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Stalin-Mao Alliance Was Uneasy, Newly Released Papers Show [1]
['Tim Weiner']
Date: 1995-12-10
Scholars have unearthed official records of the two meetings between Stalin and Mao. Along with Mao's commentaries on the meetings, they suggest that the Chinese-Soviet alliance that the two men made in Moscow 45 winters ago was founded on shaky ground.
The transcripts of the December 1949 and January 1950 sessions, obtained from Soviet archives, had long been sought by historians of the cold war. The documents, to be published by the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, contain no great revelations, only the give and take between the leading Communist titans, and tyrants, of the cold war. Stalin gives more than he takes.
The first meeting took place in Moscow on Dec. 16, 1949, only months after Mao's revolutionary army had taken control of China. Stalin, taking the attitude of the chairman of the board talking to the chief of a subsidiary, advised Mao that he thought China would have peace for the foreseeable future.
"Japan has yet to stand up on its feet," the transcript quotes Stalin as saying, "and is thus not ready for war. America, though it screams war, is actually afraid of war more than anything. Europe is afraid of war."
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/10/world/stalin-mao-alliance-was-uneasy-newly-released-papers-show.html#:~:text=Stalin%20and%20Mao%20danced%20around%20the%20issue%20of,waiting%20in%20a%20dacha%20in%20the%20Moscow%20winter.
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