Zagoria Donald. The Sino-Soviet Conflict 1956-1961.

(Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1962): 236-244.

Zagoria’s account of the development of the Sino-Soviet split is notable for being

published in 1962, when this process was still in full swing. Secondary sources that

were written in close temporal proximity to the events in question contain more narrative

and analysis than historiographical argumentation, and also contain a unique type of

bias or even incorrect information stemming from viewpoints on yet incomplete arcs of

history, in this case predominantly the ongoing Cold War. An example of this is

Zagoria’s retrospectively somewhat overly optimistic view on Khrushchev’s détente

given the subsequent events of 1962.

In this excerpt dealing with the Sino-Soviet disagreement over Khruschchev’s

intended détente with the western bloc Zagoria outlines the concurrent facets of the

conflict, namely the public discourse centered on Khruschchev’s revisionism and the

underlying Chinese impetus to topple Moscow as the centre of world communism.

Particularly interesting are the reported outlooks by Khruschchev on the prospects of

the communist bloc by 1970 and the Chinese reaction thereto. In this account one can

gratifyingly sense the motion in events, with Khrushchev uncertain of the Soviet’s

technological future and the Chinese pushing for immediate political aggressiveness

towards the West given the contemporary balance of power. In the same vein a for

modern standards raw account of the CCP view of the US government at the time, as

“madmen” or “wild beasts”, is also not always appreciably found in later secondary and

tertiary works.