow steadily over the ensuing years. It was then, for example, that he offered to return the Port Arthur naval base without even being asked to by the Chinese-only to have Mao demand that the Soviets also hand over free of charge the Soviet weaponry located there.

Until 1956, recalls Mao's doctor,

Li Zhisui, the Chinese leader welcomed Khrushchev's assumption of leadership in the Kremlin. But the latter's speech denouncing Stalin soured Mao on Khrushchev for good. Despite his own personal and other grievances against Stalin, Mao now decided the new Soviet leader was "unreliable," and after that "never forgave Khrushchev for attacking Stalin."6 Moreover, Mao hardly bothered to conceal how he felt about Khrushchev, and later practically flaunted his contempt in Khrushchev's face.

For example, during his November 1957 visit to Moscow, Mao hardly hid his disdain for his Russian hosts, their hospitality, their food, and their culture. Khrushchev was "friendly and respectful," Dr. Li recalls, and went out of his way to treat Mao as a highly honored

A New "Cult of Personality":
Suslov's Secret Report on Mao,
Khrushchev, and Sino-Soviet
Tensions, December 1959

[Ed. note: Though still masked from public view, the simmering tensions in the Khrushchev-Mao relationship burst into the open between them when the Soviet and Chinese leaderships met in Beijing on 2 October 1959. Khrushchev, who had led a delegation to attend celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, was shocked when his criticisms of recent Chinese policies provoked a furious response-and the resulting argument turned so angry that officials on both sides sought to suppress the transcript. (A secret Chinese compilation of Mao's meetings with foreign communist leaders omits this encounter, and scholars have reported finding Soviet documents indicating that the record should be destroyed.)

Nevertheless, the Soviet transcript of the meeting has survived-it was cited in Dmitrii Volkogonov's biography of Lenin-and the Cold War International History Project plans to publish it in full when it becomes available, with translation, commentary, and annotation by Mark Kramer (Harvard

guest. Yet, from the moment he arrived, "Mao was reserved and even a bit cool with Khrushchev," while in private conversations with his Chinese colleagues (which the KGB probably overheard and reported to Khrushchev), Mao overflowed with "private barbs against the Russian leader."7

During the first half of 1958, Mao's attitude toward the Soviets darkened even more drastically as he launched the "Great Leap Forward," and resolved to reduce Chinese dependence on Moscow. Ironically, it was just then that Khrushchev decided to propose still more military dependence to the Chinese in the form of a radio station on their territory to be used by Moscow for communicating with its new nuclearpowered, missile-toting submarines.

"We fully expected the Chinese to University). The excerpts below come from another recently-discovered document, a secret report on Khrushchev's trip to Beijing and meeting with Mao delivered two months later by a senior member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Suslov, to a December 1959 Plenum of CC CPSU. The excerpts suggest how the fast developing Sino-Soviet split had moved beyond political and ideological disputes into a highly-personal conflict.

The document, part of a large collection of Plenum transcripts and supporting materials recently declassified by Russian authorities, was discovered in the Center for the Storage of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD, the former CC archives) in Moscow and translated for CWIHP by Vladislav M. Zubok, a scholar based at the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute and declassified documents repository located at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (Another excerpt, on the Sino-Indian conflict, is printed after M.Y. Prozumenschikov's article elsewhere in this section of the Bulletin.) A full translation of the Suslov report is slated for publication by CWIHP along with the Mao-Khrushchev transcript noted above.]

cooperate with us when we asked for a radio station on their territory," Khrushchev recalls.8 When Mao

abruptly refused to deal with Soviet Ambassador Pavel Yudin on the issue and instead rudely demanded that Khrushchev himself come to China, the Soviet leader dropped everything and hurried off to Beijing, only to find himself the target of a new round of Maoist condescension and humiliation.

Talks on the radio stations and other military matters began politely. But when Khrushchev took too long repeating points Yudin had made, Mao openly displayed his contempt. Mao smoked throughout despite Khrushchev's well-known aversion to cigarettes. He also mocked his guest's equally familiar penchant for rambling on in disorganized fashion. Mao waved

Draft

ABOUT THE VISIT OF THE SOVIET PARTY-GOVERNMENTAL DELEGATION TO THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

[Suslov:...] The crux of the matter is that the leadership of the Chinese Communist party has recently developed tendencies to embellish its successes and capabilities, to exaggerate the degree of maturity of socialist relations in China. Their heads have gotten somewhat dizzy because China is back on her feet and became visibly stronger. There are elements of conceit and haughtiness, that became particularly visible after the second session of the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of China that took place in May of 1958 [which set China on the path toward the so-called "great leap forward" which Suslov harshly criticized-ed.].

[Suslov described a series of policy dis agreements-in foreign, domestic, military, economic, ideological-between Moscow and Beijing, and how these disputes flared up during Khrushchev's meeting with Mao and other Chinese leaders on 2 October 1959, noting that Khrushchev had remarked that the "nervousness and touchiness" of the "Chinese friends" "does not mesh well with the principle of equality and comradely relations that has become customary in the fraternal family of communist parties...we continued on page 248

his hand and said, "You've talked a long time but have still not gotten to the point."9

embarrassed,

Shocked and Khrushchev is said by a Chinese witness to have mumbled, "Yes, don't worry, I will continue," and then blamed Yudin for not making things clear. Later, when Khrushchev explained his hope to build "a common fleet" to contend with America's 7th fleet, Mao is said to have "banged his large hands against the sofa, and stood up angrily. His face turned red and his breath turned heavy. He used his finger to point impolitely at Khrushchev's nose: 'I asked you what a common fleet is. You still didn't answer me.'

By this time, Khrushchev's lips were pursed and white with strain, while his small, bright eyes flared with anger. But he swallowed hard, and as if in answer to Mao's pointing finger, spread out his arms. "I don't understand why you are acting like this," he said. "We came here just to discuss things together."

"What does it mean to 'discuss things together?"" Mao demanded. "Do we still have our sovereignty or don't we? Do you want to take away all our coastal areas?" Tracing the shape of the Chinese coastline in the air with his finger, Mao added sarcastically, "Why don't you take the whole Chinese seacoast?"10

Struggling to stay calm, Khrushchev shifted to the subject of refueling stops and shore leaves for Soviet submarines at Chinese ports. But Mao rejected the idea out of hand and continued to do so even after Khrushchev noted how NATO countries mounted just such cooperation, and sweetened the pie by offering access the Chinese access to Soviet arctic ports in

return.

"We aren't interested," replied Mao, looking at Khrushchev as if (recalls the Chinese witness) the Soviet leader "were a kid trying to do a trick in front of an adult." Moreover, when Khrushchev's face turned red with anger, Mao seemed positively pleased. "We don't want to use your Murmansk, and we don't want you to come to our country either." After that he offered a

further lecture as if to a particularly dense student: "The British, Japanese, and other foreigners who stayed in our country for a long time have already been driven away by us, Comrade Khrushchev. I'll repeat it again. We do not want anyone to use our land to achieve their own purposes anymore."

During the next day's discussions beside the pool Mao invited Khrushchev for a swim. Since the Soviet leader couldn't swim very well, he at first spluttered about in the shallow area, then clambered out with the help of attendants, and finally re-entered the pool with an inner tube. As for Mao, he watched Khrushchev's clumsy efforts with obvious enjoyment, and then dove into the deep end and swam back and forth using several different strokes. For his next trick, Mao demonstrated his skill at floating and treading water, and then, highly satisfied with himself, he swam over to Khrushchev and struck up a conversation in what a Chinese onlooker called "a relaxed, friendly and open atmosphere."11 After all, Dr. Li After all, Dr. Li continues, "the Chairman was deliberately playing the role of emperor, treating Khrushchev like the barbarian come to pay tribute. It was a way, Mao told me on the way back to Beidaihe, of 12 sticking a needle up his ass.'

To make matters worse, the substantive talks went badly. Moreover, Khrushchev's trip was followed by Beijing's shelling of the offshore islands of Quemoy [Jinmen] and Matsu [Mazu], undertaken without warning Moscow, and in order, says Dr. Li, “to demonstrate to both Khrushchev and Eisenhower that [Mao] could not be controlled, and to undermine Khrushchev in his new quest for peace." Or as Mao himself put it, "The islands are two batons that keep Khrushchev and Eisenhower dancing, scurrying this way and that. Don't you see how wonderful they are?"13

In the late summer of 1959, with an explosion building in Sino-Soviet relations, Khrushchev made his third and last trip to Beijing. Behind a facade of politeness, a series of heated clashes made even the tense 1958 talks appear warm and friendly in comparison. Khrushchev's infatuation with America,

which he had just visited, was bad enough in Chinese eyes. His request that the Chinese release two American pilots who had parachuted into Northern China during and after the Korea War, and that they accommodate the Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru, whose strong "neutralist" and "anti-imperialist" positions were all-important to the socialist camp, enraged the Chinese.

At one point in the talks, Khrushchev charged that the Chinese hadn't consulted Moscow before shelling Quemoy and Matsu in 1958. When Chen Yi counter-attacked, he provoked Khrushchev to a fury. His face turning bright red, Khrushchev shouted at Chen, "You may be a marshal in the army, and I a lieutenant general. But I am the First Secretary of the CPSU, and you are offending me."

"You are the General Secretary, all right," Chen responded. "But when you are right I listen to you, and when you are wrong I will certainly refute you."

At this, Khrushchev looked at Mao, spread his arms widely, and complained that he and his delegation were badly outnumbered in a meeting with the Chinese political bureau. "How many people do you have and how many do I have? The negotiation is unfair and unequal."

Mao smiled, recalls his interpreter, paused, and then began speaking slowly and in a low voice: "I have listened to you for a long time. You have accused us of quite a lot. You say we...did not unite with Nehru, that we shouldn't have shelled Jinmen, that the Great Leap was wrong, that we brag about ourselves as orthodox Marxists. Therefore I have an accusation for you, too— that you are guilty of 'right opportunism."14

The talks ended abruptly and unhappily. In Vladivostok, where Khrushchev stopped on the way home, he looked depressed and withdrawn. Part of the problem was sheer exhaustion after trips to both the United States and China. But what was also showing in Khrushchev's face was his frustration and rage with Chairman Mao.

The next summer, Khrushchev attacked Mao by name and was attacked in turn by Peng Chen in a fiery clash at

a Romanian Party Congress in Bucharest. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet leader decided to withdraw all Soviet advisers from China immediately, and to terminate all important contracts and projects. According to the Chinese, Moscow withdrew 1,390 experts, tore up 343 contracts, and scrapped 257 cooperative projects in science and technology, "all within the short span of a month.' 15 The immediate effects were substantial; the longer-run result was to politicize trade by adding to the long list of issues over which the two sides were now in conflict. 16 Now it was but a matter of time until a full and final rupture took place in the summer of 1963, featuring an exchange of public broadsides in which both Khrushchev and Mao came in for violent personal attacks.

With these highlights (or lowlights) of the dispute in mind, let's return to certain personal characteristics of Khrushchev that help to explain his allergic reaction to Mao.

One such trait was a combination of vaulting ambition and an extraordinarily low level of culture. Just as important was a persistent sense of inadequacy centered around his lack of education and refinement. Khrushchev's remarkable rise slaked both his ambition and his shaky sense of self-esteem. But with ever greater power and fame came more responsibility in areas about which he knew nothing, and over which he had little control. Under such circumstances there were bound to be failures, but with them came increased doubts about his own capacities, thus aggravating a moodiness, impulsiveness, and hyper-sensitivity to slight that had been there all along but were usually covered by gregariousness and extraversion.

Increasingly during his long career, Khrushchev reacted with hostility to actual or implied criticism (especially from better educated and more cultured intelligentsia types), going so far in some cases as to pursue what amounted to vendettas against his antagonists. Moreover, one round of failure led to another to which he reacted badly as well. None of this cycle, I hasten to add, can be isolated from troubles inherent in the Soviet system, and in any effort

A Crucial Step toward the Breakdown of the Sino-Soviet Alliance:
The Withdrawal of Soviet Experts from China in July 1960

by Chen Jian

For scholars of Sino-Soviet relations, that the Kremlin leadership abruptly decided in July 1960 to recall all Soviet experts working in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is not fresh information. During the great polemical debate between Beijing and Moscow in the 1960s, the Chinese leaders and media repeatedly claimed that the Soviet leadership took this action in order to put more pressure on Mao Zedong and his comrades, so that they would yield to Moscow's evil intention of maintaining China as the Soviet Union's inferior subordinate. As this decision came at a time when China was facing great economic difficulties in the wake of the "Great Leap Forward," Mao and his comrades also used it to make the Soviets the scapegoat of the Leap's disastrous aftermath. Consequently, Moscow's decision proved to be a crucial step toward the breakdown of Sino-Soviet alliance.

Despite the importance of this event, scholars have been unable to gain access to many pertinent documents. Most of our knowledge has been based on Beijing's and Moscow's official accounts, which, as one might expect, offer no more than an incomplete and sometimes distorted version of the story. Recently, however, Dieter Heinzig*, a German scholar who has extensively studied Sino-Soviet relations and is completing a monograph on the Sino-Soviet relations, 1945-1950, unearthed a key document about this event in the archives of the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) in East Berlin: a copy of the note delivered by the Soviet Embassy in Beijing to the Chinese Foreign Ministry dated 18 July 1960. It was in this note that the Soviet government formally informed Beijing that it had decided to recall all Soviet experts from China and explained in detail why it had decided to do so. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev provided a copy of the note to his Communist comrades in East Germany together with a cover letter, which introduced the background and motives of the decision, thereby 2 more or less repeating the arguments of the note.4

Reading this note, one is impressed by the depth of the divergence already present between Moscow and Beijing in 1960. Indeed, the language used in the note was serious, revealing both disappointment and anger among Soviet leaders. While presenting the reasons underlying the decision to withdraw Soviet experts from China, the Kremlin emphasized three particular grievances. First, they made it clear that they had noticed Chinese "dissatisfaction with some Soviet experts and advisors." Second, they criticized the Chinese side's "unfriendly" treatment of, and "sp[ying] on," the Soviet experts. Third, and most important, the Soviet leaders emphasized that they were extremely unhappy, even angry, about the Chinese practice of forcing the Soviet experts to embrace Beijing's viewpoints on the world situation and the orientation of the international communist movement as elaborated in the lengthy article "Long Live Leninism," which explicitly revealed that the ideological divergence between the Chinese and Soviet leaders was having a tremendous negative impact upon the development of the state relations between the two Communist powers.

A sensitive, controversial, yet central, concept pervading the Soviet note (in a more general sense, also dominating the overall development of Sino-Soviet relations) concerned “equality." Throughout the note, the Soviet leaders attempted to argue that they had always paid close attention to treating China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as other "brotherly Parties," as equals, and that the decision to withdraw Soviet experts from China was based on the belief that it would better serve a more equal relationship between the two Communist powers.

No matter how sincerely Moscow's leaders might have believed this, the leaders in Beijing would have viewed the whole issue in a radically different way. What is important here is to put the note into a historical context. During the long process of the Chinese Communist revolution, the CCP had consistently regarded itself as part of the Soviet-led international Communist movement. Mao Zedong's "lean-to-one-side” state continued on page 249

(of the sort Khrushchev, and later Gorbachev, mounted) to reform it. But neither can they be separated from the personal deterioration that Khrushchev (and Gorbachev, too?) underwent as the world they tried so hard to improve unravelled around them. The fact that Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues, who eventually ousted him, held his mishandling of relations with Mao against him, and that in part, they were correct to do so, underscores both Khrushchev's selfdestructiveness, and its impact on overall Sino-Soviet relations.

In the beginning of his decade in power, Khrushchev attached a very high priority to consolidating the relations with Beijing that he believed Stalin had put at risk. Khrushchev condemned Stalin for condescending to Mao, for regarding the Chinese leader as a kind of “cave-man Marxist,” and for manifesting "a kind of haughty arrogance" during the latter's visit to Moscow in 194950.17 Khrushchev launched his own relationship with Mao with the feeling that he could, should, and would do much better by the Chinese leader than Stalin had done. But instead of evoking Mao's gratitude and respect, the Chinese leader seemed to be condescending to him. Not only was such lack of fealty a problem in larger ideological and political terms, it grated irritatingly on Khrushchev's uneasy self of self. As a white European, Khrushchev felt a sense of superiority over the upstart Chinese. All the more devastating then that the upshot of Mao's treatment of him was to make Khrushchev himself feel inferior.

Both in 1954 and during their later meetings, Mao's negotiating methods suggested to Khrushchev that the Chinese leader was playing him for a fool. Yet that was precisely the sort of image which Khrushchev could not abide, particularly because he had been forced to trade on it for so long to survive Stalin's terrible suspiciousness toward his top lieutenants.

As one who prided himself on taking the measure of his interlocutors, Khrushchev was particularly annoyed that he couldn't figure Mao out. When Mao tried to convince him that the USSR should respond to an American

attack by retreating beyond the Urals and holding out until the Chinese entered the war, Khrushchev was not only appalled by the idea itself, he was upset that he couldn't tell whether the Chinese leader was being serious.

"I looked at him closely," Khrushchev recalls. “I couldn't tell from his face whether he was joking or not."18 Later, when he better understood Mao's bluster about standing up to the United States even at the risk of nuclear war, Khrushchev decided that "Mao obviously regarded me as a coward."19

Given his chip-on-the-shoulder attitude toward his own Soviet intelligentsia, the last thing Khrushchev needed. was to feel intimidated by Mao's philosophical pretensions. In this context, consider the pompous way Mao alluded to Khrushchev's mistakes and then forgave them in a speech in Moscow in 1957: "Lenin once said that there is not a single person in the world who does not make mistakes. I have made many mistakes and these mistakes have been beneficial to me and taught me a lesson. Everyone needs support. An able fellow need the support of three other people, a fence needs the support of three stakes. These are Chinese proverbs. Still another Chinese proverb says with all its beauty the lotus needs the green of its leave to set it off. You, comrade Khrushchev, even though you are a beautiful lotus, you too need leaves to set you off. I, Mao Tse-tung, while not a beautiful lotus, also need leaves to set me off. Still another Chinese proverb says three cobblers with their wits combined equal Zhuge Liang, the master mind. This corresponds to comrade Khrushchev's slogan-collective leadership."20

Even with a perfect translation into Russian, it wasn't clear whether Mao's words were a compliment. At this stage of their relationship, Mao's sin wasn't a direct personal challenge, but rather his maddening inscrutability.

Knowing Khrushchev's aversion to being criticized, one can imagine the effort it took to contain himself in the face of Mao's attacks. Ever since 1954 he had gone out of his way to give the Chinese almost everything they wanted.

Khrushchev later claimed that he took Mao's 1958 sallies equably and even self-critically, since he understood how the Soviet request for radio stations on Chinese territory could rub the Chinese 21 the wrong way. But that claim reveals

more about his desire to be seen by history as mature and statesman-like than about his actual mood at the time.

Khrushchev claims he wasn't intimidated by Mao's swimming prowess: "Of course, I couldn't compete with Mao in the pool—as everyone knows, he's since set a world record for both speed and distance. I'm a poor swimmer and I'm ready to take my hat off to Mao when it comes to swimming. But if he didn't acknowledge what Dr. Li calls this "insult," surely that was because Khrushchev wouldn't admit to being humiliated.

Khrushchev's withdrawal of Soviet advisers was as self-defeating as it was crude and precipitous. The adverse economic impact affected both sides. Moreover, Moscow lost the chance to exert influence, and to derive invaluable intelligence from advisers in China. The then Soviet Ambassador in China, Stepan Chervonenko, recalls he was "amazed" at news of the withdrawal, and took steps to try to prevent it. "We sent a telegram to Moscow. We said the move would be a violation of international law. If our help to the Chinese must end, then at least let the advisers stay until their contracts were up. We hoped that in the meantime, things 23 would get patched at the top.'

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Nor was Chervonenko the only Soviet official appalled by Khrushchev's action. Leonid Brezhnev's former aide, AleksandrovAgentov later traced the beginning of "internal split between the leader [Khrushchev] and his own associates" to a series of "impulsive foreign policy measures that damaged our own state interests. All you have to remember is the unexpected pull-out from China of not only of our military but also economic advisers-all in spite of existing agreements and contracts. Why? Because of the ideological argument and the rivalry between Khrushchev and Mao...."24

The withdrawal of advisers reflects

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