When the Supreme Soviet reconvened three hours later, a new hierarchy presented itself. The CPSU’s chief, sixty-year-old Nikita Khrushchev, nominated Marshal Nikolai Bulganin to replace Malenkov. Bulganin, the fifty-nine-year-old Soviet defense minister, had a white goatee and a good sense of humor, traits that had made him stand out among the stolid and heavyset Kremlin headliners. Khrushchev explained that Bulganin was the choice of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. With another show of hands Bulganin became the new Soviet premier.3
After Bulganin’s election, the sixty-four-year-old Soviet foreign minister Molotov, wearing his trademark pince-nez, severe little mustache, and snarl, approached the lectern to give the first foreign policy speech of the post-Malenkov era. It was a belligerent statement. From the perspective of the British ambassador and the other Western onlookers it was also very disappointing. The ousted Malenkov had spoken publicly of the possibility of peaceful interaction between Moscow and capitalist countries. In his speech, Molotov reverted to the Stalinist line that the peace would only come through the elimination of the hostile Western world: “[T]he lessening of tension in international relations cannot otherwise be achieved than by persistent struggles against the more aggressive circles and their intrigues and consequently this struggle must not only not be relaxed but must of necessity be continued with yet greater persistence, ability and consistency.”4
From the stage Nikita Khrushchev, a short, stocky man with an almost perfectly spherical bald head and an equally round, chubby face with deep laugh lines and a double chin, applauded Molotov’s presentation but remained silent. To the surprise of the foreign diplomats in the audience, he radiated a confidence that suggested he might be the new man in charge.
“IT WAS A truly Russian affair,” Allen W. Dulles, the director of central intelligence, explained to the president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the National Security Council.5 Not for the first time Dulles’s Central Intelligence Agency had been surprised by the Kremlin. In the decade since the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, U.S. intelligence had failed to gain any significant insight into Soviet decision making. There was no American agent in the Kremlin or indeed among the elite of any Soviet bureaucracy, and U.S. eavesdropping had not produced any significant breaks into high-level Soviet political communications. The Kremlin was a black box the inhabitants of which became only somewhat known to Westerners when they attended public Communist Party events or turned up at diplomatic functions in Moscow. “Truly Russian” was CIA shorthand for inscrutable.
On February 8 President Eisenhower had first learned about the shake-up in Moscow from his press secretary, James C. Hagerty, who had read about it in wire service reports. The State Department, which was under the leadership of Allen Dulles’s older brother, John Foster Dulles, had been of no greater help to the president. Although the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, had been among the first Westerners to detect tension within the collective leadership a year earlier, the embassy had not sent any warnings to Washington that major political changes were afoot in Moscow.
Outside the Eisenhower administration the news from Moscow immediately caused deep concern. “The elimination of Malenkov is an unfortunate development for the people of the free countries,” said W. Averell Harriman, who had served as Franklin Roosevelt’s envoy to Moscow during the Second World War.6 Truman’s ambassador and Eisenhower’s wartime chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, felt the same way. “I don’t like the looks of it a bit,” Smith told the New York Times. “It certainly doesn’t mean that relations with the Soviets are going to be any easier.”7 A limited thaw in East-West relations had occurred since Stalin’s death, and most statesmen, diplomats, and journalists gave Malenkov credit for it. In March 1954 the Soviet premier had stated publicly that a nuclear war was unwinnable, completely contradicting Stalin’s earlier emphasis on the inevitability of a third world war. Under Malenkov’s leadership, the Kremlin had applied pressure to its Chinese ally to accept an armistice to end the Korean War, which had started in 1950, after Stalin had encouraged North Korean leader Kim Il Sung to launch an invasion of South Korea. The Kremlin had also renounced the territorial claims that Stalin had made on two Soviet neighbors, Finland and Turkey, and ended the USSR’s colonial control of the Chinese ice-free port of Port Arthur. At home Malenkov’s emphasis on the production of consumer goods and raising the standard of living of individual Soviet citizens had also seemed to presage a more peaceful world. Many feared that this “soft policy” had come to an end with Malenkov’s premiership.8
President Eisenhower handled the news of Malenkov’s political demise calmly, even showing a hint of optimism. Eisenhower, who had attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and then became the world’s most famous general in World War II, preferred dealing with foreign leaders who had military backgrounds. He assumed that the selection of Bulganin as the new Soviet premier reflected the rising strength of the Soviet Army in Kremlin affairs. “You know,” Eisenhower told Hagerty when he received the news, “if you are in the military and you know about these destructive weapons, it tends to make you more pacifistic than you normally have been.”9
The CIA and the State Department cautioned the president not to consider this moment as the dawn of a Bulganin regime. Nikolai Bulganin, apparently known to Soviet soldiers as General Rabbit, had the reputation of a lightweight. Washington’s top Kremlinologists believed he was merely acting as a front for a new strongman, possibly the Soviet party chief, Nikita Khrushchev.10 Indeed, about the only prediction that the CIA or the U.S. State Department felt comfortable making to President Eisenhower about Kremlin politics in 1955 was that eventually someone had to come out on top. “You can’t run a dictatorship,” Foster Dulles told a group of journalists, “without a dictator.”11
THE SOVIET UNION was not a one-man dictatorship in 1955, but the political theater of February 8 marked the rise of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev to the position of first among equals in the Kremlin’s inner circle and his international debut. From this moment until a different generation of Kremlin peers removed him from office a decade later, Khrushchev was to exercise immense influence over the Soviet Union and its behavior toward the rest of world. Only dimly understood at the time, the era of Khrushchev in Soviet affairs had just begun.
Since September 1953 all Kremlin resolutions had carried two signatures, Malenkov for the government and Khrushchev on behalf of the party. From Lenin’s time the Soviet Union appeared to be run by two parallel organizations. The USSR had a premier who chaired the Council of Ministers, which was in effect a cabinet with a defense minister and a foreign minister. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had its own leadership structure, headed by a Central Committee that was itself directed by an inner circle of about a dozen called the Politburo or, after 1952, the Presidium. Under Lenin and Stalin, the Soviet government functioned as purely an administrative arm of the Communist Party, which held all executive authority in the Soviet state. For sixteen months Malenkov and Khrushchev, however, had governed the country as if the party and the administrative organs were equals.
Khrushchev was too ambitious and disagreed too often with Malenkov on domestic matters for this power-sharing relationship to last. Although they shared a passion for improving the lot of the average Soviet peasant, the two leaders had profoundly different views on how to do it. Malenkov was somewhat skeptical about Marxist economics. By no means a capitalist, he nevertheless understood the importance of higher prices and wages to encourage productivity. He grasped that there were limits on what a planned economy could achieve without financial incentives. The first post-Stalin reform of Soviet agriculture, which Malenkov announced in the fall of 1953, featured higher producer prices for the crops that collective farms were required to sell to the state and lower taxes on private plots for peasants.
Khrushchev preferred to think of the Soviet economic problem as one of production, not of productiv
ity.12 The Soviet citizen would become better fed not by altering the planned economy but by expanding it. In 1954 Khrushchev championed the Virgin Lands program, which sent three hundred thousand young Communists to the Volga region, western Siberia, and Kazakhstan to till lands that had until then been outside the state agricultural system. Khrushchev was also uncomfortable with Malenkov’s belief that the Soviet economy should be reoriented to permit more light industry or consumer goods production. It was not that Khrushchev wanted to deprive the Soviet citizen of appliances or, as Western observers feared, that he preferred to maintain a high level of investment in military production; it was simply a reflection of his doctrinaire approach to Soviet economics that he assumed that all future economic success depended on developing a strong foundation in heavy industry.
KHRUSHCHEV ENGINEERED the removal of Malenkov with the support of Vyacheslav Molotov, who had been Stalin’s foreign minister between 1939 and 1949 and then regained the post after Stalin died. There was no more senior member of the Presidium than Molotov. Stalin had placed him in the inner circle of the party in 1926, and though Molotov had fallen out of favor by the early 1950s, death had cheated Stalin of the opportunity to purge him. Molotov needed no coaxing to become an accomplice in Khrushchev’s plot. He considered Malenkov a “decent fellow” and a superb “manager by telephone,” but a featherweight with dangerously naive views on foreign policy.13
On January 22, 1955, Khrushchev and Molotov arranged a formal meeting of the Presidium to force Malenkov out. The Presidium was by the mid-1950s regaining its traditional role as the main decision-making body of the Central Committee of the CPSU and therefore of the entire Soviet system. Established at the Eighth Party Congress in 1919 as the Politburo, this inner council had initially included Lenin, four other full members, and three candidate members.14 At first the Politburo was intended to deal primarily with urgent matters that could not wait to be decided at the two or three plenary sessions (or plenums) of the Central Committee that took place each year, but over time the Politburo met weekly.15 Although the Bolsheviks looked to Lenin as their leader, he had only one vote in the Politburo, which had a rotating chairmanship and made decisions by majority vote of the full members. Under Stalin this inner council, like all other party organs, had fallen into disuse. For example, in the early Bolshevik period there had been at least one party congress a year to confirm doctrinal changes and determine the composition of the Central Committee; Stalin let thirteen years go by between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth party congresses. The dictator preferred to govern through a kitchen cabinet that he invited to late-night drinking sessions and treated as stooges. Stalin’s successors revived the tradition of weekly meetings of the Presidium, which by early 1955 had nine full members, three candidate members, and a permanent chairman.16
Since March 1953 Malenkov had chaired Presidium meetings, giving him a slight edge in shaping the collective leadership. Agencies of the Soviet government or Presidium members themselves would propose policies to the Presidium in the form of written resolutions. Sometimes representatives of these agencies were invited to brief the members; often the draft resolutions, which would have been distributed in advance along with any relevant reports, had to speak for themselves. The Presidium chiefs jealously guarded their prerogatives and did not like to admit outsiders. Even the scheduling of sessions was a state secret. Among those allowed into the session, however, an unstructured discussion was permitted, but after a vote, either orally or by show of hands, the resolution would be presented to the rest of the Soviet system as the unanimous decision of the CPSU. Not a hint of disagreement was allowed outside the chamber.
The January 1955 meeting at which the Presidium fired its chairman was civil and orderly.17 Later rumors spread that at one point Malenkov stormed off.18 In fact, the event was choreographed, and everyone pretty much kept to the script. Even Malenkov seemed to know the part he was supposed to play. The proceedings began with his admission that he was not up to the job. “I do not meet the requirements,” he told his colleagues. “I have been looking for a way out for a long time now.”
Khrushchev, the chief architect of the event, remained silent on the indictment. Once every other full member of the Presidium but Bulganin had spoken against Malenkov, Khrushchev moved Bulganin’s nomination to replace Malenkov as chairman of the Council of Ministers.19 On cue Molotov seconded the nomination, followed by longtime Presidium members Lazar Kaganovich and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. The promotion of Nikolai Bulganin, a notorious drinker but an inoffensive Soviet defense minister, had been agreed to in advance by the key plotters.20
Khrushchev took Malenkov’s more important post, chairman of the Presidium. Khrushchev believed the Soviet Union should be governed through the Presidium and wanted to control its agenda. His assumption of this powerful position was confirmed without controversy. Molotov did not seem to want any of the spoils or at least did not think he needed to do anything to shore up his own position in the Kremlin elite.
Compared with what might have happened to him under Stalin, the damage to Georgi Malenkov was limited. He lost the top job and the chairmanship, but not his life. In fact he did not even lose his membership in the Presidium. Molotov had wanted him removed, but Khrushchev argued to keep him on the Presidium. Although he said nothing at the time, Khrushchev knew that he would need Malenkov’s vote on foreign policy issues, where the two men did not disagree. In concluding these actions, all of which were cloaked in the tightest secrecy, the group had decided to make these changes public at the meeting of the Supreme Soviet two weeks later.
THROUGH THIS secret backroom maneuvering Nikita Khrushchev made himself the most powerful man in a vast and troubled empire. The Soviet Union in 1955 was still having difficulties absorbing the influence and territory that it had acquired in the victory over Nazi Germany. At the wartime conferences of Yalta and Potsdam, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union had recognized a new order in Europe. Although the Anglo-Americans disagreed with Stalin on how he should use his influence over Eastern Europe, the Western allies were pragmatic enough to understand that the Soviet armies liberating Nazi-occupied Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and occupying eastern Germany, Bulgaria, and Romania were intending to do more than denazify these countries. Stalin did not believe he could trust a neighbor unless that neighbor was a fellow Communist.
In the first years after 1945 the Soviets set up Communist regimes under men who had spent the war hiding in Moscow. None of them—Otto Grotewohl and Walter Ulbricht of Germany, Klement Gottwald of Czechoslovakia, or Boleslaw Bierut of Poland—had been popular in their own countries before the war, and now that they were heading war-ravaged countries desperate for the kinds of aid that the West was pouring into its allied states, they were not any more popular. Indeed, there had already been an uprising in the Soviet Union’s eastern empire, but it was short-lived. A strike among construction workers in East Berlin on June 16, 1953, had sparked general demonstrations of discontent involving five hundred thousand people in over 560 towns and cities in East Germany. An estimated eighty thousand gathered in the streets of East Berlin the next day to demand the resignation of the disorder. At least twenty-one demonstrators (and possibly many more) were killed and more than four thousand arrested.21 The situation remained unstable in East Germany, and Moscow had reason to believe that the same set of circumstances could break out in any of the other so-called people’s democracies.
There were problems even with the new socialist countries in Europe that were not under Soviet occupation. Josef Broz Tito, the popular Communist guerrilla leader who had liberated Yugoslavia without the Soviet Army, wished to follow a more independent socialist course. By 1948 Stalin had grown impatient with the Yugoslav leader and ordered Soviet intelligence to kill him. Although Tito survived, relations between the two countries did not.
As difficulties grew within the socialist world, the Soviets were observing a gradual strengthening of the Western coa
lition against it. In 1949 twelve countries headed by the United States formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an anti-Soviet alliance that continued to grow.22 By 1952 Greece and Turkey had joined NATO.
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV believed that with his new power came a responsibility to undertake a revolution in Soviet foreign policy. Although he had made a name for himself as an outspoken specialist on agriculture and industry, Khrushchev had developed strong views on how badly Stalin and then Molotov had mishandled foreign affairs. He had just never revealed them.
Khrushchev blamed the Stalin-Molotov approach for the militarized struggle with the capitalists, the lack of much interaction with the neutral developing world, and the weaknesses in the Soviet Union’s relations with its socialist allies. Khrushchev’s interpretation of Marxism-Leninism made him more optimistic about human behavior than Stalin and Molotov and therefore more of an internationalist than either of them. Although suspicious of capitalists, Khrushchev wanted to believe they were capable of change, and he was convinced that nations—simply put, large groups of people—were invariably more progressive than the few rich men or militarists who might lead them. He believed that if given a chance, all societies would eventually freely choose socialism and then communism. As the world’s most powerful progressive power the Soviet Union should be prepared to reach out to leaders and regimes that, though not Communist, were anti-imperialist and anticolonial in outlook. At the same time, Khrushchev shared Lenin’s belief, which the Bolshevik leader had expressed near the end of his life, that the socialist world could live in “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalists. Indeed, Khrushchev thought that achieving peaceful coexistence was a necessity if the socialist world was to achieve its potential. His long experience as an agricultural and industrial manager made him more sensitive than Stalin or Molotov to the cost of military confrontation with the West and its effects on the standards of living within the Soviet Union and its Communist allies. His few foreign travels, all of which had been to socialist countries—to East Germany, Poland, and China in 1954—had reinforced his belief that economics was the Achilles’ heel of the Soviet bloc.
Khrushchev's Cold War Page 2