alliance with the CCP, slaughtered tens of thousands of communists, and expelled all the Soviet advisers. The revolutionary project lay in ruins.
Meanwhile, playing a complicated game, Bolshevik Russia and, after 1924, the Soviet Union, successfully maneuvered to retain the imperial gains tsarist Russia had wrested from China in the preceding century. In other words, the Soviet Union simultaneously pursued both statist and revolutionary goals vis-?-vis China. Under its new leader, Mao Zedong, the CCP continued to look toward Moscow for ideological and political guidance while pursuing its own path to power.
On July 7, 1937, Japan’s creeping aggression against China escalated into a full-scale war. To deflect the threat of Japanese attack against Siberia and the Maritime Province, the USSR provided Chiang Kai-shek substantial military and financial aid in his lonely war of resistance against Japan. Soviet military advisers were attached to Chiang’s armies, and Soviet pilots defended Chinese cities against Japanese attack. In 1941, however, Moscow signed a neutrality treaty with Tokyo, and Soviet aid to China dried up.
The renewed civil war in China (1946-1949) that followed hard upon victory in World War II culminated in the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Although suspicious of Mao Zedong, the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin quickly extended diplomatic recognition to the new communist government and, after intensive negotiations, signed a thirty-year Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance on February 14, 1950, with the PRC. Mao Zedong proclaimed that the Soviet Union provided a model of socialism for China to emulate. Thousands of Soviet civilian and military experts flooded into China while tens of thousands of Chinese students studied in the USSR and the East European satellite states.
Within a few years, however, a combination of Soviet high-handedness, Chinese suspicion, and differences over international political strategy eroded the bonds of Sino-Soviet friendship. Beijing challenged Moscow’s leadership of international communism, claimed huge chunks of Russian territory, and condemned the USSR as a “social imperialist” state. In 1969, fighting broke out along the contested eastern and central Asian borders, and a large-scale war loomed but did not materialize. The Sino-Soviet Cold War gradually dissipated in the 1980s as new leaders came to power in Moscow
CHINA, RELATIONS WITH
Mao Zedong escorts Nikita Khrushchev to the airport, following celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China in 1959. © SOVFOTO/EASTFOTO and Beijing. During Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s summit in Beijing in May 1989, the two countries proclaimed a new era of amity.
Post-communist Russia suffered a sharp decline in economic and political power just as China was enjoying its greatest period of economic growth that translated into military power and international influence. Yet the two countries soon found common cause in their opposition to the exercise of unilateral American global power. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin in 1996 proclaimed a new Russian-Chinese strategic partnership that was largely rhetorical. By that time the border issue between the two countries had been basically settled, and stability restored to the relationship. However, Russians in eastern Siberia and the Maritime Province objected to an influx of Chinese illegal migrants and traders whose presence, they said, constituted a growing threat to Russia’s hold over territories acquired only in the mid-nineteenth century. Levels of Russian- Chinese trade remained quite modest, although Russia became a main supplier of advanced military technology to the newly affluent Chinese who could now afford to pay. Within Russia debate continued over the question of whether China could be trusted as a friendly neighbor or whether growing Chinese power would eventually turn north and seek to reassert dormant historical claims against a weakened Russian state.
In cultural terms, Russian influence upon China peaked in the early to mid-twentieth century, but receded thereafter, leaving very little residue except among the older generation of Chinese who
CHIRIKOV, ALEXZEI ILICH
remember the brief era of Sino-Soviet friendship in the 1950s. Chinese influence upon Russian culture is also considerably less than it is in other Western countries, particularly the United States. Racist and condescending attitudes are present on both sides of the relationship along with genuine admiration and understanding of each society’s cultural achievements on the part of educated Russian and Chinese elites. See also: ALGUN TREATY OF; CENTRAL ASIA; COLD WAR; COLONIAL EXPANSION; COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL; FAR EASTERN REGION; JAPAN, RELATIONS WITH; KARAKHAN DECLARATION; NERCHINSK, TREATY OF; SIBERIA; PEKING, TREATY OF
Clubb, O. Edmund. (1971). China and Russia: The “Great Game.” New York: Columbia University Press. Mancall, Mark. (1971). Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Paine, S. C. M. (1997). Imperial Rivals: Russia, China, and Their Disputed Frontier. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Quested, Rosemary. (1984). Sino-Russian Relations: A Short History. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. Tien-fong Cheng. 1957. A History of Sino-Russian Relations. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press.
STEVEN I. LEVINE
In the summer of 1740, Bering’s ships, the St. Peter and St. Paul-captained by Bering and Chirikov, respectively-set sail for Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. From there, the ships departed in June 1741. Shortly after, the ships separated and never reestablished contact. The crew of the St. Peter sighted Alaska in July, then wintered on the isle now called Bering Island. Bering himself perished; the survivors returned to Petropavlovsk in the fall of 1742.
In July 1741, Chirikov and the crew of the St. Paul discovered Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago. Short of food and fresh water, the St. Paul returned to Kamchatka in October 1741, having lost eight sailors. The following May, Chirikov sailed east again, searching for Bering and his crew. Unfortunately, the St. Paul sailed past Bering Island. In June, after exploring the Aleutians, Chirikov turned back once more. In August 1742, Chirikov sailed into Petropavlovsk-only a few days before the survivors of the St. Peter voyage returned.
For his participation in the Great Northern Expedition, Chirikov was promoted to the rank of captain- commander in 1745. In 1746 he helped to compile new Pacific maps, based on data the Expedition had gathered. See also: BERING, VITUS JONASSEN
CHIRIKOV, ALEXZEI ILICH
(1703-1748), naval officer and explorer.
An instructor at St. Petersburg’s Naval Academy, Alexei Ilich Chirikov was selected in 1725 to be one of two assistants to Vitus Bering, recently appointed by Peter the Great to travel to Kamchatka and, from there, determine whether Asia and America were united.
Bering’s first Kamchatka expedition (1728-1730) was criticized for not having proven conclusively that Asia and America were not physically linked. Indeed, Chirikov had disagreed with Bering on the question of when the expedition should turn back, arguing that further exploration was needed. In response, Bering proposed an ambitious series of voyages and surveys that, together, became the Great Northern Expedition. Bering undertook a second survey of Russia’s northeasternmost waters. His second-in-command was Chirikov.
Fisher, Raymond Henry. (1977). Bering’s Voyages. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Neatby, L. H. (1973). Discovery in Russian and Siberian Waters. Athens: Ohio University Press. Urness, Carol Louise. (1987). Bering’s First Expedition. New York: Garland.
JOHN MCCANNON
(1904-1938), test pilot and polar aviator.
Born in the Volga town of Vasilevo (now Chkalovsk), Valery Pavlovich Chkalov went on to become the USSR’s most famous aviator of the 1930s. Hailed as the “Greatest Pilot of Our Times” and named a Hero of the Soviet Union, Chkalov, often referred to as the “Russian Lindbergh,” remains one of the Stalinist era’s greatest and best- loved celebrities.
