Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  The next day, following the Sèvres script, France and Britain issued their joint ultimatum. The Israeli ambassador in London received his copy at 4:15 P.M., and his Egyptian opposite number ten minutes later. France and Great Britain called on both parties to cease firing and to withdraw ten miles from the Suez Canal. To protect the rights of neutral shipping, France and Great Britain announced their intention to mount a “temporary occupation…of key positions at Port Said, Ismailia and Suez.”28 If either the Egyptians or the Israelis did not comply with these demands within twelve hours, UK and French forces would “intervene in whatever strength may be necessary to secure compliance.”29

  PRESIDENT EISENHOWER was not completely surprised when he received reports that Israel had attacked Egypt. For more than a week the White House had been watching the buildup in the region closely. On October 20 the CIA had started daily U-2 flights over the eastern Mediterranean. For a few days there had been some disagreement over whether to interpret Israeli troop movements as preparation for an attack on Jordan or Egypt. But by October 28, with Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers clearly headed south toward Egypt, not east toward Jordan, the president had become persuaded that Israel was going to attack Egypt.

  Eisenhower had also suspected that his French and British allies were making trouble. The spy photographs had revealed an ominous buildup of British and French military assets on the island of Cyprus. As these photographs had been developed and shared with the White House, Eisenhower noticed a dramatic decline in diplomatic messages from the French and the British. The president had been unsure about the extent of their collusion with Israel, but this silence had not been reassuring.

  As soon as he learned that Israel had attacked Egypt, Eisenhower informed his advisers that U.S. policy would be to do whatever was necessary to restore peace in the region. By the letter of the Tripartite Declaration of 1950, the United States was obliged to go to Egypt’s defense if it was attacked by any of the signatories. France and Great Britain were parties to that declaration, and Eisenhower made it clear that the United States would honor its pledge to Egypt, even at the risk of confronting the British and the French. “In these circumstances,” the U.S. president declared, “perhaps we cannot be bound by our traditional alliances.”30 He informed his national security team not to provide any economic support to Great Britain—in particular not to defend the pound sterling in foreign currency markets—if it turned out that the British were colluding with the Israelis.31 This decision later had dramatic consequences. He also wanted a letter sent to Eden that assured the British that the United States believed it would have to support Egypt if asked under the Tripartite Declaration.32 Finally Eisenhower wanted the U.S. delegation at the United Nations to table a resolution that day calling for a cease-fire. Some delaying tactics employed by the British and the French late in the day on October 29 postponed discussion on Eisenhower’s UN resolution for another twenty-four hours, but his other requests were acted on immediately.

  Eisenhower’s decisiveness stemmed from a deep concern that only the Soviet Union could benefit from a conflict between the West and an Arab nation. The possibility that France and Britain might have enlisted Israeli assistance for their scheme just increased Eisenhower’s pessimism about the effect of the conflict on Western influence in the Middle East.33 It also increased his anger. He suspected that Paris and London had assumed that he would have to tolerate an attack on Nasser because he needed the Jewish vote in November. American Jews, if they voted as a bloc, tended to vote Democratic, so this assumption was ludicrous.34 Eisenhower, however, let it be known that whatever the electoral consequences, he planned to oppose this war. “I don’t care in the slightest,” he told his top advisers, “whether I am re-elected or not. We must make good on our word.” He said that though he doubted the American people would “throw him out in the midst of a situation like this.” If they did, “so be it.”35

  The French and British ultimatum the next day proved the conspiracy and validated Eisenhower’s sense of betrayal. Since late July he had urged French Premier Guy Mollet and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden in every way he knew how not to do anything rash before the election. Eisenhower would probably have looked askance at European aggression in the Middle East after November 6, but he had left no doubt of what his reaction would be up to that time. Eastern Europe was also on Eisenhower’s mind. The bloodshed in Budapest on October 24 and October 26 was tragic evidence of what the West had been saying all along about the bankruptcy, moral and otherwise, of the so-called people’s republics. London’s and Paris’s descent into imperial nostalgia over the Suez threatened to undermine the stark contrast that Eisenhower wished to present between the civil West and the brutal East.

  FOLLOWING THE ISRAELI ATTACK, Cairo expected to hear from Khrushchev, but there was only silence. Early on October 30, before the British and French announced their ultimatum, Nasser’s closest aide, Ali Sabri, conveyed a message to Khrushchev through the Soviet Embassy. “With every hour the situation gets worse and is becoming very dangerous.”36 Nasser wanted “unofficially” to request military assistance to help Egypt defend itself against the three armies, Britain, France, and Israel. Sabri added that Nasser was impatient for a response to this unofficial sounding. If Moscow indicated a willingness to support Egypt, a formal request would follow.

  Soviet Ambassador Kiselev tried to be helpful to the Egyptians. Although lacking any instructions from Moscow, he asked, “[G]iven the fact that the situation might provoke a third world war, in practical terms, what kind of support does Nasser have in mind?” Sabri had prepared a response: “[T]he deployment of naval vessels close to Egyptian shores would be a major step.” He added, “Egypt especially needs the help of an air force.” Nasser wanted Sabri to raise the possibility of Soviet volunteers, especially pilots, participating in the defense of Egypt.

  Nasser did not wait for the response to repeat this request in a letter to the Kremlin. “The enemy is relying solely on air power,” he wrote. “We desperately need air support for our troops.” Nasser wanted the Soviet Air Force to intervene on the side of Egypt. He suggested that Soviet volunteers flying MiGs carrying the Egyptian insignia be sent to Egypt. “We will prepare air bases and let you know regarding their location.”37

  Khrushchev ignored both Egyptian requests for Soviet military intervention. He decided to take a chance on Nasser’s being able to survive this military crisis on his own. Soviet intelligence believed the Egyptians militarily a match for the Israelis and thought the Egyptians would be in grave danger only if the Western Europeans got involved. Khrushchev clung to the comforting assumption that an Anglo-French attack on Egypt was unlikely. Faced with U.S. opposition to the use of force against Nasser, about which Khrushchev knew from intelligence sources, the British would restrain themselves in Egypt. Soon after the announcement of the Anglo-French ultimatum, Soviet intelligence had reassured Khrushchev that the Europeans were indeed not colluding with Israel against Egypt. Instead the GRU predicted that the British and presumably the French “were preparing to assist Egypt in isolating the Canal from Israel or any other aggressor.”38 Lacking any inside information on Britain’s military objectives, and still captive to the portrayal of a weak prime minister provided by Burgess’s and Maclean’s sources, Khrushchev opted to take the Western powers’ ultimatum at face value and let Nasser be protected by the Western Europeans or the United States.

  It was uncharacteristic of Khrushchev to abandon an ally in danger. Hungary was the reason for his behavior toward Nasser at the end of October 1956. The Soviet leader was incapable of managing two military crises simultaneously, at least not these particular crises. The problems in Hungary were so overwhelming that Khrushchev concluded he had no choice but to set his Egyptian allies adrift and hope for the best.

  The day the Israelis began their attack on Egypt, Soviet troops, including additional units from outside Hungary, were mobilizing for a possible return to Budapest to crush any
renewal of the anti-Soviet revolt. On October 30, as news arrived of the Middle East ultimatum from the French and the British calling on both Egypt and Israel to withdraw from either side of the Suez Canal, Khrushchev was agonizing over what to do next in Hungary. Khrushchev revealed his indecision that day to Mao’s representative in Moscow, Liu Chiao Chi. “The troops must stay in Hungary and Budapest,” was the advice of the Chinese representative.39 But Khrushchev was not so sure. “There are two options,” he explained: “First to use force, second to negotiate a withdrawal of forces.”

  Throughout October 30 the discussion among the Kremlin leaders involved much more than the decision to use force or not in Hungary. The actions of the Nagy government were calling into question a basic Soviet assumption about the stability of the highly centralized alliance system that the Kremlin had imposed upon Eastern Europe. In both Poland and Hungary Moscow had initially blamed any instability in the streets on the weakness of the local Communists. In Poland the Kremlin had then wondered if Gomulka was encouraging this disorder. But Khrushchev had since been reassured that Gomulka was a true Communist who understood that he needed friendship with Moscow. At this point in the Hungarian crisis the Kremlin did not know what to think about Nagy or the movement that seemed to have brought him to power.

  A hothouse environment prevailed in the Kremlin as Shepilov, Zhukov, and Khrushchev began discussing the phenomenon of national communism. “We will have to contend with national communism for a long while,” observed a depressed Shepilov.40 “This is a lesson for us in the military-political sphere,” added Zhukov. Stalin had used this phrase to sentence Tito to death. This form of communism implied more differentiation in how socialism was implemented and a more distant relationship with Moscow. For Stalin the phrase had been shorthand for anti-Sovietism. Khrushchev and his associates, however, were not yet prepared to give up on managing foreign Communist leaders who were also strong nationalists.

  It will be recalled that Khrushchev in particular had not liked how Stalin dealt with the Yugoslavs and believed that there was more that united Communists than set them apart. On October 30 others of the Kremlin elite shared enough of this basic optimism about fellow Communists that they became very creative in trying to work out the problem of national communism. Ultimately Khrushchev spoke for most in the room when he announced that there should be a complete overhaul of the way Moscow managed its Eastern European allies, which up until this point had been treated like colonies. As of 1956 Soviet troops were stationed in Poland, Romania, and Hungary without any legal basis. In Hungary, for example, this troop deployment was initially justified by an agreement with Budapest that allowed for the Soviet Union to protect the supply lines to its occupying forces in Austria. But the occupation of Austria had ended in mid-1955, and Soviet troops were still in Hungary.

  Under the threat of the complete collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the Kremlin began considering how it might reduce its military and security presence in each of the socialist countries. Khrushchev had already permitted the Poles to send its KGB advisers and Soviet officers packing. If the relationship were to become less imperial, Moscow would have to tolerate the same independence in Budapest and start negotiations with Poland and Romania to reduce its troops there as well.

  A sense of unreality pervaded the discussion. Despite the fact that by calling for multiparty elections, Nagy was breaking a key unspoken rule for leaders in the socialist bloc, Khrushchev believed that a Soviet declaration of a new style in the handling of the satellites would be enough to bring him and the Hungarian rebels home to the Soviet Union. There can be no other way of explaining this hastily improvised policy than as a function of Khrushchev’s belief that other Communist leaders shared his intense devotion to their faith. Nagy might well resent the symbols of Soviet power, but Khrushchev argued that he would not do anything to undermine the existence of a socialist Hungary. This was a test of Khrushchev’s assumption that even the most independent socialist regime, such as Yugoslavia and perhaps now Hungary, would ultimately choose to ally itself with Moscow.

  A few hours after the meeting ended, Moscow received the first signs of how wrong this assumption about Nagy was. Over Hungarian Radio in the afternoon of October 30, Nagy announced the end of the one-party state in Hungary and called for multiparty elections. The next morning he was to declare his government’s decision to remove Hungary from the Warsaw Pact.

  Khrushchev’s other key assumption on October 30 was that the United States would step in to contain the Western Europeans before they attacked Nasser. For at least a brief moment this assumption appeared validated. Late in the day, just before Britain and France’s twelve-hour ultimatum would have lapsed, the United States introduced a resolution at the UN Security Council calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Sinai. For the first time in the Cold War, the Soviet Union found itself on the same side as Washington in a dispute with the Western Europeans. The Soviet ambassador at the UN supported the U.S. resolution. But the British, who as one of the five permanent members had a veto over all Security Council resolutions, used their veto to kill their American ally’s proposal. Both the British and the French offered the feeble excuse that the UN was not the proper place to solve the problems of the Middle East. Nevertheless, the Americans were now on record as opposing war in the Middle East.

  The events of October 31, 1956, however, overturned Khrushchev’s basic assumptions about how to manage the challenges in both Hungary and Egypt. Two shocking pieces of news hit at precisely the same time. From Hungary came word that despite Khrushchev’s expectations, Nagy was now calling for withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Meanwhile hundreds of miles away, on the pretext that Israel and Egypt had violated the London and Paris ultimatum, squadrons of British and French aircraft had started bombing Egyptian cities and airfields. Soviet intelligence, which only the day before had assured Khrushchev that Britain would not come to Egypt’s aid, now began providing increasingly dire descriptions of the losses to Egyptian weaponry, much of it Soviet made and as yet unpaid for.41

  These events left the Soviet Union without a strategy to cope with either crisis. The realization that he had so badly misjudged the situations in both Egypt and Hungary left Khrushchev extremely defensive and belligerent. He called the Presidium into session and angrily called for defiance: “If we depart from Hungary, it will give a great boost to the Americans, English and French—the imperialists. They will perceive it as weakness on our part and will go onto the offensive. We would then be exposing the weakness of our positions. Our party will not accept it, if we do this. To Egypt they will add Hungary. We have no other choice.”42 Britain’s and France’s attack on Egypt upset Khrushchev’s calculations in Hungary. A day earlier Khrushchev had been prepared to take a risk that Nagy would quell the revolt in Hungary and resume good relations as a Communist ally of the Soviet Union. Now he could no longer tolerate any uncertainty over Hungary’s future in the Soviet Empire. Khrushchev’s personal prestige and that of the Soviet Union would not recover if Moscow were to lose two allies in quick succession. Moreover, with the world in crisis, he could ill afford to appear to be retreating in Europe, even if his intention was eventually to restore Soviet power through political means.

  Khrushchev decided to deal with the Hungarian problem first and harshly. The previous day’s Presidium decision not to use force was immediately overturned, as was the new policy on relations with the socialist bloc. All but Mikoyan, who still hoped to find a peaceful way out of the crisis in Hungary, joined the majority in voting for the largest military assault on European civilians since the end of World War II.

  The Presidium discussion was bloodless. It was one of concepts—power, party, stability, and prestige—and not of the fate of human beings. The result, however, was anything but bloodless. The Kremlin ordered the Soviet Army back into Budapest and authorized the use of lethal force against civilians who resisted the reimposition of Moscow’s imperial control over the country. It is one of the great tr
agedies of the twentieth century that the alter-native policy toward Eastern Europe was never tested. Eventually the Kremlin might well have determined that there was no choice but to use tanks. Still, who can tell what might have happened in Budapest had the situation been allowed to develop over an additional week or two? Arguably, the Soviet reaction might then have been even more ferocious. But other outcomes might have prevailed.

  Regarding Egypt, Khrushchev painfully chose continued inaction. Besides his desperation over Hungary, what may have restrained him was a real fear that Soviet intervention in Egypt could spin out of control. The Soviet Union could not afford to risk fighting a two-front war. Were he to agree to the Egyptian request for Soviet air power, for example, Soviet pilots would soon find themselves firing on the British and the French and perhaps later U.S. pilots.

  Khrushchev was not even willing to attempt a sustained political strategy that would at least show solidarity with the Egyptians. Earlier in the day the Kremlin had received an urgent request for some public diplomacy from the Soviet ambassador in Cairo. “Any declaration,” Kiselev advised the Kremlin, “would lift the spirits of the Arabs.” It was the opinion of both KGB and Soviet diplomatic representatives in Cairo that Moscow’s inactivity was harming the Soviet position in the region. They noticed a tendency in the Egyptian press to “exaggerate the peaceful role of the USA in the current events and to hush up our efforts to condemn the Anglo-French intervention and those directed to a liquidation of the conflict.” The Soviet ambassador said that Egyptians were criticizing the Soviet Union for getting Nasser to take Soviet advice and, now that Egypt was in this critical situation, for remaining silent. Kiselev wanted Moscow to start an immediate propaganda campaign to attack the United States for its hypocrisy in pleading for peace while apparently allowing its NATO allies to commit aggression against a sovereign state.43 In response to Kiselev’s request, Pravda published a statement the next day that blamed France, Britain, and Israel for colluding against the nationalist aspirations of the Arab world but did not suggest a specific response.44