Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  Eisenhower had shown that he understood Egyptian sensitivities about control of the Suez Canal, but he still could not grasp Gamal Abdel Nasser. By 1957 the White House had ample evidence to conclude that Nasser was no more an agent of Communist influence than he was a stooge of the West. He was a political animal who was prepared to bargain with any side in the Cold War to achieve whatever end he thought Egypt needed. Indeed, a careful review of Nasser’s actions since 1954 would have shown that in spite of his cooperation with the Kremlin, the Egyptian leader consistently preferred dealing with the United States. In 1955 Nasser had delayed purchasing weapons from the Soviet Union to see if the United States could come close to Moscow’s sweetheart deal. In early 1956 his representatives had spent months negotiating millions of U.S. dollars in secured loans to construct the Aswan High Dam before the United States summarily ended these talks. Later, on the eve of the Anglo-French attack, he had sent Washington a secret plea for diplomatic assistance so that he would not have to turn to Khrushchev yet again. And most recently, just after the cease-fire had taken hold in Egypt, Nasser reiterated his commitment to good relations with the United States.3 Nasser’s ideology, if he had any at all, was Arab nationalism.

  Yet Cold War concerns so distorted the lens through which the Eisenhower administration viewed the Middle East that the U.S. government convinced itself that communism, with Nasser’s assistance, was the main political force shaping the region in 1957. If the United States did nothing, the administration assumed the Soviet Union would rapidly fill the political vacuum created by the collapse of French and British influence. Eisenhower also became convinced that the Soviets wanted to control the oil reserves of the Middle East.4 The president’s anxiety over the future of the region was reinforced by his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who was always quicker than his boss to perceive a Soviet challenge and was even less attuned to the mass phenomenon of Arab nationalism.

  On January 5, 1957, Eisenhower announced a new political offensive to meet this perceived threat to the Middle East. In a special message to Congress, he formally extended U.S. protection over the entire region. Immediately dubbed the Eisenhower Doctrine, the statement established a U.S. commitment to provide economic and military aid (though not direct military intervention) to “any nation or group of nations in the general area of the Middle East” in light of “the increased danger from International Communism.”5 As Eisenhower later explained, his objective was to demonstrate his administration’s “resolve to block the Soviet Union’s march to the Mediterranean, to the Suez Canal and the pipelines, and to the underground lakes of oil which fuel the homes and factories of Western Europe.”6 Had the statement been combined with a new initiative to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, then it might have been greeted in the Arab world with more approval. But in so forcefully pursuing the bogeyman of Soviet influence, the United States sent the message that it was departing from its traditional role as honest broker in the region. In the mid-1950s nationalists like Nasser had turned to Washington as a counterweight to Great Britain’s imperial pretensions. Now Washington was speaking as if it intended to become Britain’s successor in the area. Eisenhower’s misunderstanding of the political dynamics in the Middle East soon complicated U.S. policy in the region and handed Khrushchev new opportunities to expand Soviet influence.7

  EISENHOWER AND the U.S. government had made a serious misjudgment about both Moscow’s intentions and capabilities. The Kremlin was in no mood for a foreign policy offensive in the Middle East or anywhere else in January 1957. The twin crises of the autumn in Hungary and Egypt had taken a heavy toll on Soviet self-confidence and on Khrushchev’s leadership. Despite the Soviet Army’s success in crushing the Hungarian revolt and Khrushchev’s apparent feat in using the new tactic of nuclear bluff to pull victory from the jaws of defeat in Egypt, his preeminence in the Presidium was now under intense scrutiny. Fortunately for him, his colleagues did not agree on what had gone wrong in late 1956. The old guard eclipsed by Khrushchev in 1955 blamed him for even attempting a political solution with Imre Nagy. Former Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had been complaining for two years that Khrushchev was naive in his handling of foreign Communists, like Tito of Yugoslavia, who wanted to be independent of Moscow. When Nagy tried to take Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact and endorsed a call by Hungarian students for a reexamination of relations with Moscow, Molotov felt vindicated. Lazar Kaganovich, a member of the Kremlin leadership since the 1920s, and Georgi Malenkov shared Molotov’s concerns.

  Khrushchev and his protégés in the Kremlin interpreted the Hungarian incident differently, finding its causes in the failures of socialism in Eastern Europe. None of these men, Khrushchev included, was psychologically prepared to blame the lack of personal freedom under socialism for the fragility of the governments in Eastern Europe. Nor did they hold Western intrigue responsible for the political upheaval in the region, an excuse that would have permitted them to sidestep tough questions about what had happened in October 1956. Instead this group, which constituted a majority in the Presidium, had reached the disquieting conclusion that the Polish and Hungarian governments had brought workers as well as students into the streets by failing to provide their citizens with adequate standards of living.

  What made the analysis telling for the Kremlin was that it led to the unspoken but shared assumption that the Soviet Union was not itself immune from political disorder for similar reasons. Barely two weeks after the Soviet troops had put down the rebellion in Budapest, Khrushchev called for an immediate reexamination of the budget for 1957, the second year of a five-year plan announced in 1956. He suggested an emergency investment in Soviet residential housing construction and more funds targeted at raising the material well-being of Soviet workers.8 The Presidium rallied around the proposal, despite the fact that this infusion of capital would put additional stress on the Soviet budget. Any fiscal qualms were outweighed by the conviction that Soviet standards of living, especially for the industrial working class, had to be improved to forestall political trouble.

  The Hungarian effect could also be seen in a hardening of the Kremlin’s attitude toward political dissent at home. Khrushchev encountered no opposition when he suggested that the Communist Party begin cracking down on “anti-Soviet and hostile elements” in the USSR.9 He wanted a subcommittee of the Presidium to reexamine sentencing for political crimes. Since Stalin’s death in 1953 the Soviet Union had rapidly dismantled much of the widespread gulag system of concentration camps. Thanks to Khrushchev’s policy of destalinization the vast majority of the 2.5 million prisoners of the gulag had already been released.10 The Hungarian rebellion did not compel Khrushchev to reconstitute the system, but it played on existing concerns that perhaps his act of clemency had gone too far. “We were scared, really scared,” Khrushchev recalled later. “We were afraid the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which could drown us.”11 In December 1956 Khrushchev wondered aloud if some dangerous political opponents who should remain isolated from the general population had been released. “About those we have released from prison and exile,” he confessed to the Presidium on December 6, “some don’t deserve it.”12 Having seen how the workers had taken up the banner of the Hungarian students, he was eager to prevent disgruntled Soviet workers from finding similar anti-Kremlin leadership at home.

  Khrushchev and his old guard critics were of one mind on domestic dissent in 1957. When Khrushchev recommended that the KGB and the Ministry of the Interior be instructed to work harder to root out dissenters, Malenkov and Molotov agreed. Molotov added the grumble that Soviet propaganda had become too weak. He believed it was dangerous to admit that Soviet standards of living were not high. Even Mikoyan spoke up on the importance of strengthening the “party outlook” of the people.13 Shortly thereafter Soviet soldiers and civilians who were believed to sympathize with the Hungarian reformers started serving sentences in the few remaining camps.14

  CURIO
USLY, IN LIGHT of Washington’s assessment of the Kremlin’s renewed self-confidence in the Middle East after the collapse of the Anglo-French intervention, the one criticism of Khrushchev that most of the Presidium seemed to share in early 1957 was that he had mishandled the Suez crisis. Both the old Stalinists and some of the younger leaders saw the crisis as a by-product of Khrushchev’s eagerness to expand Soviet commitments to Nasser and other Arab states. Even Mikoyan, Khrushchev’s friend and political ally, sided with those who believed that Suez had been an unnecessary crisis for the Soviet Union.15

  Eisenhower’s public commitment to fighting communism in the Middle East had the momentary, and no doubt unintended, effect of rallying new support for Egypt in the Kremlin even among those leaders who regarded Nasser as an untrustworthy ally who had dragged Moscow into an unwanted crisis. The Egyptians had recently turned to the Soviets for military assistance at cut-rate prices to rebuild after their losses in the Suez crisis. The cost alone gave Moscow pause. There was also the long-standing Kremlin concern about what Nasser would do with these weapons. Before the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Khrushchev had warned Nasser not to build up his arsenal to the extent that it provoked the more powerful Western powers. However, with Eisenhower’s having thrown down the gauntlet, even those who had been wary about providing military assistance to Nasser now supported an arms deal. On January 31, less than a month after the U.S. president announced his new doctrine, Moscow approved a multimillion-dollar package for Cairo.16

  This was but a blip, however; little more than posturing to show the United States that the Soviet Union was not afraid of the new doctrine. Most of the Presidium opposed any more Middle Eastern adventures. Khrushchev, who wanted to do much more for the Arabs than send them weapons, soon learned that there were limits to how far his colleagues would go to meet the U.S. challenge to the region. Skeptics of Khrushchev’s policy were prepared to help the Arabs help themselves, but the consensus in the Kremlin in the wake of the Suez crisis was that it should do nothing to increase the odds that Soviet forces would ever have to fight in the Middle East.

  These limits were visible in how the Kremlin responded to the trouble brewing in Syria. Since Soviet-Syrian relations had warmed in 1956, Damascus had worried about Western retaliation. Following the declaration of the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Syrians became convinced that the U.S. government would soon invade their country. When the Syrians approached the Soviets in March 1957 for a commitment to send volunteer pilots to Egypt or Syria, the Kremlin responded that though it would continue to supply arms to Syria, sending volunteer pilots “might involve negative consequences for both the Arab states and the Soviet Union.”17 Malenkov and Molotov, long skeptical of the relationship with Egypt, led the opposition to expanding Soviet assistance to Syria.

  Although disappointed at his colleagues for not strengthening his initiatives in the Middle East, Khrushchev shared the sense that this was not the right time to do anything that might goad the Americans. “This is a dangerous moment,” he explained in a secret session in the Kremlin.18 He made this statement in April 1957 during a Kremlin discussion that he and Mikoyan led on the current international balance of power. Both men believed that because both superpowers were suspicious and still licking their wounds after the events of 1956, the odds of a nuclear war’s happening were increasing.19 Moscow had had its brush with defeat in Hungary. The West had lost in Egypt. Khrushchev and Mikoyan saw the uneasy peace that had held between Moscow and Washington since the end of World War II as more fragile than ever. Under these conditions, Khrushchev believed that the Soviet Union had to redouble its efforts to achieve some form of disarmament.

  Khrushchev’s subsequent effort to revise the Soviet Union’s position at the negotiations of the United Nations subcommittee on disarmament, where the world’s largest powers had been discussing the issue since 1955, ran into as much opposition as had his earlier effort to do more to help Syria. The United States had just announced a unilateral cut in the size of its military, which Khrushchev viewed as a hopeful sign. “If the enemy is ready to make real concessions,” he argued, “we should not be diehard.”20 But the disarmament issue caused deep rifts within the Soviet leadership. Naturally Khrushchev found himself at odds with Molotov.21 But increasingly Malenkov, Khrushchev’s former ally in the struggle for a policy of peaceful coexistence, was wary of creative approaches to reaching agreement with the West.

  Most striking, however, was the form that the disarmament debate took between Khrushchev and the Soviet armed forces. Under the leadership of Marshal Zhukov, the Soviet military staked out a very pro-disarmament position. The reason for this commitment, which differed rather dramatically from the position taken by its counterparts in the Pentagon, who had been vary of Eisenhower’s Open Skies proposal, was a judgment about strategic intelligence. Zhukov’s military intelligence chiefs could not produce enough information on Western capabilities at NATO’s bases in Europe. The Soviets had not been able to develop their own version of the U-2, and spy satellites were still a figment of the imagination. What technology could not provide the Soviet Army, diplomacy might. With strong backing from their military, Soviet delegates at the disarmament talks in London in November 1956 had offered a plan for partial aerial surveillance that covered sixteen hundred kilometers between Paris and the Soviet-Polish border.22 In this next round of talks the Soviet military hoped to go further, perhaps as far as to allow parts of the Soviet Union to be inspected so as to open parts of the United States to Soviet airplanes.

  Unlike in the disagreement over Syria, Khrushchev appeared to emerge victorious from the April 1957 disarmament discussions in the Kremlin. The outcome was a personal defeat for Molotov and Malenkov and a one-sided compromise between Khrushchev and the Soviet military that benefited Khrushchev. The new policy was to accept mutual cuts in the size of NATO and Warsaw Pact armies and to halt all nuclear testing for two years. Khrushchev conceded to Zhukov that for the first time the Soviet Union would offer to open some of its territory to overflights, but he managed to dress it up in a formula that he knew the West would never accept. The portion to be opened was Siberia, which had no missile sites and few strategic airfields. Meanwhile Khrushchev would expect the United States to allow inspections of its western states, where he knew the Americans were planning to station their intercontinental ballistic missiles and which already had many strategic air bases. His concession was in fact no concession at all.

  KHRUSHCHEV HAD LITTLE chance to savor his victory in changing Soviet disarmament policy. He had won that battle, but a major shift occurring in Kremlin politics suggested that similar victories would be increasingly more difficult. Over the winter and early spring of 1957 the apparent consensus on how to meet Soviet domestic challenges in the wake of the Hungarian crisis frayed. Characteristically responding with a flood of new initiatives to raise the Soviet standard of living, Khrushchev soon found he was testing the patience of even his closest allies in the Soviet leadership. In March 1957 he had to coax the Kremlin into launching a sweeping reform of the way the Soviet Union managed the industrial sector of its economy. Unhappy with the endemic inefficiencies of Soviet industry, Khrushchev decided it was time to decentralize supervision over the factories in the republics. In practice this meant shifting power from Malenkov’s and Molotov’s allies in the ministries in Moscow to his allies among the regional party elites in the Soviet republics. Naturally, Molotov and Malenkov opposed this reform.23 But again, thanks to key votes from younger Presidium members and his staunch ally Mikoyan, Khrushchev carried the day. Had his drive stopped there, he might have negotiated the political shoals of this issue as well as he did the disarmament question, but Khrushchev was too impatient not to push for more changes.

  The rural economy was the one bright spot in the Soviet economy in 1957. In the three years since Khrushchev had called for the development of the so-called virgin lands of Kazakhstan and western Siberia, Soviet agricultural production had increased dramatic
ally. Between 1954 and 1956, 137,000 square miles of fallow land—roughly the combined area of Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio—had come under cultivation.24 And the yields were excellent. The harvest of 1956 produced a bumper crop both in the established black soil region in southern Russia and the newly developed virgin lands. The returns were 20 percent higher than in 1955 and nearly 55 percent greater than the average in the last years of Stalin’s life, 1949–1953. Most satisfying to Khrushchev was the statistic that half of all of the Soviet Union’s grain production now came from his virgin lands.25 The news from the livestock farms was similarly encouraging. Since Stalin’s death, meat output was up by 162 percent, and milk by 105 percent.26 This country of nearly two hundred million people was still not self-sufficient in food, but the gap was narrowing.

  Eager for a good story to tell the Soviet people in this period of political uncertainty, in the winter and spring of 1957 Khrushchev embarked on a series of well-publicized victory tours of the winter wheat and cotton areas of southern Russia, the northern Caucasus, Uzbekistan, and Kirghizia. The enthusiasm of the farmers he met when mixed with his own sense of accomplishment formed a bewitching brew. At stops along the way Khrushchev competed with himself to provide ever more colorful and ambitious statements. In the wheat and livestock center of Krasnodar in southwestern Russia, he announced on March 8 that the principal economic goal of the Soviet Union was to “overtake and surpass…the most highly developed capitalist countries.”27 A few days later, a little farther north in Rostov-on-Don, he slammed Western imperialists who had so wrongly predicted an agricultural crisis in the Soviet Union.28 But his most dramatic statement came two months later, on May 22, when in repeating the goal he had laid out for the country in Krasnodar, Khrushchev issued a prediction: “We shall be able by 1960 to catch up with the United States in per capita meat output.” Khrushchev was promising almost a tripling of Soviet meat production.29