Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  India was not the only place where Khrushchev believed the Soviet Union could make a profitable political investment. When the Burmese leader U Nu had visited Moscow earlier in the year, he had commented on the comfort of the Il-14s that the Russians had lent him for the trip. Khrushchev decided to illustrate his commitment to better relations by making a gift of a plane. Meanwhile Khrushchev and Bulganin intended making an even larger investment in better relations with Mohammed Daoud, the prime minister of Afghanistan.

  Throughout the trip the two Soviet leaders kept in contact with the Presidium by cable. During the negotiations with the Afghans the travelers had sent an urgent cable requesting a policy decision on selling arms to this state. Afghanistan in 1955 was a feudal monarchy with no Communist Party to speak of, let alone a progressive united front. The motivation behind the offer was strategic. Khrushchev wanted to build up his relations in the third world and also wanted an additional ally on the Soviet border. Afghanistan fitted both objectives. The recent happy experience with Egypt gave reason to believe that the entire process could proceed smoothly.

  In Moscow, however, Kaganovich and Molotov reacted badly to the idea of giving military assistance to a government that besides being non-Communist was a traditional monarchy with no pretense to progressivism. “This sets a precedent,” said Kaganovich, fearing that the Soviets would find themselves inundated with requests for aid.83

  Mikoyan, who chaired the meeting, joined Malenkov in favor of Khrushchev’s evident desire to consummate the deal. Neither man made an ideological case for supporting these governments. Their rationale was pure realism: “We should work to attract Afghanistan to our side,” said Malenkov. And Mikoyan emphasized the general utility of supporting developing countries: “We will have to render assistance to some states, if we wish to enter into more serious competition with the USA. From the point of view of state interests, it is necessary to render assistance.” Malenkov and Mikoyan carried the day for the Khrushchev forces. In mid-December the Soviet government decided to offer Afghanistan a hundred-million-dollar aid package. When Khrushchev got back, he made sure that it included a shipment of arms.84

  Returning home on December 21, Khrushchev had much to show for his efforts in the third world. Since February the Soviet government had reached trade agreements with Indonesia, India, Burma, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Syria. Of those countries, Egypt, Syria, and Afghanistan were to be the recipients of military as well as economic aid.

  These achievements in the developing world capped a remarkable year for Khrushchev. Since January he had supplanted both Malenkov and Molotov, and Soviet foreign policy reflected his priorities. Moscow had reestablished good relations with Yugoslavia, signed a peace treaty with Austria, and opened the diplomatic door to the Federal Republic of Germany. John Foster Dulles’s efforts to force damaging Soviet concessions on the German question had failed, with the initiative shifting to Moscow in the pursuit of détente and disarmament. In the months to come, however, Khrushchev came to learn that he could not always control international events as easily as he had in 1955. The initiative might not always stay with him.

  CHAPTER 4

  SUEZ

  IN THE DIPLOMATIC revolution that Khrushchev started in 1955, crises or moments of international tension were not expected to be useful for achieving Soviet goals. By the summer of 1956 Gamal Abdel Nasser had set in motion a series of events that tested Nikita Khrushchev’s new foreign policy and confronted the Kremlin with its first international crisis since the Korean War. Khrushchev ultimately derived a different, and more dangerous, lesson from surprises in the Middle East.

  Nasser and his Egyptian followers had discussed the idea of nationalizing the Suez Canal for a number of years. Although the canal was wholly within Egyptian territory, it was controlled by European shareholders in the Universal Suez Marine Canal Company (Suez Canal Company) under a ninety-nine-year lease that came into effect in 1869. The revolutionaries in the Egyptian Army, the self-named Free Officers, who had overthrown King Farouk in 1952, had vowed to break the lease, which symbolized for them a huge colonial chain around Egypt’s neck. But Nasser only decided on July 21, after what one confidant recalled as a long and sleepless night, to make 1956 the year that the lease would finally be broken.1 The decision was in large part a reaction to the U.S. government’s announcement on July 19 that it would not finance Nasser’s pet public works project, the huge Aswan High Dam. The decision both surprised and humiliated the Egyptian president, who had expected to reach a deal with Washington.

  For six months Nasser had played a high-stakes game with Western bankers and finance ministers to secure funding for the dam project. He disliked the World Bank’s financial reporting requirements and worried about other constraints that the United States and the United Kingdom, which was also a party to the dam-financing negotiations, might be able to impose. With these hesitations in mind, Nasser kept pushing for better terms from the West. The Soviets had refused to make a serious offer to help Egypt built the dam unless Nasser accepted visits from East German and Russian technicians, and in 1956 he considered these terms even more perilous than those posed by the World Bank, the United States, and Great Britain. In May 1956, having lost his patience, Nasser decided to recognize the People’s Republic of China in an attempt to increase pressure on the West to come up with a plan to finance the dam that he could accept. It had been a miscalculation. Nasser managed only to incur the wrath of the anti-Communist bloc in the U.S. Congress, which would have had to approve any foreign aid package to Egypt. Unsure of Nasser’s motives and lacking sufficient congressional support for a massive public works project that would glorify Nasser’s regime, the administration decided to back away.2

  Nasser not only was now eager to strike back at the West with a powerful gesture but also found himself in need of a way to bring additional hard currency into the state treasury so that he could proceed with the dam on his own. By agreement with the canal company, Egypt already received a percentage of the Suez tolls. Nationalizing the canal would provide Egypt with all of the revenue generated by the canal. Nasser decided to announce the nationalization on July 26.

  “[T]he West will not be silent,” Nasser wrote in a longhand note to himself as he wrestled with the risks of this move. “Most probably, we will be faced with military threats that could turn into an actual war, if we don’t use our resources with caution.”3 The British government and a group of middle-class French citizens were the principal shareholders in the canal. Besides putting their property rights at risk, the nationalization would likely be interpreted by the Europeans as a threat to their strategic interests. Of the 122 million tons of cargo shipped through the canal each year, more than 60 percent was oil. Indeed, two-thirds of all the oil imported by Europe came via Suez. In calculating the odds of war, Nasser assumed that the British rather than the French were the more likely to initiate a rash military response. The canal was the jugular vein that fed Britain’s Asian colonies.4

  Nasser took pains to restrict the number of people who would know about his plan before he was ready to announce it publicly. Besides his inner circle, Nasser informed a small group of Egyptian military officers whose job it would be to occupy the headquarters of the Suez Canal Company in Port Said after the announcement. The officers were instructed to listen to Nasser’s speech on the radio and seize the building the moment he referred by name to Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French visionary who had built the canal.

  Nasser only brought his cabinet into his confidence a matter of hours before he spoke. The news stunned the assembled ministers, some of whom immediately tried to persuade him not to go through with the plan for fear of British and French reprisals.5 Nasser assured them that he had already calculated the risks and that the British prime minister, Anthony Eden, the key player on the European side, would be too weak-willed to go to war.6

  After the meeting broke up, Nasser gave his speech, which was broadcast from Alexandria to millions listening on r
adios throughout Egypt and the Arab world. He spoke with confidence, and there was no masking the bitterness in his voice. He cited every slight ever visited upon the Egyptian people in the modern era. When he arrived at the portion of his speech that railed at foreign financiers, especially the World Bank president Eugene Black, Nasser uttered the command: “I started to look at Mr. Black, who was sitting on a chair, and I saw him in my imagination as Ferdinand de Lesseps.” At that moment three hundred miles away in Port Said Egyptian commandos occupied the headquarters of the canal company. As this action was taking place, Nasser revealed to his listeners what he had just ordered, “Today, O citizens, the Suez Canal Company has been nationalized.”7 In a bid to take a little of the sting out of this announcement for his Western audience, Nasser promised compensation for the shareholders.8

  NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV was as surprised as Nasser’s Arab audience when he learned of the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Moscow had not received any advance warning from the Egyptians. Barely five weeks earlier Molotov’s replacement as Soviet foreign minister, Dmitri Shepilov, had been Nasser’s guest in Cairo, and though there had been discussions of arms deliveries and economic assistance, the Egyptian president had not alluded in any way to the possibility that he would take on the Western powers in 1956. Nasser was expected to make his first trip to the Soviet Union in August, and the Egyptians had not even suggested Suez as an agenda item.9

  At the time of Shepilov’s visit in June Nasser still believed that he could come to an arrangement with the United States over the financing of the Aswan Dam and had not yet decided to seize the canal. But because the official Egyptian silence had continued even after Nasser had changed his mind, the Soviets were right to believe they had been actively deceived. On the morning before Nasser’s speech, Egypt’s foreign minister, Mohammed Fawzi, had visited the Soviet ambassador in Cairo and said nothing about the Suez Canal. He had talked instead about the dam project and made the strange request that Moscow pretend that the Soviet Union would help Cairo pay for it.10 In the week following the U.S. announcement on July 19 that it would not help Nasser build the dam, rumors had swirled in Cairo that Moscow intended to pick up the slack.11 These rumors were untrue—Moscow remained as dubious of the Aswan project as ever—and its Foreign Ministry spokesmen had immediately denied there was any deal. Through Fawzi, Nasser asked the Kremlin to stop denying these rumors. Although Fawzi had not hinted at any of this, it later became clear to the Soviets that as Nasser prepared to seize the canal, he needed to use Moscow as political cover. He neither wanted the Western powers nor the Egyptian people to suspect that he was nationalizing the canal out of weakness, not strength.

  Whatever Nasser’s motives for keeping Khrushchev in the dark, his announcement caught the Soviets flatfooted. The Kremlin had no policy prepared for what to do if Egypt took the canal and had hoped not to need one. Khrushchev had made the Kremlin’s relationship with Nasser the centerpiece of his strategy of building alliances in the third world and of staking a claim to influence in the Middle East. However, he had not intended to support Nasser’s dreams of establishing Egyptian hegemony throughout the region. To discourage any impression both in the West and in Cairo that it did, Moscow had ever since been counseling caution to the Egyptians. Indeed one of Shepilov’s objectives in June had been to reinforce the message that Cairo should tread carefully in its foreign policy. Egyptian requests for the most modern Soviet weaponry, the T-54 tank and the MiG-19 jet fighters, suggested to Moscow that Cairo might have aggressive intentions toward Israel. “It is especially important now,” the Soviet foreign minister had advised Nasser’s minister of war, Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, “not to allow the imperialists to provoke a military conflict between Arabs and Israelis, which the imperialists would hope to use to improve their position in the Near East.”12 Nasser’s decision to nationalize the canal ran completely counter to Moscow’s advice.

  As far as the Kremlin was concerned, the decision was also exceptionally ill timed. The last thing Moscow needed in July 1956 was another problem. That summer Khrushchev and his colleagues were absorbed by events in Eastern Europe for which Khrushchev felt some responsibility.

  Five months earlier, in a keynote address to nearly fifteen hundred Communist leaders from fifty-six countries at the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev had decried Stalin’s crimes and launched a purge of Stalinism. “Stalin was devoted to the cause of socialism, but in a barbaric way,” he told members of the Presidium before the congress.13 “He ruined the Party. He was not a Marxist. He erased all that is holy in a human being. He bent everything to his caprices.”

  The Presidium had debated for two months before deciding to proceed with this speech. Khrushchev vacillated over how critical he should be of Stalin. “We should think carefully about the wording,” noted Khrushchev’s ally Dmitri Shepilov, echoing his concerns, “not to cause harm.”14 The then Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had opposed any attack on Stalin, but even the Presidium’s reformers, Khrushchev among them, worried that anti-Communists might try to use these criticisms to undermine the legitimacy of the Soviet bloc. As a result, Khrushchev hoped to restrict knowledge of the speech only to party leaders in the socialist world.

  By May, partly thanks to the Eisenhower administration, which acquired a copy from Israeli intelligence and gave it to the New York Times, the actual speech was in newspapers around the world and was causing widespread instability in the Kremlin’s European empire. What had started out as top-down reform in the Soviet Union, announced by Khrushchev himself, had been transformed by the peculiar conditions in Eastern Europe into a grassroots push for more political freedom and democracy. The movement spread even faster because of the inability of the leaders in these countries, many of whom had been chosen by Stalin, to manage the process that Khrushchev had unleashed. In the first weeks after the Twentieth Party Congress Stalinists in Moscow’s client states in Eastern Europe tried vainly to keep a lid on these reformist pressures.

  In the summer of 1956 Poland appeared to be closest to a political explosion. Polish leader Edward Ochab, who had described the effect of Khrushchev’s secret speech as “like being hit over the head with a hammer,” was proving himself to be especially inept at handling the new political environment.15 In late June the Polish government had overreacted to a demonstration for “Bread and Freedom” in Poznan. Fifty-six workers died and more than three hundred were wounded in clashes with Polish troops.

  The situation seemed nearly as volatile in Hungary, where the struggle for reform was taking place within the Communist Party itself. In June Soviet Presidium member Mikhail Suslov had been sent to Budapest to plead for party unity. When that didn’t reduce political tensions, Presidium member Anastas Mikoyan followed in July with instructions to force a wholesale leadership change in the country.16

  THE KREMLIN got its first official word from an Egyptian on its new Middle Eastern problem the morning after the nationalization.17 The Egyptian ambassador in Moscow, Mohammed el-Kouni, painted the situation in alarming colors for the Soviets. “At the moment all [the Western powers] are mobilizing against us,” he explained to Foreign Minister Shepilov.18 Cairo assumed that the war would begin with Israel, though Egypt expected its ultimate enemy would be Great Britain. “Once Israel initiates action from her side,” said the ambassador, “the British will embrace her.” El-Kouni did not specify what form that embrace would take, but he made clear the further assumption that the British would receive covert assistance from the United States. Referring to the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in the overthrow of the Iranian nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953, he warned that “in the past the USA has propagated the illusion that it could accomplish in Egypt what it did in Iran.”

  Despite these fears, Cairo limited itself to asking the Russians for moral support. “If you [gave this],” el-Kouni explained, “then you would be helping not simply the Egyptian people; but other Arab countries as well who are also waiting for this
support.” Shepilov, who shared Khrushchev’s passion for broadening ties with the third world, promised to forward el-Kouni’s suggestions to the Kremlin immediately. Despite the lack of any formal instructions on this point, Shepilov felt confident in adding that “the Soviet government would do all that was necessary so that the measures taken by the Egyptian government in nationalizing the Suez Canal would not lead to unnecessary difficulties for her.” This was the answer that Nasser had hoped to receive.

  The urgent message from the Egyptian government had no discernible effect on the Kremlin. Khrushchev did not call an emergency meeting of the Presidium to discuss Egyptian concerns, nor were Soviet forces in the southwestern republics of the Soviet Union or in Bulgaria, the closest satellite state to Egypt, put on alert. There was no sense of crisis or imminent confrontation in the Soviet capital. Instead a very comfortable assumption took hold that the Western powers would reluctantly, but inevitably, accept the change at Suez as yet another sign of decolonization.