Khrushchev was convinced that the Cold War had not been inevitable. Although Western, especially American, arrogance irritated him, he assigned most of the blame for the international tension after the collapse of Nazi Germany to Soviet missteps. In 1945 and 1946 Stalin had pressured Turkey to force either the creation of a Soviet naval base on the Mediterranean or at least a renegotiation of the treaty that governed the use of the strait linking the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Similarly, Soviet efforts to split Iran and transform its northern province into a satellite state had compounded Western concerns that Stalin would not be satisfied with the division of Europe agreed to by the Allied powers at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945.
Khrushchev had personal memories of Stalin’s third attempt, and third failure, to rewrite the World War II settlement. By agreement each of the Allies plus the French had been given a slice of Hitler’s former capital to occupy and govern. Berlin was a hundred miles inside the Soviet occupation zone, and Stalin was concerned that the Western powers were exploiting their rights to maintain land, air, and rail access to Berlin through Eastern Germany to move soldiers in and out of their sectors. In an attempt to force the Western allies out of the western sectors of Berlin, he ordered Soviet forces to blockade the access roads and rail lines.
Years later Khrushchev claimed the Berlin blockade was a mistake. Stalin had launched the effort “without gauging our possibilities realistically. He didn’t think it through properly.”23 Instead of giving in, U.S. President Harry S. Truman launched a massive airlift of tons of supplies to West Berlin. Eleven months later Stalin called off the blockade. Soviet losses included more than just embarrassment over Berlin. As a result of the blockade, Stalin essentially motivated the Western powers to form NATO.
Khrushchev had seen little improvement in Soviet foreign policy since Stalin’s death. He had endorsed Malenkov’s talk of better relations with the West and the tentative efforts to establish diplomatic and economic ties to the third world, but Molotov had placed severe limits on how far the country could go in either area. On arguably the most important foreign policy question facing the USSR, the future of a divided Germany, Molotov had opposed any practical changes at all in the existing approach. Stalin had pushed for a reunification of Germany on condition that it was neutral and demilitarized. Although Moscow had created a Communist regime in its occupation zone, the protection of East Germany was not the organizing principle of the Kremlin’s German strategy. Instead the cardinal point of Soviet postwar policy had been to prevent the integration of West Germany into the Western bloc.
Stalin did not live to realize the bankruptcy of his policy. In the fall of 1954 the Western powers drafted a series of agreements in Paris that, once ratified by all the Atlantic powers, were to bring West Germany into NATO. As of February 1955, these protocols had not yet been ratified, but it looked as if this would happen in May. Molotov, however, had nothing to offer to rescue the policy besides vague and menacing language to the West and the Germans about the effect on international relations.
Khrushchev was not sure he had any answers, but he knew that Moscow had to scramble to try some new tactics to prevent or at least slow down the absorption of the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO. Khrushchev’s concern was less the Stalinist worry that as part of NATO the West Germans would somehow prepare an attack on the Soviet Union, than that the direction of European politics would further weaken the socialist East German regime. Every month since the June 1953 uprising an average of fifteen thousand people fled East Germany through West Berlin, a total of about three hundred thousand.24
Molotov’s insensitivity to the needs of the East Germans was part of his generally callous treatment of the entire Soviet bloc. Khrushchev blamed Molotov for the fact that the Soviet boycott of Yugoslavia endured two years after Stalin’s death. Stalin had once boasted to Khrushchev, “I shall shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito,” but he had shaken more than his little finger, and Tito was still alive.25 In the year before Stalin’s death a KGB agent under instructions from Moscow had wormed his way into the confidence of Tito’s personal staff. Code-named Maks, this agent was Iosif Grigulevich, alias Teodoro Castro, the nonresident Costa Rican envoy to Belgrade. Stalin’s secret police wanted Maks to plant a booby-trapped jewelry box that would spray a lethal poison gas the minute Tito opened it.26 Although the plots against Tito were suspended after Stalin’s death, Molotov never stopped hating Tito and continued to obstruct any reconciliation.
UNAWARE OF Khrushchev’s plans, the Western powers assumed the Cold War was entering a very chilly phase. Molotov’s speech at the February 8 event seemed to signal a return to the old Soviet confrontational rhetoric, and with Malenkov gone, it was expected that Molotov’s Stalinist ideas would once again dominate how the Kremlin dealt with the world.
The West’s expectation reflected less a sense of Molotov’s genius than an underestimation of Khrushchev. Whenever diplomats had seen him at receptions before February 1955, he talked loudly and appeared to drink too much. “Khrushchev,” recalled British Ambassador Hayter, “seemed to be rather all over the place.”27 The U.S. ambassador, Chip Bohlen, summed up his assessment of Khrushchev in a line he had cabled to Washington in 1954: “[Khrushchev] is not especially bright.”28
Not all American officials were as dismissive of Khrushchev. The new Soviet star had the grudging respect of the leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency, especially of its director, Allen Dulles, who saw him as a pragmatic realist. As early as April 1954, Dulles had identified Khrushchev as someone to watch. “His [Malenkov’s] No. 2 man, Khrushchev interests me enormously,” Dulles told the cream of the U.S. officer corps at the National War College. “Unlike most of the leaders of the Soviet Union, he seems to have quite a good sense of humor. Whether that is because he is a Ukrainian or not I don’t know, but in any event, there is a fellow to watch. He has a somewhat different mentality apparently than certain of the Soviet leaders with whom we have been dealing.”29
What apparently drew the attention of the CIA were Khrushchev’s public speeches in 1954 blasting Soviet bureaucrats for red tape and incompetence. The agency noted Khrushchev’s complaints that in one region of the USSR the salaries of tax collectors amounted to more than the sum of all the taxes they collected. His criticism of the monthly reports that every workshop had to fill out also drew notice. “Scores of workers are sweating over the compilation and propagation of these reports,” he apparently said, and “being taken away from useful work.”30
The CIA chief, who believed that an inefficient Soviet Union was a less threatening Soviet Union, did not think much good for the United States could come out of Khrushchev’s reformist instincts. “I think it is a rather dangerous sign,” he concluded, “that you have a fellow as realistic as Khrushchev, who apparently has the courage to speak out.”31 Even this praise was tempered by the assumption that Khrushchev was not likely to speak out on foreign policy and, if he did, he would sound much like Molotov.
KHRUSHCHEV MADE new policy toward occupied Austria, where forty thousand Soviet troops were still stationed, the first test of his ability to reduce Molotov’s influence on Kremlin foreign policy. In 1945 the Allies had restored the independence of Austria, which the Nazis had attempted to erase with the Anschluss of 1938. Austria was then occupied by all four powers. Under Stalin and even Malenkov, it had been Soviet policy to link any future peace treaty with an Austrian government to the reunification of Germany. Khrushchev saw this as a barren approach since the two Germanys were years from reunification. Instead he considered an Austrian settlement a possible first step in a last-minute effort to lure the West Germans into a less confrontational relationship with the Soviet bloc. Perhaps if Austria were allowed to reunify as a neutral, demilitarized state, Germans who were not comfortable with joining the Western military bloc might consider this an attractive alternative.
During their brief political alliance against Malenkov, Khrushchev had managed to conv
ince Molotov to take a new look at the Austrian problem.32 Embedded in Molotov’s stern speech on February 8, and missed by most Western commentators, was the announcement that the Soviet Union would no longer hold the signature of a peace treaty with Austria hostage to progress on settling the future of divided Germany. This actually represented a loosening of the old Stalinist position.
But as Khrushchev well knew, Molotov’s support was purely tactical. For him, the offer to Austria was, like so many of his diplomatic offers over the years, a ploy. Molotov may have feared that western Austria would be integrated along with West Germany in NATO and wanted to dangle an alternative in front of the Austrians.33 Molotov expected the Austrians to refuse the Soviet offer, but the negotiations would throw the West Germans and the Americans off-balance and could easily be dragged out.
Actually Khrushchev had no interest in dragging things out. The talks with Vienna had to happen soon for there to be any chance to reach an agreement before the West Germans entered NATO.34 “Vyacheslav Mikhailovich…How do you feel about signing a peace treaty with Austria?” He asked Molotov in late February or early March. “How about negotiating a treaty with the Austrian government?” According to Khrushchev, Molotov resisted with full force, replying: “Mind your own business. I’m an old politician. I have many years of experience with such matters and you have only just started down this path. I was minister of foreign affairs during wartime! I’ve had all kinds of meetings and conducted all sorts of negotiations on issues concerning our country. And now here you come, without consulting me, trying to force your ideas on me—ideas that are not right, that are harmful to our interests.”35
Khrushchev then trapped the “old politician.” Using his new authority, he brought the matter to the Presidium, which voted, over Molotov’s objections, to invite an Austrian delegation to Moscow.36 On March 24 an invitation was sent to Vienna. The visit, which lasted from April 11 to 15, proved very fruitful and produced an all but finished treaty.37
The first secretary hardly waited to pass this first test before he initiated an even broader assault on current Soviet foreign policy. On March 12, 1955, Khrushchev’s allies in Pravda published an article that signaled Soviet interest in better relations with Belgrade. Marshal Tito, the article suggested, should “forget the past and come to an agreement with the Soviet Union to work for peace and international security.”38 This was the start of a major public relations campaign designed to undermine support for Molotov’s views, though not directed at the Soviet foreign minister himself.
Khrushchev enlisted in this campaign the most famous man in Soviet Russia, Marshal Georgi Zhukov. In the final months of World War II Zhukov had been Dwight Eisenhower’s equal on the eastern front. As commander of the First Belorussian Front he had led the advance into Berlin in April 1945 and had represented the Soviet Union at the surrender ceremony a few weeks later. Zhukov had come home to as much of a hero’s welcome as Stalin would allow. Standing at Stalin’s side atop the Lenin Mausoleum, Zhukov had watched as unit after unit of Soviet troops threw the regimental banners of the defeated Nazis at his feet. Within a year Zhukov found himself in the political wilderness, a comparatively lucky victim of Stalin’s paranoia, alive but reassigned to the command of the Odessa military district in the southern Ukraine. “It was about the same,” observed longtime Kremlin watcher Harrison Salisbury, “as if Mr. Truman had sent Eisenhower to take charge of National Guard training in Oklahoma.”39 Once the old man died, Zhukov returned to Moscow as Bulganin’s deputy in the Ministry of Defense. When Bulganin became premier, Khrushchev nominated Zhukov to replace Bulganin as minister of defense, and he was soon promoted to the Presidium.
To increase the pressure on Molotov, Zhukov was approached to give a helpful speech on May Day. The marshal was popular and a trusted ally. No Soviet citizen doubted this war hero’s commitment to the security and strength of the motherland. It was a legitimacy that Khrushchev believed he had to borrow for this fight with Molotov. Amid boilerplate references to the Great Patriotic War, there was a phrase that carried enormous importance. “The foreign policy of the Soviet Union,” said Zhukov, “proceeds from the wise counsel of the Great Lenin of the possibility of peaceful coexistence and economic competition of states, irrespective of their social or state structure.”40
Molotov, who received a copy of the speech ahead of time, recognized immediately the immensity of this challenge to his authority in foreign policy. Inclusion of the phrase “the possibility of peaceful coexistence…of states” would mean the complete rejection of his confrontational approach to the West. At 5:00 P.M. on April 30, only hours before Zhukov was to give the speech, Molotov distributed a letter to his colleagues demanding corrections in the statement on peaceful coexistence. “He caused a scandal,” Bulganin later recalled.41 Molotov argued that Zhukov’s statement was tantamount to endorsing “pacifism.” He wanted to make the strengthening of Soviet power, not international détente, the goal of Soviet policy.
Molotov was overruled by the Presidium.
A week later Khrushchev employed Zhukov to signal again that Yugoslavia was the first place where this new policy of peaceful coexistence would be put into practice. In an article published in Pravda to mark the tenth anniversary of the victory over Hitler, Zhukov spent some paragraphs extolling the virtues of Tito’s fight against Nazi Germany. At the end of the section the Kremlin inserted a political message: “As soldiers who participated in the combined effort of our peoples against fascism, we would like to express the desire that these disagreements (which have arisen between Belgrade and Moscow) would be quickly resolved and that friendly relations would arise again between our two countries.”
Molotov tried to have this article stopped. He considered Tito a fascist and hated the idea that he would get the credit for the work of the Communist Yugoslav partisans during World War II. “Trotsky created the Red Army,” Molotov argued, “but we don’t praise him.”42
Again, his Kremlin peers overruled him. The article was published unchanged.
Among those peers, Anastas Mikoyan was most helpful to Khrushchev in voting down the Soviet foreign minister. Next to Molotov, Mikoyan had the greatest experience in foreign affairs of any member of the Presidium, having served as Soviet minister of foreign trade on and off since 1926. In 1936 he had traveled to the United States to study food production systems. There he had his first taste of American ice cream, which he liked so much that when he returned, he initiated Soviet production of the dessert. If Khrushchev was “Comrade Corncob” because of his championing of corn production, then Mikoyan was “Comrade Ice-Cream Cone.” However, all was not sweetness in Mikoyan’s past. He had carried on some of the negotiations with the Nazis that had led to the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, and the next year, after Moscow and Berlin simultaneously invaded Poland, he had been among those who signed the death warrant for forty thousand Polish officers captured by the Soviet Army and later buried in the Katyn Forest. A complex man, Mikoyan nevertheless shared Malenkov’s rejection of the inevitability of war, and Khrushchev trusted his judgment in foreign affairs. In the fall of 1954 Khrushchev had invited Mikoyan along with him to visit the People’s Republic of China.
When Molotov called Zhukov an anti-Leninist at a Presidium meeting on May 19, 1955, Mikoyan and Premier Bulganin rushed to defend Zhukov and by implication the new policy of peaceful coexistence.43 “You should never hurl accusations like that—‘anti-Leninist,’” said Mikoyan. In the Soviet Union that was a slander akin to Joseph McCarthy’s accusations of “anti-Americanism.”
“Molotov was like a wind-up toy,” Khrushchev later observed. “Once he was wound up and let go, his gears and wheels would turn and turn and turn until all the tension had gone out of his spring.”44 Although Molotov did admit that calling Zhukov anti-Leninist had been a rash thing to do, he refused to budge from his essential disagreement with the direction Khrushchev and his allies were taking the country.45
Khrushchev had the votes, however,
to initiate high-level negotiations with the Yugoslavs, and Belgrade responded positively to the Soviet suggestion of a visit by a top-level Soviet delegation in May. Molotov tried to sabotage this visit, but he failed. At the two special sessions of the Presidium arranged on the eve of the Yugoslav trip, he opposed almost everything that had been prepared for the delegation.46 It was in the nature of Soviet rule that the Presidium sign off on the formal instructions given to official delegations, which were usually prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It also prepared the “final” communiqués that the Soviets would later recommend to their negotiating partners. Although Molotov headed the ministry, the Presidium had forced the Soviet foreign service to produce non-Molotovian language for these documents. And Molotov despised them. Each time one of these documents came to a vote, the minister of foreign affairs voted against it. And each time the vote ran eight to one against him.
THE TRIP TO Yugoslavia was Khrushchev’s first outside the USSR since becoming the principal architect of Soviet foreign policy. The Yugoslavs, however, seemed not to understand the changes in Moscow and treated the Soviet delegation at times as if Stalin and Molotov were still in charge. At the arrival ceremony in Belgrade on May 26, the hosts did not even bother to translate Khrushchev’s remarks. “[E]veryone here understands Russian,” Tito explained. Khrushchev doubted this was the reason. “I know Ukrainian, but I can’t catch everything when an orator speaks Ukrainian rapidly,” he later recalled, “and Ukrainian is much closer to Russian than Russian is to Serbo-Croatian.”47 The Soviet first secretary had the distinct impression that not all diplomatic protocol had been observed.
Khrushchev's Cold War Page 3