Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  More often than not, Smirnov was a charming and courteous diplomat who delivered the fiercest communication with a calm demeanor and outside the public spotlight. A rare exception had come the previous October, when he had exploded in rage at the comments of Adenauer’s number two, Ludwig Erhard, to a visiting delegation of two hundred African leaders from twenty-four countries, many of them newly independent. “Colonialism has been overcome,” Erhard had said, “but worse than colonialism is imperialism of the Communist totalitarian pattern.”

  Before storming out of the hall, Smirnov rose from the audience and shouted, “You talk about freedom, but Germany killed twenty million people in our country!” It was a rare public display of the enduring Russian resentment toward Germans.

  This time Smirnov’s task was a more familiar one. He was presenting Adenauer with a nine-point, 2,862-word aide-mémoire from Khrushchev that would provide the most compelling evidence yet during the Kennedy administration that Khrushchev had again turned confrontational on Berlin. Soviet intelligence reports tracked Adenauer’s doubts regarding Kennedy’s reliability, and Khrushchev was wagering that Adenauer might be more susceptible to Soviet entreaties than he had been under the more dependable Truman or Eisenhower.

  “An entirely abnormal situation has emerged in West Berlin, which is being abused for subversive activities against the German Democratic Republic, the USSR and other socialist states,” the Khrushchev document said in clear, undiplomatic language. “This cannot be allowed to go on. Either one continues down the path of an increasingly dangerous worsening of relations between countries and military conflict, or one concludes a peace treaty.”

  The aide-mémoire, written in the tone of a personal letter from Khrushchev to Adenauer, called Berlin the most important issue in Soviet–German relations. It criticized what it called ever louder and more emphatic popular support in West Germany for revising postwar agreements that had ceded a third of the Third Reich’s territory to the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. “If Germany now has different borders than it had before the war, it has only itself to blame,” the letter said, reminding Adenauer that his country had invaded its neighbors and killed “millions upon millions.”

  Though the aide-mémoire had been delivered by the Soviet ambassador to Adenauer, its tough message was intended just as much for Kennedy. In unmistakable fashion, the Soviet leader was declaring that he had lost all patience with Western dithering. First, he complained, the U.S. had asked the Soviets to wait for Berlin talks until after its elections, then Moscow was told to wait until Kennedy could settle into his job, and now Moscow was being asked to wait again until after West German elections.

  “If one gives in to these tendencies,” Khrushchev wrote, “it could go on forever.”

  The letter closed with Khrushchev’s characteristic cocktail of seduction and threats. He appealed to Adenauer to use “all his personal influence and his great experience as a statesman” to secure European peace and security. If matters turned more confrontational, however, the letter reminded Adenauer that the current correlation of military forces provided the Soviet Union and its friends with all the force they required to defend themselves.

  The letter scoffed at West Germany’s appeal for disarmament at a time when Adenauer was quickly building up his military forces and seeking nuclear weapons while trying to transform NATO into the fourth nuclear power. It scolded Adenauer over talk that his party’s coming election campaign would focus on anticommunism. “If that is really the case,” the letter said, “you…must be aware of the consequences.”

  The Kennedy administration was not yet a month old, but Khrushchev had already shifted course on Berlin. If Kennedy was unwilling to negotiate an acceptable deal with him, Khrushchev was determined to find other ways to get what he wanted.

  PART II

  THE GATHERING STORM

  7

  SPRINGTIME FOR KHRUSHCHEV

  West Berlin is a bone in the throat of Soviet–American relations…. If Adenauer wants to fight, West Berlin would be a good place to begin conflict.

  Premier Khrushchev to U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr., March 9, 1961

  It seems more likely than not that the USSR will move toward a crisis on Berlin this year. All sources of action are dangerous and unpromising. Inaction is even worse. We are faced with a Hobson’s choice. If a crisis is provoked, a bold and dangerous course may be the safest.

  Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, memo on Berlin for President Kennedy, April 3, 1961

  NOVOSIBIRSK, SIBERIA

  SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 1961

  Nikita Khrushchev was in poor condition and foul temper.

  The Soviet leader’s face was ashen, his body slumped, and his eyes lifeless—an appearance in such contrast to his usual brash buoyancy that it shocked U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson and his two travel companions, the young U.S. political counselor Boris Klosson and Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet foreign ministry’s top America hand.

  It had taken Thompson ten days of pleading before he’d succeeded in winning an audience with Khrushchev to deliver the president’s first private letter to the Soviet leader, which included a long-awaited invitation to meet. Even then, Thompson had to fly 1,800 miles to catch up with Khrushchev in Akademgorodok, the vast science city Khrushchev had ordered to be built outside Novosibirsk on the West Siberian plain.

  Khrushchev’s aspiration in Siberia had been to create the world’s leading center of scientific endeavor, but like so many of his dreams, this one, too, had fallen short. Just that week he had fired a geneticist whose theories he disliked, and he had ordered four of nine stories chopped off the plans for a new academy so that it conformed to a more standard Soviet size. Akademgorodok’s frustrations only added to a growing list of Soviet failures that were taking a toll on the Soviet leader’s confidence.

  Khrushchev’s ongoing agricultural tour of the country had taken a physical and emotional toll, making him all the more aware of his country’s economic shortfalls. Albania had shifted its allegiance from Moscow to China in a heretically public manner, a worrisome crack in Khrushchev’s leadership of world communism. Moscow’s ally in the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, had been murdered, for which Khrushchev blamed UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.

  More fundamentally, the capitalist world was proving far more resilient than his propagandists had predicted. Decolonization in Africa had failed to damage the West’s standing in the developing world as much as his experts had envisioned. For all the Soviet efforts to divide the alliance, NATO’s integration was deepening, and the West German Bundeswehr was expanding its capabilities so quickly that it was altering the European military balance. Both in his rhetoric and his defense spending, President Kennedy was acting more anticommunist than Eisenhower. And each month, the East German refugee numbers hit new records. If Khrushchev’s luck didn’t turn soon, the Soviet leader had to worry that his October Party Congress would become a struggle for survival.

  Facing such an array of new challenges, Khrushchev agreed to meet Thompson only after the U.S. ambassador had leaked to New York Times correspondent Seymour Topping—and to any number of diplomats in Moscow—that the Soviet leader was giving him the cold shoulder at a time when Kennedy was trying to reach out. On March 3, Topping had reported dutifully that Thompson had been frustrated in his efforts to pass Khrushchev a crucial message from Kennedy in hopes of “seeking to head off a serious mishap in relations.” Topping wrote that Thompson had a new mandate “to initiate a series of exploratory conversations looking to substantive negotiations on a range of East-West differences.”

  Even after that, Khrushchev agreed only reluctantly to see Thompson. Khrushchev’s adviser Oleg Troyanovsky had seen his boss’s high hopes for a new start in U.S.–Soviet relations come “quickly to evaporate” in the four months since Kennedy’s election. There were few better barometers of the U.S.–Soviet temperature than Troyanovsky, the ever-present Khrushchev adviser who
had attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., while his father served as the first Soviet ambassador to Washington in the mid-1930s. He could quote Marx and speak American slang with equal fluency.

  Troyanovsky had seen Khrushchev weary of the Kennedy waiting game, having lost the opportunity he had sought to reach the new American leader before he could be infected by what Khrushchev considered Washington’s anti-Soviet bias. A little less than a year after the U-2 incident and the failed Paris Summit, Khrushchev could not politically afford another failed meeting with an American president. Yet that now seemed the most likely outcome of any such summit, given Kennedy’s determination to drag his feet on Berlin and to press for a nuclear test ban agreement that the Soviet military didn’t want. Khrushchev was already in hot water with his military brass over troop cuts, and they would resist any measures that would constrain their nuclear development or leave them open to intrusive inspections.

  Khrushchev’s farm visits en route to Novosibirsk had fed his discontent. A new Soviet statistical yearbook showed the Soviet Union had achieved some 60 percent of America’s gross national product, but that was certainly an exaggeration. The CIA pegged it at closer to 40 percent, and other experts estimated that the Soviet economy’s size was no more than 25 percent of the U.S. level. Agricultural productivity was but a third of the U.S. level, and shrinking.

  During his travels, Khrushchev had seen the ugly truth behind overly optimistic reports from provincial sycophants. Soviet farming was failing because of erratic planting, bad harvests, and dreadful distribution systems that often left crops to rot. Every week Khrushchev fumed at a new list of incompetent subordinates, some of whom fudged numbers to conceal their failures while others conceded their shortcomings but failed to fix them. In confessing his inadequacy, one party secretary named Zolotukhin, from the western Russian provincial capital of Tambov on the Tsna River, pulled down his trousers and asked Khrushchev three times to lash him.

  “Why is it that you want your pants whipped off to show us your ass?” Khrushchev had barked. “Do you think you will give us some sort of thrill? Why would we keep such secretaries?”

  At one local Communist Party gathering after another, Khrushchev demanded his underlings match American economic and agricultural benchmarks and exceed U.S. milk and meat productivity, goals that had been his fixation since his 1959 visit to the American heartland. When comrades questioned the wisdom of benchmarking against imperialists, Khrushchev said America was “the highest stage of capitalism,” while Soviets were only just getting started building the foundation for the house of communism—“and our bricks are production and consumer goods.”

  The Soviet public’s awareness of the country’s failings had produced a bumper crop of humor, told in the food lines as Khrushchev hopscotched the country:

  Q. What nationality were Adam and Eve?

  A. Soviet.

  Q. How do you know?

  A. Because they were both naked, had only an apple to eat, and thought they were in paradise.

  Some of the jokes involved the new U.S. president:

  President John Kennedy comes to God and says: “Tell me, God, how many years before my people will be happy?”

  “Fifty years,” replies God.

  Kennedy weeps and leaves.

  Charles de Gaulle comes to God and says: “Tell me, God, how many years before my people will be happy?”

  “A hundred years,” replies God.

  De Gaulle weeps and leaves.

  Khrushchev comes to God and says: “Tell me, God, how many years before my people will be happy?”

  God weeps and leaves.

  As sour as Khrushchev’s mood had been when Thompson arrived, it worsened as the Soviet leader read the Russian translation of Kennedy’s letter. Khrushchev could not find a single word on Berlin. Speaking calmly and wearily, Khrushchev told Thompson that Kennedy must understand that he would never back off his demand to negotiate “the German question.” Over time, Khrushchev said, he had converted Eisenhower to the realization that Berlin talks could not be avoided, but then U.S. militarists “deliberately exploded relations” with their U-2 flight.

  Under instructions not to be drawn on Berlin, Thompson responded only that Kennedy was “reviewing our German policy and would wish to discuss it with Adenauer and other allies before reaching conclusions.”

  Fed up with what he considered U.S. delay tactics, Khrushchev scoffed at the notion that the world’s most powerful country must consult with anyone before acting, given his own dismissive treatment of Warsaw Pact allies. “West Berlin is a bone in the throat of Soviet–American relations,” Khrushchev told Thompson, and it would be a good time to remove it. “If Adenauer wants to fight,” he said, “West Berlin would be a good place to begin conflict.”

  Though Kennedy was not ready to negotiate Berlin with Khrushchev, the Soviet leader eagerly laid out his own negotiating position for Thompson so that he could relay it to the president. He told Thompson that he was ready to stipulate in any agreement that West Berliners could maintain the political system of their choice, even if it was capitalism. However, he said, the Americans would have to take the notion of German unification off the table, even if both the U.S. and Soviets might desire it over time. Abandoning the language of unification was necessary, he said, if the Soviet Union and the U.S. wanted to sign a war-ending treaty that recognized both Germanys as sovereign states.

  For his part, Khrushchev assured Thompson he would not expand the Soviet empire any farther westward, but he also wanted Washington to refrain from any rollback of what was already his. Employing a voice calculated to project intimacy between old friends, Khrushchev told Thompson it was his “frank desire” to improve relations with Kennedy and make nuclear war impossible. However, he said, he could not do so alone.

  Khrushchev was pushing Thompson far beyond his approved talking points. The American ambassador warned Khrushchev not to expect rapid change in the U.S. position on Berlin, further cautioning the Soviet leader that if he acted unilaterally he would only increase tensions. “If there is anything which will bring about a massive increase in U.S. arms expenditures of the type which took place at the time of the Korean War,” Thompson said, “it would be the conviction that the Soviets are indeed attempting to force us out of Berlin.”

  Khrushchev dismissed Thompson’s warning. “What attracted the West so much to Berlin anyway?” he countered.

  It was because America had given its solemn commitment to Berliners, Thompson responded, and thus it had its national prestige invested in their fate.

  Khrushchev shrugged that it was only Germany’s World War II capitulation that had brought Western powers to Berlin. “Let us work out together a status for West Berlin,” he said. “We can register it with the UN. Let us have a joint police force on the basis of a peace treaty which can be guaranteed by the four powers, or a symbolic force of four powers could be stationed in West Berlin.” Khrushchev said his only precondition was that East Berlin would have to be left out of any such planning, as the Soviet zone of the city would remain the capital of East Germany under any new plan.

  Because Berlin lacked political significance for Moscow, Khrushchev repeated that he would provide the U.S. whatever guarantees it wanted to protect its prestige and ensure West Berlin’s current political system. He was prepared to accept West Berlin as a capitalist island in East Germany, he said, because in any case the Soviet Union would surpass West Germany in per capita production by 1965, and then surpass the United States five years later. To further illustrate West Berlin’s insignificance, Khrushchev said that since the Soviet population grew each year by 3.5 million, the total population of West Berlin at two million was just “one night’s work” for his sexually active country.

  Playing devil’s advocate, Thompson responded that even if West Berlin were unimportant to the Soviets, “Ulbricht was very much interested,” and would be unlikely to endorse Khrushchev’s guarantee for its democratic, cap
italist system.

  With a dismissive wave of the hand, as if swatting away a troublesome gnat, Khrushchev said he could compel Ulbricht to approve whatever he and Kennedy would decide.

  In an effort to find safer ground than Berlin, Thompson changed the subject to U.S.–Soviet trade liberalization. On that matter, he did have an offer he hoped would mollify Khrushchev. He said the U.S. was hoping to lift all restrictions on Soviet crabmeat imports to the United States.

  Instead of embracing the gesture, Khrushchev shot back his outrage at a recent U.S. decision to cancel, on national security grounds, the sale to Moscow of advanced grinding machine tools. “The USSR can fly its rockets without U.S. machines!” he snarled. He railed further against the delayed approval of a urea fertilizer factory sale, also due to its potential military application, ostensibly for chemical weapons. Khrushchev said such urea technology was so widely available that he already had purchased three such plants from Holland.

  However, no amount of fertilizer could approach the importance of Berlin to Khrushchev, and the Soviet leader returned to the issue time and again until Thompson reluctantly engaged him. He assured Khrushchev that the president knew the situation was unsatisfactory to both sides, was “re-examining the whole problem of Germany and Berlin,” and would be “disposed to do something to help relaxation.” But Thompson repeated that he could not reflect Kennedy’s views until the president had consulted personally with allies—and he would do that during meetings in March and April before their own proposed summit.

  Khrushchev complained that Kennedy did not understand fully what was at stake in Berlin. If he and Kennedy could sign a treaty ending the city’s postwar status, he told Thompson it would calm tensions all around the world. If they were unable to solve their Berlin disagreements, however, their troops would continue to confront each other in a situation “not of peace but of armistice.” Khrushchev dismissed Kennedy’s notion that arms reduction talks could build the confidence necessary to take on the more difficult matter of Berlin. Quite the contrary, he said; only U.S. and Soviet troop withdrawal from Germany would create the right atmosphere for weapons cuts.