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the alliance with China at the time and since has been that of an industrially advanced state helping a developing nation by transferring technology, resources, and social and economic models. The Chinese image, on the other hand, stresses shared security and economic benefits as well as cooperation in a global struggle against imperialist domination. These lasting images, stored in the memories of millions of Chinese and Russians, and in paintings, posters, and songs from the 1950s in both countries, need to be present in any attempt to reinvestigate this period. They help us see both the rise and the fall of the alliance. They also help us see the fervor that sustained and shaped it and that left important legacies in both countries.
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Marxism-Leninism the theory of state-building and social change that framed both the Chinese and Russian revolutions provided the language and the symbols that contained this fervor. Over the past decade, as another revolution that of the market has transformed both countries, the erstwhile intensity of the dedication to this theory among the elites and a great number of ordinary citizens has quickly faded from view. But for the purposes of this volume it is important to resurrect that fervor the pride of having found a theory that combined rapid economic progress with social justice, a shortcut to modernity for backward countries, a way of showing that their people counted for something. For its adherents, the best proof of the theory' s validity was the very scorn and hostility it engendered among Western leaders. In the view of the faithful, those powers that had looked down on Russians or attempted to dominate China now they hated and feared these "new" states because of their strength, their independence, their communism. It is difficult to find more potent amalgams of nationalism with a specific social theory in any historical epoch. 3
It was the invertionary policies of the alliance partners that made the union seem natural to most Soviet and Chinese leaders and that made it such a formidable enemy in the view of the West. The Sino-Soviet alliance was the greatest antisystemic power assembled so far during the capitalist era and probably the greatest power to challenge the political supremacy of the Western capitals since the final expansion of the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century. The geographical space of the alliance covered nearly a quarter of the earth's landmass, and the size of its population made it dominant on two continents. It was intended to be and served as a threat that could not be ignored. With Cold War tensions already running high in Western capitals, the signing of the alliance set off acute alarms. President Dwight D. Eisenhower noted in the spring of 1950: "I believe Asia is lost with Japan, P[hilippine] I[slands], N[etherlands] E[ast] I[ndies] and even Australia under threat. India itself is not safe!" 4
Throughout its existence, the men in charge of the alliance had to devise ways to translate the symbols, the sense of achievement and unity, into political aims.

     

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This is a difficult process in any alliance formation, and perhaps particularly difficult in an alliance in which the elites have varying images of purpose but very similar political language and concepts. Still, the realist interpretations of the 1970s and 1980s, in which the alliance was doomed from the outset, find little support in the vast archives in Moscow and Beijing on which the chapters in this volume are based. At the end of the Korean War, the Sino-Soviet alliance was well moored in common policies as well as common symbols, and there was vigorous debate in and between the capitals on how to develop the relationship further. Indeed, for most of its life span up to 1958 the alliance was more dynamic and purposeful than its chroniclers have so far accepted.
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The vitality of the alliance during its first years makes the totality and the relative suddenness of its