Khrushchev believed there were reasons why an agreement with the Germans was possible. He had long understood that economic ties could bring the two countries much closer together. He remembered fondly the extensive economic cooperation between Weimar Germany and Stalinist Russia that took its name from the Treaty of Rapallo signed by these two states in 1922. More recently West German trade with the Soviet Union had increased, and in 1962 the Soviets had turned to German manufacturers to buy steel piping. “We really are partners,” Khrushchev explained to his Kremlin colleagues on June 13. “The Americans, the British, the French, they are the rivals.” Khrushchev believed that a special relationship with West Germany would be possible. “Rapallo is advantageous for both the Federal Republic and the Soviet Union.”120
Khrushchev instructed the Foreign Ministry to prepare directives for negotiations with Adenauer’s representatives. It would be up to them to decide whether to come as an official delegation or as Germans on a holiday in the Soviet Union, as Kroll had done in the past. Khrushchev told his colleagues that he expected the Americans to accept closer West German–Soviet relations. They would not be threatened by this development. He anticipated resistance only from the French, who would be upset to lose their special relationship with Bonn.
The removal of the Jupiter missiles in late March, Adenauer’s initiative, and Kennedy’s American University speech all strengthened Khrushchev’s belief that 1963 was the time to make his biggest political investment in détente with the West. In April Khrushchev had said that the Kremlin should be prepared to offer a partial test ban to the Americans and the British at a moment of Moscow’s choosing. Now he believed that moment had arrived.
On July 2, 1963, Khrushchev announced he was prepared to accept a partial test ban treaty. Appropriately enough, he delivered this announcement in a hall in East Berlin. The death of his four-year Berlin strategy had liberated the test ban issue.
Washington and London greeted the announcement with enthusiasm. Both rushed negotiators to Moscow. Within three weeks an agreement was drafted and signed by the three governments. The signature of the treaty marked for many the start of a détente in the Cold War. What Kennedy and Macmillan could not know was that Khrushchev had run out of ideas for additional confidence-building measures. There was no newfound Soviet flexibility on the issue of general disarmament or, if discussion returned to it, Berlin. Even more disappointing would have been the realization that having agreed to a partial test ban, Khrushchev was no less committed to competing with the West for new allies in the third world and the industrialized world. As it had been since 1955, Khrushchev’s goal remained a better climate for this competition, where the weapons would be ideas and the major benefit would be reduced military budgets. That is what he had always meant by peaceful coexistence.
KHRUSHCHEV HAD no illusions about the effect that signing the test ban would have on Soviet relations with Beijing. Besides the Chinese ideological aversion to agreements with the United States, Beijing wanted a nuclear device of its own, which would be more difficult to achieve under international pressure to accept a test ban. But in Khrushchev’s eyes his efforts to improve relations with China since the start of the year had been so unproductive that he had little to lose. In January he had told his colleagues that if Moscow allowed the split with China to continue, what he called pursuing a policy of severance, this would only encourage nationalism in the Communist movement. “Severance is not the Communist route.”121 He believed that the Soviet Union had to show the patience expected of a world leader. “We are paving the way to the future…[and we should] have a tolerant attitude.” Later, in May 1963, when Castro visited the Soviet Union, Khrushchev admitted that he really did not understand the bases of Sino-Soviet tension. “Look, I am asking myself,” he told Castro, “what are the divergences? We are for peace and they are for peace. We are for coexistence and so are they. What’s the problem?”122
He did acknowledge that the Chinese were jealous of the Soviet Union’s preeminent position in the bloc. “They want to be first violin,” said Khrushchev.123 Beijing had to accept that it could not be. Since the Chinese said that they followed Lenin, Khrushchev assumed that any ideological differences should ultimately be resolved in Moscow’s favor, the home of Leninism. To his dying day, Khrushchev never appreciated the imperialism inherent in that thinking.
Within days of Khrushchev’s speech in East Berlin proposing a partial test ban, a bilateral meeting between the Chinese and Soviet Communist parties took place in Moscow. The two sides had been hammering out the agenda items for these discussions for months. In the end neither Khrushchev nor Mao was prepared to visit the other’s capital. Their places were taken by Mikhail Suslov and the chiefs of the International Department of the Soviet party’s Central Committee and a Chinese delegation led by Deng Xiao Ping. The talks were a failure. After a five-hour opening speech by Deng, the two delegations immediately began trading barbs. The Chinese attacked Moscow for its “nonrevolutionary” line. Since 1956 the Soviets had indulged in vicious attacks on Stalin at the expense of a clear-eyed assessment of their own mistakes. Deng blamed Khrushchev’s zealous anti-Stalinism for the instability in Eastern Europe in 1956. He criticized Khrushchev’s efforts to reach an accommodation with the United States: “The United States of America is an imperialist country—the Soviet Union is a socialist country. How can these two countries, which belong to two fundamentally different social systems, coexist; how can they exercise general cooperation?…This is completely unthinkable and in this relationship one cannot submit to illusions.”124
He also attacked Khrushchev’s efforts to spread the doctrine of peaceful coexistence to the third world. In 1958 the Cuban Communist Party, the PSP, had opposed Castro’s revolution as “putschism” and “terrorism.” Had matters been left to Anibal Escalante and the other PSP leaders, Cuba would never have become a Communist country. Similarly, the Chinese found fault with Moscow’s handling of the Algerian and Iraqi Communist parties. Under pressure from Moscow, the Algerian party had renounced armed struggle in 1957 “and in doing so wasted its place in the political life of the country.” The Chinese blamed Moscow for the ease with which the Ba’ath Party had taken over Iraq in February 1963. By pushing the Iraqi Communist Party to cooperate with Qassim, Moscow had effectively defanged the movement, laying it open to the Ba’athists.125
Although not a complete surprise, the talks opened a more difficult chapter in Sino-Soviet relations. “The time has come to publicly cross swords with the Chinese,” Khrushchev announced at one of the first Kremlin meetings after the Chinese delegation had returned home.126
I N THE EIGHT MONTHS since the end of the Cuban missile crisis there had occurred in international politics a seismic shift, largely caused by a change in Khrushchev’s international strategy. In midsummer 1963 the Soviet Union was on better terms with the United States than it was with the People’s Republic of China. With a series of unilateral gestures, Khrushchev had removed the Berlin issue from the top of the international agenda, where he had placed it in November 1958. Faced with a series of setbacks at home and abroad in the spring of 1963, he had chosen the path of concession and discussion, instead of tension. He had allowed himself to change his mind, and the world was a safer place, though the Kremlin leader now had to worry that the Soviet bloc seemed to exist more in theory than in fact.
CHAPTER 21
LEGACY
KHRUSHCHEV BEGAN TO THINK of his own mortality after Frol Kozlov suffered a major stroke in the late spring of 1963. Kozlov was a controversial figure who had once been viewed as a possible successor to Khrushchev. But it was the fact that this comparatively young man—he was fifty-five to Khrushchev’s sixty-nine—had fallen ill that concerned Khrushchev. “I’ve gotten old,” he admitted to his son sometime after hearing the news, “and the rest of the Presidium are old enough to retire as grandfathers. I was forty-five when I joined the Politburo. That’s the right age for matters of state; you have the st
rength, and there’s lots of time ahead of you.”1
Khrushchev had been tossing around the idea of retirement for some time. After his first trip to the United States in 1959 he had shocked his colleagues by revealing that he did not intend to follow Lenin’s and Stalin’s examples by dying in office. “[I]t is impossible to use a person until he is worn out,”2 Khrushchev had said. “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?”3
But the robust sixty-nine-year-old was not thinking in 1963 of an imminent departure. He told his son that he planned to continue in his job until the Twenty-third Party Congress, expected in a little over two years. Besides the détente with Kennedy, Khrushchev had launched major domestic economic reforms in 1963. Earlier in the year he had rammed through a massive reorganization of Soviet industry over the objections of Mikoyan, who had oppposed dismantling the republic-level industrial groups in his native Caucasus.4 In particular, Khrushchev had reason to want to stick around long enough to see some returns on the huge investments that he had ordered in the chemical industry. There was a messianic quality to Khrushchev’s crusade for chemicals that mirrored how he had oversold the importance of growing corn in the mid-1950s. A first-rate Soviet chemical industry would create reservoirs of fertilizer to improve crops and to increase Soviet textile production by substituting man-made for natural fibers.
For the first time since 1955, Khrushchev now lacked a similar sense of mission in foreign policy. Sino-Soviet relations had displaced the superpower struggle as the Kremlin’s most difficult international problem. In his relations with the United States Khrushchev had reached a plateau of sorts by the fall of 1963. On September 30 the United States had tried to open a new back channel to Khrushchev. Kennedy had recommended to the Kremlin that his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, start meeting privately with Colonel G. V. Karpovich, an officer at the KGB station in Washington.
The Salinger-Karpovich channel had not yet been established when events in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, gave Khrushchev a shocking reason to confront the finality of human mortality. Upon hearing of Kennedy’s assassination, Khrushchev believed that a conspiracy had killed the president. The KGB tried its best to find evidence that the right-wing militarists and oil barons had been responsible but could do no more than present the Kremlin with disconnected, uncorroborated fragments of information. Khrushchev refused to let the lack of evidence get in the way of a confirmation of his darkest suspicions of American society. Ten years of negotiations and some summitry with Americans had not altered his fundamental belief in the existence of two Americas. Kennedy represented the better America, which, though anti-Soviet, was prudent, mildly progressive, and antiwar. The other America was bellicose and profiteering. Khrushchev considered the latter his enemy and was now convinced that this sinister America had killed Kennedy.
He showed his concern about the loss of the youthful American leader by appearing at the U.S. Embassy to sign a book of condolences. Mikoyan went to the funeral to represent Khrushchev and the entire Soviet Union and to meet the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson.
The loss of Kennedy was yet another reminder for Khrushchev of the fragility of his apparent successes abroad. In late 1963 and early 1964 he tried once again to improve relations with the People’s Republic of China but with little success. The Chinese reopened border disputes with Russia that preceded the foundation of the two Communist states. In January 1964 Khrushchev sent his own version of an encyclical to most world leaders, calling for the peaceful settlement of boundary disputes. China simply ignored it, and no negotiations followed between the Chinese and the Soviets on their dispute. Moscow also witnessed a cooling of relations with North Vietnam, which not only was following China’s lead but disliked Moscow’s increasingly hands-off approach to the struggle for communism in Southeast Asia.
Khrushchev continued to travel the world in search of friends. In May he attended the inaugural ceremony for the Aswan Dam project in Egypt, and in June he went to Scandinavia. The ceremony in Egypt, which symbolized the positive achievements of the Soviet-Egyptian relationship that Khrushchev had worked hard for almost a decade to create, also brought reminders of the failures of Soviet policy in the region. Khrushchev found himself seated next to Iraq’s anti-Communist leader Abdel Salam Aref, and it was all he could do to maintain his composure. In their private sessions with the Egyptians, the Soviet delegation raised the awkward subject of Nasser’s persecution of Egyptian Communists. “How is it possible,” asked the Soviets, “to pursue a policy of anticommunism in a country that is building socialism?” Nevertheless, Khrushchev returned from the Middle East hopeful that the Soviet Union could continue to broaden its influence in that region. He reported to the Presidium on May 26 that Nasser seemed prepared to help Moscow with Aref. Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko, who accompanied Khrushchev, noted that Nasser was “a serious political figure,” who could be “unyielding on a number of issues, but he tried to understand our views.” Still, Khrushchev cautioned that future gains depended on the Kremlin’s being smarter about how it responded to Arab nationalism. Local Communists, like the Syrian Communist leader Khalid Bagdash, railed against Arab unity, which they saw as antithetical to a socialist revolution. Although Moscow was sympathetic to these concerns about nationalism, Khrushchev brought back from this trip a sense that Moscow needed to be more pragmatic in the region. “[B]y keeping to this slogan [against Arab nationalism],” he said, “we will not find our way to the Arabs…. There is no reason we should be against Arabunity. This issue should be developed.” The Soviet leader was convinced that Moscow should consider getting more involved in the Middle East. He believed that Nasser was a true progressive and that there were others like him in the region. Ideology was not the only attraction. Khrushchev’s competitive instincts were flowing, and he came home ready to suggest that the Kremlin should find additional weapons systems to sell to the Arabs. If Moscow did not do more in the Middle East, he cautioned his colleagues in the Presidium, “the Chinese might interfere [there].”5
The Chinese were not Khrushchev’s greatest political threat, however. While he was abroad, a group of his Presidium colleagues began to coalesce against him. By all accounts, neither the sterile relationship with Washington nor the confrontation with Beijing had inspired this opposition. Khrushchev had lost favor because of his increasingly authoritarian management of the Kremlin.
Education, specifically the number of years Soviet children had to spend in grade school, was the issue that brought the resistance to him out in the open. Khrushchev, who equated general education with freethinking, wanted to limit the standard Soviet education to eight years. In 1958 he had spearheaded an overhaul of Soviet education. To eliminate those he called loafers, Khrushchev had called for adding an extra year to the ten-year Soviet system of primary and secondary education.6 The extra year was largely devoted to vocational education. Soviet students were sent to factories two days a week to prepare them for manual labor. Six years later Khrushchev believed the experiment a failure. But instead of deciding to eliminate the vocational training and add an extra year of science and liberal arts, Khrushchev sought to reduce the number of hours that Soviet students spent in the classroom.
This scheme stirred deep opposition in the Presidium. The discussion, which started in December 1963 and lasted until July 1964, pitted men like Mikoyan, who believed that the Soviet Union needed more scientists to be able to compete with the West, against Khrushchev, who feared the expansion of the country’s intelligentsia.7 It was in discussions like these that Khrushchev bared an orthodox commitment to Marxism-Leninism and a deep anti-intellectualism. “Those who support the idea of an eleven-year education system,” he said in December 1963, “support a politically wrong trend.”8 He wanted young Soviets to start working after grade eight. “The main thing,” said Khrushchev in restating his familiar argument, “is to inure [the
student] to work.”9 Despite his insistence, as of July 30 the leadership could not agree on what to do.
Trouble began for Khrushchev in August, when he unilaterally announced the elimination of the eleventh grade in Soviet schools.10 With the Presidium still undecided on educational reform, his action represented a cavalier disregard of Soviet ritual. Even at the height of his power, just before the Cuban disaster, he had shown respect for the principle of decision by majority vote in the Presidium. The forces arrayed against Khrushchev were too strong in 1964 for him to be forgiven this indiscretion.
THE PLOT BEGAN with the man who stood to gain the most by removing Khrushchev, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. A onetime protégé of Khrushchev’s who had also been born in the Ukraine, Brezhnev was a decade younger than the first secretary and had grown in stature since becoming Soviet president in 1960. Brezhnev shared Khrushchev’s fascination with missiles and space, and for some time Brezhnev had been allowed to give reports to the Presidium on those matters. Most recently he had vowed that the Soviet Union would be second to none in space. By his side was Nikolai Podgorny, a member of the Presidium since 1960. Like Brezhnev, Podgorny had also benefited from Khrushchev’s patronage.
Needing the support of the Soviet secret services, Brezhnev turned to Aleksandr Shelepin, a secretary in the Central Committee who until 1961 had been chairman of the KGB and retained special ties there. Shelepin required no persuasion to sign on. Unlike colleagues who were dissatisfied with Khrushchev because of his domestic failures, Shelepin was determined to oust Khrushchev because of his foreign policy maneuvers, especially the fledgling détente with the United States. Shelepin believed that compromise with the United States was at best temporary, and Khrushchev’s vision of a general abandonment of the military competition seemed to him a pipedream. He was also uncomfortable with Khrushchev’s efforts to mold Soviet foreign policy to fit the promotion of nationalist regimes in the third world. He did not share Khrushchev’s optimism that postcolonial regimes would always serve Moscow’s interest of spreading communism far and wide.
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