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antistructural approaches; there is more awareness of the subjective parts of international affairs ideologies, perceptions, and personalities and less emphasis on interests, borders, and grand strategies than in previous accounts. Undoubtedly this implies a move away from the realist dominance in the study of the Sino-Soviet alliance, although the authors exploit many insights from the realist school. 10
Social realism in art and realism as a school of thought in the study of international relations have something in common. Their best practitioners can show a structure or a situation with perfect clarity and provide an image that convinces and, in some cases, inspires. But neither of them can penetrate the surface of the image and make us wonder about the complex ideas that uphold it. This is why we, at least at this stage, should emphasize multidimensional interpretation in history as well as in art.
Writing the Alliance
This volume is a very early attempt to make use of the newly available Russian and Chinese documentary sources to enrich our picture of the Sino-Soviet

     

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alliance. The individual chapters vary in approach and method and there are clear disagreements on some issues of interpretation. The group who has been working to prepare the volume consider its metamorphic base an advantage "international" history needs heterogeneous approaches.
The authors in this volume come from four different countries, China, Russia, the United States, and Norway. The heterogeneity of the project undoubtedly has been helped by the diversity in traditions of historical writing. But more important in terms of conclusions has been the fact that although from different countries, all the authors come from the same generation. Born between 1950 and 1960, none of us has more than a fleeting recollection of the heyday of the alliance. We all have encountered it primarily as history, presented to us in widely divergent interpretative wrappings. Those conclusions on which we do generally agree may, at least in part, be attributed to all of us approaching the historical record intent on unwrapping those presentations that we have encountered.
This introduction provides a chronological overview of the period and brief looks into the main issues discussed in the individual chapters. The chronology that come out of the new Russian and Chinese sources is different from the periodization so far employed by Western scholars not only was the alliance effective for considerably longer than what has been believed so far, but the practical cooperation started earlier and was broader in scope than many of us thought. In some cases the conflicts that did emerge in the relationship had different backgrounds or even different content from what has been the general wisdom in the West. The new chronology shows a very complex set of connections between the two countries and shows how both domestic and international changes influenced the timing of their development.
The Past, 1917-1946
Images of the 1917 October Revolution the Communist seizure of power in Russia were at the core of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.
    11 The leaders of the fledgling Chinese party adopted the language, the symbols, and important parts of the worldview of the Russian Communists. Internationalism which in practice meant subsumption under the political direction of the CPSU and the teachings of its first leader, Vladimir Lenin joined Chinese nationalism in an uneasy ideological marriage that lasted for over forty years. Soviet control of the CCP was always tenuous, even during the 1920s, when the party could operate legally and when both it and its rival, the Guomindang (GMD), received Soviet advisors. 12
In 1927 the head of the GMD main faction, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), turned on his Communist allies and defeated them for control of the cities. The

     

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massacres of CCP members that followed marked a bloody turning point