The Cold War Revisited. (from extract (File: Gaddis))
John Lewis Gaddis (Revisionist View)
John Lewis Gaddis (Revisionist View)
John Lewis Gaddis (Revisionist View)
- Believed West had overtaken USSR in 1960 (Cold War should have ended)
- Nuclear weapons concealed the internally decaying but impressive militarily USSR
John Lewis Gaddis (Revisionist View)
- Stalin did not want a hot or Cold War, as he was still reliant on Anglo-American support to rebuild after WWII
- Stalin's goal (according to Gaddis) was to have complete control over Europe like Hitler
The First Cold War
- US white paper on Chinese Civil War
- "the war had fatally sapped the powers of resistance of the Guomindang"
- "its troops had lost the will to fight, and its government had lost popular support"
- "The Communists, on the other hand, through a ruthless discipline and fanatical zeal, attempted to sell themselves as guardians and liberators of the people"
Sino-Soviet Relations
- "Our work will be written down in the history of mankind, and it will clearly demonstrate the fact that the Chinese, who comprise one quarter of humanity, have from now on stood up..." Chairman Mao Zedong
- "Moscow making puppets out of the Chinese" US State department referring to 1950 Sino-Soviet Alliance
- "It was an insult to the Chinese people. For centuries the French, English, and Americans had been exploiting China, and now the Soviet Union was moving in." Nikita Kruschev commenting on the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Alliance
Nikita Khrushchev of the USSR
- "Neither economic nor political reforms in the Soviet Union would have been possible without the reduction of military spending to a necessary minimum" - William Taubman, Historian
- "And this in turn demanded the establishment of a new modus vivendi [way of working] in relations with the United States and other Western countries."- William Taubman, Historian
- "From a historical perspective the reduction of tensions that he began helped the world to hold out without any major cataclysms up until the mid-1980s" -William Taubman, Historian
Mao Zedong of the PRC
- "As much captive as guest" Adam Ulam (Historian) on Mao's visit to Moscow
- "I am here to do more than eat and shit" Mao Zedong (leader of PRC) during visit to Moscow
- "It weakened the Soviet international position, making the USSR more anxious to reach agreement with the United States on issues already under negotiation." -Immanual Hsu (historian) on Mao's rapprochement with the USA
- "From the infancy of Chinese Communism, Mao's contact with Moscow was neither pleasant nor gratifying" -Immanual Hsu, Historian
- "Mao's approach was never endorsed by Stalin as proper for revolutionizing China" -Immanual Hsu, Historian
- "Mao had concluded that Khrushchev was something of a 'blunderer', who was 'disaster prone'. -Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Historians
- "Mao was aiming to cut Khrushchev down to size as leader of the Communist bloc, and make his own bid for the leadership" -Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Historians
The People's Republic of China
- "not like a dinner party" Mao referring to the revolution