Mr. Kissinger’s arrival in Peking once again spotlights the well-known fact that the deployment of one million Soviet troops on the Chinese border lends legitimacy to Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s anti-Moscow stance in the eyes of his people and enables the United States to try to reassert its primacy in the world. Why then does the Soviet leadership not reduce its garrisons in Central Asia and Outer Mongolia to the pre-1969 level and thereby knock down one of the central planks of President Nixon’s foreign policy?
Generally two explanations are offered for the Soviet government’s reluctance to make so obvious a move to bolster its bargaining position. First, it is contended that in the psyche of the Soviet people the Chinese have taken the place of the Tartars, who conquered and ruled over Moscovy for several centuries with great ruthlessness.
Secondly, any number of experts have said that the Kremlin wants to be in a position to influence the outcome of the struggle for succession to Chairman Mao when he is dead or incapacitated. The implication is that in such an eventuality it can use the presence of its troops on the border as a powerful political instrument.
The second explanation is easy to dispose of inasmuch as it clearly ignores the possibility that Chairman Mao may be there for many more years, that Mr. Chou En-lai may continue to head a new collective leadership even afterwards and that by the time neither of them is available the Sino-US relations may be so firmly established as to leave their successors with no incentive to revert to the old policy of friendship with Moscow.
Explanation
The first explanation has slightly greater merit. But it, too, is not free from serious flaws. For one thing, the disparity between Soviet and Chinese power is itself so great that the Russians have no good reason to be scared of Peking. For another, the Chinese are too hard-headed to disregard military realities unless they are pressed too hard as they were by the Americans in Korea. And as for the psychological aspect of the problem, the deployment of one-half of the present strength or even less in Central Asia should suffice.
It is true that the Chinese have condemned the treaties of 1858 and 1860 which define the border between the two countries as unequal and have demanded their replacement by new pacts. But they have not formally repudiated the existing treaties and they have made it known that they do not seek territorial gains in the process of renegotiating the border.
Thus neither of the above explanations is particularly satisfactory and it is necessary to look for another. This should be sought in the relationship between the party and the military leadership in Moscow.
On a superficial view, it can be said that after 1968 when the Soviet top brass apparently played a critical role in the making of the decision to occupy Czechoslovakia, there has not been much evidence to suggest that it has been at odds with party and government leaders. But a careful study of the statements made by some of the field marshals and admirals during SALT-I negotiations with the United States and the debate over the allocation of resources will show that this has not been the case.
The outcome has been different in the two cases. While the political leadership has had its way regarding the agreement with Washington on the issue of limiting the deployment of missiles, it has had to yield to the military-industrial complex on the question of allocation of resources with the result that the primacy of heavy and basic industries has been re-established in the Soviet economy at a time when the people there are openly clamouring for consumer goods and production has fallen behind the targets in light industries and agriculture.
Compromise
The fact of the compromise becomes all the more obvious if we take note of the additional fact that since the armed clashes on the Ussuri and the consequent buildup along the Chinese border in 1969, the Kremlin has not had to waver in the single-minded pursuit of detente with the United States and Western Europe. Only some months earlier they had ordered the occupation of Czechoslovakia ostensibly on the plea of protecting it from the evil designs of the so-called western imperialists and West German revanchists.
The Soviet leaders did not provoke the clashes on the Ussuri in March that year. But they were quick to seize the opportunity these provided them not so much to put the fear of god in the minds of the Chinese as to divert to some extent the attention of the military brass from the West to the east and thereby to win for themselves somewhat greater room for manoeuvre in their dealings with the West, particularly Washington and Bonn.
Such a compromise cannot but be uneasy and perhaps also unstable. That this is so is amply illustrated by the fact that, while the political leadership has resisted Egypt’s request for “offensive” weapons even at the cost of denying itself access to highly useful naval and air bases in that country, it has had to agree to a continued expansion of the navy, a massive build-up along China’s border and restoration of heavy and basic industries to the first place in the economy.
Egypt’s case is particularly interesting because it demonstrates more than anything else the central contradiction in Soviet policy. It shows that while on the one hand the Soviet government continues its phenomenal military buildup, it is ready to deny itself the facilities that are necessary to make it effective. Surely this contradiction would have been resolved if either the triumvirate consisting of Mr. Brezhnev, Mr Kosygin and Mr. Podgorny was in a position to impose its will on the marshals or vice versa.
The Soviet Union undoubtedly faced an extremely difficult choice last summer when President Sadat served it an ultimatum that it either make good its promises in respect of “offensive” weapons or withdraw its military experts. But it would in all probability have dealt with the problem differently if it still attached the same importance to its bases in Egypt as it did when it acquired them at a truly fabulous price. It could have tried to hang on to them by appeasing President Sadat to some extent. Instead it evacuated even Mersa Matruh which it had not been asked to leave. Similarly, it withdrew its personnel far more quickly than President Sadat had expected or bargained for.
On this reckoning, the deployment of one million men along the Chinese border and the consequent aggravation of tension between the two countries suit the triumvirate in the Kremlin as much as it does Chairman Mao and Mr. Chou En-lai. Surprisingly, enough the objectives are also identical – a detente with the West and curbing the influence of the military brass.
Both sides are whipping up popular passions against each other not so much because they are scared of each other as because they find it necessary to do so in order to contain or dispose of opponents, actual as well as potential, of the current policy.
Bizarre
The situation is indeed bizarre in that the Sino-Soviet conflict has worsened while the causes that led to it in the first instance have more or less disappeared. In the ‘fifties, the Chinese opposed Mr. Khrushchev’s policy of seeking accommodation with the United States and extending economic assistance to non-communist regimes like India’s under Mr. Nehru. Now they themselves are wooing the Nixon administration with considerable ardour and for the last two years they have been spending more money on economic aid to so-called bourgeois regimes in Asia and Africa than the Soviet Union.
As a matter of form they still occasionally talk of wars of national liberation. But not many people take that seriously. In the fifties, they asked for Soviet nuclear umbrella to be able to make good their claim to the offshore islands. Today they have forsworn the use of force for settling the Formosa issue itself.
The Maoist model of economic and social development is, of course, very different from the Soviet one. But that has as best been only one factor among many in the Sino-Soviet dispute. This leaves only the border as a real source of conflict between them. But one is tempted to take the view that even that is kept going not because they cannot find an acceptable compromise but because it is not convenient to do so.
The Times of India 11 February 1973