ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union’s impact on the international politics of China, Japan, and Korea since World War II is a complex subject that is best approached by way of a summary of Soviet policy toward the East Asian region. Moscow has aspired not only to security but to influence in East Asia, although less obsessively than in Eastern and Central Europe. Stalin’s East Asian policy in 1945 was remarkably similar to his East and Central European policy. Stalin wanted a buffer zone and sphere of influence extending along the Soviet border from the Pacific to Kazakhstan. Stalin was much more successful in Korea, since his forces occupied it down to the 38th parallel in 1945 and over the next three years turned it progressively into a Communist-controlled Soviet satellite. During 1959 Khrushchev clearly came to regard the Chinese as the main threat to the desired detente with the United States.
