Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  Khrushchev performed very well despite the slights. Although aware that the three representatives of the Soviet Presidium would not be packing white or black tie, Khrushchev’s Yugoslav hosts organized a white-tie affair at Tito’s Winter Palace outside Belgrade. Khrushchev arrived in a powder blue suit. A bank of cameras and hot lights awaited him as he stepped out of his car. To the surprise of the Yugoslavs and the assembled foreign journalists, who were pressed in so close to the scene that they could have reached out and touched him, the fledgling Soviet leader responded well to the challenge. “He stood there,” recalled Edward Crankshaw, the Moscow correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, “[and] allowed himself to be photographed, sweating slightly.” To outsiders, Khrushchev seemed to be saying to himself: “What is happening to me? This is clearly a thing I’ve got to put up with. I will put up with it.” He took the scene in stride like “any Western statesman, to the manner born.”48

  But the strain of the trip weighed on Khrushchev. By the end of the formal dinner he was drinking heavily. Becoming very theatrical, he yelled out to the journalists, “Why don’t you come and visit us in our country?” When a few of the reporters complained that they had wanted to but had been denied visas, Khrushchev waved his arms and promised them all visas. The liquor continued to flow, and at the end of this very long night Khrushchev had to be carried down the stairs to the car that was to return him to the Soviet Embassy. Mikoyan had wanted to take Khrushchev home hours before, but the Soviet leader wouldn’t allow it. “No,” said Khrushchev, “you think I am drunk. I am not. You’re an Armenian. You can’t drink as much as I, but I feel well. I feel very well.”49

  In Yugoslavia, as at home, Khrushchev was at his best when he was outside formal settings, campaigning for socialism. There he showed the sparkle, enthusiasm, and drive that many observers, from whatever culture, found intensely appealing. At one factory stop these traits were on full display. After touring the shop floor, Khrushchev crowded into the factory manager’s small office, with Mikoyan, Bulganin, the factory manager, and two journalists. Khrushchev listened intently to the factory manager, who explained the ins and outs of the workers’ council setup. When Khrushchev began to speak, it quickly became apparent that he was in charge. He spoke at excruciating length about cement, its properties and its uses and was never interrupted by Mikoyan or Bulganin. Indeed, when Bulganin tried to get the pretty female journalist covering the visit to blush, Khrushchev shot him such a quick and devastating glance that Bulganin stopped and became impassive. “[F]or the first time I realized,” recalled Crankshaw, who was the other journalist in the room, “that this was a man of great inner power, who was quite clearly going to have very little difficulty in dominating all his colleagues at home.”

  Upon their return from Belgrade, it was Khrushchev, not Bulganin, who gave the official report on June 6 to the Presidium.50 Khrushchev acknowledged that the summit with Tito had not achieved all that had been hoped. On economic and state-to-state issues, the Soviet delegation reached agreements, but on the sensitive issue of the relationship between the Soviet Communist Party and Tito’s party a gap remained.

  Before the delegation left for Belgrade, Molotov had pressed for them to find out what kind of state Tito was leading.51 Was it bourgeois or proletarian? The implication was that in the answer to that question was a guide to future relations. For Molotov, a proletarian state by definition had to place the interests of the Soviet Union, the leader of international communism, ahead of its own parochial interests.

  Khrushchev and his delegation brought subtle answers to Molotov’s question. Dmitri Shepilov, the editor of Pravda, who at Khrushchev’s request had joined the delegation, replied that Yugoslavia “is not a bourgeois state; it is a people’s republic.”52 But it was a people’s republic that as yet didn’t always agree with Moscow. For all the hours the Soviet delegation spent with Tito and his chief ideologist, Edvard Kardelj, the Yugoslavs had refused to budge on some of their interpretations. For Molotov, this was reason to give up on close relations with Belgrade, but for Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Bulganin, and his longtime patron in the leadership Lazar Kaganovich, this was acceptable. A new doctrine of patient pressure was to replace the rejectionism of the Stalin-Molotov foreign policy. “With confidence,” Khrushchev told his colleagues two days later, “we must manage things so that we draw Yugoslavia to our side. Step by step [we must] strengthen our position. We must show confidence and not allow defeatism.”53

  Khrushchev’s and Molotov’s ideological debate would have implications far beyond the Kremlin’s standoff with Tito. If the Presidium followed Khrushchev’s lead and dispensed with the tradition of forcing potential foreign allies to jump through ideological hoops, then the number of potential friends for the USSR in the world would more than triple. It was in the developing world in particular that this shift would reap the greatest rewards. In the meantime the trip had put Molotov on notice that whatever his formal position in the government, he was now on the defensive in a struggle with Khrushchev over the future of Soviet foreign policy.54

  A week after his return from Belgrade, Khrushchev confirmed his achievement at a secret plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, a biannual meeting of the three hundred or so members of the Central Committee.55 He and Bulganin told the stories of Molotov’s unwarranted attacks on Zhukov and his uncompromising stand on Yugoslavia.

  Khrushchev kept this anti-Molotov diatribe out of the Soviet press, and neither the British nor the Americans had any significant secret or press sources in or near enough to the Kremlin to pick up on either the contest between Khrushchev and Molotov or what it might mean for international security. Khrushchev’s next foreign policy initiatives would be of a scale and importance, however, that London and Washington could not miss.

  CHAPTER 2

  GENEVA

  THE FIRST GREAT power conference since Harry Truman, Clement Attlee, and Joseph Stalin met at Potsdam in 1945 took place against the background of Nikita Khrushchev’s effort to wrest control of Soviet foreign policy from Vyacheslav Molotov. On May 10, 1955, France, Great Britain, and the United States invited Khrushchev and Bulganin to meet “at the summit” in Geneva, Switzerland. Four days earlier the formal occupation of West Germany had ended, the Federal Republic of Germany was declared, and it joined NATO as a sovereign state. With West Germany securely within the Atlantic military alliance, the Eisenhower administration had finally agreed to the three-power invitation to Moscow. For two years the British, led by former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, had been pressing Washington to meet with the Soviets, but the U.S. government had resisted so long as there was the chance that a high-level meeting with Soviet representatives might complicate bringing West Germany into NATO.1

  It would be hard to exaggerate the depth of the defeat for Soviet diplomacy that had made this invitation possible. Stalin had designed, and Molotov had loyally implemented, a policy of encouraging the reunification of a neutral and possibly socialist Germany. In practice, this meant that the Soviet Union would not recognize West Germany as a separate state, and though the USSR would be committed to the support of East Germany, that state was to be considered only a transitional regime before the reunification of the entire country. After Stalin’s death and as momentum built in Western Europe for admitting the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO, the Kremlin under Molotov’s influence pursued a carrot-and-stick approach. Moscow warned the Atlantic powers that if the West Germans joined NATO, the Soviet bloc would form its own military alliance and the Kremlin would refuse to participate in any four-power summit.2 If the West Germans rejected the Atlantic alliance, however, the Kremlin promised to support all-German elections with international observers, and a European security system and to welcome normalizing relations with the Federal Republic of Germany.

  Khrushchev’s last-minute effort to use Soviet policy toward Austria as an incentive to the Germans to reconsider joining NATO had come too late and probably had had no chance of succe
ss. The remilitarization of West Germany and its entry into NATO appeared to be popular in that country. The West German parliament, the Bundestag, quickly passed laws to start military training for 150,000 young Germans by 1956 and an additional 250,000 eighteen months later.3

  The Kremlin’s immediate response to West Germany’s joining NATO suggested that Moscow would be in no mood for a summit. Arguing in Pravda on May 7 that “West Germany [was] being turned into a bridgehead for the deployment of large aggressive forces,” the Soviet Union announced its abrogation of the wartime mutual assistance treaties that Stalin had signed with France and Great Britain.4 It was hardly likely that in the Cold War the French and the British would defend the Soviet Union against an American attack, but Moscow wanted to make a point. The Kremlin also made good on its earlier threat to create an anti-NATO military alliance. On May 14, military representatives from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union met in Warsaw to establish the Warsaw Pact treaty organization.

  For all of the Kremlin’s official truculence, however, Khrushchev did not question his conviction that it was in the long-term interest of the Soviet Union to push for better relations with the West. In his mind, the West German decision was the last in a long line of international events almost entirely brought about by Stalin and Molotov’s stupidity. It simply underscored the need for a new approach.

  Khrushchev responded by pushing even harder to get the Austrian treaty. Even though it was of little help in keeping West Germany out of NATO, a unified Austria might still play a useful role in the future diplomacy over the German question. At the very least, Moscow would be able to save money by reducing one of its occupation commitments. In early May the Soviets informed their negotiating partners in Vienna that they no longer insisted on maintaining a right to return Soviet forces to Austria in the wake of a collapse of order there. This removed the last real barrier to a four-power agreement ending the ten-year occupation of Austria. The Austrian State Treaty was signed on May 15, 1955.

  At the same time, Khrushchev applied pressure to the Soviet Foreign Ministry to come up with a more realistic approach to international disarmament. On May 10, the same day that the summit invitation came from the Western powers, the ministry announced a plan to reduce international tensions by a phased dismantling of the arsenals of the great powers. Calling for reductions in conventional weapons and the size of each country’s armed forces, as well as elimination of all nuclear weapons, the Soviets proposed a two-year schedule to reach these goals, which would include the closing of all overseas bases by the great powers. In addition, as a measure of nuclear disarmament, the Soviets proposed a nuclear test ban, the first time this had been proposed by any nuclear power.5 At this point in the Cold War the Soviets did not seem to rely as heavily on testing for their nuclear program as did the United States. Since their first atomic blast in August 1949, Soviet scientists had conducted only nineteen nuclear tests, compared with sixty tests by U.S. scientists.6

  Thus Khrushchev saw the invitation to the summit as a positive development, not as a sign of Soviet weakness. He was eager for a major platform from which he could introduce himself and his new policies to the West. He had met with the press lord William Randolph Hearst earlier in 1955, but in his sixteen years as a full member of the Kremlin’s inner circle, Khrushchev really had had few interactions with foreign capitalists. Just as he had thought it important to see Tito as a way of showing the Yugoslavs that Molotov no longer presented the attitudes or objectives of the Soviet Union, so he hoped his appearance at the summit would have the same effect on Eisenhower; Churchill’s successor, Sir Anthony Eden, and the French premier, Edgar Faure.

  THE MAIN FORCE behind American preparations for the Geneva Conference was President Dwight Eisenhower. A popular general whose crowning military achievement was the organization of the successful D-day landings in Normandy, Eisenhower had commanded the Western forces that drove into the heart of Germany in 1945. In the frenetic last weeks of the war he had come under pressure to race the Soviets to Berlin, though Hitler’s capital lay a hundred miles inside the agreed-upon Soviet zone and was itself to be divided into four occupation zones. “Why should we endanger the life of a single American or Briton,” Eisenhower had wondered, “to capture areas we will soon be handing over to the Russians?”7 This decision had earned Eisenhower almost as much respect in the Soviet Union as it had dismay the likes of George C. Patton and British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery.

  As the U.S. commander in occupied Germany Eisenhower developed some understanding of the Soviets. He spent enough time with Soviet commanders, especially his opposite number in the Soviet Army, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, to escape being one of those who viewed Communists as a unified hostile group. Moreover, on a trip to Moscow in 1945 he had witnessed both the poverty of the average Soviet citizen and the immense destruction wrought by the Nazis. Memories of his interactions with Zhukov and of what he had seen in Moscow forever after served as a check on his accepting exaggerated estimates of Soviet power and the Kremlin’s willingness to use it.

  Once in the White House, Eisenhower discovered that some fellow Republicans were second-guessing his instincts in foreign policy. The entire first year of his administration had been taken up with a fight over whether hard-line members of Eisenhower’s own party would strip the presidency of some of its treaty-making powers. Eisenhower had won that contest, but it had been a real battle, and he had to rely on help from congressional Democrats.8 No U.S. president had faced such an extensive mutiny from his congressional colleagues since Franklin Roosevelt had pushed through the New Deal.

  Eisenhower interpreted Stalin’s death, which had occurred less than two months after his inauguration, as a possible turning point in the Cold War, and despite these serious challenges from within his own party, he looked for opportunities to relax Cold War tensions. His motives were not simply humanitarian. Like Khrushchev, an adversary he hardly knew, Eisenhower was concerned about the cost of perpetual confrontation. Unlike Khrushchev, Eisenhower came to this conclusion from a belief in small government and balanced budgets. He was appalled when he saw the amount of money that the United States was spending on defense. During the Korean War the annual defense bill had increased from $13.5 billion to nearly $45 billion per year.9 Eisenhower’s foreign policy strategy, which he called the New Look, was designed to reduce defense expenditures to $35 billion by relying more on cost-efficient nuclear weapons than on conventional forces. To avoid the implication that America was less secure, Eisenhower had his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, threaten “massive retaliation” with nuclear forces in case of any Soviet attempt to invade the United States or any of its allies. The threat was credible because Eisenhower and Dulles knew that the United States enjoyed a qualitative and quantitative advantage in nuclear weapons. Still, Eisenhower also hoped for some disarmament, which could bring defense expenditures down even more. In the meantime the doctrine of massive retaliation would leave no doubt of U.S. resolve to defend itself.

  NOT EVERY MEMBER of the Eisenhower administration looked to Geneva as a welcome opportunity to reduce East-West tension. Secretary of State Dulles had disliked the idea of a summit when Churchill first raised it in 1953 because he did not want to take the pressure off Moscow. Dulles believed the Soviet Union was vulnerable enough that under the right circumstances U.S. policy might force its collapse.10 “A policy of pressures,” he argued, “can increase the gap between their requirements and their resources [and] lead to [their] disintegration.”11 His brother, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, was less sure that the USSR would collapse anytime soon, but he did believe that the Soviet regime was in trouble. Calling the Austrian treaty “the first substantial concession to the West in Europe since the end of the war,” Allen Dulles interpreted the new foreign policy coming out of Moscow as a sign that Soviet leaders understood they were in trouble.12

  This shared confidence that the Soviets were weak
inspired a confrontational approach to the Geneva summit. Why make any concessions now, the Dulles brothers believed, when over time the Soviets were only likely to become more accommodating? As Allen Dulles told a group of journalists on the eve of the summit, “if tensions are relaxed the Soviets get precisely what they want—more time.”13 Foster Dulles, the brother who would actually be taking the trip to Geneva, assumed that at the very least, arguing from strength would score points for the West in world public opinion. Unlike Eisenhower, who was focusing on a possible disarmament initiative, the secretary of state put greater stock in preparing a new German proposal that he was sure the Soviets would oppose and the Western Europeans and democrats around the world would applaud.

  Dulles embraced a British idea—in fact the 1954 proposal of Winston Churchill’s longtime understudy, Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden—to push for a demilitarized East Germany within a reunited pro-Western Germany. The Eden Plan envisioned all-German elections followed by strict arms control within 150 miles of both sides of the current eastern border of the Soviet occupation zone in Germany. The rationale for this proposal was that the Soviets might accept the dissolution of their East German client state if they were promised that the newly reunified Germany could not pose a military threat to the East. Even if Germany decided to join NATO, the plan stipulated that there would never be NATO troops on the Polish-German border.