The Sino-Soviet Split

"Lorenz, while a graduate student, learned both Russian and Chinese. There aren’t many professors, even, who’ve managed that. So when we were discussing dissertation topics, I suggested something ambitious: why not write a history of the Sino-Soviet conflict? There wasn’t one based on Russian and Chinese archives, and yet this was an event of great importance in the history of the Cold War. So Lorenz looked into it, concluded that it was possible, and wound up spending a lot of time in Moscow and Beijing, as well as Eastern Europe (the Russians and the Chinese complained frequently to the fraternal comrades about each other), working on the project. His book is now the standard account of the Sino-Soviet conflict, and it reaches a couple of important conclusions. One is that ideology was not just window-dressing. Leaders in both capitals took it extremely seriously, and rather than being a source of cohesion, as Marxist-Leninist theory suggested it should have been, it caused deep divisions. The other is that Mao Zedong was chiefly responsible for this. The Soviets, under Khrushchev, tried repeatedly to smooth over the difficulties, but Mao consistently frustrated those efforts. There’s one other thing about Lorenz’s book that’s important. We’ve long known that something like 30 million Chinese starved to death during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, his disastrous effort to industrialise China in 1958-61. We’d always assumed, though, that he didn’t know about this – that Mao’s underlings kept it from him. Lorenz shows conclusively that this was not the case: Mao was getting regular reports on the famine he was causing, and yet for a long time he did nothing about it. Which makes him, if you go by the body count, the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century. Only partially. We’re blessed with great students at Yale. They’re pretty perceptive themselves in seeing where the opportunities lie. All I’ve tried to do is to tell them that it’s OK to think big. Admittedly this goes against the way a lot of graduate training is done, both at Yale and elsewhere – there’s too much of an emphasis on micro-topics, that only microscopic numbers of people will want to read about. My pitch to the students is that if you’re going to spend four to six years getting a PhD in history, you might as well do a dissertation that can quickly become a book that will attract more than four to six readers – and that might get you a tenured professorship somewhere. Life is too short to do otherwise."