Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

  If Washington’s objective was to torpedo any chance for substantive discussion between Macmillan and Khrushchev and make the Soviet leadership more intransigent, its diplomatic note did the trick. The note so infuriated Khrushchev that he dropped any idea of trying out any of his Berlin concessions on the visiting Briton. Khrushchev’s pride was by now the main factor driving his choice of tactics to achieve his objectives in Berlin. If he felt confident that the West respected him and that he might succeed in securing his irreducible demands, then Moscow’s line softened. Conversely, if he felt he was being humiliated, the line would harden despite the cost in terms of international instability. The U.S. refusal to respond to the lengthy draft treaty with any proposals for alternative scenarios to resolving the West Berlin question fed Khrushchev’s frustration with relying on traditional diplomacy. He had wanted to pursue a wholly confrontational attitude in November, but Mikoyan had persuaded him to try diplomacy. Now, with the U.S. note essentially saying nyet, Khrushchev’s desire for a fight intensified.

  The Macmillan visit, which was supposed to be the next step in the diplomatic resolution of the Berlin crisis, was now a potential embarrassment for both political leaders. Khrushchev convened a special Saturday meeting of the Presidium only hours before the prime minister’s arrival to cancel the planned concessions and initiate a new harder line.

  At the meeting Khrushchev found himself once again disagreeing with his own Foreign Ministry and with Mikoyan.15 He refused to entertain the ministry’s suggestion that Moscow respond positively to the U.S. offer of a foreign ministers’ meeting. If Moscow sent the proposed reply, he argued, the Western powers “will believe that the Russians are retreating.” Why agree to their conference when there was nothing in the note to indicate that there was going to be any movement in the Western position? Khrushchev warned his colleagues that “the West wants to freeze the question at its current level.” He said; “They are dragging us into an aventura,” meaning that the West was pushing Moscow to make a provocative act.16

  Khrushchev’s new proposal was that there be either a summit that involved the leaders of all four great powers from World War II, where the leaders could discuss the unacceptable situation in Berlin and direct serious attention to preventing the militarization of the two Germanys, or nothing. To his colleagues, Khrushchev revealed a sense of urgency about the consequences of waiting any longer to solve these issues. Recent trends in U.S.–West German relations, including the possibility that the Bundeswehr might acquire nuclear weapons, suggested the fragility of the four-power settlement that had ended World War II. How long until the West sought to eliminate East Germany through a combination of economic, political, and perhaps even military means? “All we want to do is to secure the status quo,” Khrushchev repeated. This could not be done by means of a foreign ministers’ conference or a summit with Macmillan alone. For new initiatives to appear there was no better forum than a heads of government summit. Anything less would offer the West a chance to delay dealing with the question to allow the situation on the ground to continue shifting in its favor. To get the West’s attention, Khrushchev believed the Soviets had to threaten military action. “If you wish to force your way through, using all appropriate means…we will answer with all appropriate means.”17

  But Khrushchev lacked sufficient Kremlin support in 1959 to provoke a direct military clash with the United States over Berlin, even for the purposes of bluff. Mikoyan came to the defense of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and pleaded successfully for a more conciliatory reading of the U.S. note. “I agree with what the Foreign Ministry has said,” said Mikoyan. “[The Western powers] have made some concessions to us.” He added that if the Soviets did not accept talks among the foreign ministers, “they will claim that the Russians are trying to avoid negotiations.”18

  Mikoyan’s intervention prevented Khrushchev and his allies from engineering an immediate Presidium decision on what to do next about Berlin. Instead the Foreign Ministry was given three days to draft a new reply to the U.S. note. Meanwhile Khrushchev would have to entertain his British guest and Macmillan’s visit had the potential to tip the balance in favor of either Mikoyan’s or Khrushchev’s preferred approach to Berlin.

  ALTHOUGH HAROLD MACMILLAN had no idea that he was arriving in the midst of a Soviet foreign policy storm, he was arguably the best-prepared Western leader to navigate through it. His foreign policy team, unlike Dulles and the U.S. State Department, had grasped the essence of Khrushchev’s desire for consolidating the Soviet position in Eastern Europe as a step toward demilitarizing the Cold War. It was Her Majesty’s representative in Moscow, Sir Patrick Reilly, who had written that Khrushchev’s “chief ambition [was] not the extension of an empire, but to be able in his lifetime to ‘declare Communism’ in the Soviet Union [i.e., celebrate the realization of the economic and social potential of communism], with its corollary of overtaking the United States in gross production.”19 Meanwhile the roots of his drive for disarmament lay in this goal, not in any superficial grab for favorable propaganda or attempt to divide NATO. Khrushchev did not want “his handwork” obliterated in a nuclear confrontation. For the British, this fact created a zone of mutual interest between East and West in seeking agreements on ending nuclear tests and reducing nuclear arms stockpiles.

  The British also understood that as long as the Soviets insisted on comparing themselves with the Americans, they would be laboring under an enormous inferiority complex. Macmillan was quick to sense that Khrushchev personified that complex. However, this insight did not mean that the British always acted with tact. For some unknown reason Macmillan thought it wise to arrive in Moscow wearing a high white fur hat, which he had dug out one of his closets. The last time he had worn it was in 1940, when he had visited Finland as a well-publicized observer of the Finno-Soviet War, a war Moscow would rather have forgotten.20

  It is not clear if the fur hat meant anything to Khrushchev. Notwithstanding advice from Mikoyan and the Soviet Foreign Ministry to be conciliatory, he had decided to be churlish with his guest. In Macmillan’s presence, Khrushchev gave a speech at a public event denouncing the Western approach to the Berlin question and announcing that he would not accept a foreign ministers’ meeting to solve the issue. A private lunch with Macmillan the next day dissolved into an angry exchange between the leaders. Khrushchev stirred the pot by demanding that Macmillan explain Western stubbornness on West Berlin. The Briton’s efforts to outline the thinking of his NATO partners, with whom it had to be said he did not always agree, only angered Khrushchev more. He railed at Macmillan, accusing a unified West of conspiring with Adenauer to liquidate East Germany. When Khrushchev vowed to push ahead with a peace treaty with the GDR, Macmillan lost his temper. “If you try to threaten us in any way,” the usually composed Briton exclaimed, “you will create the Third World War. Because we shall not give in, nor will the Americans….” At this Khrushchev was now on his feet, shouting, “You have insulted me!”21

  On February 26 Khrushchev announced that he had decided not to accompany Macmillan, as he had intended, on a trip to Kiev and Leningrad. He blamed this decision on a sudden need to have a tooth filled.22 Despite the flimsy excuse, Macmillan did not rush home. He continued his visit, giving Khrushchev a chance to calm down. Behind the scenes Mikoyan and the Foreign Ministry effectively persuaded Khrushchev to leave the door open to a foreign ministers’ conference if that was all that Moscow could get from the West.

  When Macmillan returned to Moscow, he was met with smiles. The British leader might well have thought he was dealing with a manic-depressive regime. Khrushchev had sent him a cable before he left Leningrad telling him that his toothache had passed because “the dentist had used an excellent and newly designed British drill!”23 In Moscow Macmillan learned that he would be allowed to make an uncensored broadcast over Soviet television, a first for a Western leader. While they did not reach any agreement on Berlin, the two leaders agreed that the abolition of nuclear weapons
and an interim nuclear test ban agreement were of mutual interest. A few days after Macmillan returned home, the outcome of the backroom debate in Moscow became public. The Soviets issued a statement that pushed for a summit but accepted a foreign ministers’ conference were a summit to be impossible at the present time. Even more significantly, a few weeks later Khrushchev announced a six-month extension of the ultimatum. Meanwhile Operation Atom, the stationing of a dozen Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles in East Germany, was completed as all the missiles became operational. Moscow was now able to launch a nuclear attack on Paris and London, but Mikoyan had too effectively contained Khrushchev for the Soviet leader to exploit this new power in 1959 to renew his brinkmanship and press for a complete rupture in East-West relations until the problems of Berlin was solved.

  THE NEXT FEW MONTHS saw an unusual amount of East-West diplomatic activity. In May 1959 the foreign ministers of France, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union convened in Geneva to discuss a settlement of the Berlin question. Observers from East and West Germany were invited to witness the proceedings. At issue for the West was whether the Soviets would acknowledge that the Americans, British, and French had a right to be in West Berlin. Meanwhile the Soviets pushed the Western powers to accept negotiations between East and West Germany, to undertake steps to limit the use of West Berlin to destabilize East Germany, and to acknowledge that the situation was abnormal and needed to be fixed. Meanwhile in the United States Foster Dulles, one of Khrushchev’s staunchest opponents, had succumbed to cancer at age seventy-one. In April Dulles had been replaced by Christian Herter, a former governor of Massachusetts and congressman, who despite a low-key personality was ardently committed to active international diplomacy.

  Khrushchev seemed to be gripped by uncertainty over how to proceed in the wake of Dulles’s death and the opening of negotiations in Geneva. At times he screamed at any and all who suggested that there was hope for diplomacy, while at other times he grasped at what could best be described as straws in an effort to convince himself that he could champion a diplomatic approach.

  One such straw came into his grasp just before the formal start of the foreign ministers’ conference. A Soviet representative, presumably the KGB representative with the delegation, cabled that there appeared an opportunity for successful negotiations on “a narrower basis.”24 Available Soviet records leave unclear whether the KGB had learned this from a spy within a Western delegation or was using one of its own men to undertake back channel feelers with Western diplomats. In any case, Soviet intelligence had picked up indications that the West might agree to reduce the size of its eleven-thousand-man contingent in West Berlin. Even though there did not appear to be any concrete basis for this reduction, Khrushchev was encouraged and wanted to take advantage of this possibility.

  On May 24 Khrushchev suggested to his Kremlin colleagues that the KGB be used to convey to the West that if they agreed to a troop reduction, the Soviets would reduce and then withdraw their own contingent in East Berlin. The current occupation regime in West Berlin would then be allowed to remain for one to two more years, during which time the Soviets would promise not to sign a peace treaty with East Germany.25

  Nothing came of this KGB-sponsored diplomacy; but the fact that Khrushchev pursued it revealed that underneath the bluster was a leader who hoped for a diplomatic settlement. The Soviets did not need the KGB, however, to pick up that some members of the Western delegations were indeed considering reducing the size of their contingents in Berlin. British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd mentioned in an open session that the troops could be reduced to eighty-five hundred or perhaps seventy-five hundred.26 The proposal did not go anywhere because the United States delegation, led by Secretary Herter, refused to agree.

  At the first formal meeting of the conference Foreign Minister Gromyko presented a draft agreement on West Berlin that permitted the presence of small numbers of Western troops once West Berlin became a “free city,” so long as these could “in no way be considered as occupation of territory.”27 A week later he explicitly linked an immediate reduction of Western troops with a one-year suspension of the Soviet threat to sign a peace treaty.28 The Soviets stipulated four preconditions in all. Besides the reduction of Western troops to a “symbolic number,” the West had to agree to end all “hostile propaganda against the GDR and other socialist countries” and all espionage and subversion launched from West Berlin. Finally, it had to agree not to station any nuclear weapons or missiles in West Berlin.

  Eisenhower’s response was immediate and direct. The new Soviet proposals were “a clearly unacceptable challenge to our position in that city,” he wrote to Khrushchev on June 15.29

  In response, Khrushchev tried something new.30 In the 1950s it was Kremlin practice to send open letters to U.S. presidents, which were published almost immediately in Soviet newspapers. But Khrushchev wanted to indicate some flexibility with Eisenhower and open the way for a real bilateral discussion. So he composed the first private letter ever sent by a Soviet leader to the White House. He used this unusual method to underscore the honest concerns behind his impatience to see the start of real negotiations on West Berlin. Chancellor Adenauer had made known that West Germany wanted these discussions over Berlin to drag on for years. “In this time,” Khrushchev explained to Eisenhower, “…the policy of militarization of West Germany and the policy of preparation of war would be continued.” He ended the letter in somewhat dulcet tones. If the foreign ministers’ conference did not succeed, perhaps a summit would be more successful. In any case, he told Eisenhower that the Soviets wanted to meet the West halfway on establishing a timetable for agreement.

  The next day Khrushchev told the East Germans, who were in Moscow for high-level talks, that he was confident that the discussions with the West were moving in the right direction. He was pleased that the Western powers were at least prepared to discuss the future status of Berlin and to have observers from East Germany in the room as they did so. Khrushchev sensed that it was only a matter of time before the West gave Moscow and East Berlin what they wanted, and he wanted to prepare the East Germans for the Kremlin’s decision to drop the ultimatum completely. “Let’s not give a time period,” Khrushchev told Ulbricht. “A year or a year-and-a-half—this isn’t a key issue for us.”31 He also wanted Ulbricht to understand that a resolution would probably take a heads of government summit, so there was only so much that East Germany should expect to be achieved at a foreign ministers’ meeting. “[N]ot one self respecting prime minister will allow his foreign minister,” he told Ulbricht, “due to prestige considerations, to sign an agreement on concrete issues.”32

  In a meeting with visiting American governors on July 7, Khrushchev indicated his interest in visiting the United States and seeing President Eisenhower.33 If the Americans agreed, Khrushchev would be the first Soviet leader ever to visit the United States. The year 1959 was already shaping up as the most active period of face-to-face meetings between Soviets and their American counterparts up to that point in the entire Cold War. As Khrushchev met with the state governors, Soviet Presidium member Kozlov was at the end of his own extensive ten-day tour of the United States. Kozlov had had a pleasant, though unproductive, meeting with President Eisenhower at the end of June.34 Khrushchev had hopes that he would have more luck if given the chance.

  The Washington Post picked up the story of Khrushchev’s comment to the U.S. delegation, and Eisenhower was asked about it at a press conference the next day. “This was the first I had heard of Khrushchev’s statement,” Eisenhower later recalled.35 The president was intrigued by the idea. Once the press conference was over, he called his new secretary of state. “The Khrushchev statement,” Eisenhower said to Herter, “might possibly provide a device to break the stalemate.”

  Khrushchev’s initiative had caught the president in a reflective mood about the Cold War. Just before that morning’s press conference, Eisenhower had made a very difficult decision. T
he CIA wanted presidential approval to send a U-2 spy plane into Soviet airspace. In March 1958 Eisenhower had discontinued U-2 flights after the Soviets protested a U-2 mission over the Soviet Far East.36 When Eisenhower approved the U-2 project in 1954, he had been assured that the planes would be able to fly unnoticed into Soviet territory.37 Since 1956, however, the United States had known that the Soviets could detect these missions, though they still lacked the capability to bring these high fliers down. The flights continued in large measure because Foster Dulles had convinced a skeptical Eisenhower that the Soviets would never protest these flights. “To do so,” Dulles had observed with acerbity, “would make it necessary for them to admit also that for years we had been carrying on flights over their territory while they, the Soviets, had been helpless to do anything about the matter.”38 It took the Soviets until 1958 to begin their protests of U-2 flights, but once they did, Eisenhower had believed he had no choice but to call a halt to these missions.