Meanwhile an event at home reminded Khrushchev of the necessity of pushing forward with his domestic reforms. In late September a riot broke out over wages and food prices at the metallurgical factory in Karaganda, a town in Kazakhstan. The Presidium managed the crisis despite Khrushchev’s absence, and by early October the situation was stable and men were in jail.81 But Khrushchev and the Kremlin understood that there was no time to waste. Fresh from his successes in America and the Far East, Khrushchev would very soon propose the most audacious reform of his career. Not only the Soviet Union but the Cold War itself would take a new turn.
CHAPTER 10
GRAND DESIGN
IN THE WAKE of Khrushchev’s trip to the United States, the Cold War entered a period of rapid and dramatic change. In retrospect the late fall and winter of 1959–1960 might well have seen one of the great pivots in that fifty-year war, easily on a par with events in 1946, the year the U.S.-Soviet struggle first took front and center on the world stage, and 1972, when Washington and Moscow reached a strategic détente. Only with the release of the Kremlin leadership documents is it now possible to understand the extent to which Khrushchev tried to create an opportunity for reducing the level of international danger and limiting the enormous economic burdens of defense budgets. Not until Mikhail Gorbachev would a Soviet leader again initiate as bold an effort to end the Cold War.
Once he returned to Moscow on September 28, 1959, Khrushchev didn’t waste any time in signaling to party apparatchiks and the Soviet people that he believed a corner had been turned in the Cold War. Standing as tall as his five-foot frame allowed, and with more energy than he should have had after an exhausting transatlantic flight, he announced nothing less than a new era in superpower relations. “I can tell you in all frankness, dear comrades, that as a result of my talks and discussions of concrete questions with the U.S. president,” Khrushchev informed a crowd of officials at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, “I have gained the impression that he sincerely wishes to see the end of the cold war…. I am confident,” he added, “…that we can do a great deal for peace.”1 As he left the rostrum, Khrushchev surprised some in the audience by crying out, “Long live Soviet-American friendship!”
The change in Khrushchev’s statements was a matter neither of propaganda nor of good manners, a trait rarely associated with him at any time. Something profound had happened to the Soviet leader’s assessment of the struggle with the United States. “I am pleased with my U.S. trip,” Khrushchev had told a group of American businessmen a few days before leaving New York. “It seems to me that the American people want to come to an agreement and live in peace.” Before the trip he might have gone on to say that the desires of the American people were bound to be thwarted by Wall Street. But he was no longer convinced of that view, as he had been. Although admonishing himself not to “dig into souls,” he seemed hopeful that at heart most American businessmen preferred peace over war profits.2 For Khrushchev, who believed that the corporate world drove political decision making in the West, this new conclusion had widespread implications.
In cities from New York to California, the Soviet leader had observed a standard of living for ordinary people almost beyond his comprehension. It was one thing to look at a mock-up of an American kitchen at an exhibition designed to promote the virtues of the United States, as he had done in 1959 with the visiting Nixon at his elbow. It was something else to see row upon row of middle-class houses along the train route from New York to Washington. What Khrushchev had to admit was that the Americans had succeeded in providing to their workers a lifestyle that he had imagined possible only under full-fledged communism. The trip had not made him a capitalist by any means; instead its effect was to stir his competitive spirit.
Khrushchev had always understood that the Soviet Union had to become more efficient for its citizens to live comfortably. Even without the shock of seeing the United States, he had ample evidence at home that things were not going well. Instead of the gains mandated by the seven-year plan, 1959 had brought a drop in labor productivity, by one estimation from 7.2 to 2.7 percent. News from the farms was even worse. Agricultural production actually shrank by 4.1 percent in 1959.3 Lacking any sense of the role that market forces had played in America’s postwar boom, Khrushchev assumed that solving the problems of the Soviet economy lay in wiser Kremlin decisions and better people to implement those decisions. In his first weeks back home, he seized on any and all visible signs of inefficiency in Soviet life and dramatized them to make his point. Having noticed that in major U.S. cities the mayors spent money cultivating lawns instead of large floral arrangements, Khrushchev began questioning the wisdom of maintaining acres of greenhouses to line Moscow’s main boulevards with flowers. If the rich Americans didn’t need them, why did Soviet citizens?4 Similarly, he had noticed that New York City had many fewer lampposts than major Soviet cities. “Why do we waste electricity to produce light our cities don’t need?” he asked.5 If the famed New York urban developer Robert Moses did not think that there had to be two lampposts on every block, why did Moscow city authorities believe otherwise?
There was a direct connection in Khrushchev’s mind between this drive for a more efficient Soviet Union and talk of better relations with the United States. Khrushchev had long feared that the race to keep up with Washington in military firepower would bankrupt his country. “If we are forced into doing this,” he told his son, Sergei, “we’ll lose our pants.”6 In 1958, during Nasser’s first state visit to the Soviet Union, Khrushchev had warned the Egyptian leader not to believe what military advisers said about the defense needs of the country. “You give them twice as much as they asked for and the very next day they will tell you that it is not enough [to defend the country].” Khrushchev believed that arms races corroded a country’s ability to provide for its own citizens, and if any general or admiral tried to argue otherwise, he advised Nasser, “[y]ou should pour cold water on them.”7
KHRUSHCHEV’S INCREASING confidence in U.S. intentions in foreign policy and his desire to match the Americans in economic achievement were necessary ingredients in determining his next great initiative, but what made the moment ripe for him was a breakthrough in Soviet nuclear technology. Within three months of his return from New York, Soviet nuclear scientists gave him an unprecedented opportunity to test how far he could go in cutting the Soviet defense budget. Six and a half years after the Kremlin had authorized its development, the first Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7, was prepared to go into service at two launch facilities in Plesetsk. Although the missile had been used to put Sputnik into space in October 1957, the R-7 had needed more engineering before it could be outfitted with a nuclear warhead and brought into the arsenal. The first successful launch from Plesetsk took place in late July 1959, and now the Soviet military reported that it was prepared to station two R-7 missiles, each of which carried a three-megaton nuclear warhead, at both launch facilities.8 Although the force was tiny in comparison with the U.S. arsenal, it had symbolic meaning. The Soviet Union finally had the ability to launch a nuclear missile attack on the United States.
Khrushchev hoped that only a few nuclear weapons of this kind would be necessary to reach rough parity with the United States. In 1958 Soviet military planners had presented him with plans for the creation of a vast system of intercontinental ballistic missile bases, which would have assured him complete parity with the expected U.S. nuclear forces of the 1960s.9 But he had turned down that proposal, trusting instead in the logic of what might be called minimum deterrence. Why waste money on a program that the Soviet Union could hardly afford when no sane leader, he believed, would ever risk war with the USSR so long as it had a few nuclear missiles? There is no evidence that Khrushchev had a particularly sophisticated view of what a sufficient deterrent would entail, but he had a sense that he needed only enough rockets to make any U.S. president fear the potential cost of a nuclear exchange. “Missiles are not cucumbers,” he liked to say, “one cannot
eat them and one does not require more than a certain number in order to ward off an attack.”10
Armed with news of Moscow’s new nuclear deterrent, Khrushchev moved fast to alter his government’s approach to the Cold War. There was some grumbling in the Presidium and the Central Committee about the lack of preparation for the party plenum scheduled for late December, but Khrushchev wanted the government’s agenda to accommodate yet one more topic. Military strategy was added to the schedule for a Presidium meeting on December 14. Concerned about how his colleagues might respond, Khrushchev opted not to spring his new plan for the military as a complete surprise. A few days before the meeting Presidium members received a lengthy memorandum describing what he had in mind and why.11
KHRUSHCHEV CHOSE a December morning to discuss his vision of the Soviet future. “Each citizen,” he said, “each resident of the Soviet Union, should more and more and in full measure be provided for; his needs should be satisfied at the expense of public service.”12 Khrushchev believed that the weak Soviet economy stood in the way not only of a better life for Soviet citizens but also of achieving the classless political system that Marx and Lenin predicted under communism. “When we have created the material foundations for communism…it will become clear where there is freedom, and where there is no freedom,” Khrushchev told his colleagues on December 14.13 But in the wake of his recent trip to the United States, he felt compelled to discuss how far the Soviet Union was from achieving that utopia.
In this secret session among his closest associates, Khrushchev admitted what he would almost never allow himself to say anywhere else. Throughout his American tour he had boasted of the overwhelming superiority of the Soviet political system. But behind the walls of the Kremlin he acknowledged that he did not fully believe this anymore. What he had seen in the United States convinced him that the Americans were much closer to the type of democratic society that he expected under communism. He was struck by the fact that Americans had found a way to ensure a peaceful transfer of power from one president to another. He also thought Moscow could learn from the newly ratified Twenty-second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, limiting U.S. presidents to two terms of four years. “When we have communism, it will not be possible that a person will sit at a post forever…[I]tis impossible to use a person until he is worn out.”14 Khrushchev warned. “If the bourgeois and capitalists are not afraid, that their foundations will be destroyed because after two terms the elected president changes, then why should we be afraid? What, are we not certain of our system or less certain than these bourgeois, capitalists and landowners?”15
What frustrated Khrushchev was that the USSR was so many years away from undertaking those political reforms. He believed his system could not survive a free vote or regular transfers of power so long as the Soviet standard of living was low. The Soviet people could not possibly believe in the superiority of communism over capitalism so long as they were ill fed, poorly sheltered, and underemployed and the citizens of the West enjoyed a higher standard of living. When Khrushchev suggested term limits for Kremlin leaders, he was thinking of generational change, pumping fresh blood into the system, not a replacement of Communist party members by Western liberals or conservatives. Khrushchev believed, until the country reached a higher level of economic performance, Moscow could not risk granting American-style democracy to its people. “The further we go in the elevation of the economy,” he explained, “the deeper and the stronger will be the basis for democratization.”16
Khrushchev did not offer his Kremlin colleagues any specific plan for improving the Soviet economy. He asked only that the economic planners be instructed to prepare detailed statements of goals for each step in the drive toward full-fledged communism, which in effect meant a U.S.-style standard of living in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev tossed out the figure of fifteen to twenty years to accomplish this radical transformation of the Soviet economy. In 1957 he had pledged that at least in the production of meat and milk the Soviet Union would catch and surpass the United States by 1970. But now, as then, he really had no idea how long catching up would take. Still, he did believe it was possible. In the meantime he wanted the Kremlin to send a series of signals through all levels of Soviet society that Moscow took this goal seriously and would expect to make systematic progress according to some well-defined list of milestones.
The few concrete proposals Khrushchev did have in mind for improving the Soviet way of life concerned reducing the cost of the Cold War so that more money could flow into the civilian economy.17 Following the Presidium’s discussion of Soviet political goals, the country’s most powerful military men were ushered into the Kremlin hall to join the meeting. Khrushchev was very comfortable with his military commanders, all of whom he had handpicked. Gone were the troublesome Marshal Vassily Sokolovsky, who had expressed doubt about Khrushchev’s approach to the Middle East, and the wrong-thinking Admiral Nikolai G. Kuznetsov, whose dreams of a massive three-ocean navy would have bankrupted the state. Khrushchev’s new military elite was anchored by men who had fought alongside him in World War II, Marshals Rodion Malinovsky, Ivan Konev, and Andrei Grechko. Beside them was a new generation of military men who owed their promotions to Khrushchev, Marshal Kyrill Moskalenko, Marshal M. I. Nedelin, and the great architect of the Soviet war machine Marshal Dmitri Ustinov. With these men present Khrushchev outlined an audacious new Soviet military strategy designed to win the Cold War without a single shot being fired.
Desperate to shift the superpower struggle away from an arms race toward a contest of political ideas and economies, Khrushchev believed it was time to take a huge risk to achieve a major disarmament agreement with the United States. Earlier in the year the Soviet government had authorized the parallel development of two intercontinental ballistic weapons systems, the R-9 and the R-16. Both missiles were lighter and thinner than the bulky R-7 that had put Sputnik into orbit. Khrushchev had been looking for a missile that could be placed in underground silos to protect it from a U.S. attack. On the drawing board the R-16 had the added advantage of using a solid fuel, which meant it could be prepared for launch faster than a liquid-fueled missile and also would be more stable. The only problem was that the deployment of the R-9 and the R-16 systems was as much as six years away, and although not as expensive as conventional weapons, they were still a burden on a failing economy.
The Soviets faced a stark choice. Already far behind the United States in nuclear firepower, Moscow had few military options for keeping pace with Washington in the short term. Even though the U.S. rocket program had barely caught up with the Russian program, U.S. bombers with nuclear weapons were stationed at NATO air bases in Europe only hours away from Moscow. Eisenhower already had the capability to deliver a crippling strike on the USSR with one order, whereas Khrushchev was years away from achieving that. As he looked forward, the situation was not likely to get better. It was known from open sources that the United States had also invested in long-range nuclear missiles and in missiles that could be launched from submarines. The missile gap favoring U.S. power would probably widen before the R-9 and the R-16 could be deployed.
Constrained by the Soviet economy and his own ideas about how to achieve better living standards in the near future, Khrushchev did not opt for a crash rearmament program or even an acceleration of the development of the next generation of missiles. Instead he decided to gamble on a diplomatic strategy that would head off a costly arms race with the Americans. His plan was to announce at the party plenum in January a dramatic unilateral cut in the Soviet armed forces. He suggested cutting between 1 and 1.2 million soldiers, about a third of the active Soviet military. The Western powers had always complained that the enormous Soviet Army posed a constant threat to the security of Central Europe and to Germany in particular. Now he would show Washington, London, and Paris that Moscow had no military designs on Bonn.
The Presidium adopted Khrushchev’s strategy of unilateral disarmament after hearing nothing but praise from his
handpicked military chiefs. Defense Minister Malinovsky blessed the troop cuts and assured the Presidium that the general staff had already worked through these numbers and could do it.18 The chief of the Warsaw Pact forces, Marshal Konev, also applauded the cuts, underscoring the fact that the nuclear revolution made this disarmament possible without harming Soviet security. Equally enthusiastic support came from the younger military men. To show his commitment to building a nuclear missile force, Khrushchev planned to create a separate branch of the Soviet armed forces for nuclear weapons, and he wanted Marshal Nedelin to command this force. Not surprisingly, Nedelin expressed delight at Khrushchev’s new strategy and the cuts in conventional forces. So too did the man selected as his future deputy in the Soviet rocket forces command, Kirill S. Moskalenko.19 The two had served together in an antitank brigade in 1941 and had grown to appreciate the cutting edge in Soviet military technology. “Nikita Sergeyvich,” Nedelin said in front of the Kremlin bosses, “your proposal is not only necessary but overdue.” Moskalenko chimed in that Khrushchev’s proposal was “courageous and responsible before the nation and history. The peace initiative is in our hands.” Nedelin’s future assistant then proceeded to list conventional weaponry that could also be considered obsolete, including the T-34 tank and much of the army’s artillery.20
The entire Soviet leadership understood that Khrushchev was forcing the country to take a huge strategic risk. The effect of these decisions would be to create a Soviet window of vulnerability. Even the nuclear enthusiast Moskalenko had to admit that the USSR was still two years from having a reliable retaliatory capability in case the United States launched a first strike. By having placed some limits on rocket development and production and by not increasing expenditures on Soviet conventional forces, Khrushchev ensured that in the early 1960s the Soviet Union would be far weaker than the United States. He would have the few missiles he thought he needed to be a great power, but he would not have anywhere near the capacity to ensure a nuclear retaliatory strike in the event the United States launched its missiles, bombers, and submarines first. Secrecy would be essential to ensure Soviet safety during these difficult years. Not only would he have to hide Soviet vulnerability, but he would have to find a way to use disarmament negotiations to soften the U.S. advantage in the correlation of forces.
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