'Russia and the Far East: Working toward a Serious Partnership with China" by Peter Ferdinand, in Transition (Sept. 1995), Open Media Research Institute, 1201 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia pursued a pro-Western foreign policy, and its relations with China cooled. Lately, however, there has been a noticeable warming, reports Ferdinand, director of the Centre for Studies in Democratisation at Britain's Warwick University.

At first, he notes, Chinese leaders scorned Russian president Boris Yeltsin as the "gravedigger" of communism. And Yeltsin "acted as if Japan were Russia's highest pri- ority in the Far East." Courting the Japanese and their money, he tried to resolve the Russo-Japanese dispute over the Kuril Islands, which the Soviet Union had seized after World War 11.

By 1993, however, Moscow and Beijing were in a new mood, Ferdinand says. The West's failure to provide Russia with what it considered adequate economic aid prompt- ed it to reconsider its westward tilt. At the same time, "the revival of Russian national- ism among State Duma deputies under-mined Yeltsin's attempts to secure better relations with Japan," the analyst writes, because it impeded a resolution of the Kuril Islands dispute.

Beijing, meanwhile, had come to terms with the end of communism in the former Soviet Union. Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders were reassured by the Yeltsin government's willingness to abide by the Soviet Union's border agreements. The col- lapse of the Soviet Union, Ferdinand observes, "shifted the balance of forces across the Sino- Russian frontier to China's favor, with the People's Liberation Army nearly twice as big as the Russian army." Russia no longer can con- front China with military pressure "from the north, the south (Vietnam), and the southwest (India), as the Soviet Union attempted to do in the 1970s."

In 1993, Russia and China signed five-year agreements on military cooperation and tech- nology. Hundreds of Russian scientists have since moved to China to work in the Ministry of ~eronautics. Russian sales of weapons and equipment to China have increased, reaching a reported $2-$3 billion in 1994.

As China's strategic importance to the West New Statesman (5 Society (Aug. 18, 1995) recently reprinted a forgotten essay by George Orwell. He wrote it in 1944 as a preface to Animal Farm after the novel had been rejected on political grounds by at least two large publishing houses.

The sinister fact about literary censorship is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. . . .

At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet regime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nationwide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticize the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticize our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. . . .

For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet regime may be the generally accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

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