HUNGARIAN STUDIES 14. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [2000]

László Borhi: Some Questions on Hungarian-Soviet Relations, 1949-1955

SOME QUESTIONS ON HUNGARIAN-SOVIET RELATIONS 1949-1955 LÁSZLÓ BORHI Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, U.S.A. By late 1949 the bipolar structure of the world had already taken shape. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had decided that not only was there no longer any ground for their cooperation, but to continue cooperating would men­ace their respective positions in the world, if not their very existence. Hence the most pressing issues that faced the victorious powers remained unresolved. No collective peace treaty was signed with Japan, and Germany ended up as two separate states. The division of Germany had not been premeditated, but it was probably inevitable.1 Nevertheless, Stalin, at least, may have kept hoping for its unification until his note of 1952 was turned down by the Western powers.2 World politics seemed now to function as a zero-sum game: a loss for one superpower constituted a gain for the other, and vice-versa. A case in point was China, where Mao Tse-tung's victory meant the "loss" of that country for the United States. This loss was exploited by Stalin through the signing with China of a pact of friendship that guaranteed military, political and economic gains for the Soviet Union. In exchange Moscow recognized Chinese sovereignty and the Chinese communist party's preeminence in leading revolutionary movements in the Asian region.3 Subsequently, the North Korean invasion of South Korea received sup­port from the Kremlin, which had come to be convinced by Kim II Sung that a revolutionary situation existed in Korea. Stalin, who thought that a friendly re­gime ruling the whole Korean peninsula was needed in order to hold off a seem­ingly inevitable Japanese revanchist invasion of the Soviet Union, agreed to sup­port Kim on the assumption that the United States would not intervene.4 This turned out to be erroneous, and Washington launched a counterattack under United Nations auspices. Learning from the experiences of European diplomacy in the late 1930s, when the democratic powers had mistaken each of Hitler's aggressive steps as Germany's final move rather than as what they actually were, the step­ping-stones for further gains, the United States regarded the Korean aggression as a mere prelude to further communist expansion orchestrated by Moscow.5 The Korean aggression as a result gave a strong impetus for the United States to dras­tically increase its military preparedness. The division of the European continent Hungarian Studies 14/1 (2000) 0236-6568/2000/S5.00 © 2000 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest

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