Oxford Studies in International History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xi, 383 pp. US$34.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-993877-3.
In this remarkable book, Sergey Radchenko, a native of Sakhalin Island who now teaches in the UK, presents an even-handed and richly detailed account of Soviet policy in Asia from 1982 to 1991. His concern is the rise and fall of Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision for Asia. He argues that while the last Soviet leader is known for the rapprochement with the West that brought a peaceful end to the Cold War, Gorbachev initially focused on the East. His aim was to improve relations with India and China and maintain relations with longtime clients like Vietnam and North Korea in order to strengthen the Soviet position in the global struggle with the United States. His vision failed for lack of followers, as the leaders he believed he could woo were not, in the end, enticed by what Moscow had to offer. Nonetheless, Radchenko argues, Gorbachev’s unrealized dreams have lived on in the imaginations of post-1991 Russian leaders, nurturing visions of a grand comeback.
Radchenko bases this account on prodigious research. His main source is Russian archives, particularly the Gorbachev Foundation, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Sakhalin State Archive, and Soviet documents held in the Hoover Institute of Stanford University, the Library of Congress, and the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He supplements these records with holdings of East German, Hungarian, and Mongolian archives, the Shanghai Municipal Archive, the Archive of the International Olympic Committee (for South Korea), the Nehru Memorial Library and Museum, and the Archive of the United Nations. He skillfully integrates this broad documentary base with newspaper and memoir accounts, as well as numerous interviews with policymakers. Balancing detail with the larger context, writing with wit and grace, Radchenko provides by far the most detailed and insightful account yet published of the Soviet Union’s involvement in Asia during the Gorbachev years.
He begins with China policy, charting how despite deep mutual mistrust, the small steps Moscow and Beijing took between 1982 and 1985—exchange of visits and increased trade—“helped to build up a certain reserve of trust that made further movement toward normalization possible”(50). He moves next to Japan, recounting how between 1982 and 1987, important players on both sides seriously considered coming to a compromise on the territorial issue. Despite moments of real opportunity, however, Moscow and Tokyo backed out of agreements because of the higher priority they placed on relations with the United States.
Turning to South Asia, Radchenko discusses the key role India played in Gorbachev’s vision for a new global order. As Sino-Soviet relations improved, Gorbachev hoped to create a strategic triangle that would unite the three Asian powers under his leadership. However, to pursue this goal Moscow had to withdraw from Afghanistan, which necessitated greater cooperation from Pakistan just as Rajiv Gandhi sought greater Soviet aid to prevail over Islamabad. Moreover, as Gorbachev increasingly turned to the West beginning in 1989, he lost interest in India while domestic chaos within the Soviet Union left Moscow unable to capitalize on the anti-American sentiment brought by the 1991 Gulf War.
A chapter on Southeast Asia recounts how Gorbachev sought to secure Vietnam’s withdrawal from Cambodia, a precondition of improved Sino-Soviet relations. Radchenko then examines, in particularly rich detail, the single lasting success of Gorbachev’s Asia policy: normalization of relations with China. He argues that the key factor in this success was the view held by Gorbachev and his inner circle that relations with Beijing would have to be on the basis of equality and respect for China’s place as a great power. By the time of the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev, Chinese leaders sympathized with Soviet hardliners. The gains of the previous years could have been lost had Yeltsin turned against Beijing for its suppression of democracy. However, “Beijing and Moscow jointly set out on a road toward strategic partnership informed by a shared sense of resentment of the United States, which, in Gorbachev’s words, had wished them both ill” (197).
Radchenko’s account of the tortured process of establishing diplomatic relations with Seoul is particularly groundbreaking, presenting much more evidence of the policy debates and confusion in Moscow than previously seen. He argues that Gorbachev was reluctant to sacrifice Soviet ties with North Korea, for fear of loss of credibility in the Third World, and therefore failed to respond quickly enough to overtures from Seoul. It was only the collapse of his grand strategic vision in the late 1980s coupled with Moscow’s acute need for money that prompted the Soviet leader finally to jettison Pyongyang in favour of Seoul. In Radchenko’s view, Gorbachev’s foot-dragging on the issue cost the Soviet Union a profitable economic relationship with South Korea and left Moscow with little leverage in Seoul, even as tensions on the Korean Peninsula remained high.
Radchenko concludes with two chapters examining Soviet-Japanese relations from 1988–1991. Even though Moscow entertained grand hopes of foreign investment in the Soviet Far East, Gorbachev was offended by Tokyo’s blatant attempts to use economic leverage to force a favourable settlement on the “northern territories.” Moreover, as Radchenko documents, decentralization of political power in the Soviet Union brought a new factor: the strong opposition to concessions by nationalists in Sakhalin and elsewhere. Thus, as Japan floated proposals in 1990 and 1991 to buy the islands for a considerable sum of money, Gorbachev was unable politically to accept such a resolution.
With the depth and breadth of evidence Radchenko presents and the subtlety and balance of his analysis, this book is a milestone in scholarship on the international history of Asia in the last years of the Cold War. It will be essential reading for political scientists, area studies specialists, historians of foreign relations, and policy analysts seeking to understand the antecedents of the region’s contemporary international affairs.
Kathryn Weathersby
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA