On December 16, around two o’clock in the afternoon, Mao’s entourage on Stalin’s personal train arrived at the Yaroslavsky station, and a group of senior Soviet leaders were at the platform to welcome him, including Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Marshal Bulganin. They went into Mao’s berth carriage to greet him and then accompanied him out of the train. The guests and the hosts walked together through a small military review. It was snowing lightly, and it was so cold that Mao, in spite of wearing a thick woolen overcoat and a black fur toque, seemed to wince in the biting wind. Originally the hosts had planned a much larger ceremony, but due to the foul weather, they had scaled down the welcome spectacle considerably. Mao delivered a short speech, saying he was delighted and honored to come and see with his own eyes what the Soviet Union, “the heart of the world proletarian revolution,” was like. And he also thanked Stalin and the Soviet government for hosting him.
Yomei was standing at the front of the audience, among the members of the Chinese embassy, and she was amazed by the touch of feminine shrillness underlying Mao’s voice, which she hadn’t noticed before. He was obviously under the weather and sounded as if he was short of breath. As soon as the speech was over, they all got into sedans heading southwest toward a villa called Sisters River, which was about twenty miles away from downtown. It was the place where Mao was to lodge. He planned to stay in the Soviet Union for three months, negotiating with the Russians, visiting some factories and cultural sites, and also having some rest and medical treatment. If possible, he’d go on to visit Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. Yet in spite of the long visit to the Soviet Union that was planned, it was still strange to put him up so far away from the Kremlin. Mao and his colleagues all knew that state visitors usually stayed at dachas on Lenin Hill, which was close to Red Square. Yomei had noticed that Mao wasn’t in a good mood. He didn’t smile, and his smooth face dropped the whole time after they had left the train station.
Together with Mao was Mr. Shi Zhe, who had come all the way from China on the same train. He was trusted by the chairman, having served as his Russian secretary for many years in Yan’an and then in Beijing. Yomei was mainly an informal interpreter, which meant that whenever Shi Zhe was tired and needed a break, she would step in, especially when Mao met the Soviets casually, not on official business. In addition, she was in charge of translating the meeting notes, some of which, after being summarized, would be telegraphed back to the CCP’s Central Committee in Beijing. So although she wasn’t present at some formal occasions, she was often around as an understudy of Shi Zhe’s. By and large she was informed well enough to follow the general drift of Mao’s business meetings with the hosts. From the very beginning, she could tell that Mao might not be happy about the location of his lodgings, even though the Sisters River residence was also Stalin’s personal dacha in Moscow, the second one besides his chief one in Kuntsevo.
Though it was called a dacha, Sisters River was more like a villa, grand and white, three stories, with four massive columns at the front, and surrounded by birch woods. Yomei guessed that Mao’s moodiness might be due to the fact that Stalin hadn’t shown up in person to receive him at the train station. But then, Stalin was pushing seventy and in poor health, and it was understandable that he couldn’t go there personally.
Yet a meeting between Stalin and Mao was already scheduled for that very evening at the Kremlin. The Chinese group arrived at the grand palace at six o’clock. When the gate to a hall opened, they found the whole of the USSR politburo standing in a line and led by Stalin to receive them. Stalin held Mao’s hand and observed him carefully for a long moment. He said through his interpreter Nikolai Fedorenko’s translation, “You look splendid, so young and in such good color! The Chinese people are fortunate to have a great leader like you. You have made tremendous contributions to the revolution and will lead your people to more victories.”
Mao was moved and said, “It’s a great honor to meet you in person at long last, like a dream come true!” Actually, in the past two years he had kept asking to come and visit Stalin, but the supreme leader had never given his assent, always making one excuse after another for his unavailability. That might explain why Mao had brought with him only a small staff of some twenty people—he feared Stalin might give him the cold shoulder and thus humiliate him as well as his colleagues. Rumor had it that in Stalin’s eyes Mao was merely a hidebound peasant, a self-proclaimed Marxist who was shrewd and recalcitrant, though forceful. If Stalin didn’t treat him warmly, Mao might shorten his stay in the USSR.
After everyone was seated, Stalin and Mao began conversing rather casually. Mao said that he used to have no voice within the CCP and had often been mistreated. Stalin told him, “Now you’re victorious. The winner never goes on trial because nobody can condemn him. This is a universal principle.”
Mao nodded and realized that was Stalin’s way of acknowledging that they had over the decades backed the wrong factions in the CCP. Those supported by the USSR had lost one fight after another to Mao, who was indeed triumphant and had to be accepted by the Kremlin now.
Stalin asked Mao about the purpose of his visit, saying, “You’ve come a long way and can’t go back empty-handed. Do we need to do something together?”
Mao replied, “We came to learn mainly, to see what you have accomplished. Your experience means the world to us. As for our needs, we would like to have something that looks nice and also tastes good, full of nourishment.”
His last sentence was meant to strike a humorous note, but it was impossible for Shi Zhe to render the humor transparent, so Mao’s words puzzled the Russians. Struggling as Mr. Shi did, he couldn’t get the message across fully—China wanted something grand in appearance but also substantial. Mao’s expression puzzled the hosts, and a lengthy pause set in. Then Beria, the Soviet police chief, broke out giggling—apparently he alone caught the joke. His small round glasses kept glinting.
Then Stalin said that Mao was welcome to go anywhere while he was here, and of course they’d do their best to play host, making his visit a happy and memorable experience. Stalin went on to talk about how the establishment of the People’s Republic of China had tipped the scale of global power balance. Now the Soviet Union and the PRC must unite like true socialist countries so as to keep peace in the world while opposing the aggression of Western imperialism. Mao asked Stalin whether the global peace would last, saying “As a matter of fact, my colleagues all want me to ask you how to maintain peace in the world, because we need peace in order to rebuild our war-battered country.”
Stalin said there was no threat to China’s peaceful environment from now on, since Japan was still struggling to recover from its defeat and since the United States and Europe were still shaken by the Second World War. He bantered, “Who else? Do you think Kim Il Sung will invade China? In short, there’ll be a decade or two of peace ahead of us if our two countries join hands in solidarity.” (Neither of them could foresee the Korean War that would break out seven months later and plunge China into a three-year confrontation with the United States.)
Gradually Mao shifted to the topic of revising China’s old treaty with the Soviet Union (signed by Chiang Kai-shek’s government in 1945)—the PRC had declared they would abolish all the unfair treaties signed by the previous regime and was eager to take back Port Arthur and Port of Dalian and the Changchun Railroad (the Chinese section of the Trans-Siberian railroad). A few months prior, Liu Shaoqi had talked with Stalin about this matter, but Stalin hadn’t given a clear answer. Now he explained to Mao that the old treaty, though unfair to China, had been made together with the U.S. and England as part of the Yalta Conference. If the Soviet Union changed the contents of the treaty unilaterally (relinquishing its holdings in China), the other powers might intervene and want to revise the agreement on the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin. What if Japan demanded the return of the Kuril Islands? This might complicate matters. So for now it would be better to keep the old treaty as it was, meaning the Soviet navy should continue staying at Port Arthur and China should not take over the railroad. Neither should the USSR relinquish its hold on Dalian too soon.
Mao was taken aback to hear that, but he agreed to consider the Soviet position on this issue. Stalin offered a possible solution, namely to keep the old treaty while revising its contents so as to avoid giving the Western Powers an excuse to demand any formal revision of the Yalta treaty. Mao even admitted that while considering revoking the current unfair treaty, the CCP leaders hadn’t taken into account the Yalta treaty (though they had understood how important the Port of Dalian was to the Soviet Union, which had no ice-free seaport of its own), so more caution should be taken and there was no need to withdraw the Soviet navy from Port Arthur or revoke the old treaty right away.
Mao then mentioned the aid of three hundred million rubles that Artem Mikoyan had promised the CCP to seriously consider a year earlier. China was in shambles and needed to recover from the devastation of the civil war, so any help from the USSR would be greatly appreciated. Besides money, China would also like to have many experts of various fields from the USSR. Stalin was quite generous and agreed to grant all the aid the Chinese requested, as he had already given his word to Liu Shaoqi a few months before. Now he was willing to sign all the agreements on the aid. Mao was elated to hear Stalin’s affirmation, saying, “This is the first time our two parties have signed a treaty on financial aid and it will definitely bring about a positive response in China.”
They then talked about trade in Xinjiang and with Mongolia. Stalin agreed to help China open civil aviation in those regions that could facilitate trade, transportation, and travel. Following the issue of civil aviation, since China didn’t have its own air force yet, Mao hoped the Soviet Union would provide air cover if China launched an attack on Taiwan to reunify the country. That seemed to catch his host unprepared. Stalin lowered his grizzled head to give thought for a moment, then answered, “We would love to, but that might invite interference from the U.S. If they send over warships and aircraft to the Taiwan region, the confrontation could get out of hand, so let us think more about such a move and make our decision later. We’d better be cautious about this.”
Toward the end of the two-hour talk, Stalin expressed his wish to read more of Mao’s writings. Such a request delighted Mao, because it was rumored that Stalin viewed Mao as another Tito, not a real Marxist at all. Mao informed him that the translation of his writings into Russian was about to begin, and he had been looking through the pieces to be translated. Stalin asked whether he would need an expert to help with the translation. Again Mao was taken aback, but recovered himself at once, saying he welcomed any help of course. Stalin recommended Pavel Yuqin, a philosopher who a few years later became the Soviet ambassador to China. At the moment, however, Mao slightly resented assigning such a theorist to help him, as if to ensure everything must be politically correct. But Mao’s resentment eventually faded, because Yuqin did manage to convince Stalin that Mao was a genuine Marxist, with a great amount of practical experience. And for years, Lily served as one of the translators of Mao’s writings.
In spite of a good night’s sleep, Mao was in a foul mood the next morning that was caused by the stymied negotiation over the revocation of the old treaty. That had been the main purpose of his visit, but it had gotten laid aside at the very first meeting. What an imbroglio he was in now. He regretted having agreed to not revise the treaty right away. He should have begged to differ at the meeting, emphasizing that both sides should agree to disagree for now. Now, without any development in this respect, he might have to face criticism in China once he was back. The more he mulled over this frustration, the angrier he became. He told Li Jiaji, a staffer on his retinue, to remove the spongy mattress, saying it tended to give him a crick in the neck and make him insomniac as he was unused to this kind of comfortable bed. He wanted real wood boards, like the bed he had back home. Jiaji didn’t know where to get wood boards, so he asked Yomei to explain the matter to Ivan Kovalev, the Russian official in charge of Mao’s daily life here, to see if they could replace the mattress with wood boards. Yomei believed it would be inappropriate to make a big fuss over such a trifle. Instead, she measured the bed lengthways and crossways and then reported Mao’s demand to Ambassador Wang, who sent a junior diplomat to a furniture store downtown with Yomei’s measurements and bought some boards. The mattress was replaced that very evening, and Mao was satisfied with the new hard bed. The Russian servants later told Yomei that Mao was a genuine revolutionary, still living like a guerrilla in the wilderness.
Mao expected that Stalin would meet with him again to discuss the unfinished business, but there was no word from the Kremlin. Now he understood why he’d been put up at such a faraway place—Stalin must have meant to keep some distance from him and also to show that he was not a major guest here. So Mao was galled, though he knew that Stalin must be busy these days with so many delegates from other Eastern Bloc countries coming to celebrate his seventieth birthday. Nonetheless, Mao came up with a more bizarre demand—he wanted to have the toilet altered, claiming that sitting on the nice toilet would make his bowels seize. He needed the more primitive type he had back home—a small, rectangular porcelain bowl set in the floor of the bathroom so that he could squat over it. Yomei tittered on hearing such a demand and said, “My, this one is like a nail in my head that I don’t know how to pull out.” After considering Mao’s new demand a moment, she reported it to Ambassador Wang, who sighed on the phone, apparently at a loss what to do. “My heavens, where could I find a mason who can change the toilet for him?” he wondered aloud. “Besides, that’s Stalin’s bathroom and we’re not supposed to mess with it.”
Yomei laughed, then said she was going to speak with Ivan Kovalev, who had lived in China for many years and must know what a toilet for squatting was like. So she went to see Ivan and explained Mao’s demand. Kovalev cracked up and said no Russians but himself knew anything about such a toilet. Moreover, it was Stalin’s bathroom and he’d have to get permission if he’d have anything done to it. Luckily he got approval from the Kremlin, and then sent over a mason to lay bricks around the toilet to construct a tiny terrace around it, and even built two steps for Mao to climb up to squat over the hole when he needed to defecate.
Yomei placed a roll of toilet tissue at the corner of the mini-platform, then turned to Mao and said, “Please be careful. Don’t fall from this.”
Mao laughed and said, “I’m not that frail and old. I just don’t want to give them the impression that we Chinese are merely pushovers.”
Yomei nodded and went on giggling. “Please let us know if you need something else, Chairman.”
“Of course. What’s our plan for tomorrow?”
“You told the Russians you wanted something nice to look at and also good to eat, so they made arrangements for you to visit a national museum of fine arts.”
“All right, is the Russian winter always so cold?”
“Yes, it can be harsh and miserable.”
“No wonder so many of Hitler’s troops froze to death at Stalingrad.”
Mao seemed pleased with the renovation of the toilet and even praised Ivan Kovalev, saying he was a clever fellow.