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Review of Stalin as Warlord, by Alfred J. Rieber (2022)

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At the age of 91, the prolific historian of Soviet history Alfred J. Rieber published a monograph on Josef Stalin. Covering the period from the 1920s to the post-war period after 1945, Stalin as Warlord adopts a historical and, at times, materialist perspective. It focuses in particular on the “paradoxes” of the supreme leader, the tensions between creative and destructive impulses that together, as the author argues, played a critical role in forging the complex outcome of Soviet war performance. Leaving aside common speculations about Stalin’s paranoid mentality, Rieber explains Stalin’s decisions in significant historical and theoretical contexts and interactions with his subordinates, thereby taking a firm stand in academic debates and condensing serious political lessons beyond myths of the dictator.

According to Rieber, the fundamental step in understanding Stalin was acknowledging his persistent fear of war, which the leader expected to take place between the Soviet Union and imperialist nations, demanding the industrialization and ideological unification of the entire country. This anxiety was rooted in his experience of foreign interventions in the civil war, threats of war with Western powers in the late 1920s, and the rising fascism in Europe. And it manifested itself in rapid collectivization and industrialization, as well as the initiation of the Great Terror. Some of these campaigns produced tragic results that many party members struggled to tolerate. Nonetheless, the author reminds us of the great collective drive behind them. In his view, Stalin was the representative of the Bolsheviks in the sense that his actions mirrored the historical challenge faced by revolutionaries: leading a massive, sometimes resistant, agricultural population through a time of general international hostility.

Picture of Nikolai Yezhov with Stalin and Molotov along the Volga–Don Canal — *Nikolai Yezhov with Stalin and Molotov along the Volga–Don Canal, orignal. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

For Rieber, another critical aspect of Stalin was his selective, mostly pragmatic, yet non-negligible subscription to Marxism-Leninism. While conventional discussions have explored his non-Marxist antisemitism, Russo-centrism, and investment in crafting a tamed privileged bureaucracy, rarely have scholars touched the egalitarian aspects of his policies. The book reveals that Stalin built a creative tension between Russian and other nationalities—one that involved not only the promotion of Russian culture but also the limited tolerance and even inclusion of indigenization. Further, during the Great Terror of 1936-1938, amidst the massive arrests and executions of managers and specialists, people of peasant or worker origins gained promotions, indeed constituting – to some degree – a class revolution from above.[1]

Stalin, in Rieber’s eyes, was, after all, characterized by “paradoxes.” Although the author clearly favors such a term over “contradictions,” the term is intriguing yet elusive. An example of this is the author’s formulation of Stalin’s “rational and irrational” impulses. While the author has accounted for the material, historical, and theoretical context that de facto justified Stalin’s decision, his final abstraction of “paradoxes” circles back somehow confusingly to a non-materialist conclusion on irrationality.[2] For critical readers, this is a problematic and self-contradictory tieback.

*Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill on portico of Russian Embassy in Teheran, during conference–Nov. 28 – Dec. 1, 1943. Source: Library of Congress*

Moving away from Rieber’s “paradoxes” to materialist “contradictions” better emphasizes the historical and dialectical lesson of Stalin as a Warlord: that hasty, arbitrary actions in both scope and method can produce unexpected oppositions. In Stalin’s case, such a pattern of action can be observed in the destruction of the communist leadership in different republics and the Comintern during the Great Terror. These actions ultimately undermined Soviet foreign support of anti-fascism campaigns or gave ground to extreme nationalists who would collaborate with Nazi forces. Perhaps echoing this observation, during 1956-1957, as they offered an alternative theoretical assessment of Stalin following Khrushchev’s 1956 report, Chinese leaders criticized the deceased leader for confusing two distinct types of contradictions: those between “the enemy and us” and those arising “within the people.” A revised thesis of Stalin as Warlord thus emerges: While Stalin’s decisions may have been justified by the historical and theoretical contradictions he faced, his frequent arbitrariness in decision-making generated opposition that undermined his agenda—an outcome which, at first glance, appears “paradoxical.” By addressing this overshadowed pillar of Rieber’s explanation, I believe readers can comprehend the duality in Stalin’s decision-making: ambitious planning existed alongside improvisation to counter unforeseen challenges of his own making—a hallmark of Stalinist governance.

In sum, Stalin as Warlord is a book that deserves close reading. Its importance lies in the enormous amount of detail that the author assembles to provide a striking but meticulous analysis of Stalin. Far from a dictator without constraint, he was caught between numerous challenges surrounding the Soviet system and the pitfalls created by his actions. But to fully comprehend this history, I suggest one additional: using “contradictions” instead of the author’s elusive notion of “paradoxes.”

Shutong Wang (王庶同) was born and raised in China. He earned a B.A. in History at McGill University and is currently a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies the social movements of the 1950s, with a particular focus on the interactions between grassroots communities in Modern and Contemporary China.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

[1] Further in this direction, Rieber points out his ignorance of technocrats and a preference for practice over theory.

[2] This is not to say irrationality did not exist but to question the legitimacy of using such a term here.

The Man Who Loved Dogs, by Leonardo Padura (2013)

By Rebecca Johnston

Leonardo Padura is arguably one of Cuba’s most untouchable writers. He made his name first as an investigative journalist, and then as the author of the Havana Quartet detective series, sometimes described as “morality tales for the post-Soviet era.” The Man Who Loved Dogs is by far his most ambitious work. A painstakingly-researched historical novel, it is the culmination of Padura’s twenty-year journey, beginning at the final home of Soviet exile Leon Trotsky in Coyoacan, Mexico and concluding with the National Prize for Literature, Cuba’s highest literary honor. It has received nearly universal critical praise, with the bemusing exception of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Their dissatisfaction may have stemmed from the premise in their review that Padura’s book is about “why revolutions and revolutionaries fail,” which it is not.

The Man Who Loved Dogs is largely a novel about struggle. The complex narrative follows the lives of three protagonists, one of whom is also the narrator, across two continents and several decades. The first, Leon Trotsky, struggles to remain politically relevant after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1929, fighting to maintain an alternative to Stalin’s form of communism through his global opposition movement and the Fourth International. Next is Spanish revolutionary Ramón Mercader, struggling to defend the ideals handed down to him from Moscow, pledging unwavering obedience first to his radical Marxist lover África, then to his sociopathic mother Caridad, and finally to a coercive state bureaucracy. Finally, the narrator, Iván Cárdenas Maturell, struggles to survive the reconstitutive process by which Fidel Castro’s Cuban government seeks to shape him into the “New Soviet Man.” The novel subjects Iván to a series of “falls,” one after another, until, as he puts it, “they fucked me for the rest of my life.” Throughout the book, all three protagonists struggle to come to terms with their actions, to determine who they are, and what meaning their lives may have had.

Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico, ca. 1938 (via Wikimedia Commons).

All of this struggle raises the question of what it is that the characters are struggling for. At times, the fight seems to be an end in and of itself, something the characters often seem aware of. Ramón joins the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War, “convinced that his life only had meaning if he was able to defend with a rifle the ideas in which he believed.” At the same time, those ideals “had been only recently discovered by many,” and yet he and those around him had “prepared themselves for sacrifice.” Trotsky’s first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, lays the death of their daughter at Trotsky’s feet, “accusing him of having marginalized Zinushka from the political struggle and of having thus pushed her to her death.” For Sokolovskaya, denying Zina a role in that battle was more deadly than the tuberculosis consuming her lungs. For each of them, struggle itself was a method of survival.

There are external motivations for these struggles as well. On accepting a Jason Bourne-style pact, the Soviet government transforms Ramón into Soldier 13, an entity that “did what they asked him to out of obedience and conviction.” Indeed, the importance of obedience dominates Ramón’s entire political career. Early on, África makes it clear to him that the Party is always right and obedience to the Party is mandatory, even though you may never understand the Party. Similarly, Iván’s rise from his falls was contingent on obedience to the Party line. He is given continual “correctives” until his writing falls within the acceptable standards set for him by the Cuban government, itself obeying the order to adopt them from the Soviet model.

Proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in Barcelona, 14 April 1931 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Central to both these instances of obedience, and key to understanding the book, is a denial of access to knowledge. When Iván speaks with his friend Dany about conducting research on Trotsky, Dany emphasizes the inherent danger of particular forms of knowledge. “I’m not going to become a Trotskyist or any shit like that,” Iván spits in defense. “What I need is to know…k-n-o-w, you get it? Or is it also forbidden to know?” To which Dany replies: “But you already know that Trotsky is fire!” Any type of knowledge that falls outside the Party line is potentially deadly. As a writer and radio worker, Iván is responsible for propagandizing the “correct” form of knowledge, making his transgression even more dangerous than that of a typical citizen. While Iván is coerced to shun any knowledge of Trotsky, Ramón is called upon to eliminate him in the most literal fashion. He accepts the Soviet government’s “first sacred principle: obedience,” allowing himself to be denied an understanding of truth, and ultimately destroying this alternative interpreter and propagandizer of knowledge.

Aside from Iván and Ramón, Padura shows us one of the twentieth centuries’ most violent displays of state control of knowledge: Stalin’s show trials. During the Soviet Terror of the 1930s, it was not enough to confess to being a Trotskyist-Bukharinite Japanese-German fascist spy. Defendants were made to perform self-criticism, ultimately regurgitating newly-fashioned realities of their nonexistent transgressions in public court. The Soviet government had the power to extract these false confessions, even from its own executioners, and then to force them to speak them into reality. Understanding the power of this performance is why Ramón’s handlers in Moscow bring him to not just any show trial, but the trial of Genrikh Yagoda, the former head of the NKVD (later the KGB). The lesson here for Ramón was precisely about truth, which in his case means one thing: obedience. As his handler puts it: “No one resists. Not even Yagoda. Neither will Yezhov when his turn comes.” Spoiler: Nikolai Yezhov, Yagoda’s successor, doesn’t even last another two years.

Soviet newspaper “Perekovka” (“Reforging”), front page announcing the replacement of Genrikh Yagoda by Nikolai Yezhov, 1936 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Trotsky, on the other hand, is more characterized by disobedience than anything else, and his own struggle helps to put the others in perspective. Our narrator tells us: “The struggle on which he had to focus from that moment on would be one against men, against a faction, never against the Idea.” Trotsky’s struggle was against Stalin and anyone who bought into Stalin’s interpretation of the “Idea.” The Idea, he explains, is “the truth of the revolution,” and he wishes to “throw himself into the void and proclaim the need for a new party capable of recovering” it. His crusade had always been to establish himself as the bearer of that truth, for the sake of which he committed bloody “excesses” that he would later claim to regret. Whereas Ramón and Iván are coerced to obediently accept and promote the Soviet government’s Truth, Trotsky seeks to convince others that he is the one with the real Truth, so everyone should obey him. The guilt over his “excesses,” and the fear that his command over Truth might transform him into “a pseudo-communist czar” like Stalin, was ultimately insufficient to dissuade him altogether.

Josef Stalin, 1949 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Tragically for the book’s heroes, it turns out they were struggling for nothing. In fighting “men” instead of the “Idea,” Trotsky forgot, as Dany reminds us, to “think about people.” They are the ones, after all, creating the ideas. The Soviet government certainly recognized as much, since in ordering Ramón to destroy Trotsky, they sought to destroy a particular set of ideas that threatened their own. Of course, we’ve heard these critiques of Soviet-style communism before. But at the heart of Padura’s book is something much farther reaching: it is the impossibility of utopia, communist or otherwise, and moreover, the destruction of knowledge that utopian projects inherently entail. For Padura, the construction of any utopia is a violent struggle over control of the “truth,” a struggle that leaves no room for the people for whom the utopia is supposedly built. Trotsky even acknowledges as much when he notes that the first executions from the show trials spelled the “death rattle of utopia;” Iván and Ramón were its “gullible” victims. It is no mistake, as Dany concludes, that the only utopia available to them is the one beyond the grave.

Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).

Also by Rebecca Johnston on Not Even Past:
Policing Art in Early Soviet Russia.

You may also like:
Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba, by Jonathan C. Brown.
The Old Man and the New Man in Revolutionary Cuba, by Frank A. Guridy.

China Today: Communism for Americans in the 1930s

By Fei Guo

China Today was a monthly periodical and the official organ of the American Friends of the Chinese People (AFCP), an organization formed by a group of American Communist Party members and left-leaning intellectuals devoted to introducing the Chinese communist revolutionary movement to Americans. Located in New York, the AFCP also organized public talks on Chinese politics and economics. The journal never became widely popular, with its highest monthly sale of a mere 7,000 copies, yet it remained influential among left-wing intellectuals who shared a concern for events in China.

The Communist Party USA’s Workers’ Bookshop, at its headquarters on 13th Street, between University Place and Broadway, New York City. Posters in the window advocate for a U.S. invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, to open a “second front” in 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The editors included Philip Jaffe and a secret Communist Party member and graduate student at Columbia University, Chi Ch’ao-ting, using the pseudonym Hansu Chan. Chi joined the Communist Party in America, and together with a few other Chinese students, formed the Chinese Bureau of the Communist Party of USA. With the help of Moscow, Chi was able to receive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, which became an important source for articles in China Today. Chi later returned to China and acted as an undercover agent inside Kuomintang (KMT) government, the main enemy of CCP. Chi eventually became a prominent trade official in Mao’s China in the 1950s. Philip Jaffe, a successful leftist businessman, became well known because of the “Ameraisa” spy case in 1945, in which he and several other Amerasia editors were accused of espionage, after US intelligence agents found classified government documents in their office. The espionage charge was later dropped due to lack of evidence, and they were only punished with fines. Jaffe supported the journal financially since China Today was never an economically profitable enterprise and he gave the journal some credibility. Jaffe became interested in China well before the launch of the journal and, although a leftist, Jaffe never joined the Communist Party, sometimes even criticizing the orthodox Moscow-dominated communist movement.

Philip Jaffe, Owen Lattimore, Zhu De and Agnes Jaffe in 1937 (via Wikimedia Commons).

There were two reasons behind the launch of China Today. First, American Leftists were curious about the Chinese revolutionary movement. Classical Marxism predicted that communist revolutions would sooner or later sweep the world and liberate the whole of humankind. The founding of Soviet Union seemed to confirm the inevitability of the spread of communism globally giving hope to leftists. Many intellectuals believed that China would be the crucial next step in the global enterprise of revolutionary human liberation. A journal dedicated to introducing the Chinese communist revolution would perfectly fit the niche. Second, the journal sought to compete with reactionary news outlets and spell out the Communist perspective on Chinese events for the Anglophone world. China Weekly Review, a prominent pro-KMT government newspaper based in Shanghai was their direct target. Given its limited circulation, it appears China Today only partially fulfilled this object.

What gave this China Today a special advantage was its ability to procure Chinese communist documents. Because of KMT government censorship, people both inside and outside China had difficulty accessing undistorted political messages of the CCP. China Today offered such an opportunity when publishing original political manifestos or decrees of Soviet China. Chi was the crucial link as he was secretly receiving documents from China.

Three reports from China Today give an indication of the character of the journal. The three articles center on Chinese communists’ activities in Szechwan Province during the war between the Nationalist government and the communist insurgency that resulted in the Long March (1934-36) and the ascendancy of Mao Zedong. The first two articles give a detailed account of the origins of Szechwan Soviet Base (1929-35) and the military campaigns conducted by its main force, the Fourth Red Army. The third article surveys the communist military movements towards the latter stages of Long March.

Mao Zedong on the Long March (via Wikimedia Commons).

These articles contain important material not available elsewhere and they offer perspectives on the ways Chinese history, in this case the history of the Long March, was framed for an American audience. The heroism and sacrifice of Chinese communists portrayed in these articles are helpful in writing a more nuanced and comprehensive history of Communist China in America. The article on the Fourth Red Army, which occupies a unique position in Chinese revolutionary history, offers both valuable information and a case study in the political shaping of the past. The Fourth Red Army was led by a prominent Chinese communist leader Zhang Guotao (Chang Kuo-tao) who had a huge policy disagreement with Mao Zedong during Long March and even tried to kill Mao in late 1935. Szechwan was the base area controlled by Zhang at that point in time. The Fourth Red Army subsequently was defeated by government troops and suffered huge losses. Zhang lost his power base and eventually defected to KMT. As a result of this internecine fighting, official Communist Party history tends to erase the achievements attained by Zhang in constructing Szechwan Soviet Base. But these China Today articles were published just after the Zhang-Mao split, when the Fourth Red Army was still praised. Given the poor communication during Long March, the editors of China Today were probably still not aware of the inter-party struggle and therefore their account was more accurate and informative than later assessments of Zhang Guotao.

These news reports were about the events occurring during the epic Long March, but the reporters never explicitly mentioned the term Long March or the supposed goal of Long March: to go to North China to fight with Japanese invasion. This is a call to rethink the narrative of Long March. Chinese official history tends to frame Long March in a way that emphasizes the CCP’s superb strategical capabilities and nationalist political agenda. The Long March was considered to be a strategic retreat that has a clear purpose and destination. We can hardly glean any convincing evidence in articles in China Today that support this characterization. The Communist forces acted more opportunistically, striving to fend off government forces and find a favored location for building a new base. This was in fact for a long time a distinct pattern of Chinese communist guerrilla warfare before Long March. Thus, these news reports open a window to scrutinize pro-communist narratives of CCP activities from 1934-36 before a full-fledged account of Long March came into being.

Route of the Long March (via Wikimedia Commons).

The articles in China Today provide useful information regarding both historical facts and narrative building. We still need to be cautious about overstating the achievements of the Fourth Red Army, but in this case, considering interpretations of Long March narratives, the journal’s ideological bias are not an obstacle, but instead a valuable asset.

Sources:
China Today is part of the Philip J. Jaffe Collection of Leftist Literature in Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

Stephen Averill, Revolution in the Highlands: China’s Jinggangshan Base Area (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)

Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

This essay mainly uses Wide-Giles Romanization System to denote Chinese names and places following its usage in the historical sources being analyzed, except for some well-known Pin-yin names such as Mao Zedong.

Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia, By Douglas Northrup (2003)

By Natalie Cincotta

When the Soviets launched their campaign, known as the hujum, against the veil in Uzbekistan in 1927, their goal was not just to liberate women. Without a class framework or a working class to build socialism in Uzbekistan, Soviet activists instead attempted to transform society through the liberation of women. Northrop argues that a woman’s behavior and dress, expressed namely through the veil, came to symbolize all social values and, as such, became a battleground between Uzbek national identity and the socialist project. According to Northrop, the battle over the veil thus came to represent a process of mutual self-definition.

Northrop’s main aim is to explain the unfolding of Soviet policy in Central Asia through the lens of gender relations and policy. Rooted in a colonial studies framework, Northrop argues that the campaign to unveil women began only after the isolation of Muslim clerics and landowners as class enemies failed to win the rest of the population to their side. Only then did Soviet activists initiate the “liberation” of women as the means to build socialism, through bringing profound changes to Uzbek society, culture, and everyday life. In 1927, these Soviet activists launched a campaign, or hujum, to liberate Muslim women from seclusion and oppression through mass unveiling, which they hoped would dismantle the traditional patriarchal structure of everyday life.

Woman wearing a traditional paranja in Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan) circa 1910 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Northrop highlights the limits to Soviet power through a thought-provoking consideration of Uzbek responses to this new drive to unveil women. For the most part Uzbeks resisted Soviet policies simply by non-compliance. Others learned to work the system or subvert Soviet language and logic, but wearing the veil became the primary symbolic assertion of anti-Soviet sentiment. Apart from expressing anti-Soviet sentiment, however, exactly how opposition to the hujum fostered Uzbek identity beyond preserving traditional cultural and societal structures remains an elusive aspect of the book.

Northrop’s use of gender as an analytical framework is arguably the most valuable contribution of Veiled Empire. He masterfully considers the way the Uzbek woman’s body became conflated with a social purpose by both Uzbeks and Soviet policy makers, as women’s behavior and dress came to represent practices in everyday life and social values in communities and in the nation as a whole. Northrop shows that unveiling did not necessarily spell out “liberation” for Uzbek women because western notions of feminism, gender, and patriarchy are not universal. For example, veils were not necessarily associated with oppression in Uzbek society, evident in the fact that the Uzbek Zhenotdel (Women’s Bureau) did not make it a chief concern before 1926. Northrop’s consideration of gender relations from both a Soviet and an Uzbek perspective thus allows him to understand the complexity of underlying tensions during the hujum and connect the gender project to broader Soviet goals. It is unfortunate, however, that women’s experiences are largely absent from this account, due to a lack of sources, as their voices would help further illuminate these tensions and complexities.

urging_peasants_to_speed_up_cotton_production_-_russian_and_uzbek_tashkent_1920s_mardjani

Soviet propaganda poster urging Uzbek peasants to speed up cotton production. Islamic clerics are depicted disparagingly (via Wikimedia Commons).

Overall, Veiled Empire is an admirable work that illuminates the limits of Soviet power in Central Asia. Using gender as an analytical framework, Northrop highlights how the Soviets attempted to use the “liberation” of women as a means to meeting a broader goal of building socialism. On both the Soviet and Uzbek sides, the veil was made to represent an entire identity and was conflated with social utility. As such, Northrop highlights the ways “oppression” and “liberation” are not as straightforward as Soviet activists hoped they were.

You may also like:

Janine Jones reviews The Politics of the Veil, by Joan Wallach Scott and Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood (2004).
Christopher Rose recalls Exploring the Silk Route in Uzbekistan.

CIA Study: “Consequences to the US of Communist Domination of Mainland Southeast Asia,” October 13, 1950

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Before 1948, the Cold War was largely confined to Europe and the Middle East, areas that both U.S. and Soviet leaders considered vital to their nations’ core foreign policy objectives after the Second World War. By 1950, however, the Cold War had spread to Asia. First, Mao Zedong’s communist armies prevailed in the long-running Chinese civil war in October 1949, making the world’s most populous country part of the communist bloc. Then, on July 25, 1950, communist North Korea invaded Western-oriented South Korea, igniting a bloody war and intensifying the mood of global crisis. U.S. officials assumed that Stalin and Mao were behind the North Korean attack and feared that the assault marked the start of a broader offensive in other parts of the continent. Even as they sent troops to defend South Korea, U.S. leaders pumped money and weapons into the region to help bolster friendly forces. Underlying such behavior was a strong sense, illustrated in the following analysis by the Central Intelligence Agency, that losing the region to the communist bloc would have an array of devastating strategic, economic, military, and psychological repercussions extending far beyond Southeast Asia.

Communist domination of mainland Southeast Asia would not be critical to US security interests but would have serious immediate and direct consequences. The gravest of such consequences would be a spreading of doubt and fear among other threatened non-Communist countries as to the ability of the US to back up its proclaimed intention to halt Communist expansion everywhere. Unless offset by positive additions to the security of non-Communist countries in other sensitive areas of the world, the psychological effect of the loss of mainland Southeast Asia would not only strengthen Communist propaganda that the advance of Communism is inexorable but would encourage countries vulnerable to Soviet pressure to adopt “neutral” attitudes in the cold war, or possibly even lead them to an accommodation with Communism.

Domination of the Southeast Asian mainland would increase the threat to such Western outposts in the Pacific as the island chain extending from Japan to Australia and New Zealand. The extension of Communist control, via Burma, to the borders of India and Pakistan would augment the slowly developing Communist threat to the Indian subcontinent. The fall of the Southeast Asian mainland would increase the feeling of insecurity already present in Japan as a result of Communist successes in China and would further underline the apparent economic advantages to the Japanese of association with a communist-dominated Asian sphere.

The countries of mainland Southeast Asia produce such materials on the US strategic list as rubber, tin, shellac, kapok, and teak in substantial volume. Although access to these countries is not considered to be “absolutely essential in an emergency” by the National Security Resources Board, US access to this area is considered “desirable.” Unlimited Soviet access to the strategic materials of Southeast Asia would probably be “desirable” for the USSR but would not be “absolutely essential in an emergency” and therefore denial of the resources of the area to the Soviet Union would not be essential to the US strategic position. Communist control over the rice surpluses of the Southeast Asian mainland would, however, provide the USSR with considerable bargaining power in its relations with other countries of the Far East.

Loss of the area would indirectly affect US security interests through its important economic consequences for countries aligned with the US. Loss of Malaya would deprive the UK of its greatest net dollar earner. An immediate consequence of the loss of Indochina might be a strengthening of the defense of Western Europe since French expenditures for men and materiel in Indochina would be available to fulfill other commitments. Exclusion of Japan from trade with Southeast Asia would seriously frustrate Japanese prospects for economic recovery.

Communist domination of mainland Southeast Asia would place unfriendly forces astride the most direct and best-developed sea and air routes between the Western Pacific and India and the Near East. The denial to the US of intermediate routes in mainland Southeast Asia would be significant because communications between the US and India and the Near East would be essential in a global war. In the event of such a war, the development of Soviet submarine and air bases in mainland Southeast Asia probably would compel the detour of US and allied shipping and air transportation in the Southeast Asia region via considerably longer alternate routes to the south. This extension of friendly lines of communication would hamper US strategic movements in this region and tend to isolate the major non-Communist bases In the Far East – the offshore island chain and Australia – from existing bases in East Africa and the Near and Middle East, as well as from potential bases on the Indian sub-continent.

Besides disrupting established lines of communication in the area, the denial of actual military facilities in mainland Southeast Asia – in particular, the loss of the major naval operating bases at Singapore – would compel the utilization of less desirable peripheral bases. Soviet exploitation of the naval and air bases in mainland Southeast Asia probably would be limited by the difficulties of logistic support but would, nevertheless, increase the threat to existing lines of communication.The loss of any portion of mainland Southeast Asia would increase possibilities for the extension of Communist control over the remainder. The fall of Indochina would provide the Communists with a staging area in addition to China for military operations against the rest of mainland Southeast Asia, and this threat might well inspire accommodation in both Thailand and Burma. Assuming Thailand’s loss, the already considerable difficulty faced by the British in maintaining security in Malaya would be greatly aggravated. Assuming Burma’s internal collapse, unfavorable trends in India would be accelerated. If Burma were overcome by external aggression, however, a stiffening of the attitude of the Government of India toward International Communism could be anticipated.

Source: http://www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000258837/DOC_0000258837.pdf

Photo Credits:

Mao Zedong proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, October 1, 1949 (Image courtesy of the People’s Republic of China)

South Korean refugees flee south to escape the North Korean army, 1950 (Image courtesy of the United States Government)

U.S. air and ground Marines fighting Chinese forces in Korea, 1950 (Image courtesy of the United States Federal Government)

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