The international position of the USSR when Khrushchev rose to the top could hardly have been worse. It controlled an expensive and restive empire in Eastern Europe, which had already started to splinter, and Stalin’s errors had pitted once-friendly Yugoslavia against Moscow. On the positive side of the socialist balance sheet was the Kremlin’s strong relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Yet nationalistic tensions between Beijing and Moscow lay not far beneath the surface. Beyond Eastern Europe, China, and its allies in Southeast Asia, Moscow had few friends. Looking westward, the Kremlin faced a united and self-confident enemy. In 1955 the United States was far ahead of the Soviet Union militarily and economically. Washington led a military alliance that was both well aware of Soviet inferiority and eager to exploit it for diplomatic gains.
Khrushchev had refused to accept the world on these terms. From the moment he stepped onto the world’s stage, he sought to alter the status quo. Enthralled by his colorful gestures and barnyard humor, observers of this impetuous and erratic man generally missed the strategist within. For all the bluster, there was a consistency of goals. Over the course of his time at the top Khrushchev sought to avoid war with the United States while seeking American respect, to shore up existing socialist states while cultivating new allies abroad, and to provide a better standard of living to his own people while building a sufficient strategic force. Convinced of the benefits of Marxism-Leninism, he blamed his country’s difficulties abroad on Stalin’s excesses and the military competition with the West. Khrushchev imagined a grand settlement with the United States that would demilitarize the Cold War, allowing him to redirect resources to the Soviet civilian economy and restrict the East-West struggle to the ideological and economic level, where he was convinced history would ultimately prove him right.
What varied was his strategy for attaining this settlement. Bobbing as he so loved to do in his pool at Pitsunda, Khrushchev alternated between trying to seduce the West and scheming to scare it. The carrots he offered were promises of mutual disarmament, a comprehensive test ban, and a worldwide nonaggression pact. When these concessions, as he saw them, did not work, he sought to get his way by impressing Washington with the dangers inherent in Soviet power.
He never wavered in his belief that because of the overwhelming nature of U.S. power, the key to attaining his goals was to alter Washington’s behavior. Khrushchev had known little about foreign policy when he reached the top rung of the Kremlin ladder. What he saw in the 1950s was that American leaders were relying increasingly on nuclear weapons as both a means of defense and an instrument of influence in world affairs. President Eisenhower understood that the cost of defense could cripple the country’s economy and introduced the new look strategy, which relied on nuclear forces as a cheaper deterrent than large armies. Meanwhile the combative John Foster Dulles hailed the political utility of nuclear weapons. U.S. strategic power—or, as Dulles called it, this position of strength—could be used to compel the Soviets to accept concessions, to roll back the gains Stalin had made in World War II.
Having learned from his American tutors that under the right circumstances nuclear weapons could be source of tangible, usable political power, Khrushchev made himself synonymous with playing the nuclear card. “The purpose,” he explained to his colleagues in 1957, “is to give a rebuff, to steer to détente.”37 Adopting what political scientists call coercive diplomacy, Khrushchev sought to make the United States fear the consequences of not accepting Soviet positions in international negotiations. The stick that he wielded in 1956, 1958, 1960, 1961, and for the last time in 1962 was the threat to use nuclear weapons unless Soviet interests were respected.
Ultimately none of his strategies resulted in immense gains for the Kremlin. The mistrust between the superpowers was too great to permit the United States to accept disarmament on Khrushchev’s terms. He did not help his cause by resolutely opposing any real verification regime. This too was a by-product of his fear of the United States. He was convinced that allowing on-site inspectors or overhead reconnaissance would give the United States the chance to look behind the curtain of Soviet power and, like the protagonists in the Wizard of Oz, see the true weakness of the Kremlin. Although both Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy would have agreed to verifiable arms reductions, neither was prepared to submit to the U.S. Senate a treaty that rested on blind faith. Moreover, even though Khrushchev did offer cuts in Soviet conventional forces, they were never enough to remove completely the threat posed to West Germany by the frontline Soviet divisions in the western USSR. Although Khrushchev promised a nonaggression pact, this could not bridge the gap in trust, especially as it had been enlarged by the Soviet crackdown in Hungary in 1956. The West was unprepared to trade its advantage in strategic weapons for a piece of paper. Similarly, the pursuit of a comprehensive test ban treaty foundered on the issue of verifiability.
Khrushchev’s political antennae also failed him in his efforts to negotiate a way out of the Berlin impasse. Khrushchev was never prepared to allow the West to retain its special relationship to West Berlin. Although he had witnessed the first Berlin crisis and had blamed Stalin for so clumsily maneuvering the Soviet Union into an unnecessary and futile crisis, he discounted the lingering effects of that crisis on Western politicians. From 1948, whether Moscow liked it or not, the defense of West Berlin became a barometer for U.S. commitment to European security. Khrushchev never accepted that this was one concession that Washington could not deliver short of war.
The explosion of nationalism in the third world made whatever trust that was possible between the superpowers even more elusive. Khrushchev and his American rivals were hostages to fortune in these countries where a few planeloads of weapons and one charismatic leader could install new regimes. One of the great myths of the Cold War was that the superpowers orchestrated events in these regions through handmade puppets. Qasim, Castro, Nkrumah, Touré, Lumumba, Souvanna, and Nasser were nobody’s puppets. Indeed, most skillfully played the superpowers off each other. Nevertheless, Washington and Moscow competed for these leaders’ favor, and the competition consistently undermined any gains made in discussions over the main issues dividing the superpowers in Europe or at home.
Khrushchev’s resort to coercive diplomacy was equally problematic. He managed to transform the years between 1958 and 1962 into the most dangerous period of the Cold War without achieving a grand settlement. The threat of nuclear war was useful only if your enemy truly believed you were suicidal. Instead, with the United States aware of its strategic advantage, these standoffs turned into games of chicken that Khrushchev always called off first.
It was Khrushchev’s propensity to risk war to make peace that bedeviled U.S. presidents. Eisenhower was self-confident enough to dismiss these challenges. He refused to get into a lather over Berlin in November 1958 or to bemoan a collapse of the Paris summit in 1960. Until the Cuban missile crisis, the younger, less tested Kennedy was more vulnerable to Khrushchev’s pressure tactics. More than Eisenhower he worried about the possibility of miscalculation in the nuclear era and was concerned about the impression that his actions made on foreign leaders, especially those in the Kremlin. This was what prompted him to ask Llewellyn Thompson in August 1962, “Do you think that the Cuba thing and the fact that we hadn’t gone into Laos might have given him the impression that we were going to give way in Berlin?”38 In retrospect we can see that the answer was no. Khrushchev wanted the U.S. president to stand up to the Pentagon and the CIA, which the Soviet leader believed were at the center of U.S. militarism. But if the president was weak—and he assumed until the Cuban missile crisis that Kennedy was weak—Khrushchev believed that there was no alternative but to use nuclear threats to move the Americans in the right direction. “We are not afraid of German aggression…. Germany that will not start a new war. The most dangerous[country] is America,” he had asserted before heading off to Vienna in a foul mood in the spring of 1961.39
Would any successor to S
talin have handled the problem of Soviet strategic inferiority the same way? Certainly, there were structural reasons for why the Soviet Union was so far behind the United States. The Soviet command economy began a slow death spiral in the late 1950s that would be delayed only by the dramatic increase in the price of oil in the 1970s. But Khrushchev made critical decisions that further widened the military power gap and deepened Moscow’s economic difficulties. He chose to implement a Soviet new look policy without building as many rockets as Moscow could afford; he decided not to build aircraft carriers, thus excluding the possibility of rapidly and reliably projecting force into other regions of the world; he repeatedly cut the number of Soviet citizens under arms. Yet at the same time that he consciously reduced the defense burden on the Soviet civilian economy, Khrushchev increased the number of Soviet commitments overseas, providing weapons at cost or below to Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Laos, North Vietnam, Congo, and Cuba. The effect was to make him increasingly reliant on the appearance rather than the reality of Soviet power.
This strategy, though dangerous, was not entirely barren. By 1960 Khrushchev’s nuclear arsenal did include a handful of missiles that could reach the U.S. homeland. His willingness to brandish those missiles raised an uncomfortable uncertainty in the minds of Western politicians who could not take the risk that Khrushchev would finally act on his impulses. It did not get him the deal he wanted on West Berlin or an arms reduction agreement, but it did deter John Kennedy from considering an invasion of Cuba at the height of the Cuban missile crisis and forced the U.S. president and his successors to accept the existence of East Germany. The Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement of 1962 held, and the Castro regime no longer had to be concerned about a U.S. military intervention. Never again would the West attempt to compel the Soviets to accept general elections in a reunified Germany as a precondition for a European security agreement. By the 1970s NATO was acknowledging the existence of East Germany and the United States had joined the countries of Europe, including the USSR, in signing the Helsinki Agreement, which created a standard for the protection of human rights throughout the continent.
When Khrushchev abandoned coercive diplomacy in April 1963, the world witnessed what it thought was a superpower détente. Khrushchev delinked the stubborn Berlin question from progress in arms control and accepted a partial test ban. In July 1963 Kennedy said that “a shaft of light cut into the darkness.”40 The reason for the enthusiasm was an underappreciation of Khrushchev’s basic objectives and an exaggeration of his willingness at any time since 1958 to use force to get his way.
The costs to Khrushchev of his pressure tactics had been very high. His rhetoric and his actions served to confirm worst-case assumptions about his objectives, spurring a great American military buildup and complicating the efforts of U.S. presidents to seek some form of coexistence. The specter of the Soviet Union’s backing down from its threats three times in five years betrayed a weakness in the Kremlin that at the very least emboldened the Chinese to take their own path in international affairs. At home these reverses undermined Khrushchev’s credibility as a leader.
Ironically, Khrushchev disappeared just as he had decided to abandon pressure tactics altogether for patient diplomacy. Mikoyan’s lament in those final hours of Khrushchev’s leadership that he was being forced out when he was finally good at foreign policy suggests that had he been given time, Khrushchev might have come closer to achieving his wider goal of demilitarizing the Cold War. His successors accelerated the Soviet defense buildup to prevent a humiliation like the Cuban missile crisis from ever happening again. Given the dynamics of the Cold War and the nature of Khrushchev’s personality, however, it is equally likely that had he stayed, something might have triggered yet another Berlin ultimatum in 1965 or 1966. Moreover, it is hard to imagine that despite his uneasiness with the North Vietnamese, he would have countenanced Lyndon Johnson’s expansion of the war in Vietnam without again seeing Soviet prestige at risk and then trying to do something about it.
What is indisputable is that once Khrushchev abandoned brinkmanship in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, the superpower struggle became more predictable and less dangerous. From 1963 to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Beijing, Havana, and Hanoi were the main centers of international change. In 1973 the Soviet Union and the United States found themselves in a tense but very short standoff over the Middle East, but Moscow’s sense of vulnerability and alarm was then much less than in 1956. Once Khrushchev was gone, no Soviet leader would again make the argument that to get peace, one had to go to the brink of war. Until Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War, no Soviet leader—arguably no leader of any country—would so hold the world in his thrall.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would have been impossible without the kind assistance of many colleagues, friends, and institutions. We are very grateful for the assistance of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, which facilitated the first Russian publication of the minutes of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Khrushchev period and made it possible for Naftali to assist Fursenko, the editor in chief, and the Russian team in annotating those documents. And without Aleksandr Fursenko’s perseverance, these materials would never have been declassified. Philip D. Zelikow, then the director of the Miller Center, was a stalwart supporter of our work, as were the members of the center’s Governing Council; the director of the Miller Center Foundation, B. Wistar Morris; Professor Zelikow’s chief of staff, Robin Kuzen; Tim’s administration assistant, Lorraine Settimo and Olga Riukin, who assisted with the translations for the Kremlin Decision-making Project. In addition, we wish to thank Ambassador Piotr V. Stegni, formerly the director of the archive of the Russian Foreign Ministry, for his assistance and Natalia Y. Tomilina, the director of the Russian Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), and her colleague Mikhail Prozumenshikov. We both benefited enormously from the research that we were able to do at these fine Russian institutions. Interviews were also an important part of our work and we wish to make special mention of the patient assistance of Sergo Mikoyan and Nikita Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, his daughter Rada and his grandson Nikita Khrushchev, Jr. We are also grateful to Ernest R. May, who with Philip Zelikow invited us to participate in Harvard University’s Suez project, and to Vitali Afiani, a superb archivist, formerly of RGANI and now at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Finally, we wish to thank our agent, John Hawkins, and our devoted editor and friend, Drake McFeely, and his able young editor, Brendan Curry, at Norton.
Aleksandr Fursenko wishes to single out V. N. Jakushev, A. S. Stepanov, and S. N. Mel’chin at the Archives of the President of the Russian Federation; his fellow editors of the Archives of the Kremlin series, A. K. Sorokin and V. A. Smirnov, and his colleagues B. V. Anan’ich. R. Sh. Ganelin, N. L. Korsakova, L. M. Mlechin, V. V. Noskov, V. N. Pleshkov, and V. O. Pechatnov. In the United Kingdom he received the kind assistance of Peter Brown and Jane Lyddon at the British Academy, Lawrence Freedman, and Christopher Andrew. Aleksandr’s research in France benefited from the assistance of Maurice Aymard and Sonia Colpart at La Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Maurice Vaisse, and Jean Soutou and Isabelle Neuschwander at the Archives Nationales. Timothy Naftali also wishes to thank Zachary Karabell, Bart Aronson, Fred Logevall, Marc Trachtenberg, Irv Gellman, Mel Leffler, and David Coleman for insightful comments and suggestions on the manuscript. He also thanks his mom and Robert Feldman, Kent Germany, Gerry Haines, Hope Harrison, Serge and Debbie Lacroix, Gloria Naftali, Jean René Scheffer, Gordon Knowles, Neil Hultgren, Matt Waxman, and Andy Tompkins for their friendship. This book would not have been possible without Tim’s muse, Laura Moranchek, who remained a dear friend and helpful editor in spite of all the challenges. In addition, he received assistance from the expert staff at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, the Nixon Library and Birthplace, the National Archives facility at Laguna Niguel, the Manuscripts and Ar
chives Division of the Library of Congress, the Hoover Institution, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. In particular, he wishes to thank David Haight and Kathleen A. Struss at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Regina Greenwell at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Robert Hamilton at the Roy H. Thomson Archive, Tom Blanton at the National Security Archive, Maryrose Grossman at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and Joseph Lelyveld for allowing him to use the New York Times Archive.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Jerrold L. Schecter with Vyacheslav V. Luchkov, ed. and trans., Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), p. 3.
2. The original transcripts of Khrushchev’s recorded reminiscences are preserved at Columbia University’s Low Library. Between 1970 and 1990 three edited volumes of English translations appeared. Strobe Talbott translated and edited the first two, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970) and Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). Schecter with Luchkov translated and edited the third volume, Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes.
3. Schecter, ed., loc. cit., p. 3.
4. Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 32–33.
CHAPTER 1: RED STAR ASCENDANT
1. Interview (1963), Sir William Hayter, NBC Death of Stalin Collection, Hoover Institution. This comes from research materials prepared for a television documentary marking the tenth anniversary of Stalin’s death.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid. Clifton Daniel, “Bulganin Is Premier as Malenkov Resigns, but Khrushchev Is Viewed as Real Leader; Moscow Shake-Up; Malenkov Avows Guilt for Shortcomings in Agriculture,” New York Times, February 9, 1955.
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