Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  Khrushchev had not requested any analyses of this proposal in advance. The Foreign Ministry had done its work using a different set of assumptions, and there was no preliminary military planning. Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet defense minister, had not even been invited to attend the Presidium meeting. Khrushchev simply presented the renunciation of the postwar European settlement as his wish. This was enough for his acolytes, who enthusiastically endorsed the idea. Suslov, Brezhnev, Kozlov, and Kirichenko chimed in their support. Only Gromkyo and Mikoyan spoke in less than positive terms, and Gromyko’s concerns were only minor quibbles. Gromyko, who was not a member of the leadership of the CPSU, had to agree with his boss, but he did mention that this idea would have to be discussed in advance with the East Germans. The Soviet foreign minister also thought that there should be some clarification of what the Soviets intended to do in the absence of the Potsdam Accord. In the hands of a skilled debater, that concern could have been telling, but Gromyko, who “was afraid of Khrushchev to a degree that was indecent,” was only soliciting more instructions from the Kremlin.28

  Mikoyan’s dissent was unmistakable and telling. He understood immediately that Khrushchev was talking about the future of Berlin. “How far are we to go with this?” he asked, fearing the West would say that Khrushchev was after Berlin. Adding, “I have doubts,” Mikoyan argued that he didn’t think Khrushchev should renounce the Potsdam settlement anytime soon.

  Mikoyan had identified the most dangerous element of Khrushchev’s proposal. World War II had left Hitler’s great capital city of Berlin in an anomalous position. The Allied powers had competed to see who would occupy the city, a symbol of the victory over nazism. In the immediate aftermath of the Allied success in Normandy in the summer of 1944, Winston Churchill had begun a campaign to convince Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower to make a dash to Berlin to end the war sooner and cut off the Soviet’s advance from the east. Eisenhower preferred deploying Western troops along a broad front to occupy as much of the western portions of Germany as possible and was not convinced that racing the Soviets to Berlin would bring the war to an end any faster. As a result, forces led by Field Marshal Georgi Zhukov reached the city first in late April 1945, causing Hitler to take his own life and that of his wife, Eva Braun, in his subterranean bunker. Even before Zhukov captured Berlin, the Allied leaders at Yalta had decided that they would jointly administer the occupied city. Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt did not bother with the logistical details of how the French, British, and American sectors of Berlin, which lay a hundred miles inside the Soviet zone, would be provisioned. Those decisions were to be made as needed by the local military commanders.

  East-West relations were so good in the afterglow of the victory that when Marshal Zhukov assured Western generals in late June 1945 that “Western forces could travel to the city unhampered,” nothing further was thought to be needed to guarantee road and rail travel to Berlin.29 The potential for accidents in unregulated airspace, and not a concern about politics, did, however, produce a more formal system for air travel. A four-power air security office was established in Berlin, and in September 1945 an agreement was signed that specified the three air lanes, or corridors, that Western planes could use to fly across the Soviet zone to the western sectors of Berlin.30

  These arrangements went untested for three years until June 1948. Mikoyan, who had been in Moscow at the time, recalled the international crisis that ensued when Stalin tried to throw the Western powers out of the city. Angry at a series of Allied decisions to coordinate the economies of their occupation zones, Stalin closed all land and water routes to West Berlin, as the British, American, and French sectors had come to be known. Forced to rely on the air corridors, which were guaranteed by the September 1945 agreement, the Western air forces mounted an unprecedented airlift to keep the residents of West Berlin alive. In March 1949 Stalin ended the blockade without getting anything in return from the West, and from that moment onward Mikoyan understood that the Western powers had invested their prestige in the survival of West Berlin, home to 2.2 million people in 1958, and the access routes that guaranteed that survival. Khrushchev’s proposed obituary for the Potsdam Accord would effectively cancel the 1945 agreements on access to West Berlin and cause Washington, London, and Paris to assume that a new Berlin crisis was at hand.

  Before his colleagues in the Presidium, Mikoyan phrased his opposition carefully to avoid a direct confrontation with an obviously determined Khrushchev. He recommended that the Kremlin not be hasty in trying to resolve the German question. “Why not wait until after the elections in West Germany?” he said, trying to buy time. West Germans were not going to the polls until December.

  Although the Khrushchevite bloc—the youngest members of the Presidium who had benefited from Khrushchev’s patronage—spoke up in favor of the first secretary’s sweeping proposal, Mikoyan thought he had carried the day. The Presidium did not issue any formal instructions on November 6, and there was no vote that day on the German question. That should have been it for a while. It was a matter of Soviet practice that policies had to be formally endorsed by the Presidium if they were to take effect.

  But Khrushchev interpreted the outcome of the meeting very differently. He left the session with the endorsements of his men ringing in his ears. Brezhnev and Kozlov had shouted in approval, “We must start!” while Kirilenko of the Ukraine had exclaimed, “Let’s light a fire under them.” Confident he could bring the entire Presidium around, Khrushchev told Gromyko to reassemble his German experts to prepare a speech for the rally on Monday. Word was also leaked to the East German ambassador, Johannes König, that Khrushchev’s November 10 speech would bring “something new.”31 However, Foreign Ministry officials were not permitted to tell their East German colleagues any specifics about the speech.

  Although Khrushchev did not yet know it, in circumventing Mikoyan and the traditional Presidium process, he had set in motion a crisis that would test his hold on power. His longtime colleague Anastas Mikoyan, had left the meeting assuming that no decision had been made. He would not soon let Khrushchev forget his mistake.

  SHORTLY BEFORE leaving for Moscow’s Sports Palace on November 10, Khrushchev decided to make his Polish visitor the first Eastern European ally to learn the details of what he was about to say. He told Gomulka that he was preparing to withdraw the Soviet mission from West Berlin and to have the American, British, and French missions expelled from East Berlin. He left no doubt that he was eager to have all Soviet responsibility for overseeing the checkpoints pass to the East Germans. It would be up to them what they did with the access routes. Gomulka grasped immediately, as he later put it, that Khrushchev wished to “liquidate the western part of Berlin.”32

  In laying out his decision to move dramatically to revise the system put in place by the Potsdam Accord, Khrushchev emphasized that he understood the risks. He expected that the Cold War would become as tense as it had been in 1948, when Stalin blockaded West Berlin. This time he suspected that the Allies would refuse to accept East German controls, and all rail and auto transit would stop. “Some form of blockade will result, but we have enough foodstuffs. We will also have to feed West Berlin. We do not want to, but the population will suffer from it.”33

  Khrushchev assured his Polish guest that despite the crisis that would ensue, he did not expect war. “There will be tensions, of course…there will be a blockade. They will test to see our reaction. In any case,” he explained, “we will have to show a great deal of cold blood in this matter.” He told Gomulka that he believed the risks worth taking because the situation of West Berlin was intolerable: “West Berlin is there to be used as an attack base against us.” Yet Khrushchev believed that nuclear weapons made a world war over Berlin unlikely. Although the Soviet Union could not yet launch a missile strike against the United States, it had developed missiles that could hit U.S. allies. Fudging the distinction between these two things, Khrushchev boasted to Gomulka, “Today America has move
d closer to us; our missiles can hit them directly.”34

  His speech that day was longer and less direct than his talk with Gomulka. But the message was clear. “The time has obviously arrived,” he announced, “for the signatories of the Potsdam Agreement to renounce the remnants of the occupation regime in Berlin and thereby make it possible to create a normal situation in the capital of the German Democratic Republic.”35 The Potsdam Accord was “out-of-date.” Now that the United States and its NATO partners were prepared to allow West Germany to develop a military that was more powerful than the armies of Britain and France combined, there appeared to be nothing in the Potsdam Agreement for Moscow. The only part of it that the Allies still observed governed their occupation rights in West Berlin, and Khrushchev saw no reason to let those rights continue. “Who profits from such a situation?” he asked rhetorically. Not the Soviet Union, was the implicit response. As a result, the USSR planned to hand over to the East Germans those functions that it still provided as one of the four victors of World War II. East German soldiers would patrol the corridors that led from West Germany through East German territory to West Berlin and check the visas of visitors into the city. East Germans would also replace the Soviet officers who coordinated air traffic control for the greater Berlin region. Ultimately it would be up to the East Germans whether to permit access through their airspace or territory to West Berlin.

  INITIAL WESTERN REACTION to the Sports Palace speech was muted. Despite the shrill, indignant language, Khrushchev had never said when the Soviet Union would remove its representatives from the four-power headquarters that oversaw Berlin or when it would transfer its responsibilities for border control of the Soviet zone to the East Germans.

  The Eisenhower administration did not see any need for a major response. Instructions went to a lower-level State Department official in Washington to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to West Berlin and reject Khrushchev’s assessment of the condition of the Potsdam Accord. The French and British said even less. Meanwhile in Moscow the three main Western ambassadors feverishly tried to parse Khrushchev’s statement to see if there was any indication of what could come next. The British ambassador Sir Patrick Reilly focused his attention on getting a better translation of the speech, which had been broadcast over Moscow Radio. He knew that London wanted to know whether Khrushchev had been speaking in the future tense or just the subjunctive.36

  The calm lasted only two days. Although Khrushchev had not officially terminated Soviet participation in the occupation of Germany, the Soviet military stationed there had apparently received permission to harass Western military movements into and out of West Berlin. By right, the forces of the four occupying powers could move men and weaponry into their sectors of Berlin without declaration to the other occupying powers. At 1:00 P.M., Berlin time, on November 12 the Soviets showed that change was in the air by stopping three U.S. Army trucks that were leaving West Berlin by the Babelsberg checkpoint at the southwest corner of the city. The Soviets insisted on inspecting the vehicles before allowing them to proceed. In accordance with U.S. policy, the commanding officer of the contingent refused to permit inspection. The standoff was broken eight hours later, when a platoon of U.S. tanks arrived at the scene. Once the Soviets realized that the U.S. Army was prepared to use force to retrieve a minor convoy, they released the men and their trucks.37

  The border incident changed the attitude at NATO headquarters in Paris and among the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. It now seemed what many considered a purely political gesture by Khrushchev might have a military component. Both General Lauris Norstad, the supreme commander, allied powers, Europe, and General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recommended the preparation of a military motorized unit to move from West Germany, along the autobahn corridor through East Germany to West Berlin, as a way of demonstrating the continuing Western Allied commitment to the divided city.38

  Foster Dulles had a different reaction to the Babelsberg incident. He did not want a show of Western Allied military resolve at this point in the crisis. His view of the strategic implications of Soviet moves in and around Berlin was fundamentally different from his view of the situation in the Middle East. In July he had been disappointed by the Joint Chiefs’ unwillingness to consider some kind of military operation to help the British in the Persian Gulf. Here he thought that the U.S. military was moving too fast to consider a military reaction to Khrushchev.39

  WHAT THE WEST did not know was that Khrushchev’s speech had also left the Kremlin in disarray. The Babelsberg incident did not reflect the thinking of the entire Soviet leadership, and any Western efforts to parse the November 10 speech or to discern what was happening on the ground in Berlin would be in vain. No intelligence service or foreign ministry, no matter how wise or well informed, could have predicted what the Soviet government would do next. Khrushchev’s decision to start a crisis over Berlin had brought a challenge to his leadership from a most unlikely quarter.

  The November 10 speech had infuriated Khrushchev’s longtime ally Anastas Mikoyan. “It was,” Mikoyan later recalled, “a most flagrant violation of party discipline.”40 Mikoyan considered himself more of an expert on international affairs than Khrushchev, who had, in Mikoyan’s view, very simple ideas about the world. In particular, Mikoyan thought he understood Germany better than Khrushchev did. Mikoyan’s reputation may have been somewhat tarnished by the poor assessment of West Germany’s nuclear ambitions that he had brought back from his April 1958 visit with Adenauer. Nevertheless, he believed that Khrushchev’s proposed policy presented even more dangers to Soviet security than anything Adenauer had yet done.

  Little is known about how Mikoyan began his intrigue, but almost immediately after the Sports Palace speech, it became clear to him that if he wanted to stop Khrushchev from turning Europe upside down, he would have to work fast. On November 14 Khrushchev used a speech to new graduates of Soviet military academies to signal to the West that the Soviet Union was planning to make “definite proposals” on Berlin. A document, he said, was being prepared.41

  Mikoyan could count on little help in his effort to revise the new German policy. One possible ally was Gromyko, whose German team had drafted the original proposals on November 3 before having to rush out a Khrushchevite speech a few days later. But when Mikoyan approached him, Gromyko showed that he was unwilling to challenge Khrushchev. Another possible sympathizer was the Soviet president, Voroshilov, whom Khrushchev had not bothered to purge after the failed coup in June 1957. The old marshal had been quick to question Khrushchev’s risk taking over Iraq in the summer but had remained silent on Berlin at the November 6 session. The sole female member of the Presidium, Furtseva, might also be helpful. She and Mikoyan were allies in the fight for reducing the length of the workday and a few other social reforms that Khrushchev had abandoned as too expensive. She too had remained silent on Khrushchev’s Berlin proposal, but she had even less political sway than Voroshilov. All she could bring was one vote.

  The new Khrushchev men were of even less use to Mikoyan. Ten of the sixteen full members of the Presidium had been elevated since 1955 and felt various degrees of gratitude to Khrushchev. Leonid Brezhnev, Averky Aristov, and Frol Kozlov, in particular, owed their positions to Khrushchev and were unlikely to mount a challenge to his foreign policy. In any case, they were even more ignorant than Khrushchev in matters of international affairs. The Presidium’s chief ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, was a dark horse for Mikoyan. Clever and ruthless, Suslov had endorsed the Berlin policy, but perhaps his mind could be changed.

  Despite these odds, Mikoyan decided he had no choice but to try to head off Khrushchev’s potentially disastrous Berlin policy. He knew that a direct challenge against Khrushchev would probably fail, so in good Soviet style he worked instead to undermine Khrushchev’s authority by an indirect attack.

  For years Mikoyan had been trying to remove the chairman of the KGB, Ivan Serov, a man whose fingerprints were all over the terrible years of
the 1930s. With destalinization, the Soviet regime had made a promise to the people to curb the more terrorist tendencies of the secret services. Having Serov in place as the chief of the KGB belied that policy. Well before the Berlin debate, Mikoyan had tried to convince Khrushchev that it did not look good for the regime to continue entrusting Soviet security services to someone as odious as Serov. He had gotten nowhere. Serov was one of the few individuals Khrushchev trusted in Moscow. The two had formed a bond when Khrushchev was Stalin’s viceroy in the Ukraine and Serov was his chief of security. A persistent rumor in the Kremlin and among the inner circle of Soviet society was that at Khrushchev’s instructions, Serov had personally overseen the destruction of Stalin-era archives that implicated them for crimes in the Ukraine.42

  In the closed world of the Kremlin, Mikoyan understood that by applying pressure on Serov, he could remind Khrushchev that there were limits to his power. But being an accomplished intriguer, Mikoyan also understood that he could not pin his hopes on the Serov ploy alone. Khrushchev had made himself vulnerable among his colleagues by his harsh treatment of the fallen Nikolai Bulganin. The amiable former chairman of the Council of Ministers had been edged out of the Presidium as punishment for siding with the conspirators who had tried to fire Khrushchev in 1957. Mikoyan decided to play as well on that to slow the drive toward a new Berlin policy.

  The Presidium had decided in October that as part of the public campaign before the Twenty-first Party Congress, the Kremlin would “reveal more widely the essence of the Anti-Party Group [the 1957 coup plotters].” Khrushchev and his supporters wanted the Soviet people to understand that his opponents had doubted their own wisdom, productivity, and energy. But the Presidium had not decided to use this campaign to destroy Bulganin. It was Khrushchev who decided to use the public campaign to link Bulganin to the men who conspired to overthrow him in 1957.43 Mikoyan knew that this act of unnecessary political cruelty was a sign of overreaching by Khrushchev that could also be used to undermine his hold on foreign policy.