Remaking the Eastern Bloc after Stalin: how China and Poland took on the Soviet Union, 1956-1960

Stalin expanded communist power across Eurasia, from Berlin to Pyongyang, linking disparate territories into a single geopolitical organism under his dictatorial control. Three years after his death, in 1956, a backlash of pent up political and economic anger overthrew Stalinism and shook the foundations of the Eastern Bloc, as communist regimes almost fell in Poland and Hungary. Four years later, the intercontinental communist bloc built by Stalin fractured when People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union went their separate ways in the acrimonious Sino-Soviet split. Those two momentous events in the history of the Cold War are rarely linked. The paper I present seeks to fill that gap and rewrite the history of the late 1950s as a single process of grappling with a post-Stalin future that involved communist countries big and small, and could have well produced a reformed Eastern Bloc instead of the breakup that finally happened. China, Poland, and the Soviet Union are the main actors in this story, each looking out for its own interests and seeking allies in the uncertain atmosphere of the Eastern Bloc that was redefining its geopolitical and ideological rules. From Polish lobbying for Chinese support in the summer of 1956, Chinese intervention in the Polish-Soviet crisis of October that year, inter-communist diplomacy around the Hungarian crisis, and several years of close Sino-Polish relations before a final breakdown in 1960, this paper introduces new evidence from Polish state and party archives to shine a new light on Cold War history.