The Mikoyan mission to Bonn failed. Not only did the Soviet effort to put a thumb on the scales of public debate come to nothing, but Mikoyan found himself yet another Soviet victim of Adenauer’s cleverness. In the sessions with Khrushchev’s representative, the West German chancellor admitted that he had indeed changed his mind since 1957. Now he intended to acquire the U.S. Matador missile, which could carry nuclear as well as conventional warheads.14 This should have been a devastating blow to Soviet assumptions, but Adenauer somehow persuaded Mikoyan, and through him Khrushchev, that the decision to buy U.S. nuclear weapons could be revisited if there were any progress on general disarmament among the great powers.
What made Adenauer’s performance especially masterful was that he managed to convince the Soviets not only that he was a reluctant player in the drama of West German rearmament but that despite the fact that the Bundestag had authorized him to make West Germany a nuclear power, nothing bad was going to happen. The Kremlin decided that despite the failure of its attempt to alter the Bundestag vote through public diplomacy, there was no need to reappraise Soviet policy toward West Germany. Curiously, in trying to manage Adenauer at this stage, the Soviet Union apparently did not consider making any overtures to the United States, without which Bonn could not acquire nuclear weapons in the near future. Moscow, which apparently knew nothing about Adenauer’s May 1957 request for tactical nuclear weapons, probably assumed Eisenhower would give Adenauer the Matador missiles if he formally asked for them. Yet the Soviet policy of preventing that from ever occurring was directed primarily at altering West German behavior.15 And as the war clouds gathered in the Middle East that summer, the Kremlin felt it could afford to take a wait and see approach to Adenauer.
KHRUSHCHEV’S PATIENCE with the West Germans would have been even greater had it not been for the difficulties he was having simultaneously with his East German allies. Events in East Germany in 1958 magnified the danger to Moscow posed by Bonn’s nuclear dreaming. The economic disparity between the two Germanys was growing, with East Germany becoming ever weaker. The East German leadership had launched its own version of Khrushchev’s catch and surpass campaign in July 1958, with West Germany as the means of comparison. Rather than energize the East German population, these efforts had created political unease. With West Berlin available as an escape route, upward of twelve thousand people were leaving East Germany every month. These were many of the best-trained East Germans, the engineers, doctors and other professionals that the Berlin government could not do without.16
One very forceful German lay behind East Berlin’s failing economic campaign. Walter Ulbricht was almost a generation younger than Adenauer, but he had been a player in German political disputes since the 1920s, when he served as a functionary in the German Communist Party. Having fled from the Nazis in 1933, he spent the next twelve years in Moscow, where ultimately Stalin tapped him to be the first secretary of the Party of German Unity (SED), the Communist Party in the Soviet zone of occupation.17 Ulbricht, who wore a distinctive white goatee, had the great distinction of being almost as thoroughly disliked by Communists as by capitalists. He was viewed as pushy, arrogant, and doctrinaire. But Stalin had liked him, and Khrushchev had decided to tolerate him.
Ulbricht had very nearly lost his job in 1953, when the SED’s attempt to foist half-baked collectivization schemes on the Soviet zone led to riots in East Berlin. Once again in 1958, he faced the consequences of mass dissatisfaction when he tried to tighten controls on the East German economy to make it more efficient. Instead of being deterred by domestic troubles, Ulbricht reacted by trying to force an acceleration of negotiations with the West over the future of Germany. He assumed that treaties that confirmed East Germany’s eastern borders and closed the escape valve through West Berlin would consolidate the SED’s control over the former Soviet occupation zone.
As of September 1958, Ulbricht was sending signals that the East German regime was eager for additional protection from Moscow. He did not hide his concerns about Bonn’s drive for atomic weaponry. The new weapons could not reach Moscow, but they could inflict damage on fellow Germans in an accidental war. Beyond this medium-term issue, there was the immediate problem of the growing inequality of the two Germanys. Parity was the best that East Germany could hope for in its rivalry with its larger and more populous capitalist brother. But with the drain of some of its best citizens and the growth in political, economic, and now military might of the other Germany, a sense of urgency was developing among the East German leaders.
IN THE FALL of 1958 Khrushchev left it up to the Soviet Foreign Ministry to manage the German problem. In September 1958 a stultifying exchange of notes took place between the two Germanys and the occupying powers. The two sides were arguing over whether to start discussing a peace treaty between each Germany and the occupying powers before or after the formation of an all-German commission that was itself designed to prepare a peace treaty. When all the diplomatic rhetoric was stripped away, the issue came down to the fact that the West Germans, who wanted East Germany to disappear, hoped for all-German elections. Even in the unlikely event that all adults among the seventeen million in East Germany voted Communist, Ulbricht would be defeated. The East German leaders understood this very well. They tied the survival of a Communist Germany to a treaty system that guaranteed the equality of the two Germanys. In their eyes, the first step to that goal would be for Moscow to sign a pact with East Germany that declared a formal end to World War II and permitted East German soldiers and police to replace their Soviet counterparts along the borders of West Berlin and West Germany.18
Following this exchange of notes, which only served to confirm the gulf separating the official positions of Bonn and East Berlin, Ulbricht turned to Moscow for help. He believed the Kremlin had been too passive in dealing with both Adenauer and the deteriorating situation within East Germany. Ulbricht initially found support at the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin. The former Kremlin heavyweight Mikhail Pervukhin, who was now in virtual exile as Soviet ambassador to East Berlin after his participation in the failed June 1957 coup against Khrushchev, added his voice to Ulbricht’s call for some Soviet movement toward signing a peace treaty with East Germany. In early October Pervukhin met with Ulbricht, who called on Moscow to support this initiative. In reporting this conversation to the Kremlin, Pervukhin agreed with the East German leader.19
Unlike the East Germans and the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, the Soviet Foreign Ministry saw no reason for haste in dealing with the German question in October 1958. It was quietly understood that the East Germans should be mollified and that the Westerners who had been acting up lately ought to be contained. But there seemed to be no particular crisis brewing, nor was there any pressure at that moment from the Kremlin for action. There was time before West Germany would acquire nuclear weapons, if that ever happened. There was also time to manage whatever economic difficulties were experienced by East Germany. So in an effort to keep everybody busy and out of trouble, the Soviet Foreign Ministry settled on an elegant nonpolicy. According to a draft prepared for consideration by the Kremlin, the Soviets were to invite France, Great Britain, and the United States to a four-power conference on resolving the German question.
“This recommendation,” the Germanists argued in their brief to the Presidium, “would undermine the principal argument used by the West against preparing a peace treaty with Germany: namely, that the fundamental prerequisite of negotiations on such a treaty is the formation of an all-union Germany government.”20 In forwarding this modest proposal to his Kremlin bosses, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko explained that it was certain the West would reject it. He regarded this rejection as useful, although not to move the German problem any closer to solution. No one in the ministry thought that a possibility. No, this tactic’s appeal was that it “would draw attention to the problem of the preparation of a peace treaty and the formation of a German federation at the expense of the Western idea of all-German election
s.”21
Sometimes foreign ministries are a step or two ahead of their political masters. Sometimes they are a step or two behind. At this time and on this matter the Soviet Foreign Ministry was so out of step with Nikita Khrushchev that they might as well have been providing policy guidance to Dwight Eisenhower. Khrushchev, as the world was soon to discover, was tired of playing games with the West over Germany.
THE PRINCIPAL REASON why Khrushchev did not take a more active part in handling the German leaders in September and October 1958 was that domestic problems did not leave him much time for foreign policy. All fall, but especially in October, he was leading a complex discussion on what shape Soviet society should take into the mid-1960s.22 Since the 1920s the Kremlin had produced five-year plans for the domestic economy and social programs. For the first time in Soviet history, it decided to prepare a seven-year plan, requiring even more complicated estimates and raising even more management issues. Reflecting Khrushchev’s desire to achieve the lofty goals announced as part of his 1957 crusade to catch and surpass America, the plan was to be ambitious not only in its chronological sweep but also in the improvements to Soviet living standards that it promised. The Kremlin hoped to increase the supply of food and consumer goods, to build more housing and more preschools and kindergartens, and to complete the massive northern Crimean canal, designed to irrigate the Crimean agricultural region and provide fresh water to southern Ukrainian towns. Khrushchev was preoccupied with the details of the seven-year plan; the discussion at the top included everything from projected levels of national milk production and the need for more sugar refineries to the high cost of inputs in building apartments. The Soviet system relied on the Kremlin to set all these targets and then to use a combination of coercion and flattery to see that they were met by thousands of bureaucrats throughout the country.
Although these Kremlin discussions of future achievements tended to take on aspects of fantasy, especially as discussion centered on the production of wheat in 1965, even Khrushchev felt the need to acknowledge limits. He believed the USSR could not go as far as some of his colleagues wished in lifting some of the burdens of Soviet life, especially those carried by women. A commission of the Central Committee had recommended phasing in a thirty-to thirty-five-hour workweek. Soviet citizens, who were required to work on Saturdays, put in at least forty-two hours a week. Complaints about the long workday were on the rise, particular among women, who predominated in the fields of education and medicine. The Kremlin’s sole woman member, Yekaterina Furtseva, not only wanted a shorter workweek but thought the government should increase family allowances to allow women to have more children.23 Khrushchev had his doubts that the country could afford these worthy goals.
By early November Khrushchev was impatient to settle the main planks of the party’s new economic program. The seven-year plan would not be announced until the Twenty-first Party Congress in January, but he appears to have set a personal goal to end discussions of the outlines of the plan before the forty-first anniversary celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7. The next regular Presidium meeting was scheduled for Thursday, November 6. At that meeting he would have to disappoint Furtseva and those who supported a shorter workweek and more family assistance. He not only worried about the cost of these initiatives but had ideological qualms about any assistance that was made directly to individuals. He preferred distributing money to communes, communities, and club organizations. He did not want people to become wards of the state. Instead he hoped that through these social organizations, people would become self-sufficient. But the bottom line for him was that in 1958 Moscow could not afford any experiment that supported a higher birthrate or shorter workdays, not if the USSR was to catch up with the United States anytime soon.
THE FOREIGN MINISTRY’S unimaginative suggestion for dealing with Germany landed on Khrushchev’s desk just as he was grappling with how to explain the limits on what the Soviet Union could provide its own citizens in the short term. He was so busy that he could have pushed the German problem to one side, as he had done in the summer, when Iraq appeared to be threatened, but he didn’t.
Instead he decided to take the greatest foreign policy gamble to that point in his career. The collision of his mounting German frustrations with his domestic troubles had raised the temper of this emotional man. New archival evidence suggests that though Iraq had increased his foreign policy swagger, a dramatic development in the Soviet nuclear posture played an important role in the timing of his explosion.
In contrast with the disappointing news about the Soviet economy, Khrushchev was doubtless receiving at the same time some encouraging progress reports on the highly secret Operation Atom.24 In March 1955 the Kremlin had approved a plan to deploy medium-range ballistic missiles, the R-5M, which had a range of 1,200 kilometers, or 750 miles, to the far eastern and transcaucasian regions within the USSR as well as to East Germany and Bulgaria outside the country. This first generation of medium-range ballistic missiles lacked the range to strike Paris and London if only stationed in the European portion of Russia, Byelorussia, or the Ukraine. Operation Atom had run into difficulties, however, chiefly because of production bottlenecks in the inefficient Soviet defense industry, and deployment deadlines were repeatedly missed. Moscow eventually decided to drop the Bulgarian deployment, but as Khrushchev knew in the fall of 1958, the East German deployment was finally taking place.
In the summer of 1958 the Soviet Army had built special bases north of Berlin, which included housing for troops to guard and service the missiles and storage facilities for the nuclear warheads. It is not known if Khrushchev was given a date for when these missiles would become operational, but they reached these bases in late November or early December 1958. What Khrushchev could confidently expect in early November was that the Soviet Union was about to acquire a real nuclear threat to London and Paris, rather than the hollow boast that he had been using since 1956. Although he did not tell Ulbricht about Operation Atom, he did hint that he was increasingly confident of the correlation of Soviet and American forces. “The more the Western powers know that there is a balance in the area of atomic weapons and rockets,” Khrushchev told the East German leader, “the better for us.”25
MOSCOW WAS LOOKING more festive for the forty-first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution than it had looked for the fortieth. Western journalists remarked on the number of colored lights, a rarity in Soviet shops. Max Frankel of the New York Times noticed that though some were arranged in decorative daisy chains, most were strung to represent graphs showing industrial progress.26 Only the regular Thursday Presidium session on November 6 separated most of the Kremlin bosses from the three-day holiday weekend. It is not known if any of them expected the early festivities that Khrushchev had planned for them. Unfortunately, though Malin was in attendance to take his notes, Khrushchev did not invite a stenographer to what was, in retrospect, one of the most important Kremlin meetings of his era.27
He led off with a discouraging discussion of what the Soviet government could and could not do to help the country’s workers. He explained to Furtseva and her supporters Anastas Mikoyan and Averky Aristov, that the issues of the workweek and family assistance would have to be reexamined. It was too late for these reforms to be included in this version of the seven-year plan. This was a painful admission by Khrushchev that the dream of a better life for Soviet citizens was not yet attainable. It simply cost too much.
Khrushchev then moved to unveil his foreign policy surprise. He had decided to ignore the Foreign Ministry’s proposal for the next diplomatic phase in the discussion on a German peace treaty. He wanted a bold initiative. He was tired of diplomacy, tired of the rhetorical games over this or that procedure to signing a peace treaty, and though it had not happened, he assumed that it was only a matter of time before Washington provided Adenauer with nuclear-tipped short-range missiles. “What remains of the Potsdam Accord?” Khrushchev asked, referring to the arrangements for governi
ng Nazi Germany confirmed by Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee in a Berlin suburb in August 1945. He listed Western violations of the postwar settlement. “They attracted Germany into NATO, they are giving her atomic weapons.” His conclusion was that nothing remained of the agreement. “Is it not the time to begin rejecting the Potsdam Accord?” he asked. He was prepared to announce this declaration to the world and suggested that the right opportunity was only a few days away. The following Monday, November 10, he was scheduled to give a speech at a Soviet-Polish friendship rally that the Polish leader Wladyslaw Gomulka was expected to attend. Although the focus of the event would be Soviet-Polish relations, which had again become rocky in recent months, he thought this would be a reasonable forum in which to announce a formal end to the Second World War.
With a few lines in one speech, the Soviet leader would effectively renounce the entire basis for European stability since 1945, and Khrushchev left no doubt among his colleagues that he understood at least some of the implications. He wanted plans drawn up for the immediate removal of Soviet military personnel from East Berlin and East Germany. He would sign a peace treaty with the East Germans that would make them responsible for their own borders. One important consequence of the peace would be that if Americans wished to visit their political island of West Berlin, they would have to get permission from the East Germans to cross East German territory, by air or by land.
There was no reason to believe that the West would allow this to happen without some kind of fight. What would the reaction of East German soldiers be if the Americans and the British, as they doubtless would, decided to strengthen their contingents in Berlin in the wake of the chaos created by the Soviet removal of all rules governing the area? The postwar settlement permitted the Allies to move troops at will into West Berlin, and as of November 1958 there were already eleven thousand NATO soldiers in the city.
Khrushchev's Cold War Page 26