Why the Russians Lifted the Blockade at Bear Island
In the river traffic that swings past the great Soviet city of Khabarovsk this summer, down the Amur and back up the Ussuri and in the opposite direction, there are Chinese as well as Soviet vessels. The great bulk of the traffic is Soviet: passenger ferries, freighters, barge trains loaded with raw materials, agricultural machinery and other cargo for the development of Siberia and the Soviet Far East, occasionally a rakish gunboat setting off upstream to its patrol station. But now, after a ten-year break, some Chinese ferries and cargo boats carrying coal or agricultural produce pass that way too.
Neville Maxwell is Senior Research Officer at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Oxford University, Oxford, England. He is the editor of China's Road to Development and the author of India's China War, India and the Nagas, and other works. Copyright (c) 1978, Neville Maxwell.
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There is an anecdote going the rounds in Moscow these days. It seems that Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev were all riding together on a train. Suddenly the train lurched to a stop and remained immobile for an hour. What to do? Stalin ordered some soldiers on the train to shoot the conductor. They obeyed. But still the train did not move. Khrushchev ordered the rehabilitation of the conductor. This being done, the train still did not move. Everyone turned to Brezhnev for a solution. Brezhnev ordered all the passengers on the train to hold up their hands to their mouths and to whistle. Then, at least, they would think that the train was moving!
Since the end of World War II, there have been three watersheds in Sino-Soviet relations. In February 1950, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China formed an alliance against the West. In the late 1950s, there was the beginning of the historic split between them that transformed international politics. Then, in the early 1970s, there began the Sino-American rapprochement that, by the end of the decade, completely altered the strategic landscape and led to an incipient Chinese-American alliance against the Soviet Union.
