Zhukov had seemed especially cocky after his apparent rescue of Khrushchev’s political career in June. In August the marshal had tried to reopen the disarmament debate that he had lost in the spring. At that time the Kremlin had decided to offer the West an aerial inspection plan that it knew the Americans could not accept, and Zhukov remained convinced that Moscow should pay the price of limited aerial inspection to open U.S. military facilities to Soviet cameras.52 He pressed Khrushchev to reconsider his opposition to the idea. Zhukov was also increasingly vocal about his differences with Khrushchev over how to reform the military in a period of budgetary difficulty. In late 1955 the two had disagreed over how to spend money on the Soviet Navy. Whereas Khrushchev wanted to concentrate on improving the submarine fleet, Zhukov wanted to save the aircraft carrier program.53 After the coup attempt Zhukov expressed uneasiness about Khrushchev’s intention to reduce the size of Soviet forces in Germany without reaching some kind of political arrangement with the West, and he opposed any budget cuts that threatened his goal of increasing the standard of living of Soviet soldiers.54
Khrushchev was not the only member of the Kremlin leadership to have noticed that Zhukov seemed to be over-asserting himself. Besides his policy initiatives, the marshal raised concerns because he seemed to be going out of his way to cultivate public support for himself. He had recently thrown the support of the Soviet Army behind the making of a movie about the Battle of Stalingrad that highlighted his historical role. He had even commissioned one of the nation’s preeminent portrait painters to produce a canvas of him as the savior of Mother Russia, astride a white horse against a background of the burning Reichstag.55
Khrushchev and his allies placed a sinister construction on reports that Zhukov was now creating his own personal guard. Without Kremlin approval Zhukov’s intelligence branch had organized a special school to train guerrillas and saboteurs. Memories of the corps of bodyguards loyal to Stalin’s former intelligence chief Lavrenti Beria were fresh in the party leadership, and they had no wish to see Zhukov establish a similar private army.
Politically stronger after the failed coup attempt against him, Khrushchev did not believe he had to tolerate Zhukov. Once the Soviet defense minister had left the capital, Khrushchev invited Zhukov’s principal rival in the military, the head of the Main Political Directorate of the army, General A. S. Zheltov, to slander Zhukov in front of the Presidium.56 Zheltov, the army’s chief political commissar, alleged that Zhukov mistrusted the party’s representatives in the military. “If you were to hang red beards on the political workers and give them daggers,” Zhukov had reportedly said to Zheltov in an apparent allusion to the Mongol hordes that had swept through Russia in the Middle Ages, “they would slaughter all the commanders.” Zheltov complained that Zhukov had placed so many restrictions on him that he could not take inspection tours of the troops without the marshal’s approval.
Two days later special meetings were convened for junior officers in Leningrad and Moscow to discuss the accusations against Zhukov. A special conclave of all of the living marshals of the Soviet armed forces was also assembled to prepare the way for Zhukov’s removal. Presidium members attended these events.57
On October 25, the eve of Zhukov’s return to Moscow, the Kremlin officially decided to remove him once he returned.58 The very next day, just after he arrived in the Soviet capital, Zhukov was called to the Kremlin to be formally told of the charges against him.59 At this dramatic meeting the war hero denied the accusations, calling Zheltov’s central criticism “wild.” He did admit to “some blunders” on his part in how he managed his public image, but it was too late. “I consider him dangerous in the leadership of the ministry,” said Bulganin. “A regime of terror has been created,” added Mikoyan with a dramatic flourish. Brezhnev captured the fears of the Presidium, which seemed less concerned about Zhukov’s personal ambitions than the long-term consequences of letting him reduce the role of the CPSU in the Soviet military: “The policy is aimed at a rift [between the army and the party].” Khrushchev brought the vilification to an end: “The drama with Zhukov is difficult for me now…. Why cut the threads connecting the party with the army?” Khrushchev’s resolution that Zhukov be removed immediately was passed unanimously. The decision was to be publicized on the radio that day to prevent any effort at resistance by Zhukov’s allies in the military. In Zhukov’s stead the group chose Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who had been reluctant to join Zheltov in criticizing Zhukov.60 Although Malinovsky had also been a formidable military commander in World War II, Khrushchev had worked with him and believed he could be controlled.
Khrushchev moved quickly to alter those foreign policies that reflected Zhukov’s influence. First, he called for a vote to pull the Soviet Union from the London disarmament talks, which had remained in session throughout the first ten months of 1957. Khrushchev had shared Zhukov’s commitment to the talks and still worried about the possibility of nuclear war, but he did not share Zhukov’s view that the Soviet position needed to change. Instead he wanted to force a change in the Western conditions for disarmament by dramatically walking out. The most recent Western proposals, given to Moscow’s representatives on August 29, had not closed the gap remaining between the two sides.
The Kremlin and the White House had reached an understanding on a very modest cut in the size of their respective armed forces from 2.8 million soldiers, sailors, and airmen to 2.5 million and even that all nuclear testing should be halted for between ten months and two years. But each side continued to impose preconditions that made it impossible to proceed from these shared goals to signed agreements.61
On the Soviet side, Khrushchev refused to accept a cut to 2.5 million unless it was agreed ahead of time that it would be followed by a second cut to 1.3 million. As for a nuclear test ban, it was the Americans who imposed the unacceptable precondition. At the urging of his advisers Eisenhower, who wanted a test ban, insisted that the United States would not support a test ban without a simultaneous ban on the production of fissionable materials. In other words, superpower nuclear stocks would have to be frozen at their current levels.
Khrushchev had a greater objective than simply forcing some tactical changes. He intended to kill Eisenhower’s Open Skies proposal once and for all.62 With Zhukov gone, he could rescind the Soviet offers made in November 1956 and April 1957 to open part of Eastern Europe and the USSR to U.S. airplanes.63 These had been domestic concessions to Zhukov and were no longer necessary.
Khrushchev’s tougher disarmament policy made the Foreign Ministry and Anastas Mikoyan uneasy. Deputy Foreign Minister Valerian Zorin, who had been the Soviet delegate at the London talks and was representing the ministry while Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Shepilov’s replacement, was at the United Nations, called the recommendation premature, but lacking a vote in the Presidium could do nothing to stop Khrushchev’s allies from ratifying this suggestion.64 Also on the losing end was Mikoyan, who ultimately decided not to fight Khrushchev on this matter. The Soviet Union could return to the disarmament issue later.
With his victory over the old Stalinists and Zhukov, Khrushchev had hopes that he could finally control the Soviet Union’s Middle Eastern policy. The Syrian government had just signed a trade agreement with Moscow, and there were indications in the fall of 1957 that the United States was encouraging Turkey to invade Syria in response. On October 10, while Zhukov, who might have objected, was on his final foreign trip to the Balkans as Soviet defense minister, Khrushchev had pushed for a commitment to help Syria.65 He proposed that Soviet forces be mobilized in the southern republics to deter Turkey from invading Syria. The Presidium approved the request, and when Turkey did not invade, Khrushchev believed he had scored a little personal triumph.
But a month later Khrushchev was to learn a crucial lesson when he tried to exploit his success to push the Soviet Union too far too fast. For all his success in escaping political death in June and in removing Zhukov in October, he was still not alone at
the top. Although the era of the nasty debates with Molotov and Kaganovich were over, the Presidium still contained men with independent minds. Moreover, even with the removal of Zhukov the basic conservatism of the Soviet armed forces, which was resistant to expanding defense commitments into the third world, remained.
This hard little lesson came when Khrushchev suggested a Soviet-led military alliance in the Mediterranean modeled after the Baghdad Pact. In mid-November he outlined a plan for the Presidium that would involve giving security guarantees to Egypt, Syria, Yugoslavia, and Greece. But he didn’t get it. Mikoyan refused to support the idea, as did the senior military officers whom Khrushchev had brought to the meeting especially to hear the idea. Despite having been handpicked by Khrushchev to succeed Zhukov because he was reliable, the new defense minister, Rodion Malinovsky, also thought it a bad idea to proceed with this arrangement now. The chief of the general staff, Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky, then effectively threw cold water on the plan by suggesting that Nasser, Moscow’s key ally in the region, would probably not support it. The Presidium did not formally kill the proposal; it was simply sent to the bureaucrats in the Defense and Foreign ministries and was never heard from again.66
These Presidium debates over Soviet policy in the Middle East had taken place in a newly appointed room in the Kremlin. To dramatize his authority after the failed coup, Khrushchev had moved the Presidium meetings from the room where they had long been held to a room adjacent to his suite of offices in a building near the imposing Spassky Gate, which opened onto Red Square. A large oval table that could accommodate forty to forty-five people dominated the new meeting space, and the fact that Khrushchev’s own office was next door was a reminder of who had the most powerful voice around that table.67
THE YEAR 1957 had witnessed the end of the old guard in the Kremlin. What was to follow remained unclear. At best, from Khrushchev’s perspective, the Soviet Union was an incomplete dictatorship. There was no question that all future policy initiatives would come from him. This had largely been true since 1955, but now there was less negotiating that had to be done. Nevertheless, if his proposals were too dramatic, as was his call for a Soviet Baghdad Pact, he could count on some opposition.
While the rest of the world had caught glimpses of the major political events of the year in Moscow, all the policy debates had remained hidden from view. The United States had no way of knowing what new Soviet policies Khrushchev’s political victories would bring to the fore. Since October 1957 there had been changes in Soviet foreign policy, the most noticeable being the withdrawal from the London disarmament talks, but they had hardly been dramatic. What remained to be seen was what kind of statesman this more powerful Khrushchev wished to become.
CHAPTER 7
COUP IN IRAQ
ON JULY 14, 1958, Khrushchev awoke to the news that his almost single-handed three-year effort to increase Soviet influence in the Middle East had brought a happy result. At 5:30 A.M. a group of army officers had entered the royal palace in Baghdad and executed the royal family. Prime Minister Nuri al-Said had fled the capital. The new regime, led by Brigadier General ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim, proclaimed a republic with a neutralist foreign policy, ending Baghdad’s alliance with Great Britain and the West.1 It was not that Khrushchev was surprised. He believed that the rise of Qasims and Nassers was inevitable as Western power receded from the developing world. It was just that he had not expected a revolution in Iraq so soon.
Gamal Abdel Nasser, his closest friend in the region and who had just visited Moscow, had not given the Soviet leader any reason to expect the sudden implosion of the pro-Western regime in Iraq. Indeed, the message from Cairo had been quite the opposite. In their meetings in April and May the Egyptian leader had complained about the slow progress of his policies in the Arab world, singling out the role of conservative Iraq as an obstacle. “The imperialist powers,” he predicted, “will by all means create difficulties for us and organize provocations…using for these purposes Israel, Iraq and Jordan.”2 At best Nasser predicted a tough slough in Baghdad between the forces he supported, the forces of Arab nationalism, and those supported by Great Britain. Nasser had not dared predict a nationalist revolution anytime soon.
Khrushchev’s own sources were not telling him much more. Qasim was not completely unknown to the Soviet Union before the Iraqi brigadier general rearranged the politics of the Middle East. Moscow knew that sometime in 1956 Qasim had reached an understanding with the leadership of the Iraqi Communist Party.3 He and his followers in the Iraqi Army would conspire with the Communist Party to remove the Feisal dynasty and the conservative Nuri government. The Kremlin was even told that Qasim considered himself a Communist.
But the information was too fragmentary to produce any firm conclusions about Qasim. The Iraqi had never approached any Soviet representative to ask for assistance. So, hearing the news in Baghdad, Khrushchev chose to doubt that this was a direct victory for communism, though the revolution was undoubtedly a step closer to a more progressive regime.4 Khrushchev’s recent experience with Nasser, a man friendly to Soviet power but not to communism, was reason enough to be skeptical of this new Arab nationalist star. In February, Nasser had amalgamated Syria with Egypt to create the United Arab Republic (UAR). The former Syrian government had been friendly toward the Soviet Union, even tolerating the activities of the local Communist Party. All that changed with the unification of Damascus and Cairo.5 The head of the Syrian Communist Party, Khalid Bagdash, had had to flee the country briefly, fearing for his safety in a new regime dominated by Egypt. The same might occur in Iraq. There was already talk that Qasim wanted to make Iraq a member of the UAR.
Whether or not Qasim was good for Iraqi Communists, Khrushchev understood immediately that this surprise development in Iraq was a boon to Soviet strategic interests. The revolution challenged the Western position in the Middle East and represented a test of the Eisenhower Doctrine. Besides serving as the headquarters of the Baghdad Pact, Iraq was one of only two Arab countries to have hailed the president’s doctrine in 1957. “Can we imagine a Baghdad Pact without Baghdad?” Khrushchev mused. “This consideration alone,” he added, “is enough to give [John Foster] Dulles a nervous breakdown.”6
Dulles’s suffering a nervous breakdown was not, of course, Khrushchev’s real concern. The news from Baghdad brought a different worry. The United States might not accept the new situation in Iraq without some sort of struggle. Eisenhower’s so-called doctrine consisted of a pledge to assist any Middle Eastern country that was the victim of aggression from “international communism.” Even though Moscow was not actually playing a decisive role in the domestic politics of any Arab state, Khrushchev had reason to believe that Eisenhower had committed himself to launching a U.S. military intervention if a Middle Eastern country shifted away from the West.
Khrushchev could draw some confidence from the fact that his initial testing of the Eisenhower Doctrine had been successful. In October 1957 the Soviets had mobilized along their southern border to prevent Turkey, a U.S. ally, from attacking Syria in retaliation for Damascus’s decision to sign a trade pact with the Kremlin.7 When Turkey did not invade, Khrushchev saw this as proof that if threatened with Soviet military action, U.S. allies and perhaps even the United States itself might leave Moscow’s allies in the Middle East alone.8
Even so, Khrushchev saw no reason to use Iraq to provoke Eisenhower if he could help it. The revolution was also a challenge to existing Soviet policy. Should Iraq be given the same treatment as Egypt and Syria, two states that the Kremlin had vowed to defend? Khrushchev hoped to avoid a situation in which the Kremlin had to make that decision. From his experience in the fall of 1957, when he had unsuccessfully tried to gain the Presidium’s support for a Moscow-led defensive alliance in the region, he knew that it would take some work to get his colleagues to extend Soviet military obligations to Iraq.9
Khrushchev had another reason for taking a wait and see approach to the situation in Iraq. The r
evolution happened just as he was trying to manage an urgent problem in a different part of the world. Soviet negotiations with the People’s Republic of China over military assistance and future joint planning had hit a major snag. Soviet statements and Mao Zedong’s characteristic suspicion had combined to produce strong and bitter resistance from Beijing, and Khrushchev expected that within the next few days he would have to meet personally with the Chinese leader, perhaps even in Beijing.10
IN WASHINGTON the news from Iraq was greeted with alarm and some despair. “The Arab world is in a period of revolutionary ferment,” concluded the CIA in a line that also captured the tumult in the Eisenhower administration.11 It was broadly assumed that Qasim was a Nasser stooge or at the very least had been helped into his present position by the Egyptian special services. Washington also saw the hand of the Kremlin in the Iraqi Revolution. Eisenhower expressed the view of most officials when he stated that the dramatic events unfolding in the Persian Gulf were “fomented by Nasser under Kremlin guidance.”12
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