For the leaders of the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China, formally committed to an ideology that predicted world revolution, establishing their leadership of that world revolutionary process was both an ideological necessity and a grand strategic imperative. The latter was the case because neither Imperial Russia nor Republican China enjoyed the economic and political conditions that seemed necessary to build a socialist utopia on its own, and both Bolsheviks in Russia and the Chinese Communist Party found themselves surrounded by hostile forces upon taking power.
Though the imperatives of more narrow Soviet political interest would at times override those of world revolution, the claim to be the leader of the world revolution remained central to the role the USSR attempted to play on the world stage and to the support that it commanded around the globe. Emerging victorious after World War II, with expanded global influence and a phalanx of satellites in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union could claim more strongly than ever that history was on its side. It soon found itself in a direct confrontation with the United States, first in Europe and then in the rest of the world, over ideology and influence.
In time, though, the revolutionary battleground shifted, away from the booming West toward the decolonizing South, and with this shift the degree of unity that Moscow had managed to achieve within the Communist movement at the end of the war began to crumble.
Decolonization changed the terms of the anticipated world revolution. It put the question of revolutionary war squarely on the table in a way that it had not been arguably since the Red Army was stopped outside Warsaw in 1920.
It changed the economic questions from ones about how to reorganize an industrial economy along socialist lines to others about how to rescue nations from abject poverty and construct an industrial economy from the ground up. Finally, it put race and nation, rather than class, at the center of revolutionary discourse in many places.
By itself, this placed the Soviet leadership, in competition with the West for influence in the decolonizing world, in a difficult spot. However, despite the best efforts of some, the postcolonial states never managed to form a united front that could have offered an alternative to the USSR as the leader of the world revolutionary process. It took the People’s Republic of China, a power of similar ambition and immense size, to crystallize the threat that decolonization posed to Soviet revolutionary leadership into one that could actually present a true alternative. The PRC, a nonwhite, non-European, primarily agrarian nation which had suffered tremendously from the depredations of imperialism, managed to rally others in its challenge to the Soviet agenda and revolutionary model, and, for a while, it threatened Soviet influence in Asia, Africa, and to some degree in Latin America as well.
In part, the Chinese leadership felt compelled to mount this challenge in order to build its own global constituency to protect it from American aggression and Soviet betrayal. As a result, the Soviets now were waging a two-front struggle against the United States on one side and China on the other. While much has been written about the first of these struggles, much less has been written about the second, and that which has been written has focused on the bilateral Sino-Soviet relationship rather than the competition between these two nations for influence around the world.
Viewed from the perspective of the global competition between the USSR and the PRC, it becomes clear that the divide between the Soviets and the Chinese ran deeper than personal rivalries or domestic politics. It reflected a much more profound tension between two different revolutionary agendas, agendas that were not the sole province or concern of either Moscow or Beijing.
Reprinted from Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World by Jeremy Friedman. Copyright 2015 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.