Much has been made of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “no-limits” partnership and its resemblance to the alliance between Beijing and Moscow during the Cold War, writes the historian Joseph Torigian. But today’s relationship is different—and sturdier—in large part because Xi had a front row seat to the mistakes that fueled the Sino-Soviet split in the decades after the Chinese Revolution.

With newly reported details, Torigian tells the story of how Xi’s father, a high level Chinese Communist Party official, attempted to deal with the deterioration of the relationship between China and the Soviet Union—and the personal cost the rupture ultimately wrought on him and his family. “As the son of a man so involved in his country’s relationship with Moscow, Xi Jinping knows his history,” Torigian writes. “The past has shown the dangers of both incautious embrace and full-blown enmity.”

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