The particular fear of Germany was largely a relic of World War II and the inability of Khrushchev and many others of his generation to realize how much Europe, including Germany, had changed after 1945. West Germany’s chancellor of those years, Konrad Adenauer, while violently anti-communist, was also not interested in provoking conflicts and wanted much better trade relations with the Soviet Union than his American allies would permit. The immediate irritation for the Soviets was West Berlin, mainly because it created a threat to the GDR, where most of the Soviet Union’s troops facing NATO were stationed. To make matters worse, no final resolution of the outstanding issues of the occupation or any other matter concerning Germany was possible without including Berlin, an issue on which Soviet and American views were completely incompatible. A solution of sorts came in 1961, as East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht urgently requested Khrushchev for help in yet another economic crisis that led to a big increase in emigration from the east. Ulbricht suggested that somehow they close the border and Khrushchev responded with the idea of building a wall around West Berlin. The result was the Berlin Wall, put up in the early hours of August 13, 1961. Khrushchev was careful to make it clear that the access of the soldiers of the Western powers would not be affected, thus eliminating the incentive for Kennedy to respond with anything other than condemnation and more aid. Though it was a huge blow to the prestige of the socialist bloc, the wall defused the Berlin problem for the next decade.
European affairs had been at the center of Soviet attention for most of the time since 1945, but as the years passed China and what became known as the Third World came to take a larger place. The Third World meant the vast majority of the globe that in 1945 was still part of one or another European empire or (in the Western hemisphere) dominated by the United States. It was here that the Soviet Union was gradually able to challenge the West with increasing success until the 1970s. From the outset the Soviet leadership had assumed that sooner or later they would find allies in the colonial world, and their own policies in Central Asia were, in their minds, an anti-colonial revolution. The first Comintern Congress in 1919 had proclaimed the alliance of Communists and anti-imperialist nationalists, but the policy had little impact outside of China, and there it seemed a failure after 1927. The Second World War changed all that, and not only in China but also with its neighbors. In most other colonized countries the Communists were not strong, but virtually everywhere nationalist movements grew much more powerful than they had been before the war, which so weakened Britain and France that neither could put up much resistance. In 1948 the centerpiece of the British Empire, India, became independent, and by the 1950s it was clear that Britain would have to give up its empire sooner or later. France fought on in Indochina until 1954 and then in Algeria, but there too it went down to defeat. A whole host of new states came into being. Stalin had been skeptical of these new states, but his successors were not so wary.
The first Third World country that came into the good graces of the Soviet Union was Nasser’s Egypt in 1955. After some debate among the leadership Khrushchev agreed to supply Nasser with tanks and planes, marking the USSR’s first major entrance into the Middle East. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Khrushchev supported him during the ensuing crisis, though he had little real leverage over the area. In any case, the week that the Suez crisis peaked, the Soviet leadership was absorbed with a far more serious issue in Eastern Europe. The beginnings of de-Stalinization in the USSR had a prompt echo in Poland, where riots led to the installation of Wladyslaw Gomulka as party leader. Gomulka had been a victim of Stalinist purges in Poland and now steered the country on a course that was loyal to Moscow but differed in its social and other policies: most notably, Polish farmers received land on the breakup of the collectives and remained owners until the fall of communism. More serious was the challenge in Hungary. Here the local Stalinists tried to hang on, provoking the collapse of the regime, and the emergence of a new leader in Imre Nagy. Nagy announced that Hungary would have multi-party elections and leave the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev, hesitated. They had moved troops near Budapest, but only after days of indecision did they finally move in and suppress the revolt, installing Janos Kadar as the new party leader. Nagy was taken to Rumania and executed.
After 1956, relations with all the socialist brothers became increasingly complicated. Kadar retained collective farms but permitted and even encouraged small businesses. Both Poland and Hungary (after initial repression) permitted oppositional opinion to express itself in ways that were generally modest but not seen in the USSR or other Communist ruled countries. Other East European countries began to exert much more independence, though not necessarily accompanied by more liberal policies. Albania’s Enver Hoxha had opposed de-Stalinization from the first, and gradually built a Stalinist mini-state featuring crank economic schemes. Rumania became increasingly critical of Khrushchev and Soviet leadership generally, but also moved in a much more authoritarian direction than the USSR, and accompanied this course with super-industrialization schemes that impoverished the country by the 1980s. None of these changes in East Europe, however, were as significant as the growing break with China. Mao Tse-tung was not happy with Khrushchev’s secret speech, claiming later that Stalin was seventy percent good and only thirty percent bad. With some ambiguity, Mao backed the Soviets in Hungary, but relations deteriorated in subsequent years. Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) reflected the growing radicalization of Chinese policy, establishing gigantic communes in the place of Soviet-style collective farms and promoting back yard blast furnaces to make steel. Mao was also increasingly unhappy with Khrushchev’s attempts at peaceful coexistence with the United States, in his mind a fundamental impossibility. Khrushchev, as elsewhere, exacerbated the tension with his clumsy diplomacy, but totally different visions of socialism were at the heart of the dispute. The Soviet Union had spent a great deal of money in aid to China, especially after 1953, and sent many advisers on technical matters. Then in July 1960, Khrushchev ordered them all home. The final split came with the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, for Mao saw the resolution of the crisis as a surrender to the United States. Open polemics in the Chinese press calling Soviet policies “revisionist” made the split obvious for all to see, and continued until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China (1967). Now the Chinese leadership was claiming capitalist restoration in the USSR, and entered into a mad world all of its own. Border clashes only made things worse, but China was too absorbed in its own upheaval to make problems for the Russians. Nevertheless, the only major ally of the USSR in the Cold War was now gone, right at the time when Moscow had finally achieved strategic parity with the United States.
The rivalry with America moved more and more to the center of Cold War politics. Khrushchev continued to make attempts at promoting understanding, symbolized by his trip to the United States in 1959. The Soviet leader saw more than farms, for he toured the country extensively, meeting with Hollywood stars (though he was prevented from seeing Disneyland) and speaking with Eisenhower and other American officials. In spite of the ongoing Berlin problem, there seemed to be some progress, and more meetings were scheduled in Europe. Then in 1960 the Soviet air defense tracked a U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk and shot it down, ending any hope of talks on arms control or easing of tensions for the time being. The construction of the Berlin Wall the next year did not help either, but Khrushchev had much riskier plans in mind.