Thus Europe was divided by 1949. Stalin had already abandoned the Greek Communists just as the West abandoned its allies in Eastern Europe, for both sides realized that Soviet and Western power were unshakeable in their respective spheres of influence. Stalin discouraged any adventures by Italian or other Communist hotheads in Western Europe, telling them instead that their goal was to maintain their structures intact and fight for peace against the possibility of a Western attack on the Soviet Union. As it turned out, events were unfolding in Asia that would come to put European affairs in the shadow.
Stalin had not paid much attention to Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist party for years. After the Communist defeat in 1927 the party had spent years forming a guerilla base around Yenan, remote from the centers of the country. The Japanese invasion had led to a sort of Popular Front with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and in the course of the war the Communists grew immensely in numbers and strength. With the defeat of Japan, Chiang’s troops moved into northern China and Manchuria, where the Communists had strong bases in the countryside. Initially Stalin assumed that the Communists would not be able to match Chiang’s professional army and were too weak politically to matter, but by 1947 Mao had proved his ability to hold off the apparently superior forces of the enemy. The Soviets upgraded their support, and Stalin began to send the Chinese telegram after telegram with advice on how to organize power as well as answers to questions of Marxist ideology. By the summer of 1948, the Communists were clearly winning, but even Mao thought victory might come in only three to five years. Even he did not expect the decisive Communist victories ending with the rout of Chiang’s troops at the giant battle of Huaihai at the end of the year. The battle smashed the corrupt and incompetent Nationalist regime and the People’s Liberation Army entered Peking in January 1949, sweeping on into southern China. Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 1. The Communist world had more than doubled in size.
One of the first international consequences of Mao’s victory was in Indochina. Since 1940 the Vietnamese Communists under Ho Chi Minh had been battling first the Japanese occupation and then France, which was trying to rebuild its colonial empire. The Vietnamese Communists followed a variant of the people’s democracy strategy, stressing opposition to colonial rule and land reform rather than an immediate transition to socialism. Ho’s bases were in the north, and with the Chinese Communist victory he turned to link up with China, a ready source of supplies. The French fought on, but in 1954 made a fatal error in establishing a base in the mountainous northwest of the country to cut off Ho’s links with Laos. The Communist army, no longer just a guerilla force and now equipped with heavy guns, surrounded the French and forced the garrison to capitulate after a siege of several months. The Geneva settlement divided the country at the seventeenth parallel, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam now held the north. Vietnam would come to play a crucial role in the Cold War, but the most important immediate consequence of the Chinese Communist victory was in Korea.
In Korea events had moved very much as in China and Vietnam. Soviet troops had briefly occupied the north, giving a boost to the Communists under Kim Il Sung. Kim too followed the line of people’s democracy rather than proletarian dictatorship but found himself stopped in the south, occupied by American troops. In 1948 American-sponsored elections led to the formation of the Republic of Korea under the despotic Syngman Rhee. From 1949 Kim began to press Stalin to allow him to invade the south, where Communist guerillas were active and victory seemed within grasp. Stalin was initially very skeptical, but in 1949 changed his mind, in part because of the Chinese revolution and in part as a response to the formation of NATO in that year. Mao had similar doubts, but both approved the plan. The Soviet Union provided North Korea with massive military aid and in June 1950, Kim’s troops invaded South Korea, quickly defeating both American and South Korean troops. Soviet confidence in victory was such that they continued to boycott the UN Security Council over American policy toward Taiwan, allowing the United States to fight an American war under the UN flag. Stalin monitored the war’s progress in detail, sending regular advice and instructions until the American landing at Inchon in September 1950, which turned the tide against the Communists. It seemed that Kim would go down to defeat, for Stalin had no intention of sending in Soviet troops. A request for Chinese troops met with refusal, to the surprise of both Stalin and Kim, and Stalin ordered the Korean leader to prepare for guerilla warfare and evacuate to the Soviet Union. Then the Chinese changed their minds, apparently in response to General Douglas MacArthur’s bellicose talk of “rollback” and its implied threat to China. Chinese “volunteers” poured across the border, pushing the Americans and their allies back to the thirty-eighth parallel, more or less the starting point. By 1951 the war was at a stalemate, to be resolved only by the truce concluded a few months after Stalin’s death. Kim had failed to conquer the south, but the Chinese and North Korean armies, barely out of their own revolutions and with only backward economies (and some Soviet aid) had held off the United States for three years.
At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953 the Soviet Union had a great deal to show on the international stage for the years since the Second World War. There was now a “socialist camp” that included China and the northern parts of Korea and Vietnam as well as most of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union did have an atomic bomb and was about to acquire a hydrogen bomb. These successes were also the reasons that galvanized Western opposition, in the process negating Stalin’s belief in the inevitability of conflict among Western powers. The United States was now completely committed to prevent any more Communist successes, and it possessed resources that the Soviet Union could not match. Furthermore, Eastern Europe was a mixed blessing. None of the new regimes except (ironically) Yugoslavia had enough popular support to stay in power without Soviet backing, and the German problem remained unresolved. The German Democratic Republic had not been able to produce a stable economy and the open border with the West meant that thousands of people, mostly highly trained professionals, left every year. The emerging Cold War prevented the final resolution of the many problems created by the post war four-power occupation, the most explosive being the status of Berlin.
Behind the back and forth of Cold War diplomacy, with its periodic crises, loomed the larger issue of Soviet military power. The mere possession of an atomic bomb did not render the country invulnerable, much less equal to the United States. By 1953 the Soviets had gone a long way toward fending off the potential threat of US strategic bombers, but the world was not standing still. The United States realized that the next stage would be the construction of missiles and as such was working on them. Soviet scientists and military planners had come to the same conclusions, and thus missile construction proceeded, if slowly. The launching of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 created the impression that the Soviets might be way ahead in missile design and construction, and set off a frantic search by the CIA for information about Soviet capabilities. In reality, the rocket that launched Sputnik was highly successful but useless for military purposes. It required a huge launching pad and several days’ preparation time, besides being too expensive to manufacture in large numbers. The Soviets would not have even twenty or thirty ICBMs until the early 1960s, and rough parity with the United States did not come until after the fall of Khrushchev. The United States did not know this until relatively late, however. The notorious U-2 flight of 1960 was an attempt to find out just what the Soviets had, but it was, of course a failure though it did demonstrate the abilities of Soviet air defense. It was not until 1961, after the United States deployed its first spy satellites that the American government was able to determine just how weak the Soviet missile program was. Thus, for most of the 1950s Khrushchev could continue to bluff his way through a series of crises.
The absence of the ability to strike the continental United Stares during those years did not remove the problem created by nuclear weapons. The So
viets most certainly could destroy Western Europe in any nuclear exchange, and Washington could not be sure that some sort of weapons could reach farther. Fortunately in both the Soviet Union and the United States, political leaders, generals, and scientists were becoming increasingly concerned that the weapons were too destructive to be easily or even usefully deployed. Stalin had resisted this conclusion, but once he was gone, even his inner circle began to have doubts. When Eisenhower remarked in a speech at the end of 1953 that atomic weapons could end civilization, even Malenkov echoed the idea, though Khrushchev initially rejected it. Nevertheless they also began to move toward the idea of international cooperation in developing peaceful uses for atomic energy. For the scientists, led by Kurchatov, the 1955 Soviet hydrogen bomb test was a turning point. Still the scientific head of the Soviet nuclear project, Kurchatov began to speak in favor of peaceful coexistence and warning of the dangers of nuclear war. He and the other physicists also pushed for more contact with Western colleagues, and Soviet and Western physicists began to meet fairly regularly. This was important for science, and in addition the involvement of so many scientists east and west in weapons programs meant that an informal channel existed on nuclear issues. Even before the hydrogen bomb test, Khrushchev had Marshal Zhukov mention the possibility of peaceful coexistence in his May Day speech of 1955, in spite of Molotov’s objections. Thus by the Geneva conference of 1955 the limitation of nuclear weapons became a major part of Soviet diplomacy, a concern shared by Eisenhower and most other Western leaders. Khrushchev’s further proclamation at the Twentieth Congress in 1956 that war was not inevitable and peaceful coexistence between capitalism and socialism was possible had many dimensions, but one of them was to justify the need and possibility for talks on weapons limitations and disarmament. The continuous crises of the Cold War played out against powerful counter-currents in both the United States and the USSR, pushing both sides toward some sort of agreement on nuclear weapons. Fortunately these countercurrents were at least to some extent present in the minds of most of the political leaders on both sides. Ultimately they would lead to the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban treaty, which eliminated atmospheric and undersea testing of nuclear weapons. The treaty did nothing to stop the arms race, but it did sharply curtail the damage to the environment and public health caused by the testing of nuclear weapons.
With the knowledge that their nuclear arsenal was inferior to that of the United States and that American military doctrine in the 1950s included the first use of atomic weapons, Khrushchev was in a difficult position. The issues that mattered to him the most, at least at first, were the European issues that centered on Germany. For the Soviets there were three basic problems. First were the economic problems in East Germany and the resultant series of political crises, starting with the June 17, 1953, disorders in East Berlin that were put down by force. Second was the status of West Berlin, a thorn in the side of both the Soviets and the GDR, even if also a major inconvenience to NATO. Finally there was the problem of West Germany. After Stalin’s death the Soviet leadership realized that the Federal Republic was not going to turn against the United States, and indeed early in 1955 it joined NATO and began to build an army. The Soviet response was to establish the Warsaw Pact with its East European allies and put an end to any ideas of a neutral Germany. Though Molotov stuck to older policy, he had no support in the Politburo and from this moment on the Soviet leadership was committed to the division of Germany and full support of the GDR.
The particular fear of Germany was largely a relic of World War II and the inability of Khrushchev and many others of his generation to realize how much Europe, including Germany, had changed after 1945. West Germany’s chancellor of those years, Konrad Adenauer, while violently anti-communist, was also not interested in provoking conflicts and wanted much better trade relations with the Soviet Union than his American allies would permit. The immediate irritation for the Soviets was West Berlin, mainly because it created a threat to the GDR, where most of the Soviet Union’s troops facing NATO were stationed. To make matters worse, no final resolution of the outstanding issues of the occupation or any other matter concerning Germany was possible without including Berlin, an issue on which Soviet and American views were completely incompatible. A solution of sorts came in 1961, as East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht urgently requested Khrushchev for help in yet another economic crisis that led to a big increase in emigration from the east. Ulbricht suggested that somehow they close the border and Khrushchev responded with the idea of building a wall around West Berlin. The result was the Berlin Wall, put up in the early hours of August 13, 1961. Khrushchev was careful to make it clear that the access of the soldiers of the Western powers would not be affected, thus eliminating the incentive for Kennedy to respond with anything other than condemnation and more aid. Though it was a huge blow to the prestige of the socialist bloc, the wall defused the Berlin problem for the next decade.
European affairs had been at the center of Soviet attention for most of the time since 1945, but as the years passed China and what became known as the Third World came to take a larger place. The Third World meant the vast majority of the globe that in 1945 was still part of one or another European empire or (in the Western hemisphere) dominated by the United States. It was here that the Soviet Union was gradually able to challenge the West with increasing success until the 1970s. From the outset the Soviet leadership had assumed that sooner or later they would find allies in the colonial world, and their own policies in Central Asia were, in their minds, an anti-colonial revolution. The first Comintern Congress in 1919 had proclaimed the alliance of Communists and anti-imperialist nationalists, but the policy had little impact outside of China, and there it seemed a failure after 1927. The Second World War changed all that, and not only in China but also with its neighbors. In most other colonized countries the Communists were not strong, but virtually everywhere nationalist movements grew much more powerful than they had been before the war, which so weakened Britain and France that neither could put up much resistance. In 1948 the centerpiece of the British Empire, India, became independent, and by the 1950s it was clear that Britain would have to give up its empire sooner or later. France fought on in Indochina until 1954 and then in Algeria, but there too it went down to defeat. A whole host of new states came into being. Stalin had been skeptical of these new states, but his successors were not so wary.
The first Third World country that came into the good graces of the Soviet Union was Nasser’s Egypt in 1955. After some debate among the leadership Khrushchev agreed to supply Nasser with tanks and planes, marking the USSR’s first major entrance into the Middle East. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Khrushchev supported him during the ensuing crisis, though he had little real leverage over the area. In any case, the week that the Suez crisis peaked, the Soviet leadership was absorbed with a far more serious issue in Eastern Europe. The beginnings of de-Stalinization in the USSR had a prompt echo in Poland, where riots led to the installation of Wladyslaw Gomulka as party leader. Gomulka had been a victim of Stalinist purges in Poland and now steered the country on a course that was loyal to Moscow but differed in its social and other policies: most notably, Polish farmers received land on the breakup of the collectives and remained owners until the fall of communism. More serious was the challenge in Hungary. Here the local Stalinists tried to hang on, provoking the collapse of the regime, and the emergence of a new leader in Imre Nagy. Nagy announced that Hungary would have multi-party elections and leave the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev, hesitated. They had moved troops near Budapest, but only after days of indecision did they finally move in and suppress the revolt, installing Janos Kadar as the new party leader. Nagy was taken to Rumania and executed.
After 1956, relations with all the socialist brothers became increasingly complicated. Kadar retained collective farms but permitted and even encouraged small businesses. Both Poland and Hungary (after initial repression) permitted oppositional opi
nion to express itself in ways that were generally modest but not seen in the USSR or other Communist ruled countries. Other East European countries began to exert much more independence, though not necessarily accompanied by more liberal policies. Albania’s Enver Hoxha had opposed de-Stalinization from the first, and gradually built a Stalinist mini-state featuring crank economic schemes. Rumania became increasingly critical of Khrushchev and Soviet leadership generally, but also moved in a much more authoritarian direction than the USSR, and accompanied this course with super-industrialization schemes that impoverished the country by the 1980s. None of these changes in East Europe, however, were as significant as the growing break with China. Mao Tse-tung was not happy with Khrushchev’s secret speech, claiming later that Stalin was seventy percent good and only thirty percent bad. With some ambiguity, Mao backed the Soviets in Hungary, but relations deteriorated in subsequent years. Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) reflected the growing radicalization of Chinese policy, establishing gigantic communes in the place of Soviet-style collective farms and promoting back yard blast furnaces to make steel. Mao was also increasingly unhappy with Khrushchev’s attempts at peaceful coexistence with the United States, in his mind a fundamental impossibility. Khrushchev, as elsewhere, exacerbated the tension with his clumsy diplomacy, but totally different visions of socialism were at the heart of the dispute. The Soviet Union had spent a great deal of money in aid to China, especially after 1953, and sent many advisers on technical matters. Then in July 1960, Khrushchev ordered them all home. The final split came with the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, for Mao saw the resolution of the crisis as a surrender to the United States. Open polemics in the Chinese press calling Soviet policies “revisionist” made the split obvious for all to see, and continued until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China (1967). Now the Chinese leadership was claiming capitalist restoration in the USSR, and entered into a mad world all of its own. Border clashes only made things worse, but China was too absorbed in its own upheaval to make problems for the Russians. Nevertheless, the only major ally of the USSR in the Cold War was now gone, right at the time when Moscow had finally achieved strategic parity with the United States.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 52