Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  Although the foreign ministers met in the same hall in the Palais des Nations that the summit had, the mood could not have more different. There was so much tension that when a press photographer accidentally dropped a camera case, every foreign minister appeared to jump.57

  Despite this tension, Molotov took the bait offered by Western negotiators. He indicated that he liked the idea of a demilitarized zone in Central Europe, where armaments would be limited and inspected and there would be a ceiling on the number of French, British, U.S., and Soviet troops. However, when the Soviet foreign minister was asked if Moscow would accept the treaty securing this zone as a guarantee that a unified Germany in NATO would not pose a threat to the Soviet Union, Molotov understood that he had fallen into a trap and started repeating long-standing Soviet phrases about the problem of future German remilitarization.

  On November 4 the Presidium recalled Molotov to Moscow to discuss the collapsing Soviet position in Geneva. Over an arduous two-day Presidium meeting, the leadership hashed out new language for its German policy. Molotov and the Foreign Ministry went to work on something to take back to the conference table that would permit the Soviets to regain the high ground in the competition for German public opinion.

  On November 6 Molotov submitted a new position paper to the leadership.58 Although its drafters referred to it as a new proposal, it read like the old Stalinist policy on Germany. It stated that the goal of Soviet policy in Germany was the reunification of the country on the basis of all-German elections. To create the possibilities for this, the Soviet Union would propose the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the Germanys within three months and the creation of an all-German council to discuss the details of eventual German reunification. To preserve the “democratic and peace-loving” development of a reunified Germany, Moscow would also demand the rescinding of the Paris treaties—i.e., the removal of West Germany from NATO—so that a united Germany would be neutral and free of all blocs. Molotov made clear that this proposal was purely designed to make gains in the propaganda war. He did not expect the West to accept it.

  Khrushchev rejected Molotov’s entire strategy and dismissed the proposal out of hand. “We won’t do it,” he said.59 “There are too many hidden dangers.” Khrushchev was not sure that the West would reject this proposal. “Dulles will maneuver,” said Khrushchev out of respect for his adversary. He thought there was a chance that the Americans might test Soviet sincerity by removing all their troops, something that the Soviets were not yet prepared to do themselves. Khrushchev believed that any Soviet mention of withdrawing troops would “disorient” the Germans and threaten the stability of the East German regime.

  Molotov tried to rebut Khrushchev by saying that the Soviet Union had to get back on the correct side of this issue. It looked bad for Moscow to seem to be against the self-determination of the German people. “[The West] is in favor of elections,” complained Molotov, “while we are against.” When Molotov said that there really was little risk involved because the West wasn’t really going to go through with its proposals anyway, Khrushchev cut him off. The Soviet foreign minister’s cynicism irritated him. Molotov was prepared to risk the future of East Germany in a ploy to defend the old Stalinist position on general elections. “What is the sake of strengthening the NATO front,” Khrushchev asked him, “of carrying out reunification for the purpose of having a whole Germany that will strengthen NATO and will be aimed against the policy of peace and the Soviet Union?”

  Molotov found he had no allies in this debate. “I doubt the correctness of the proposals offered,” said Mikoyan. “I agree with the opinion of Comrades Khrushchev and Mikoyan,” added the Soviet president (a purely formal title), Kliment Voroshilov. A telling blow came from Lazar Kaganovich, who shared many of Molotov’s views but was closer to Khrushchev on the need to protect socialist regimes. “We will not let them peck the GDR [German Democratic Republic] to pieces and we told them about that,” said Kaganovich, “while they keep talking about elections.”

  Khrushchev led the group in thinking about new tactics. The West had sprung a trap by hinging the success of all disarmament discussions on whether there was an agreement to reunite Germany. If Moscow did not find a way out of its current negotiating strategy, the West would conclude the Soviets could be ignored until they were forced to accept NATO’s positions on Germany and European security. “They will raise a cry,” said Khrushchev, “that the position of strength prevails…. This is wrong.” Perhaps it was time to have the Germans settle their differences themselves and for Moscow to stop trying to reach a settlement on Germany at the four-power level. “Every politician of sound judgment,” Khrushchev concluded, “understands that in the circumstances where West Germany belongs to NATO, this question is complicated and it is not so simple to resolve it.”

  The next day the meeting resumed with a speech by Khrushchev outlining the new policy. “Now they wish to speak about elections from a position of strength. We should set up our reasoning against it.”60 He repeated his view that it was time to change the focus of great power diplomacy. It should now be on disarmament and just the development of contacts between the blocs, leaving the German issue to Bonn and East Berlin. The success of the Adenauer visit had reduced the immediate utility of the great power negotiations on Germany for Moscow, and with the establishment of diplomatic relations there were new opportunities for the Soviets to increase their influence in West Germany. Adenauer could not live forever, and there was reason to hope that his successors might turn out to be more interested in developing relations with the East.

  In this discussion Khrushchev stressed what he believed to be Moscow’s new bottom line in these discussions on the German question: “We wish to preserve the regime established in the GDR.” He was also happy to have Moscow’s representatives make this clear to the world. As he pronounced the old German policy dead, his Presidium ally Anastas Mikoyan praised its replacement: “Our position is constructive.”

  In ending Molotov’s stranglehold on German policy, Khrushchev had done more than alter the shading of Moscow’s language on German reunification. In accepting Khrushchev’s leadership on this question, the Kremlin was endorsing the line that however beneficial détente in Europe might be, it could not come at the cost of East Germany. If need be, Moscow would have to be patient, allowing forces in West Germany or in the rest of the West to move Eisenhower, Eden, and the French closer to the view that the best route to détente and disarmament lay in the recognition that there were two Germanys. “The question of European security,” said Khrushchev, “can be resolved if both Germanys exist as well.”61

  THE NEXT NIGHT Molotov alerted journalists at a huge diplomatic reception in the Kremlin that he was returning to Geneva with new proposals. “I came here with good baggage,” said Molotov, “and I am leaving tonight with even better baggage because I have heard many good things here.”62 Once he arrived back in Geneva the representatives of the other three powers learned that Moscow had given up on four-power negotiations of the German problem.

  In a one-hour speech Molotov outlined Khrushchev’s new policy, and he did it in Khrushchev’s language. He attacked the West for trying to deal with the Soviet Union from a “position of strength.” West Germany’s adherence to NATO was “an insurmountable obstacle” to reunification in the short term, he said, adding that elections now would “provoke a general dislocation” in Germany. He also stressed that the Soviet Union was committed to the survival of East Germany, which faced “a great future since it is moving along the main road of progress which is that of all mankind and since it has strong and loyal friends.”63

  Dulles reacted bitterly to Molotov’s speech and called for a recess. This proposal, the secretary said the next day, after conferring with Eisenhower by telephone, “has largely shattered such confidence as was born at the summit conference.”64 The French and the British representatives responded just as negatively.65 Despite Dulles’s effort to show surprise, he had
predicted in the summer that the Kremlin would never allow East Germany to die. In what the celebrated American columnist Walter Lippmann called the Geneva gamble, the three Western powers had tried to force the Soviets to accept that its satellite had no future.66 Apparently Molotov’s bosses were not prepared to yield. After a week of inconclusive discussion and some recrimination, the “little Geneva” broke up without any agreement on when it would meet again.

  This was a defining moment for both Khrushchev’s conduct of Soviet policy and the Cold War. Molotov never regained his influence and would soon be replaced as a foreign minister. A few days after “little Geneva” Moscow announced that it had signed an agreement formally ending the Soviet occupation of Germany and nominally transferred to the East Germans responsibility for defending the borders of the eastern zone.67 On November 22 West Germans noticed East German troops replacing Soviet soldiers on the frontier.68 Under the Potsdam Accord of 1945, Moscow had responsibility for monitoring military travel into East Germany and divided Berlin. Although Khrushchev was also eager to hand over this responsibility to the East Germans, Moscow retained it for the time being. With Molotov’s loss of authority to Khrushchev, the defense of East Germany became a cardinal point in Soviet policy. Until 1990, in fact, the Soviet Union would not contemplate any security steps that might weaken the existence of its German ally or risk the reunification of Germany within NATO.

  For Washington and Moscow the issue was now whether the two governments could live with the status quo in Central Europe. Dulles’s policy of forcing Moscow to accept a reunified Germany in NATO had failed. There was a limit to how much Khrushchev would concede to relax international tensions.

  Khrushchev and Eisenhower had fundamentally different assessments of the situation in Germany. Eisenhower rejected the notion that the German people in the east were the willing subjects of a Communist regime and had no desire to abandon them. What Khrushchev proudly referred to as the German Democratic Republic, Eisenhower called the Soviet Zone. The future peace and stability of Europe would depend on resolving the tension between those two concepts. Thanks to Khrushchev’s energy and ambition, the German issue, which remained a core concern for both Moscow and Washington for the rest of Eisenhower’s and Khrushchev’s time in power, soon had competition from newer core concerns in geographical regions far outside the traditional areas of U.S.-Soviet rivalry.

  CHAPTER 3

  ARMS TO EGYPT

  “RED BLUEPRINT FOR CONQUEST” read the golden banner headline across a portrait of an unsmiling Khrushchev on the November 28, 1955, cover of Newsweek. “Russia’s supersalesman, Nikita S. Khrushchev,” went the teaser line, “has begun a month-long invasion of Asia’s have-not nations, peddling a new line of promises.”

  For most of 1955 Khrushchev had largely hidden his role in reorienting Soviet foreign policy. The struggles over Soviet policy toward Austria, Yugoslavia, and Germany had taken place behind the opaque walls of the Kremlin. Over the summer rumors had circulated that Molotov might be replaced by Khrushchev’s protégé Dmitri Shepilov, the editor in chief of Pravda, but this hadn’t happened, and the usually dour foreign minister had managed to deflect attention with some uncharacteristic public joking about the speculation.1 At Geneva Khrushchev had been perceived as the strongest opponent of Eisenhower’s Open Skies position, but his overall influence in setting the general Soviet line in foreign policy had not yet been picked up.

  It was in the third world that Khrushchev would first come to personify a new and ambitious Soviet approach to the Cold War. “Let us verify in practice whose system is better,” he proclaimed on a state trip to India in late 1955. “We say to the leaders of the capitalist states: Let us compete without war.”2 Khrushchev was eager to extend this competition for influence to the developing world, where the dissolution of the great European empires had brought forward a new generation of leaders who were looking for advice, money, and legitimacy.

  The event that drew the world’s attention to Khrushchev’s ambitions in the developing world came in late September 1955, when Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, announced that his country would be buying weapons from the Soviet bloc. Cairo’s action reordered the politics of the Middle East and in the minds of Eisenhower, Eden, and the French leadership represented the greatest bid for hegemony over that oil-rich area since German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s panzers were on the outskirts of Alexandria in 1942. The Middle East was an unexpected place for the Soviets to seek influence. Britain and Imperial Russia had not contested the region in the nineteenth century, and with the exception of Stalin’s brief play for a colony in Libya after World War II and some equally short-lived support for the new state of Israel, Soviet regimes had largely stayed clear of the area. The Egyptian decision to buy Soviet weapons signaled a major departure for the Kremlin in a region that was of strategic importance to the United States and Western Europe. Whatever terms Khrushchev might use to try to soften his drive for influence in the postcolonial world, the apparent Soviet-Egyptian alliance represented realpolitik pure and simple. What the West did not understand was that the story could have very easily turned out differently.

  INITIAL SOVIET EFFORTS to build a relationship with Egypt predated Khrushchev’s eclipsing of Molotov. In the months following Stalin’s death Soviet diplomats fanned out to the developing world in the hope of establishing diplomatic relations and in search of trade and cultural relationships. There actually weren’t as yet many countries to choose from; the explosion of sovereignty in Asia and Africa was still five years away. India, Indonesia, and Egypt therefore received most of the wooing, though Moscow also made an effort with some Latin American republics. Of these first three big partners, Egypt ultimately drew the closest to the Soviet Union. But this was hardly predictable.

  In its first phase the Soviet-Egyptian relationship was almost exclusively economic. The catalyst for this limited relationship was the overthrow of the Egyptian royal house in July 1952 by a military junta led by General Mohammed Naguib. A staunch Egyptian nationalist, Neguib was eager to reduce Egyptian dependence on the British, who had exercised influence over the fallen King Farouk, and was prepared to take help from anyone else. In August 1953 Soviet and Egyptian representatives negotiated an economic agreement.3 Trade negotiations followed in the fall with the result that a barter deal was signed the following spring. Egypt was soon buying as much as 40 percent of its kerosene from the USSR and the Soviet-bloc’s Romania. In return the Soviets purchased Egyptian cotton.

  When Nasser replaced Naguib in 1954, the relationship with Moscow seemed to stall. Barely thirty-five years old, Nasser had been the brains behind the overthrow of King Farouk. His enormous charisma had created a devoted following among the men who had served with him. Once this charisma was projected to the Egyptian people and beyond, largely through dynamic public speeches broadcast on radio, his following grew into the millions. Nasser brought an expansive political message to his audiences. He dreamed of uniting the entire Arab world in one state and under Egyptian leadership. In a book of his ruminations published as The Philosophy of the Revolution, Nasser said, “For some reason it seems to me that within the Arab circle there is a role wandering aimlessly in search of a hero. And I do not know why it seems to me that this role, exhausted by its wanderings, has at last settled down, tired and weary, near the borders of our country and is beckoning us to move, to take up its lines, to put on its costume since no one else is qualified to play it.”4

  Initially Nasser was not that keen to expend much of his charm on the Soviets. He was deeply mistrustful of communists and assumed that the Soviets would use Arab Communists to weaken him and threaten Arab Nationalism. Because of his special interest in the Sudan, where he had served as an officer, he was especially concerned about Moscow’s ambitions in that former British colony.

  Nasser’s principal objective in his first months at the top had been to eliminate Great Britain’s remaining influence over Egypt. Britain still had troops
in the Suez Canal Zone, and Nasser wanted to negotiate them out of the country. He did not want to give London a pretext to delay negotiations out of fear that he was close to Moscow.

  Aware of Egypt’s deep financial difficulties—this developing country had few natural resources and few exports yet needed to import vast quantities of industrial goods—Nasser permitted his government to continue talking to Soviet representatives about economic matters. Indeed, Nasser bent their ears to interest Moscow in his great dream of building the Aswan High Dam, a gargantuan project to create hydroelectric power and regulate the flow of the Nile. He hoped the Soviets would consider providing him with financial assistance to undertake this project.

  In 1953 and early 1954 Nasser had also informed Soviet representatives that he hoped to equip the Egyptian military with modern weapons. But he was very coy. Although he hinted at perhaps shopping for these in the Soviet bloc, he avoided making a formal request. What he did not tell the Kremlin was that he preferred to buy American weapons. The problem for him was that since 1950 it was the declared policy of the United States to discourage the flow of weapons into the Middle East to prevent another Arab-Israeli war. The United States had joined Great Britain and France in issuing the Tripartite Declaration, serving notice on the Arabs and the Israelis that they could expect to buy whatever military supplies they needed for internal security and self-defense, but nothing more.5 Nasser wanted more.