Khrushchev's Cold War Read online

  KHRUSHCHEV’S COLD WAR

  ALSO BY ALEKSANDR FURSENKO AND TIMOTHY NAFTALI

  “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964

  ALSO BY TIMOTHY NAFTALI

  Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism

  ALSO BY ALEKSANDR FURSENKO

  The Battle for Oil: The Economics and Politics of International Corporate Conflict over Petroleum, 1860–1930 (trans. Gregory L. Freeze)

  KHRUSHCHEV’S COLD WAR

  The Inside Story of an American Adversary

  ALEKSANDR FURSENKO AND TIMOTHY NAFTALI

  Copyright © 2006 by Aleksandr A. Fursenko and Timothy Naftali

  All rights reserved

  First published as a Norton 2007

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Map on frontmatter by John McCausland

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fursenko, A. A.

  Khrushchev's cold war: the inside story of an American adversary / Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-33072-4

  1. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—United States. 2. United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 3. Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich, 1894–1971. 4. Cold War. 5. World politics—1945–1989. I. Naftali, Timothy J. II. Title.

  E183.8.S65F85 2006

  327.4707309'045--dc22

  2006017576

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 RED STAR ASCENDANT

  Chapter 2 GENEVA

  Chapter 3 ARMS TO EGYPT

  Chapter 4 SUEZ

  Chapter 5 TWIN CRISES

  Chapter 6 “KHRUSHCHEY’S COMET”

  Chapter 7 COUP IN IRAQ

  Chapter 8 “A BONE IN MY THROAT”

  Chapter 9 KHRUSHCHEV IN AMERICA

  Chapter 10 GRAND DESIGN

  Chapter 11 THE CRASH HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

  Chapter 12 CASTRO AND LUMUMBA

  Chapter 13 SOUTHEAST ASIAN TEST

  Chapter 14 “HE IS A SON OF A BITCH”

  Chapter 15 IRON RING

  Chapter 16 “THE STORM IN BERLIN IS OVER”

  Chapter 17 MENISCUS

  Chapter 18 “I THINK WE WILL WIN THIS OPERATION”

  Chapter 19 CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

  Chapter 20 “LEAVING FEAR ASTERN”

  Chapter 21 LEGACY

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  INTRODUCTION

  THERE ARE TIMES when the personality of a single human being can rival ideologies, institutions, or social movements as a cause of great international events. The influence of these individuals extends beyond their own cultures, shaping not only other societies but the competition for power among states. In the middle years of the twentieth century the Cold War entered what would be known in retrospect as its most dangerous phase. Five separate crises—Suez, Iraq, Berlin (twice), and Cuba—broke out in succession; each of them seemed capable of producing World War III. For much of that time the world was caught in the grip of intense uncertainty about the future. Leaders and ordinary citizens alike had no sense of how things would work out, whether the two great adversaries, the Soviet Union and the United States, would remain in a limbo defined by no peace and no war or suddenly plunge into a devastating nuclear conflict. There was one leader, however, who stood apart from others in believing in his ability to dictate history.

  On January 8, 1962, in a speech that remained secret for over forty years, Nikita S. Khrushchev announced to his colleagues in the Kremlin that the Soviet position in the superpower struggle was so weak that Moscow had no choice but to try to set the pace of international politics. “We should increase the pressure, we must not doze off and, while growing, we should let the opponent feel this growth.” He adopted the metaphor of a wineglass that was filled to the rim, forming a meniscus, to describe a world where political tensions everywhere were brought to the edge of military confrontation. “Because if we don’t have a meniscus,” he explained, “we let the enemy live peacefully.”

  The United States was the “enemy” that Khrushchev did not want to see “live peacefully.” Was the Soviet leader spoiling for war? The wineglass, Khrushchev explained in his characteristically colorful way, was not to overflow, but so long as the Soviet Union was the weaker superpower, it had to practice brinkmanship to keep its adversary off-balance. A dangerous strategy at any time in history, but in the nuclear age this approach was potentially suicidal. Rarely had a single world leader shown this much hubris. Yet the strategy that Khrushchev announced in 1962 was one that he had been practicing in various forms since he had come to dominate the Kremlin’s foreign policy in 1955. What made Khrushchev believe he could control the consequences of Soviet pressure tactics? Why was he confident that the United States would understand that the wineglass was not supposed to spill?

  President John F. Kennedy, who like the rest of the U.S. government never knew about the January 1962 “meniscus” speech or the strategy behind it, had a very hard time figuring out Khrushchev. All Kennedy had to work with was the abundant evidence of a contradictory man. On the one hand, the Communist Party chief spoke of the need for détente and disarmament. In July 1962 Khrushchev was to agree to the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos, which eased the U.S.-Soviet struggle in Southeast Asia. At home he was credited with having ended Stalinist repression, releasing political prisoners and speaking out against the blood-splattered previous regime. Yet this same leader gave very tough anti-Western speeches and at times seemed prepared to turn the Cold War into a deadly competition. Endlessly boastful about Russia’s weapons of mass destruction, Khrushchev issued ultimatum after ultimatum to force the West to accept his view of how things ought to be in the Middle East, Central Europe, and Latin America.

  No amount of intelligence or regional expertise ever gave American leaders in the Cold War enough insight into the Kremlin to feel confident that they knew what was going on in the corridors of power in Moscow. Were there any debates? What were their objectives? Did they ever consider going to war? What role did the personality of the dictator, in this case Nikita Khrushchev, play in the course of events?

  Khrushchev left a clue to where some of the answers might be found. “I will have to dictate my memoirs without access to archival materials,” he confessed to a tape recorder in the late 1960s.1 With time on his hands after he was deposed as Soviet leader in October 1964, he set about dictating hundreds of hours of recollections. But the result, though fascinating, was a two-thousand-page tangle of historical truth and self-delusion.2 The answers lay elsewhere. “In future generations, anyone who is interested in what I have to say can check up on me,” Khrushchev revealed on tape. “The facts can be found in the minutes and the protocols of meetings.”3

  Those minutes and protocols—the records of decisions and debates—of the Khrushchev era, the “meniscus speech” included among them, remained closed in Moscow until the summer of 2003. Despite the opening of many archives in the first years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Kremlin’s most secret information on Khrushchev was locked away in an archive controlled by the Office of the President of the Russian Federation. Some of this material was shown to the authors in the mid-1990s for a book on the Cub
an missile crisis. Although the material was very good, it did not touch on the other East-West clashes of the Khrushchev era, such as the Suez, Iraqi, and Berlin crises. In 2001 a collection of the Khrushchev protocols and minutes of the Presidium of the Central Committee, the top decision-making organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was transferred from this classified archive to a more accessible archive, where by 2003 it had been fully declassified. The handiwork of the chief of the General Department of the Central Committee, Vladimir Malin, these notes record the debates, decisions, and desires of the Soviet leadership from the year Khrushchev began to shape Soviet foreign policy through crises in Hungary, Suez, Berlin, and Cuba. These dynamic materials depict the hopes and fears of the Kremlin at a time when Western statesmen and journalists assumed that nuclear catastrophe was nigh. Had the CIA been able to steal these materials in 1962, U.S. intelligence and the State Department could have explained to Kennedy the outlines of his adversary’s plans.

  Using these new materials and others found in Moscow, we attempt in this book to re-create how Khrushchev viewed the Cold War and the strategies and tactics he used to fight it. Using the tools of international or comparative history, we will explore his personal responsibility for the international events that ensued. Between 1956 and 1962 the world witnessed crises in the Middle East, Central Europe, and the Caribbean, yet war did not break out between the superpowers. Why was the world so lucky? Then in 1963, while Khrushchev was still in power, the superpowers reached an accommodation of sorts that seemed to preclude more of these crises. In piecing together the international environment in which Khrushchev operated, we also hope to show the process of action and reaction between the superpowers and the independent actions of smaller players that helped determine the way things turned out.

  Unwrapped and declassified, the Khrushchev who emerges was the most provocative, the most daring, and, ironically, the most desirous of a lasting agreement with the American people of any man or woman in the Kremlin. He also was no less cruel or ideological than the other Kremlin leaders who had survived Stalin. Had this complex personality led a small country, his idiosyncrasies would be worthy of some storytelling, but they would hardly be seen as major factors in understanding the course of world events. But Khrushchev stood at the pinnacle of the most powerful adversary ever faced by the United States. The country covered eleven time zones, nearly eight million square miles of territory, with a population estimated at two hundred million. Beyond the Soviet Union, the Kremlin controlled a vast territory of client states. On VE Day in 1945, Soviet armies occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and a third of Germany, including the eastern half of Hitler’s capital, Berlin. By the time of Japan’s surrender on August 14, 1945, Moscow had added a military presence in Manchuria, the northern islands of Japan, and the northern part of Korea. But it all had come at great cost. No military victor had ever suffered as much as the Soviet Union did in World War II. It is estimated that the Nazis destroyed seventeen hundred Soviet towns and seventy thousand villages, in all about a third of the wealth of the Soviet Union.4 The human toll remains beyond reckoning. Battlefield deaths, twice those suffered by Nazi Germany, reached about seven million. The civilian loss was even higher, estimated somewhere between seventeen and twenty million people.

  Yet what might have turned other civilizations inward seemed to propel the Soviet Union onto the world stage. Within five years of the end of World War II, Russia had detonated its own atomic device, threatened its neighbors, assisted a Communist regime’s rise to power in China, and participated in North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. This spectacular case of imperial stretch inspired fear and concern that not only was the Soviet Union’s political influence worldwide, but its military ambitions were boundless.

  Khrushchev was never more than the dark horse candidate to lead this empire. Born to a peasant Russian family in 1894, Nikita Sergeyevich had only four years of formal education before he began a career as a metalworker in the Ukrainian part of Imperial Russia. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the far-reaching Communist Party apparatus provided the means of advancement for the ambitious and energetic in the new state. Through a combination of patronage, street smarts, and talent, Khrushchev steadily rose in the party organizations in Kharkov and Kiev before arriving in Moscow in 1929. He distinguished himself by his hard work, the ease with which he learned the details of agriculture and engineering, and his dedication to Joseph Stalin, who by this point had launched the first wave of the great purge. Stalin noticed Khrushchev and in 1938 sent him back to the Ukraine, where he ultimately oversaw the defense and reconquest of that region in the war with Nazi Germany. In 1949, Stalin brought Khrushchev back to the Kremlin to serve as Moscow party chief. He was by now a full member of the Politburo (later Presidium) of the Central Committee and considered one of Stalin’s inner circle.

  Despite increasing ill health in the early postwar years, Stalin was too paranoid to prepare his lieutenants for the succession. Indeed, in the last months of his life the dictator had sent powerful signals that he was preparing to purge some of the men who were closest to him. When he finally died in March 1953, a few days after suffering a massive stroke at his dacha outside Moscow, the smart money was on others, not Khrushchev, as the heir apparent.

  Once it became clear that this would be Stalin’s final illness, a group of four formed to lead the country. Georgi Malenkov, the most competent administrator, who was the youngest of the quartet, became the head of the formal government, the Council of Ministers. Clustered around him were Lavrenti Beria, a secret policeman with a menacing pince-nez who was chief of the KGB and minister of the interior; the longtime Politburo member and foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov; and, finally, Nikita Khrushchev, who became first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. No one was named general secretary, Stalin’s old title.

  Beria inspired too much fear in his colleagues for any stable power-sharing arrangement to emerge. Either the secret policeman would kill all of them in a single purge, or they would have to eliminate him first. In three months Beria was executed, and Khrushchev played a leading role in the conspiracy that brought him down. For the eighteen months that followed an uneasy alliance remained among the three remaining members of the “collective leadership.”

  This account begins at the moment in 1955 when Khrushchev stepped out of the shadows of the better-known Molotov and Malenkov and walked onto the world stage. His influence over Soviet strategy grew dramatically, and by the early 1960s the Soviet Union had almost returned to the one-man rule of the Stalin era. In that decade Khrushchev also came to hold a commanding position in shaping world events, locked in a struggle for power with two American presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. Ambitious, aggressive, and impatient, Khrushchev intended to leave his imprint on the world. This is the story of how he went about doing it.

  KHRUSHCHEV’S COLD WAR

  CHAPTER 1

  RED STAR ASCENDANT

  BRITISH AMBASSADOR Sir William Hayter was bored, but this was not unusual for a Western diplomat in the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. It was February 8, 1955, the second to last day of a meeting of the Supreme Soviet, the entirely symbolic parliament of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Hayter was in the diplomatic box with other foreign plenipotentiaries expecting nothing new. Part of the job of being a foreign representative in Soviet Moscow involved attending and then summarizing for a foreign ministry or the State Department the interminable public meetings of Communist officials. With luck you might find amid the ideological blather some new shade of meaning. Today, however, Hayter and the rest of the world were to be surprised by the sudden twinkling of a rising Kremlin star.1

  Without any warning, after hours of debate on minor matters, a short bureaucrat named Aleksandr P. Volkov walked to the podium and announced that he had a statement to read from Premier Georgi Malenkov.2 In the two years since Stalin’s de
ath, in March 1953, a new “collective leadership” headed by the relatively dapper fifty-two-year-old chairman of the Council of Ministers, Georgi Malenkov, had emerged in the Kremlin. Alongside Malenkov in this troika were two other powerful Kremlin figures: the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Nikita Khrushchev, and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Rumors of tension within the troika had reached Western diplomats, but no one seriously expected the comparatively young and energetic Malenkov to lose his position.

  Although all the top Kremlin chieftains were sitting on leadership benches behind the dais, Volkov read the statement as if Malenkov were not in the hall. In his statement, the Soviet premier accepted “guilt and responsibility” for the shortfalls in Soviet agriculture—Soviet farms in 1955 could not produce enough to feed the country adequately—and offered his resignation. “Did I really hear what I thought I heard?” the British ambassador asked his neighbor. Hayter, like the others in the box, had followed the rumors of a rift in the Kremlin but had routinely discounted them. Malenkov seemed clever and, at least among Western observers, well respected. It was assumed he could survive any challenge from Molotov and the lesser-known Khrushchev. But this afternoon it was clear that someone else was in control.

  Immediately following the reading of the statement, a resolution accepting Malenkov’s resignation was put to a vote. There was no debate. The thirteen hundred or so delegates in the hall raised their hands in approval as if pulled by one puppet master hidden above. In ten minutes the Malenkov era was history. The meeting then broke for a late lunch. The diplomats had just witnessed an unprecedented transfer of power in the Soviet Union. Vladimir Lenin had died in office in January 1924, as had Stalin a generation later. In 1953 Stalin’s successors had arrested his police chief, Lavrenti Beria and later executed him, but otherwise the leadership structure remained intact. Now, by a show of hands, the Soviet leadership was being changed.