WASHINGTON -- In early October 1950, as U.S. and South Korean forces advanced into communist North Korea, Soviet leader Josef Stalin urged his Chinese counterpart, Mao Zedong, to send five or six Chinese divisions to aid the collapsing North Korean forces even if it led to World War III, according to newly released Russian documents.


"If a war is inevitable" between the communist giants and the Western powers, Stalin said, "then let it be waged now" and not years later when the alliance of Japan and America would be too strong, according to an Oct. 7, 1950, message found among top-secret documents on the Korean War in the Russian Federation's presidential archives in Moscow.


Mao, in a message to Stalin five days earlier, had been more cautious. The Chinese communist leader told Stalin he and his colleagues had "originally planned to move several volunteer divisions to North Korea" but had reconsidered because "such actions could elicit extremely serious consequences" including "open conflict between the U.S.A. and China, as a consequence of which the Soviet Union can also be dragged into war that would be extremely large."


A week later, the documents show, Mao had changed his mind, and he sent his troops into Korea to battle the Americans and their allies in a critical intervention that preserved North Korea as a communist state.


The Russian archive documents challenge some long-held views on China's entry into the Korean War. They show that Stalin, in trying to persuade Mao to send his troops into Korea, said the two communist countries could win a major war with the West.


"We will be stronger than the U.S.A. and England, while the other European capitalist states (with the exception of Germany which is unable to provide any assistance to the United States now) do not present serious military forces," Stalin assured Mao.


In addition, the Russian version of the Oct. 2 message from Mao to Stalin suggests for the first time that Mao at first hesitated on entering the war.


The previously accepted account of Mao's decision was based on another document of the same date, supposedly from Chinese archives and previously published by the Beijing government. In it, Mao said in a telegram to Stalin, "We have decided to send some of our troops to Korea under the name of [Chinese People's] Volunteers to fight the United States and its [South Korean] lackey." After analyzing the two Oct. 2 documents -- the Chinese one suggesting Mao had decided already to intervene, and the Russian one suggesting he was hesitating -- Soviet scholar Alexander Mansurov told a recent Wilson Center meeting that either the Russian cables are "elaborate fakes, which I find highly unlikely ... or what I find more likely that the published Chinese version of the Oct. 2 telegram is unreliable, inaccurate, unsent or perhaps misdated."


The Russian archive documents will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Bulletin of the Cold War International History Project, based at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.