Adidas instead of Barbed Wire
The Opening of the Soviet-Chinese Border
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
After the rift between Moscow and Beijing, the Chinese-Soviet border was a closely guarded, hardly penetrable “Iron Curtain” in Asia. Regime change in Beijing and Moscow in the 1980s led to a gradual opening of the border. Initially, the governments of both countries monitored this process. With the collapse of the Soviet Union at the latest, however, activity in the border region developed a momentum of its own whereby control over local initiatives slipped out of Moscow’s hands.
(Osteuropa 5-6/2015, pp. 49–65)