The Cuban revolution of 1959 had found a lukewarm reception in Moscow. Fidel Castro was not a member of the Cuban Communist Party, which had in fact opposed his movement until the last minute. Castro’s orientation was nevertheless both against American dominance and toward socialism. The many US moves against Cuba, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, covert operations, and threatening talk in the US Congress, convinced the Soviets that they should support him. Khrushchev thought that he could solve two problems at once by placing Soviet missiles in Cuba. One was that he had only a half dozen ICBMs, and the rest of his missiles were not yet big enough to reach the United States from the Soviet Union, leaving his country at a serious disadvantage. The other aim was to provide Castro with a serious defense against a possible invasion. Khrushchev made the decision largely on his own, with little consultation with the Soviet elite. Once the United States detected the missiles by U-2 overflights, Kennedy decided that they had to be removed. The outcome was inevitable, given that the USSR lacked a nuclear arsenal with the size and range of US equipment. Khrushchev had to withdraw, and to make matters worse the one US concession (removing US missiles from Turkey) remained secret. The humiliation was complete, and the internal repercussions were the beginning of Khrushchev’s ultimate fall.
With the arrival of Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader, the bluff and risk-taking came to an end, and the USSR concentrated on building up its military so that the Cuban debacle could never be repeated. Its foreign relations with the United States remained central, but as the Americans were increasingly preoccupied with Vietnam, Brezhnev had a bit of breathing room. He certainly needed it, for the descent of China into the Cultural Revolution was followed in 1968 by crisis in Czechoslovakia. In many ways the “Prague Spring” was a repeat of Hungary with the same outcome: Soviet troops restored the rule of the Communist party in a spirit in accord with Soviet conceptions of socialism. Ultimately it was not Eastern Europe but Vietnam that became the main focus of the Cold War for a decade.
The Soviet leadership had never seen Vietnam as an important front of the Cold War, and regarded the United States as too powerful in Southeast Asia to challenge. To make things worse, the Vietnamese Communists generally supported China after 1956, in part because the policy of peaceful coexistence undermined their desires for a war in the south to reunify their country. Khrushchev largely ignored them. He scarcely had the time to react to the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964, for he was soon out of office, but Brezhnev quickly decided to respond to American escalation of the war by sending large quantities of Soviet aid, including anti-aircraft missiles capable of hitting American bombers, even B-52s, over North Vietnam. Unlike Khrushchev’s quixotic pursuit of Third World nationalist leaders like Nasser or Patrice Lumumba to almost universal failure, the support of North Vietnam led to the biggest defeat for the United States in the Cold War. By 1975, the last Americans had fled from the roof of the US embassy and the Vietnamese Communists ruled in the whole country, even if one devastated by war with a million and a half dead.
The victory of the Vietnamese Communists and the continued alliance with Cuba were certainly successes, even if neither country was large enough to make much difference in the geopolitical balance. In Europe the Soviet position seemed stable. The increasing economic problems in Poland were balanced by the restoration of normal relations with West Germany, the result of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the early 1970s. This rapprochement defused the European Cold War’s most serious conflict – the German problem. Brandt’s new turn was possible because Communism was no longer an issue in Western Europe. The post-war economic boom combined with a solid welfare system produced a generation of satisfied consumers, so far from the desperate masses of the first half of the twentieth century. The West European Communist parties ceased to grow, and the smaller ones faded into obscurity and the larger ones, such as the Italian Communist Party, grew increasingly critical of the Soviets, if more so of China.
Though no one knew it then, the Vietnamese victory was the last Communist success. No Communist revolution materialized from Che Guevara’s attempts in Latin America, and the mildly reformist Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup most contemporaries believed to have been masterminded by the CIA. In Africa, the radical regime of Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopa (1974–1991) was a Soviet ally, but its land reform hardly made it a socialist country in the Soviet sense, and in any case was too poor and small to make much of a difference. Africa, like most of the Third World, evolved in various ways, some countries becoming relatively prosperous capitalist economies, others moving toward even more desperate poverty, but none of them toward socialism as Moscow understood it. The rhetoric of people’s liberation that came from the Soviets rang increasingly hollow.
The first American response to its defeat in Vietnam was to move toward some sort of accommodation, the policy that was known as détente. The Nixon administration, knowing that the Soviets had rough parity in nuclear weapons and weakened by the war in Vietnam, decided to respond to Soviet overtures on arms limitations, the result being the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) limiting strategic weapons. The next stage was the 1975 Helsinki accord that recognized the post-World War II boundaries for the first time and also included generalities about mutual consultations and human rights, the latter soon to become a bone of contention. Discussions continued through the decade, ending finally with SALT II in 1979, limiting the number of delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons.
While limiting the hitherto frenetic pace of construction of nuclear arsenals and thus reducing the risks of annihilation, these moves did not end the Cold War, nor were they intended to. In many ways the more important move was the rapprochement with China that Nixon and Henry Kissinger inaugurated in 1971. With Nixon’s visit to China the next year the Soviet Union found itself facing both China and the United States as rivals. China, of course, was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, with all its murderous effects and political and economic chaos. The US-Chinese arrangement coincided with the rise of the Gang of Four, who ruled China with terror until Mao’s death in 1976. Only then was Deng Xiaoping able to restore some sort of normalcy, so that China was able to provide the United States with important support. During these years the United States and China traded intelligence on the Soviet Union. In public, the United States denounced the exile of Soviet dissidents and restrictions on Jewish emigration in the USSR while remaining silent about the thousands of people who perished in China during the last phases of the Cultural Revolution. The Soviets lambasted US imperialism while allying with Third World countries whose socialism or even nationalism was strictly nominal. Once the United States had played its “China card,” the US-Soviet contest gradually ceased to be a struggle for socialism or democratic capitalism and turned into yet another superpower rivalry.
The aging leadership around Brezhnev did not perceive these deeper shifts in society and politics in the world. It still lived in the world of revolutionary struggles and the building of socialism, even if their tactical orientation meant that revolutions abroad were rarely a priority. Their last move in that struggle was to be fatal, the involvement in Afganistan. The USSR had always had relations with its Afghan neighbor and occasionally provided aid and considered various schemes of meddling in Afghan politics, but the country was too poor, too traditional, and too marginal to the great power conflicts, especially after the end of British India. Then in 1973 a military coup overthrew the monarchy, and five years later it, in turn, fell to another group of army officers with more or less Marxist views. The new rulers passed various measures to destroy “feudalism,” the many traditional customs which they viewed as oppressive, provoking massive discontent. The Soviet leadership took the Afghan government seriously, as Communists moving toward a society on the Soviet model, and the challenge to the regime as another US-sponsored revolt. The latter belief was correct, as the CIA had started to aid the rebels by mid-1979, in part in the hope that the Soviets would be forced to intervene. To make matters worse, the Soviets feared that the Afghan leaders at the moment might go over to the United States or China. Thus on December 27, 1979, Soviet troops seized Kabul, placed a more loyal government in charge, and the invasion began. The United States provided aid for the rebels through Pakistan, thus laying a foundation for the rise of Islamic extremism. This fighting led to massive destruction and casualties in Afghanistan, and the death of some fourteen thousand Soviet soldiers. For the next six years, until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Afghan war was the main issue of the Cold War as well as being an enormous drain on the resources and morale of the USSR. It also speeded up the collapse of the Soviet order.