Sino-Soviet Relations and the Origins of the Korean War:Soviet Strategic Goals in the Far East in Early 1950
Soviet Union was already growing.
Stalin had two particular concerns about
China’s policy toward
Korea.
First, he was afraid that Mao would openly oppose any action against the South.
Second, he worried that
Beijing would not shoulder the burden if something unexpected should take place.
[81] The three steps Stalin took alleviated those concerns.
The Soviet Union ensured that it would retain its strategic position in the
Far East, whether or not the Korean War proceeded smoothly.
Concluding Remarks
By 1950, the Korean peninsula was on the brink of war. Stalin decided to provoke a crisis to preserve Soviet strategic interests in the Far East and to thwart U.S. influence in the region. The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance threatened crucial Soviet privileges in the Far East, privileges that Stalin had gained in the Yalta Conference and in the treaty he had signed with Jiang Jieshi’s GMD government. These privileges included Port Lushun, Dalian, and the Chinese Changchun Railway, all of which were important Soviet access routes to warm water ports in the Pacific. To regain Soviet control of warm water ports, Stalin approved Kim’s military plans in early 1950 and ultimately provoked a crisis on the Korean peninsula.
The shift in Stalin’s Korea policy was intimately connected with evolving Sino-Soviet relations, revealing Stalin’s complicated attitudes toward the newly established Chinese Communist state. The Soviet leader certainly understood that the addition of China into the Communist camp meant that the balance of power in East Asia shifted from the United States to the Soviet Union. But Stalin also feared that China’s emergence as a Communist power could challenge the Soviet Union’s dominant position in the international Communist movement. Stalin’s new Korea policy not only served Soviet strategic interests in the Far East, but it also limited the growing power of the PRC. This assessment of Stalin’s intentions in Korea is necessarily based on inferences drawn from careful study of the available documents. No document has yet directly confirm Stalin’s plans, and it is possible that none ever will.
[1] Ciphered telegram from Stalin to Mao Zedong, 14 May 1950, Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (APRF), Fond (F.) 45, Opis (Op.) 1, Delo (D.) 331, (L.) Listy 554. I have collected and preserved over 500 Russian archivesdocuments on the Korean War, from which I cited directly. On the basis of the achives collected, I edited an archival compilation, 50 nianhou de zhengju: guanyu chaoxian zhanzheng de eguo jiemi dangan (Testimony 50 Years Later: Russian Secret Documents Declassified on the Korean War) (Hong Kong: Tiandi Tushu Inc., forthcoming). I would like to thank the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Security Archive and my friends Chen Jian, Kathryn Weathersby and Sergei Goncharov, for their help in providing me with copies of these documents. But some of the originals have no archival number attached. In case I cited archives that the number is missing, I use SD***** which indicates document numbers of the forthcoming book.
[2] New works on the Korean War include Sergei Goncharov, John Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Shu Guang Zhang, Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War (Lawrence, KC: University of Kansas Press, 1995); A. V. Torkunov, E. P. Ufimtsev, Koreiskaya Problema : Noveii Vzglyad (The New Views about the Issue of Korea) (Moscow: “Angel” Publishing Center, 1995), and Kathryn Weathersby’s manuscript Stalin’s Last War. For Soviet foreign policy after World War II, see Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin t