Qin Hui, Ukraine 7

Qin Hui, “Appeasement after World War II:  Solzhenitsyn's Question—Ukraine Series No. 7”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction 
 
Qin Hui (b. 1953), who taught at Tsinghua University until his recent retirement, is a historian and one of China’s most prominent public intellectuals.  Translations of many of his writings, treating topics as diverse as Thomas Piketty’s Twentieth- First Century Capitalism, “China as seen from South Africa” and “Globalization after the Pandemic:  Thoughts on the Coronavirus” are available on this site.  Qin emailed me in early March, asking me to translate a series of texts he is writing on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which are being published in FT Chinese.  I am delighted to do so, because Qin’s voice is certainly unique in China, and perhaps in the world.  I have since learned that FT is editing Qin’s texts, softening some of the rough edges and the implicit criticisms of Xi Jinping, and Qin has asked me to translate his original texts rather than the edited versions. At some point, I will compare the two versions and add footnotes to my translations, so that readers can get a sense of the editing process in the Chinese context.
 
The text translated here is yet another discussion of Western appeasement, this time in the context of the various aggressions of the Soviet Union.  The logic is the same as in Series Number Six, which discussed the twentieth century more broadly, and Qin takes greater pains in this essay to remind Chinese readers of the extent to which the Soviet Union engaged in aggression against the People’s Republic, liberally citing Mao Zedong (not otherwise a favorite of Qin’s) for his frequent condemnation of Soviet hegemony in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split beginning in the late 1950s.  He concludes with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s sobering observation that during World War II, totalitarian Germany achieved such strength that the West could only defeat it by allying with another totalitarian country, the Soviet Union.  Qin Hui clearly feels that the West has let its guard down since the end of the Cold War, and pointedly asks who the West will ally with this time around, given that China seems to be standing with Russia.  One suspects that Qin’s question is addressed more to his Chinese readers than to Western leaders.
 
Translation
 
Appeasement of the Soviet Union 
 
In fact, when appeasement of Germany and Japan came to an end, a new appeasement began—that of the Soviet Union.  It began with West's unceasing tolerance of their wartime ally's evil behavior and continued with numerous concessions to a Cold War adversary.  In fact, the appeasement of the Soviet Union traces its beginnings to the days of the secret Soviet-German pact, when the Soviet Union was not yet an ally. 
 
From the beginning of World War II until 1941, the Soviet Union was actually cooperating with Germany under the terms of this agreement and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviets and Germans not only joined forces to divide Poland for the fourth time at the outset of the war, but also tacitly agreed to separate their tactics: during Germany's "Phony War," the Soviets quickly annexed the three small Baltic states, occupied Romania's Bessarabia and North Bukovina, and attacked Finland. All of these countries were pro-Western (England and France) at the time.

Of all the small countries on the western border of the Soviet Union, only Hungary, Germany's ally and already a member of the Axis alliance, did not suffer, but instead took a piece of land from Romania, as did the Soviet Union. So what we saw here was actually the partition of Poland by the Soviets and the Germans, followed by the partition of Romania by Germany’s allies. 
 
Nonetheless, the West looked on and did nothing, and as a result, the three Baltic states were destroyed, while Finland and Romania, having lost a large part of their territory, aligned with Germany out of a desire for self-preservation. 
 
The reason for the West's inaction was that Britain and France were already at war with Germany on the Western Front and did not have the strength to support these countries against the Soviet Union. In fact, Britain and France also showed moral solidarity with Finland by expelling the Soviet Union from the League of Nations because of the Soviet invasion. But Romania was a member of the "Little Entente," and Britain and France were obliged to help. Moreover, throughout the entirety of the Winter War between Russia and Finland, the British and French were not amassing very many troops on the Western front, which meant that they indeed could have helped Finland, and even discussed sending volunteers, although it never got beyond the discussion stage, and they barely sent any arms.  Sweden, a neutral country, sent nearly 10,000 volunteers to Finland and provided 16 planes (one third of the Sweden’s warplanes). In contrast, Britain and France were embarrassed for having engaged in what we might call a "mild form of appeasement." 
 
The Soviet Union's participation in the war did contribute tremendously to the defeat of Germany. Of course the West (through the famous Lend-Lease Act, etc.) also provided great support to the Soviet Union. To be fair, there is a tendency in Western public opinion to downplay the Soviet contribution and exaggerate Western support. At the time, in fact, the gamble over “who could stand to lose the most men” was strictly between Stalin and Hitler.  In World War II, the Soviet Union entered the war two years on, but had the highest death toll in the world at the end. As a major power, it was not unusual for the USSR to have the highest absolute number of deaths, but more cruelly, in percentage terms only Poland and Yugoslavia suffered more war dead than the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union had a much greater number of deaths and a higher death rate (including soldiers killed in combat and civilians who starved to death) than Germany, which it had defeated.

During the siege of Leningrad alone, which lasted for 900 days (872 to be exact), 2.5 million Russian citizens starved or froze to death, and the total number of casualties surpassed 10 million, when we add together the military and civilian casualties. German military casualties due to the siege (there were no German civilians in the area) were only about 580,000. In the first two months of 1942, when the siege was at its most severe, more than 100,000 people were starving to death every month, and in the first six months of the same year the archives reveal 2,105 arrests for cannibalism (including eating corpses and killing people to eat them) (64% of the arrested were women!) and 1,216 murders for food ration cards.

Frankly speaking, in democratic countries where people have a choice, any city which was besieged for three consecutive harsh winters and where two out of five people froze to death would have opted for an “honorable surrender.” From this perspective, no matter how much aid the West supplied could possibly have been enough. 
 
Yalta: The Origins of Cold War Appeasement 
 
But the other side of this contribution was the brutality displayed by the Soviet Union (excluding that on the battlefield against the enemy) and the Western appeasement. To curry favor with their monstrous partner, the West not only helped the Soviets to cover up the Katyn Forest massacre, tolerated Soviet repression of pro-Western resistance forces (such as those within the Polish government-in-exile), and yielded to Soviet demands for the forced rendition of all Soviet citizens from the former Axis-occupied territories liberated by the West, which included—in addition to fascist collaborators who deserved to be punished—a large number of Soviet war prisoners who did not want to return (the Soviets' cruelty to their own captives is well known), people who defected to the West simply because they were dissatisfied with the Soviet system, and even elderly White Russians who had been in exile for decades.  All of these met with misfortune. 
 
When the United Nations was established, the West surprisingly granted the Soviet Union the privilege of being the only country with three votes (in addition to the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Belarus were also "UN members"). 
 
Even more tragic is that in East Asia, in order to reduce American casualties, when it was clear that Japan was on the verge of defeat, the US begged the Soviets to send troops to accept the Japanese surrender in Manchuria, although they had no business being there.[2] To this end, China was pressured to make concessions to the Soviet Union, making it the only country to have expanded its colonial rights in China after the war. At the time General Patrick Hurley (1883-1963) went to Chongqing and told Chiang Kai-shek that Mongolian independence was inevitable, since the Soviet Union had already taken it. It is understandable that the Soviet Union would want Lüshun in Dalian, because it needed a warm-water port. As a result, after it had abrogated all the unequal treaties during World War II and become a victorious power, China had to sign the disgraceful and unequal Sino-Soviet treaty in 1950. 
 
The Yalta Accords were in fact only the beginning of Western appeasement of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.  Putting things this way is hardly “heterodox,” and I think that even “leftist Maoists” in China (the predecessors of today’s “Putin fans”) would have had no reason to disagree, since when Mao Zedong joined forces with the U.S. in his latter years to oppose the Soviet Union, he repeatedly complained about Western weakness and appeasement of the Soviet Union's "hegemony" and the "new czar," and even used the word “appeasement” at the time. And now those good students of Chairman Mao blame the West for being too tough and "pushing Putin to the wall"! 
 
There were tough Western responses to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, such as the Berlin standoff, the dispatch of troops to Korea to counter Stalin's support for Kim Il-Sung's attack, and forcing back the Soviet Union's nuclear gamble during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but examples of appeasement still abound. In 1956, the people of Eastern Europe opted for reform, and the Soviets sent troops to suppress the movement, producing a bloodbath in Hungary.  Nagy Imre (1896-1958), the Communist head of the legitimate government was driven to revolt, withdrew from the Warsaw Pact, announced his country’s neutrality, and called for support from the great powers, but while the West talked a good game it remained on the sidelines and watched while Nagy was hanged. 

The same thing happened again in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The difference was that this time the five Warsaw Pact countries that bordered the Czech Republic sent troops to overthrow the legitimate Czech government on the grounds of the "limited sovereignty doctrine" that brazenly challenged international law. This time even China reacted, and the person scolding the West for appeasing the Soviet Union was none other than Mao Zedong. 
 
Today many people going so far as to say that NATO is an "offensive" group. Offensive? In the opposing camp at NATO’s door there are people actively calling for NATO to help, and NATO does not even lift a finger, so who is being “offensive?”  These Eastern European countries are clamoring to enter NATO, and NATO keeps making excuses.  But in the good old days of the Warsaw Pact, big brother came after whoever wanted to leave, resulting in a series of wars and aggressions by the “new Tsar” and his “socialist imperialism” (to cite Mao yet again), so who is the “offensive” one, after all? 
 
The West actually lost more than it won in the proxy wars of the Cold War.  Portugal had several colonies in Africa, but after democratization in 1974 no longer wanted them (this is another example of the "peace and democracy theory," while in fact, as a member of NATO, Portugal’s abandonment of the colonies can also be seen as a shrinking of NATO).  Post-independence, civil wars broke out in the former colonies as the various factions could not get along.  These factions were related more to tribal issues than to question of left and right; they leaned toward the Soviets or toward the US depending on who would help them win.  A typical example is Angola, where the pro-Soviet faction, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, was not dominant at the outset and was twice almost eliminated by their adversaries.  

However, the Soviet Union and Cuba blatantly sent their troops along with planes and tanks, which quickly turned the tide of the war. The pro-Western UNITA faction, by contrast, was considered "undemocratic" by the United States, which was unwilling to support it. Subsequently, the then CIA Director George Bush, Sr. (later President of the United States) decided that UNITA was worthy of assistance in terms of the larger Cold War picture, and China, which at the time was committed to "opposing the Soviets at every turn," also came out in favor of UNITA in its foreign propaganda. The US Congress, however, representing the American people, passed the Clark Amendment of 1976, which prohibited aid to UNITA.

Only South Africa came out in support of UNITA, because Namibia, which was under South African control, shared a border with Angola, and Pretoria feared that Soviet control of Angola would hurt South African interests. But apartheid South Africa was already despised by the West, and without U.S. support, how could South Africa defeat the Soviet Union and Cuba?  So the Soviet Union won the proxy war and took control of Angola. 
 
A more typical example is, of course, the Vietnam War. As I mentioned earlier, in the Vietnam War, the U.S. was actually defeated by its own anti-war movement. Soviet-backed North Vietnam fought American-backed South Vietnam, leaving 900,000 North Vietnamese dead, as well as 250,000-310,000 South Vietnamese, and more than 50,000 Americans. But the North Vietnamese system was unconcerned about casualties, while the United States was not. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed in 1964, which sent the first U.S. troops to Vietnam, received nearly unanimous approval, the combined House and Senate vote being 504 to 2.  The level of public support was almost the same as when the United States declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, or after 9/11, when the United States launched its war on terror. But after thousands of U.S. military casualties, there appeared a groundswell of opposition in Congress.

​In 1973, in response to anti-war trends in society, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, which effectively stripped the president of his power in regard to the situation in Vietnam. After Nixon vetoed the bill, Congress overrode the president's veto by a two-thirds vote. The Paris Accords of the same year set the conditions for the withdrawal of U.S. troops: ceasefire, demarcation of the border between the parties in South Vietnam, prohibition of armed reunification, prohibition of increase in personnel and equipment, reunification of Vietnam only through peaceful elections, etc.  None of these were observed by the North, but the U.S. troops still left as soon as possible. The reason is simple: domestic laws decided by the American people made it impossible for American troops to legitimately stay in Vietnam. 
 
Viewed purely from the perspective of the "U.S.-Vietnam War," it looks a lot like an American invasion, and there is no appeasement to speak of.   Indeed, this is how the left and radical anti-war activists in the United States saw it. So from this perspective, the most powerful opponent of aggression was not so much the North Vietnamese army, and instead the "American people" in their democratic system. But from the perspective of a "proxy wars of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War," if we take into account the fact that China also had 170,000 troops in Vietnam and that the North Vietnamese army started the wars in Cambodia and Laos before the U.S. (which China called the "aggression" and "hegemony" of a “regional small hegemon,” although such language of course only appeared after 1979), then it is clear that the United States lost this regional Cold War contest (in terms of the purpose of the war) through appeasement, and it was "appeasement of the American people" under a democratic system. 
 
Solzhenitsyn's Question 
 
Of course, the West always had a huge advantage over the Soviet Union in terms of competing ideological appeal. In the end, it was the people of the Soviet Eastern European countries, including the mainstream within the ruling parties, who moved to reform themselves and abandon the "Red terror of the totalitarian system" that even Putin curses today. Some people in China say “the West brought down the Soviet Union,” which means that Putin should be considered a criminal for helping the West to accomplish this.
 
However, this argument, like when Biden revealed Putin’s war plans to try to slow him down, runs the risk of deifying the U.S. and touting its omnipotence. In fact, not only did the "orthodox view" not expect the Cold War to end with such dramatic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but almost no one in Western political and academic circles, including experts in the regions, expected it, nor did dissidents in the countries who objectively contributed to the dramatic changes. At the time, everyone was worried about the "totalitarian threat" to Western democracies. 
 
In June 1975, Solzhenitsyn gave a speech to American AFL-CIO in which he suggested that the reigning democracies were weak in the face of totalitarianism. He pointed out that many people in the United States were spreading the illusion of "détente" (a criticism shared by Mao Zedong) and hoping to live in peace while ignoring the Soviet Union's internal repression of human rights and external expansion. He noted that in the World War II era, one form of totalitarianism, Nazism, ruled only a small part of the world, yet even the united might of the democratic countries could not defeat it, and had to unite with another form of totalitarianism, the Soviet Union, and finally won the war, if at a great cost.

So what about now? Today totalitarianism has taken over half of the world, or perhaps even more than half. So who can the democracies unite with? If they are still as weak as they once were, where is their hope?  The dramatic changes in the former USSR and East Europe once seemed to have put this "Solzhenitsyn question" on ice. But today's events in Ukraine suggest that this question clearly remains to be answered.
 
Notes 

[1]秦晖, “二战之后的绥靖主义：索尔仁尼琴之问, 乌克兰系列之七,” published in FT-Chinese, on April 20, 2022. 

[2]Translator’s note:  The expression Qin uses is 摘桃子/zhai taozi, lit. “picking peaches,” which means “stealing the fruits of other people’s labor.”