CWIHP is pleased to announce the publication of the latest addition to the CWIHP Working Papers Series, Working Paper #63: The Interkit Story: A Window into the Final Decades of the Sino-Soviet Relationship by James Hershberg, Sergey Radchenko, Péter Vámos, and David Wolff.
Based on newly available documents from the Russian and East-Central European archives, the paper explores the largely untold story of the Sino-Soviet rivalry and relationship during the latter decades of the Cold War through the activities of "Interkit," an organization set up by the Kremlin to coordinate Soviet-bloc analysis of and policy toward China from 1967 until the mid-1980s. Containing an appendix of 25 newly translated archival materials, the paper documents Interkit's shadowy existence through the records of the periodic meetings of China experts from the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies to consider the political, economic, ideological, cultural, and other dimensions of dealing with their problematic former ally.
James Hershberg is associate professor of history and international affairs at The George Washington University; former director of the Cold War International History Project; and author of James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Knopf, 1993) and MARIGOLD: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam (forthcoming; Wilson Center Press/Stanford University Press, 2011).
Sergey Radchenko is lecturer at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China. Radchenko is the author of Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 (2009); co-author (with Campbell Craig) of The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (2008); The Soviets' Best Friend in Asia: The Mongolian Dimension of the Sino-Soviet Split, CWIHP Working Paper No. 42; and The Soviet Union and the North Korean Seizure of the USS Pueblo: Evidence from Russian Archives, CWIHP Working Paper No. 47.
Péter Vámos is senior research fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Vamos earned a PhD from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Vamos has published five books and numerous articles on the modern history and foreign relations of China, Sino-Hungarian relations, and the history of Christianity in China, including Hungarian Jesuit Mission in China (Budapest: Akadémiai, 2003) which won the Academic Youth Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Science.
David Wolff is professor of Eurasian history at the Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. Wolff is the author of To the Harbin Station (Stanford University Press, 1999), coauthor of Le KGB et les pays baltes (Berlin, 2005) and CWIHP Working Paper #30 entitled 'One Finger's Worth of Historical Events': New Russian and Chinese Evidence on the Sino-Soviet Split, 1948-1959.