The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History by Austin Jersild

When this book on the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War was published in 2014, it joined two other prominent works that were also based on extensive international archival research. In The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), Lorenz Lüthi argues that the main cause of the Sino-Soviet split lay in ideological differences. A contrasting view was expressed in Sergey Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), which depicts the Sino-Soviet relationship as a more traditional competition for power and influence, determined by historical animosities, and with cultural and racial connotations. From the time the Sino-Soviet split flared into the open in the early 1960s, generations of scholars have explored the causes, nature, and consequences of the split. The lion's share of attention has been given to high-level diplomacy within the...