Authors: Frederick Taylor
But would this enable the shrewd, aggressive Soviet leader to bully Kennedy into making significant concessions? Or might it mean, on the contrary, that the younger leader, with his plutocratic background, would prove an obedient tool of the Wall Street capitalists, who were sworn to destroy the USSR at any price?
Khrushchev wobbled between these two possible scenarios, even confiding to US Ambassador Thompson before the elections that he wished Nixon would win ‘because I’d know how to cope with him. Kennedy is an unknown quantity.’
Scarcely had Kennedy settled into the White House than the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961—a disastrous, American-supported attempt to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba—ensured that hopes of a bright new morning were dashed. The Bay of Pigs made fools of Kennedy and his advisers, and damaged hopes of impressing developing nations with America’s new, progressive foreign policy. On the other hand, it strengthened Khrushchev, who could posture as the true friend of the Third World and its protector against the interfering, imperialistic Americans.
A few days before the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Soviets managed to put into space, for a little more than an hour and a half, and then bring back to earth, Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin (he was promoted to major in the middle of his flight, which he was not expected to survive). The world was treated to a glorious and peaceful technological achievement of the USSR, contrasted just a few days later with naked American aggression against Cuba. It was, especially for those who failed to recognise the underlying and deeply frightening violence that underpinned the Soviet sphere of influence, a telling comparison. That comparison did not favour the United States.
The Gagarin flight, notwithstanding its apparently innocent public-relations benefits, also underlined the military potential of Soviet
rocketry. Khrushchev himself had, by this point, become drawn into a passionate, quite strange love affair with missile-delivered nuclear weaponry, and the success of his country’s cosmonauts was intimately associated with this. It involved the same powerful technology. The fact that it delivered Gagarin, a winningly handsome, though compact, five-foot-two metallurgist and father of two from a small town near Smolensk for a 108-minute flight above the atmosphere, rather than a nuclear warhead against Pittsburgh, did nothing to diminish its intimidating effect.
Khrushchev spoke publicly of turning out long-range missiles ‘like sausages on an assembly line’. At the end of 1959, he had created the imposing-sounding ‘Rocket Strategic Forces’. A few weeks later, he announced huge cuts in conventional military manpower (throwing up to a quarter of a million Red Army officers out of work), making it clear that he could afford to do this because the USSR’s thermonuclear strength was now unmatchable.
Hence Kennedy’s campaign talk of the threatening ‘missile gap’ between the US and the USSR. The bright young senator from Massachusetts genuinely believed the Russians were pulling ahead. In fact, Khrushchev’s ‘missile’ talk was mostly bluff. His impressive-sounding ‘Rocket Strategic Forces’ consisted of ‘four unwiedly R-7s on a launching pad near Plesetsk in Northern Russia’.
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In one matter, however, Kennedy and his advisers were right to be concerned. Far from making Khrushchev more cautious, the Soviet leader’s grasp of the importance of thermonuclear equality made him more, not less, bold in his foreign-policy calculations. As Khrushchev later boasted to colleagues, he had realised as early as the mid-1950s, when the Soviets still possessed only conventional aircraftborne nuclear bombs, that Secretary of State Dulles’s threats of massive retaliation were also bluff—brinkmanship based on the fact that both sides knew where the brink was and would act accordingly.
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Now that the Soviet Union had ended this monopoly, it could rely on the resulting assurance of mutual destruction to keep the peace while Moscow ‘protected’ the independence of Third World countries and supported ‘national liberation movements’. These movements would chip away at capitalism’s power and draw most of the world into the
socialist camp within the foreseeable future without the need for a decisive war.
Meanwhile, the West would have to ‘respect’ Russia. The short, egotistical Khrushchev, mocked by Stalin as a clown and secretly despised by colleagues for his unsophisticated peasant ways, was keen on ‘respect’. This made him unpredictable. Humiliate Khrushchev, and there was no clear limit to what he might do.
The Russian leader’s public pronouncements did not help. ‘We shall bury you!’ Khrushchev famously declared—meaning not that the Soviets planned to exterminate the other side, but that the East would preside over the last rites of capitalism when the latter finally collapsed in the face of socialism’s unstoppable success. However, the remark could be interpreted in a more worrying way. And Khrushchev was not above crude threats. At official receptions, the normally genial Soviet leader would suddenly cut the small talk, turn on Western diplomats, and remind them exactly how many missiles it would take to destroy their major cities.
Khrushchev was ‘on a roll’. Not only was the East starting to prove its superiority in space and weapons technology, but soon, Moscow assured the world, it would show its economic superiority as well.
There were, of course, flaws in this optimistic view, some more obvious than others. The situation in the GDR was one. All the talk in East German official documents of the ‘crisis of capitalism’ that was supposedly wrecking the USA could not conceal the regime’s increasing concern about its own economic difficulties—and especially the persistent haemorrhaging of its population to the West.
Something had to be done.
Ulbricht was sure he knew what it was. Khrushchev, who had staked a great deal on the inherently superior nature of the socialist system over the capitalist one, and hoped to convince the rest of the world of this, still remained to be convinced.
Two years had now passed since Khrushchev’s original ‘ultimatum’ on Berlin.
The irritatingly persistent Ulbricht kept reminding his protector that in the interim nothing had actually happened. Khrushchev protested
that this was not true, that the West had been ‘shaken up’ by Moscow’s pressure, and so on. He continued to stall, but Ulbricht did not give up. In late January 1961, an East German delegation passed through Moscow. Not unusual, except Khrushchev was only now told that they were on their way to talks with the Chinese in Peking. This was the first he had heard of it.
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Khrushchev’s relations with Chairman Mao Tse-tung had been deteriorating for years, in part due to the Russian’s denunciation of Stalin, who was still officially worshipped in China. Mao had also started dropping none-too-subtle hints that Khrushchev’s talk of coexistence with the West amounted to capitulation. What was the point, the Chinese argued, of all this bragging about the Soviet Union’s nuclear capacity, if Khrushchev did not use it to spread revolution and overthrow capitalism?
In early 1960, Russia had pulled its advisers out of China and scrapped a host of joint projects. A Sino-Soviet truce was patched together in November, but for high-level East German officals to be visiting Peking just two months later was a signal that they were prepared to pursue an independent line. Ulbricht remained on better terms with ‘the great helmsman’ in Peking than was strictly comfortable to Moscow.
What was happening in early 1961 was quite simple. The tail was practising how to wag the dog, and finding that it wasn’t so hard a thing to master. The paradoxical position of the GDR as the Eastern Bloc’s politically weakest but at the same time most strategically crucial element had, back in 1953, led to Ulbricht’s unexpected survival. The 17 June uprising had been mostly due to Ulbricht’s rigidity and stubbornness. This was a fact of which Moscow was fully aware. But it could not afford to get rid of him, for fear of admitting weakness, and thus further destabilising an already unstable situation. Over and over, Khrushchev would continue to assure Ulbricht of his support, and of the GDR’s importance to the Eastern Bloc.
Seven years later, Ulbricht was more firmly than ever in the saddle in the GDR, but the state itself was in increasing trouble. What to do?
Attempts at economic reform, imposed by Moscow during the post-Stalin liberalisation, had been half-heartedly implemented for a while and then slowly reversed.
The results of what amounted to a re-Stalinisation of the economy were predictably poor. The collectivisation of agriculture, which was once more aggressively pursued during the late 1950s, led to food shortfalls and a flight from the countryside (often to the West).
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The radical restructuring of industry, involving further attacks on privately owned concerns, meant that productivity and living standards remained low, despite continual raising of ‘work norms’.
By early 1960, the GDR was suffering from serious shortages of raw materials and quality industrial products as well as food. It was heavily in debt both to the USSR and the West. Far from overtaking West Germany, the GDR was falling farther behind. If such a word were permitted in the Communist economic lexicon—which it was not—then the situation in East Germany could only be described as a recession.
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The exodus from East to West Germany had continued. It had averaged around a quarter of a million a year from 1955, took a dip in 1959 to 143,000, then rose again in 1960 to a little over 199,000. The deterioration of the situation in 1960 itself was a sharp one, with numbers more than doubling from just under 10,000 in February to 20,285 in May. Again it was the skilled workers, the doctors (of whom 20 per cent fled westwards between 1954 and 1961) and nurses and teachers and engineers, who were choosing to go west.
With the propaganda offensive against West Germany increasing in virulence, and the gradual tightening of restrictions on movement between East and West Berlin, a sense was spreading throughout the GDR that can only be expressed by a German word:
Torschlusspanik
—literally, panic that the door will be closed.
Because of these population losses, the GDR was also suffering from a labour shortage. This led Ulbricht at one point, during a private conversation with Khrushchev, to suggest that ‘guest workers’ be brought from the Soviet Union to do the jobs that East Germans were either unavailable for or unwilling to perform. Khrushchev was furious. ‘Imagine how a Soviet worker would feel,’ he snapped back. ‘He won the war and now he has to clean your toilets!’
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The two men had known each other for about twenty years. Khrushchev, a member of Stalin’s inner circle, was senior commissar on the Stalingrad Front in 1942. Ulbricht and other German Communist exiles
were sent there to encourage members of the
Wehrmacht
to surrender, and if possible to join one of the Soviet prisoner-of-war organisations such as the ‘National Committee Free Germany’.
The wartime relationship was an uneasy one. The stocky commissar wasted few opportunities to make jokes at his dour German comrade’s expense. As the staff sat down to enjoy their evening rations after a day’s work in the front line, a grinning Khrushchev would frequently chide him: ‘Oh, Comrade Ulbricht, it doesn’t look as if you have earned your supper today. No Germans have surrendered!’
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Well, if Ulbricht hadn’t brought any Germans to Khrushchev on those dark wartime days, in peacetime he had brought, and kept, many millions of them.
The view of most Russians, including Khrushchev, was that they had fought and vanquished Germany and were entitled to the spoils.
But there were also sound military aspects to the Soviets’ attachment to East Germany. To have that forward position, pointing at the heart of NATO, had always been important, and became harder to give up as weaponry became more advanced. Even more so since April 1959, when the first Soviet medium-range SS3 nuclear missiles were stationed in East Germany, apparently without the knowledge of the GDR government. These were the first nuclear-armed missiles that Khrushchev stationed outside the Soviet Union.
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The Americans quickly suspected, from their own intelligence, that missiles had been introduced to East Germany. Had the CIA but known it, the original deployment had contained a distinct element of dark farce, familiar to armed forces everywhere but to the Russian ones in particular. Not only did the liquid oxygen in the missiles evaporate within thirty days—a common problem with the Soviet rockets of the time
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-but it was found that soldiers had been literally drinking the rocket fuel. ‘Some…replaced the blue-coloured 92 percent ethanol, which was coveted by the troops under the name “the Blue Danube”, with a typical yellow methanol.’
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With potentially disastrous results.
In early 1961, Khrushchev was pursuing a risky twin-track policy. On the one hand, he was presiding over a propaganda campaign to give the impression of overwhelming nuclear force, and backing it up with nuclear braggadocio.
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On the other, he was concerned to set up a
summit with the new American President at which he could reach some peaceful understanding on world problems.
President Theodore Roosevelt had advised statesmen to ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. Khrushchev carried a big stick (or pretended to) but did not speak softly. The result was that the West—and Washington in particular—became genuinely concerned that he might use his weapons of mass destruction. In short, Khrushchev made Kennedy and his people nervous. And distrustful of his intentions.