Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  Privately Dulles told President Eisenhower that of course, the Soviets would probably never accept the Eden Plan or anything like it. In making this point, he stressed East Berlin’s emotional and ideological appeal to the new Soviet leadership. The Soviets, he reported to the National Security Council, “fear the effect of the loss of control over East Germany on the satellites.”14 Nevertheless, the Eden Plan was useful as a ploy. Since agreements were unlikely with Communists, Dulles argued, the goal of U.S. policy should be to appear conciliatory while making proposals that it could be assumed the Kremlin would reject or could accept only out of weakness.

  Eisenhower decided to accept the Eden proposal and Dulles’s strategy without endorsing the view that an agreement with the Soviets was unlikely at Geneva. He was determined not to let the occasion slip by without making one dramatic attempt to alter the climate of world affairs. Some months earlier Eisenhower had formed a blue-ribbon panel, known as the Gaither Committee, to assess Soviet military power and the United States’ ability to defend against surprise attack. The committee reported in February 1955 that U.S. intelligence sources were too weak to draw any firm conclusions: “[E]stimates of the specific capabilities and immediate intentions of the Soviets have, at their center, only a very small core of hard facts [emphasis in the original].”15 U.S. estimates were largely based on extrapolations from U.S. defense technologies and assumptions about Soviet manufacturing capabilities. Well aware of this weakness, Eisenhower had been looking for ways to expand U.S. intelligence coverage of Soviet military facilities. One alternative was to rely on a new high-altitude reconnaissance plane being developed by the CIA called the U-2, but U-2 flights would involve violating Soviet airspace, which under international law was an act of war, and Eisenhower worried about the possible consequences. Just before the Geneva Conference, however, Eisenhower was offered a different approach to solving this intelligence problem that involved cooperation instead of confrontation with Moscow. A small group of advisers led by Nelson Rockefeller recommended the reciprocal opening of the skies of both the Soviet Union and the United States to air reconnaissance. By regularly flying planes over each other’s territory both countries would lessen the threat of a surprise attack and possibly create some mutual trust. Eisenhower liked the idea a lot and decided to offer it in Geneva. Information about the president’s personal initiative, which came to be known as the Open Skies proposal, was tightly held within the U.S. delegation and it would come as a surprise to the Soviets in Geneva.

  IN HIS INSIGHTFUL biography of Khrushchev, William Taubman returns time and again to Khrushchev’s complicated self-image. Proud of his achievements as a self-made man, almost arrogant, Khrushchev was nonetheless painfully aware of his own lack of formal education and his humble background. “I had no education and not enough culture,” he lamented. “To govern a country like Russia, you have to have the equivalent of two academies of science in your head. But all I had was four classes in a church school and then, instead of high school, just a smattering of higher education.”16 He was always trying to prove himself, first, to his patron Lazar Kaganovich in Kiev, then to Stalin himself in Moscow. In the Stalin era Khrushchev had given bloodcurdling speeches, and signed many death warrants. He strove relentlessly to leave no doubt that despite the fact that his manner suggested a far less sophisticated man, he was as tough, as smart, as capable as any man.

  The Soviet leader thought of the Soviet Union much as he thought of himself. Khrushchev wanted Moscow to be viewed as the equal of the West, yet he was well aware of the Soviet Union’s weakness relative to the United States. Despite Soviet successes in testing an atomic bomb in 1949 and a hydrogen bomb only four years later, Moscow’s claim to being a nuclear superpower on a par with the United States was little more than posturing. As of May 1955, the Soviet Union had no way of using a nuclear device against any U.S. city. In March 1951 Stalin had established a design bureau in Moscow overseen by V. M. Myasishchev to produce a bomber that could reach the U.S. mainland. To meet this objective, the plane had to have a range, when refueled, of 6,875 to 7,500 miles. A month earlier the U.S. Air Force had authorized production of the first U.S. intercontinental bomber, the B-52 Stratofortress. The first generation of B-52 bomber could fly 7,343 miles when refueled, carrying ten thousand pounds of ordnance at a cruising speed of 523 miles per hour. The new Soviet bomber was intended to keep pace with this new American flying machine.

  The Myasishchev-4 (M-4), designated the Bison bomber by NATO, went into serial production in 1954 but was a huge disappointment.17 It lacked the range to hit American targets because Myasishchev could not devise a reliable method to refuel the plane. At best the M-4 had a combat radius of five thousand miles, too short to reach either U.S. coast from the nearest point of Soviet territory. Despite the Presidium’s hopes, the only creatures in the Western Hemisphere threatened by an M-4 attack were polar bears in Greenland.

  The Soviet Navy in 1955 also lacked the capacity to deliver a nuclear strike against Washington. Stalin had promoted the development of submarines, but missile-launching craft were still years from production. The Soviet Union had no aircraft carriers.

  With no way to deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States, the only way the Soviets could harm the United States was to damage one of its NATO allies. The same year the M-4 emerged as a failure, the Tupoluv design bureau produced the first Soviet bomber that could reliably attack Ankara, London, and Paris. The Tu-16, known to NATO as the Badger bomber, finally made the Soviet nuclear threat credible in Europe, though these planes were vulnerable to NATO’s antiaircraft defenses.

  For these reasons, conventional forces remained the primary source of Soviet power in Europe. The West estimated that the Soviet armed forces had 175 divisions, or about 4.5 million men, in 1955, though not all were believed to be at full strength and some were deployed in Central Asia and the Far East.18 By contrast, the United States had 20 divisions defending Europe. In divided Germany, the contest was less one-sided. There 400,000 Western allied troops in West Germany faced 300,000 Soviet troops and an estimated 80,000 East German troops in the German Democratic Republic.19 Yet in a time of war the Soviets could easily draw on their 2 divisions in Hungary and the 21 fully equipped and well-trained divisions that they kept in Poland and the western USSR.

  This conventional advantage held no allure for Khrushchev; he had no intention of starting a war with the West. It also meant less to him because it seemed to mean less to the United States. The Eisenhower administration’s policy of massive retaliation bespoke a confidence that the U.S. strategic advantage was sufficient to deter any unwanted Soviet action. It was this confidence that also seemed to have given rise to John Foster Dulles’s belief that the USSR could be bullied into concessions. Khrushchev wanted to undermine that confidence. He understood that the Americans intended to negotiate from a “position of strength,” and that could only harm Soviet interests.

  In preparation for Geneva, Khrushchev tried to alter the psychological climate of the Cold War. From reading U.S. newspapers in translation, he saw evidence that Washington did not understand the deficiencies of the new M-4 long-range bombers and might be vulnerable to some Soviet exaggeration. A controversy had broken out in the U.S. capital in mid-May 1955 over what U.S. Air Force officers believed they had seen at a rehearsal for the Soviet Union’s May Day air show. The actual show had had to be canceled on account of poor weather, but at the rehearsal Americans over-counted the number of M-4s in the Soviet arsenal. Because the Americans assumed the plane met all the performance specifications that Moscow had assigned it, the conclusion was that the Soviets had a reliable nuclear attack force that could reach U.S. cities.

  The Kremlin watched with glee as a very helpful discussion of Soviet bomber technology subsequently broke into the open in the United States. Led by Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, a former secretary of the air force under Truman with presidential ambitions, some congressmen began decrying a strategic “bomber gap
” between the United States and the Soviet Union. “It is now clear,” said Symington, “that the United States, along with the rest of the free world, may have lost control of the air.”20 Despite assurances from the Eisenhower administration that the U.S. Air Force remained ahead of the Soviets, some journalists and legislators began throwing around extravagant assumptions about the capabilities of the M-4. Commentators from both political parties took joy in parsing whether the administration meant that the United States held a lead in total air capability or in what everyone most cared about, the bombers that could reach across oceans.21

  On May 19, as this controversy was playing out on the front pages of major American newspapers, Bulganin and Zhukov were given the task of preparing a major air show for Soviet Aviation Day on July 13.22 The country’s entire fleet of three or four M-4s was to be flown in wide circles around Tushino Airport to convey the impression that the Soviet Union had at least twenty-eight of them. If this stunt worked, then in Geneva the Western leaders might treat the Soviet Union as an equal and stop trying to play on its weaknesses.

  Meanwhile Khrushchev took advantage of a courtesy invitation from Ambassador Bohlen to attend the U.S. Embassy’s annual Fourth of July reception. Since diplomatic relations had been established between the United States and the USSR in 1934, no Soviet leader had ever stepped foot inside Spaso House, the beautiful New Empire–style residence of the American ambassador that had been built for a Russian merchant in 1914. The presence of seven of the nine members of the Presidium, led by Khrushchev and Bulganin, was an impressive demonstration of the Soviet desire to change the tone of relations. Khrushchev also wanted to send a message to the Eisenhower administration, especially Secretary Dulles, that he was well aware that Washington believed the Kremlin could be pushed around. He told the gathering that he had read some Western press speculation that the foreign policy moves of the new leadership were being made out of weakness. “Of course, we made these proposals not for the purpose of pleasing somebody,” he said. “We made these decisions because they were the right decisions and this is what motivated us.”23 Khrushchev assured his listeners that the Soviet Union was as strong as it needed to be and it just wanted peace.

  He backed his words with action. A few days later the Kremlin made an unprecedented offer regarding a recent military incident. On June 23 two Soviet MiG fighters had fired on a U.S. Navy patrol plane over international waters in the Bering Strait. This was not the first time that the Soviet Air Force had attacked a U.S. plane in the Cold War. What was unprecedented was that after Khrushchev’s and Bulganin’s appearance at Spaso House the Soviets offered to pay half the damages for the incident, which had caused the pilot to bring the crippled plane in for a hard landing on St. Lawrence Island. Seven of the crew had been injured in the incident. Molotov made the offer to Secretary Dulles on behalf of the Soviet government at a UN meeting in San Francisco.24

  Behind the scenes, Khrushchev also maneuvered to set the right tone within the Soviet government before Geneva. Molotov, who had been flying back from a UN meeting, had been unable to attend the July 4 reception at the U.S. Embassy. When he returned, Khrushchev used a discussion of a new Soviet declaration on the German question to be sure his foreign minister understood that Moscow would have to speak more softly to create a more peaceful world. Molotov had just submitted a draft declaration on the German question for his colleagues’ approval. It repeated the stale Stalinist assertion that only a unified, neutral Germany would be acceptable to the Soviet Union. “The declaration is no good,” Khrushchev complained. “The language is quarrelsome, [like] a bludgeon.” Bulganin agreed: “The document is dry….Comrade Molotov, you did not catch the tone.” The draft was rejected, and Molotov had to come up with something better.25

  Molotov’s draft was in response to some incendiary comments made by Foster Dulles. At a press conference on June 28 the secretary of state had goaded the Kremlin. He said that Moscow had “lost interest in the reunification of Germany” and established Soviet readiness to discuss this issue as the litmus test of the new regime’s commitment to reducing international tensions.26

  Dulles had hit on a weak point in existing Soviet strategy. The Soviet Union’s rhetorical commitment to all-German elections and reunification made little sense when East Germany’s population was less than seventeen million and shrinking and West Germany’s population was over fifty million and growing. Khrushchev understood this but as yet had no sense of how to change the Soviet position. His unwavering commitment was to protect East Germany, yet he hoped to use the four-power system to bring about some disarmament in Central Europe.

  The public statement that was carried by the official Soviet news agency TASS on July 12 betrayed the muddiness of the Kremlin’s collective thinking on what to do next about Germany.27 It was clearest at the start, where Dulles’s views were attacked as wrongheaded. “This matter is being represented in such a way as if the Soviet Union had lost interest in the unification of Germany, and that, allegedly, the Soviet Union sees a threat to its security in the unification of Germany.” The Kremlin’s reply was simple: “Everyone knows that the Soviet Union has invariably given first place to the question of Germany’s reunification.” But from here the way forward became opaque. If a united, free, and democratic Germany was not possible in the short term, then Moscow believed that reunification might be achieved on a “step-by-step” basis “in accordance with the establishment of an all-European system of collective security.” Nowhere did the Kremlin state how that phased approach could be reconciled with the self-determination of the German people. Also left unstated was the Soviet hope that at Geneva the Kremlin could somehow convince the other occupying powers to accept European disarmament and a twenty-six-nation European collective security agreement, not German reunification, as the best first step toward détente.

  Khrushchev had little hope of achieving anything with Dulles but was optimistic that he might find some common understanding with the head of the American delegation. Khrushchev had met Eisenhower only once, in June 1945, when the supreme allied commander visited Moscow, but he thought he had reason to believe that if there were to be any progress toward détente at Geneva, it would be because of Eisenhower. He knew that Marshal Zhukov had worked closely with Eisenhower in occupied Berlin in 1945. Their personal interaction in those early postwar months had been positive and mutually rewarding. Zhukov liked Eisenhower, and when it became apparent that the United States would be including the secretary of defense in its delegation, Khrushchev made sure that Zhukov not only joined the Soviet group but would be afforded opportunities to meet privately with the American president.

  NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV’S insecurities were triggered immediately upon his arrival in Switzerland on Sunday, July 17. As his official plane was taxiing to the terminal, he noticed that every other leader, particularly President Eisenhower, had flown to Geneva in a much larger plane than his. In 1955 Air Force One was a 113-foot-long Super Constellation, a plane built by Lockheed that could carry 60 people and fly four thousand miles. Dubbed Columbine III, the presidential plane bore the name of the state flower of Mamie Eisenhower’s home state of Colorado. In comparison, Khrushchev’s 73-foot, 30-passenger Ilyushin 14 looked, as he later complained to his son, “like an insect.”28 (After his return Khrushchev needled his civilian aircraft designers to provide him with an official plane that befitted a world power. Once they finally delivered the 177-foot 220-passenger Tu-114 four years later, Khrushchev showed his pride not only by flying around in this behemoth, which stood 50 feet off the ground, but by prominently displaying a scale model of the plane on his desk in the Kremlin.)

  At the conference, which started in Geneva’s elegant Palais des Nations on July 18, Khrushchev found other ways to puff himself up. Although Bulganin as Soviet premier was the formal leader of Moscow delegation, Khrushchev acted as Bulganin’s superior and left no doubt that he expected to be treated as the top man.29 Khrushchev was quickly and favorably impre
ssed when Eisenhower suggested that all the leaders meet informally for cocktails between the formal working sessions and the dinners. Evidently the American believed in the value of getting to know his Soviet adversaries and would treat them as equals. Khrushchev also noted that Eisenhower put great store in the chance to renew his acquaintance with Defense Minister Zhukov.

  But not everything he saw as the conference opened improved Khrushchev’s image of the American president. The chairmanship of the meeting rotated among the four delegations. When it was Eisenhower’s turn to gavel the meeting to order, Dulles sat at his left elbow. In front of the entire group, Dulles fed Eisenhower handwritten notes, which Khrushchev determined the president was simply reading into the microphone without taking a moment to absorb them himself. “It was difficult for us to imagine how a chief of state could allow himself to lose face like that in front of delegations from other countries,” Khrushchev later recalled. “It certainly appeared that Eisenhower was letting Dulles do his thinking for him.”30

  Khrushchev still held hope for the meeting between the two military men. In the early 1960s he would use back channels to express his inner concerns to the Kennedy White House. At this stage he intended to use Zhukov, a man he believed Eisenhower trusted. “[W]e thought their acquaintance,” Khrushchev explained, “…would lead to an easing of the tension between our countries.”31 The meeting between the U.S. president and the Soviet defense minister on July 20 was to be the most honest interaction between representatives of the superpowers in the first decade of the Cold War.32

  Zhukov did not mince words. He told Eisenhower of his fears that “dark forces” in the West were attempting to undermine Soviet-American relations, and he blamed these forces for drawing a false picture of the Kremlin as being intent on launching an aggressive war against the United States. On the contrary, Zhukov assured Eisenhower, the Soviet people were “fed up to the teeth with war,” and “no one in the Soviet Government or the Central Committee of the Party had any such intentions.” The essence of Khrushchev’s political agenda, he said, was to improve the Soviet economy and to raise the standard of living of the Soviet people. War would be inimical to that end.33