The seven-year plan to improve domestic conditions in the Soviet Union, announced with such fanfare in 1958, was failing. The Kremlin had drafted this plan in the wake of fears that the material concerns of Soviet workers would produce a political crisis similar to the one that Soviet tanks had crushed in Budapest in 1956. On his inspection tours around the USSR, Khrushchev saw mounting evidence that the Soviet state was not even meeting the most basic of its citizens’ requirements. Dmitri Polyansky, the head of the Communist Party in the Soviet republic of Russia (the largest of the USSR’s fifteen republics), had assured him that food supplies were ample in Russia. After Khrushchev discovered this was not so, Polyansky responded, “If one were to remove Moscow and Leningrad from our responsibility, then we could feed ourselves.” Incredulous at this stupidity, Khrushchev asked, “But to whom will we give Moscow—Georgia?” In fact the Soviet people were experiencing shortages in meat, milk, and eggs. In peasant markets eggs, when they appeared, were selling for the equivalent of three dollars a dozen when loaves of good Russian bread cost pennies.21 The Kremlin would have to sell twenty-three tons of gold in London, the equivalent of twenty-six million dollars, to buy European butter because it could not produce enough of its own.22 A joke was heard along the lines of people waiting to buy food: “What nationality were Adam and Eve?” The answer was “Russian.” To the question “Why?” came the answer “Because they were both naked, had only an apple to eat, and thought they were in paradise.”23
Khrushchev understood all too well that his people were not living in paradise, and the problem was not simply the availability of butter. In the weeks after the Hungarian revolt, Khrushchev had warned his Presidium colleagues that housing was as politically important to the survival of the Soviet regime as was food. Consequently, in 1958 the Kremlin had promised two million cubic meters of new housing. By early 1961 housing starts had fallen so far short that Khrushchev decreed that all new apartment buildings would be built higher than the standard five stories to try to catch up with demand. Even this Band-Aid solution proved unworkable. Khrushchev had to rescind the order when he received the news that the USSR lacked the raw materials to build elevators for taller apartment buildings.24 Kremlin bosses were soon huddling to decide how they would fudge the numbers for all aspects of the seven-year plan, so that the gap between promise and reality would not appear as huge as it actually was.25
Khrushchev marveled at how easily his subordinates were willing to accept this sad state of affairs. “Why are we bringing such shit into the bosom of the party?” he remarked upon learning of a regional boss who was promoted after he met his meat quota by slaughtering cows needed for milk production.26 One party secretary in a town three hundred miles from Moscow insisted on admitting failure by taking his pants down to be lashed personally by Khrushchev. “He repeated this three times,” Khrushchev said later, “I couldn’t take it anymore and said to him: ‘Why is it that you want your pants whipped off to show us your ass? Do you think you will give us some kind of thrill?’ What kind of secretary is this?”27
For all the humor, Khrushchev felt threatened by these failures. His promise to the Soviet people was that their society would catch and surpass the United States by 1970. These dismal reports from the field caused him to remind his colleagues that the regime had to be serious about achieving the goal of affording its citizens an American standard of living. “Do you remember how Molotov and Kaganovich yelled at me when I announced that we would catch up with America…. They got frightened by the call to catch up with America.” Khrushchev still believed it possible. But it meant working harder. “What does catching up to the United States mean?” he asked his colleagues in March 1961. “It means hard thinking. Stop all this fussing.”28
Another annoyance and distraction in the early months of 1961 were China and its strange little ally in Europe, Albania. The xenophobic Albanian regime, led by Enver Hoxha since the collapse of Nazi power in the Balkans, had turned toward China out of fear that Khrushchev and Tito of Yugoslavia were scheming to divide up southeastern Europe. Ideology also played some role. Hoxha had no intention of giving Albanians even the modest liberalization associated with Moscow’s destalinization campaign. Tensions between the Soviet Union and Albania broke into the open at the Fourteenth Congress of the Albanian Communist Party in February 1961. Although personally annoying to Khrushchev—reports came to Moscow of Albanians replacing his official portraits in all their public buildings with old pictures of Stalin—the dispute was of almost no consequence to world affairs.29 However, when Khrushchev suggested breaking all trade ties to the country, Mikoyan reminded him that what really mattered was China, and Mao might overreact if the Soviet Union ganged up on his Balkan friend.30
Mikoyan made good sense, and Khrushchev accepted his plea for caution. Besides, the Kremlin’s real concern was not Chinese influence in Europe but how Beijing was complicating the picture in Southeast Asia. The Chinese were lining up with the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese to press for a revolutionary victory in the kingdom of Laos.31 The situation had changed dramatically since U.S.-backed Phoumi Nosavan’s December 1960 offensive had forced the neutralist prime minister, Souvanna Phouma, and most of the leadership of the Communist Pathet Lao to flee the country. In January 1961 the Pathet Lao’s successful counterattack had raised the possibility that Beijing’s and Hanoi’s dreams might be realized. Even as the Pathet Lao continued to make gains, however, Khrushchev advised both regional Communist powers to seek a diplomatic solution in Laos. Convinced that the Pathet Lao risked U.S. intervention if the offensive continued, he argued that only patient political struggle would bring lasting success in the region.32
In March Kennedy helped Khrushchev make this argument. In a meeting with Gromyko, who had flown to the United States to take a measure of Kennedy’s views on the situation in Southeast Asia, the U.S. president told the Soviets that Washington now supported the neutralist government of Souvanna Phouma. Kennedy hoped to create a united neutral Laos with a united army and a coalition government, exactly the policy Khrushchev had been advocating to Beijing and Hanoi.33 Four days later the Soviets gave the North Vietnamese a copy of those sections of the Russian transcript of the meeting dealing with Laos and asked that they be shared with the North Vietnamese Politburo and the leader Ho Chi Minh.34 Moscow then issued a public statement in favor of a cease-fire in Laos and privately called on Beijing, Hanoi, and the Pathet Lao to follow suit. Although the Chinese later joined with the Pathet Lao in accepting the cease-fire, Moscow understood that Mao was firmly opposed to establishing a unified Laos under a neutralist government.35
In this climate of disappointment at home and dispute abroad, the successful flight of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12 came as a welcome distraction for Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership. Although unable to feed or house its citizens properly, the Soviet Union was the first nation to put a man in space. Khrushchev had feared that something would go wrong with the Gagarin flight and had turned down a May 1 date for the mission lest a failure mar the traditional holiday. His space advisers were confident they could succeed, however, and they advanced the schedule to ensure that Moscow would be ahead of the Americans, who were preparing astronaut Alan Shepard to fly in the first week of May.36
Khrushchev greeted the news of Gagarin’s successful mission by calling for the largest national celebration since the war-ending festivities of May 9, 1945. Four MiG fighters escorted the Il-18 plane that brought Gagarin back to the Soviet capital, and the entire group circled Moscow before landing at Vnukovo Airport. People lined the streets, the roofs, and balconies along the route into the center of the city, and a huge parade in Red Square followed.37 The Soviet people were hungry for something to celebrate, and public enthusiasm for Gagarin rapidly spread throughout the USSR.38 Although the scale of these theatrics in Moscow surprised even his family, Khrushchev understood that the celebration helped distract the Soviet people from the grim reality of their daily lives and the appar
ent bankruptcy of his promises.39 Given the recent reports he had been receiving of widespread shoddy housing construction, he considered it a bonus that none of the balconies filled with onlookers collapsed during the show.40
AMID THESE EVENTS the Soviet leadership chose to ignore the increasing evidence of U.S. plotting against Castro. In April a wave of terrorist bombings and suspicious fires occurred in Havana. On April 13 El Encanto, the largest department store in Cuba, was destroyed by arson.41 The day before, the KGB resident in Mexico City reported that sources in the Guatemalan Communist Party were predicting that a broader U.S.-sponsored attack was only days away.42 Since the summer of 1960 Soviet fears of a U.S. military strike against Castro had risen and fallen. Much as in the children’s fable of the boy who cried wolf, the value of these alarms had worn down with each subsequent discovery that U.S. Marines were not on their way.43
Moreover, Khrushchev had received two signals from Kennedy that made a U.S. attack on Castro much less likely. In March U.S. Ambassador Thompson had traveled two thousand miles to Siberia to deliver a personal note to Khrushchev from the president saying that it was time for a face-to-face meeting and suggesting late May in a neutral European capital. On April 1 Khrushchev had sent his agreement to Kennedy.44 The date was still uncertain, but Kennedy’s willingness to meet was not. A week later the Americans asked to delay the meeting until June and for it to be in Vienna.
The U.S. agreement to a summit was taken as a sign of the new president’s respect for Khrushchev. The second signal that confused the Soviet leader came in the form of a statement by Kennedy that seemed to imply tolerance of Castro. The same day that the KGB in Mexico sounded the alarm, the president publicly denied the rumors that the United States was on the verge of attacking Cuba. In response to a question at a press conference, he stated that “there will not be, under any conditions, any intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces. This government will do everything it possibly can, and I think it can meet its responsibilities, to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba….The basic issue is not one between the United States and Cuba. It is between the Cubans themselves.”45
Kennedy’s answer not only strengthened Khrushchev’s assessment that this White House would restrain itself but also sent a wave of reassurance down the line of the Soviet national security system. On the assumption that nothing would happen in his absence, the KGB resident in Havana, Aleksandr Alekseyev, was permitted to leave Cuba in April for a trip to Brazil. Before leaving, Alekseyev had witnessed the opening phase of the U.S. campaign, a string of attacks by anti-Castro saboteurs in central Havana, that culminated in an invasion at the Bay of Pigs. He later recalled that even he thought that no greater threat loomed: “I had seen the [U.S.] bombings…. But why did we not believe that it would be such a large invasion? I don’t know…. We just did not believe it.”46
Cuban anxieties subsided somewhat after Kennedy’s press conference. Che Guevara, in a meeting with the Soviet ambassador Sergei Kudriavtsev on April 14, said that “the danger of invasion of the country by large beachheads of the external counterrevolutionary forces has now in all likelihood receded.” The Cubans had evidence that the U.S. government had been behind the El Encanto fire. “One of such [small] bombs,” Guevara reported to the Soviets, “was found unexploded in the [El Encanto] store building after the fire with a stamp ‘U.S. Army.’” But even Guevara believed that though Kennedy was as much an enemy of the Cuban Revolution as Eisenhower had been, the new president was less comfortable with extreme measures. “[T]he tactics are being somewhat changed,” Guevara told the Kremlin. At the moment the Cubans believed that the main emphasis of U.S. policy was on diplomatic isolation and economic sabotage.47
An intensification of the U.S.-sponsored bombing campaign the day after Che’s meeting with the Soviet ambassador, however, put the Cubans back on alert. Explosions in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and San Antonio de los Baños in the early morning of April 15 caused Castro to announce that this was a prelude to an invasion of the island. On April 16 the Cuban Air Force and Navy launched very visible patrols, though Havana had no real information on when the attack would occur.48 Meanwhile Moscow seemed not to be expecting any attack.
On the afternoon of April 17, 1961, reports reached Moscow that U.S.-backed Cuban rebels had invaded three beaches along the Bay of Pigs and a Cuban government-in-exile was calling for a national uprising.49 Khrushchev worried that the CIA’s Allen Dulles had staged this provocation to undermine the forthcoming meeting with Kennedy, just as he had dispatched Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 flight to ruin the summit in Paris. Unwilling to admit that he had misjudged Kennedy’s dislike of the Cuban regime, Khrushchev took solace in KGB reports that pointed to Dulles as bearing the primary responsibility for the Cuban fiasco.50 For example, the KGB reported from London that officials in the U.S. Embassy were saying that Kennedy now regretted having retained Republicans like Allen Dulles and Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon in his administration.51
Although the Kremlin was caught off guard and Cuban intelligence did not have detailed warning, weaknesses in the tactical aspects of the CIA’s operation doomed it to failure. There was no guerrilla force nearby to fortify the beachhead. The twelve hundred men landed in a flat, marshy region that had only a single road. When dawn broke, columns of Soviet-supplied tanks rolled down that road to defend the beaches. Besides the weakness of the plan, the operation suffered from poor presidential leadership. At the last moment Kennedy had called off an air strike that could have assured that the invasion force enjoyed air superiority. Because it did not, the six planes of Castro’s air force were able to sink two of the landing force’s ships, one of which carried the brigade’s radio equipment and some ammunition. By April 19 the United States had begun to withdraw whatever equipment and fighters it could from the area. More than eleven hundred survivors of the assault remained as prisoners in Cuba.52
THE BAY OF PIGS invasion ended Khrushchev’s complacency about the Kennedy administration. Now the Soviet leader did not know what to think about the young president. Had President Kennedy been behind this attack, or were the hard-liners like Allen Dulles in control? Khrushchev did not immediately make up his mind about what all this meant. On April 18 he sent Kennedy a stinging written protest. But he also had Andrei Gromyko, who delivered the protest by hand to Ambassador Thompson, sweeten the bitter herbs with words indicating his desire that “the differences which have arisen recently would be resolved and U.S.-Soviet relations improved.”53 Khrushchev hoped that Kennedy would signal which direction he intended to take U.S.-Soviet relations.
THE BAY OF PIGS fiasco revived Washington’s interest in a superpower summit between Khrushchev and Kennedy. The president decided that though he had no real diplomatic concessions to offer the Soviets, he needed to show presidential leadership at a meeting with the Soviet leader. Although not deaf to the chorus of political disapproval, particularly in Western Europe, that followed the failure in Cuba, Kennedy was principally motivated by a concern that in the wake of the failure in Cuba the Soviets had concluded that he was a weak president.
The president’s brother the attorney general gave him the opportunity to jump-start the summit. Naturally secretive, Robert Kennedy was the kind of man who found it liberating to work behind the scenes. “It would be extremely helpful if the Attorney General of the United States,” wrote his longtime secretary Angie Novella, “would notify his immediate staff of his whereabouts at all times.”54 When Robert Kennedy learned from his press secretary, Edwin O. Guthman, that a former president of the National Press Club claimed a special link to Moscow through a Soviet diplomat, Robert Kennedy wanted to meet this Russian.55 The journalist was the ubiquitous Frank Holeman, Richard Nixon’s longtime press ally, who hoped to make inroads in the Kennedy White House, and the diplomat was his occasional lunch partner, Georgi Bolshakov, an agent of the Soviet military intelligence service (GRU). “My guy wants to meet your guy,” Ho
leman told Guthman before a meeting was scheduled. Later the attorney general and the GRU officer called each other directly.
The Bolshakov-RFK connection became so important to the story of Khrushchev’s relationship with John F. Kennedy that its origins are worth some attention. After a few weeks of triangular diplomacy managed by Holeman, the first meeting was set for May 9. Bolshakov’s chief at the GRU station in the embassy had already disapproved of any meeting. The big bosses at GRU headquarters did not want Bolshakov to engage in diplomacy. He was in Washington to spy. It remains unclear whether Ivan Serov, whom Khrushchev had partially rescued by shifting him to the leadership of the GRU after Mikoyan successfully provoked his ouster from the KGB in December 1958, talked to his patron about this probe beforehand. In any case, Bolshakov was told not to press on with this meeting. What he did next he did on his own.
The Kennedy brothers also worked outside channels to make this meeting happen. They did not reveal to any of the statutory members of the president’s foreign policy team their scheme to sound out Khrushchev’s plans before the summit. The president’s patrician assistant for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy, later philosophically described the Bolshakov channel as among “the unsharables” kept between the brothers. Although hired by Kennedy to coordinate foreign policy within the White House, Bundy was cut out of the Bolshakov initiative. So too was Dean Rusk, the new secretary of state. As a result, the country’s three most experienced Kremlinologists were left in the dark: Llewellyn Thompson, who had agreed to stay on as Kennedy’s ambassador to Moscow; Charles Bohlen, now ensconced at the State Department as chief Soviet specialist in residence; and George Kennan, who had returned to government after an eight-year hiatus to serve as Kennedy’s man in Belgrade.56 Bundy later concluded that the Kennedy brothers had been too clever by half in cutting out all these potential sources of advice just to maintain the secrecy of the Bolshakov channel.57
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