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Bruce A. Elleman, Diplomacy and Deception: The Secret History of Sino-Soviet Diplomatic Relations, 1917-1927. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997, xviii, 322 pp. + index.
Soviet Russia did not treat China any better than did the other Western powers. From the very start of the Soviet regime, Soviet policy toward China remained imperialist and predatory, though this fact can only be seen with attention to the record of secret diplomacy that was carried on between China and the Soviet Union from 1917 through the end of World War II.
This is the point of Bruce Elleman's thoroughly researched and tightly focused volume. Drawing on Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and American archives to reinterpret the central events of Sino-Russian diplomacy during the twentieth century, Elleman convincingly demonstrates that the cataclysmic change of the Bolshevik Revolution did not extend to Russian policy toward China. Rather than treating China as an equal-as was and is believed by much of the public and academic community-the Soviet government instead presented a public face of equality while surreptitiously maintaining a policy that sought to reassert the Tsarist privileges in China.
The story begins not in Moscow, St Petersburg, or Beijing, but in Paris. Elleman sees the alleged American betrayal of China at the Versailles Peace Conference as a central myth of Chinese historiography (p. 1). When Woodrow Wilson asserted the right of self-determination for all people, the Chinese took him at his word, and hoped to regain territories on the Shandong peninsula that had been occupied by Germany since...