Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World

摘要

Everyone who studies either Russia or China, or both, is familiar with the split that cleaved these two communist giants apart. It was not a clean break, nor did it happen overnight. The seeds of the split were contained in the main conclusions from the USSR's 20th Party Congress, which, in hindsight, was riven with unintended consequences for the fate of the socialist world. The Chinese were very unhappy about Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalin and his terror tactics of governing, but they also disagreed with the new emphasis on "peaceful co-existence" with the West, the Soviet insistence that it was possible to achieve a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism, and the idea of collective leadership. Jeremy Friedman has beautifully illuminated how these unanticipated consequences played out in the Third World in his book Shadow Cold War.