Leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were balancing ideology and opportunism. In borderline situations, the winner was usually whichever policy option did the most to obtain, retain, and maintain power for the Soviet Socialist dictatorship.
Allies of the USSR and enemies of the USSR could exchange roles in an instant. As historians Herb Romerstein and Stan Evans write,
Understanding who stood where in the often confusing propaganda battles of the Cold War depends on knowing what the interests of the Soviet Union were at any given moment and how these could abruptly change when the global balance of forces shifted.
The most notable example, of course, was the “Hitler-Stalin Pact,” a treaty of nonaggression between the Nazis and the USSR. Also known as the “Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact” or the “Nazi-Soviet Pact,” the treaty was signed in August 1939. The Soviets and the Nazis were then allies, and cooperated in the invasion and oppression of Poland.
This came as a surprise to the rest of the world because Hitler and Stalin had publicly opposed each other prior to August 1939. Stalin had decried Hitler as an imperialist. Hitler had denounced Stalin as a communist.
Just as the Hitler-Stalin Pact reversed, in a moment, the previous opposition between the two, so in June 1941, the situation reversed itself again in a flash. Hitler and Stalin, who’d been allies only a few days before, were now at war with each other.
This was not the only situation in which the USSR’s allegiances reversed themselves suddenly. Stalin, needing an organized China to prevent Japan from attacking the USSR, backed Chiang Kai-shek, even though Chiang was sustaining free China against Mao’s communist revolutionaries.
While Stalin’s ideology should have dictated him to befriend Mao, Stalin’s instinct for power directed him to ally with Chiang:
Less often noted but equally telling was the zigzagging Communist line on China. As seen, a main Soviet concern of the later 1930s was the danger of invasion from Japan, then on the march in Asia and long hostile to the USSR. This threat dictated a temporarily friendly view of China’s Chiang Kai-shek, then pinning down a million or so Japanese who might otherwise have invaded Russia. The same Soviet interest meant blocking an American modus vivendi with Japan concerning China, as this too could have freed up the empire for an assault on Soviet Asia. In both respects, Chiang’s then-high standing with U.S. opinion trumped notions of accommodation with Tokyo in the Pacific.
As in the case of Germany, so also in the case of China. In mid-1943, Stalin would suddenly drop his relationship with Chiang, support Mao, and direct the USSR’s efforts against Chiang.
When Mao Tse-Tung, whose name is also spelled ‘Mao Zedong,’ finally defeated free China in 1949, Stalin formed an official alliance with the communist dictator of China. But like all other communist alliances, it was an arrangement of convenience, which ended in the early 1960s, when the Soviets and the Maoists decided that they didn’t need each other.
