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The Peking-Moscow Axis:
Who Is Top Dog?
- Abstract
ON DECEMBER 16, 1949, two and a half months after the inauguration in Peking of the “Central People’s Government of the Chinese People’s Republic,” Mao Tse-tung arrived in Moscow. It was a great historic occasion when the new ruler of China, fresh from the conquest through civil war of the most populous country in the world, came to pay his respects to his elder brother in the Marxist- Leninist faith, the man who was the heir of the Russian October Revolution and the conqueror of Berlin. Mao had long talks with Stalin, toured the Soviet Union, and did not get back to China until the beginning of March of 1950. On Soviet soil he could feel proud of his own achievement and carry himself as a person of real importance; he did not have to behave with humility as if he were a leader of a Communist party which had never made a revolution. His relations to the master of the Kremlin were nevertheless those of a junior to a senior, of a pupil to a teacher. His regime was less than a dozen weeks old, but thirty-two years had passed since the Bolsheviks took power in Russia; the new China looked to Moscow for instruction and advice, for material economic aid and for military protection. Mao might or might not follow Soviet recommendations in making his own major policy decisions, but he was certainly not at this time disposed to tell Stalin how to conduct Soviet foreign policy or to explain to him the implications of Marxist-Leninist doctrine in the current world situation.
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