How Stalin Humiliated Mao Zedong in Moscow — and Why Mao Never Forgot It

In December 1949, Mao Zedong boarded a special train and traveled for nearly two weeks across Soviet territory to reach Moscow. He had come to celebrate Stalin’s seventieth birthday and, more urgently, to negotiate a new Sino-Soviet treaty that would replace the one the Soviet Union had signed with the Nationalist government. To mark the []