East-West relations
While China and Yugoslavia could challenge the USSR, and the Third World tempted it, the United States could destroy it. The centrepiece of Khrushchev's diplomacy was a campaign for what a later era would label detente. As he saw it, reducing Cold War tensions could undermine Western resistance to Communist gains, tempt capitalists to increase East-West trade and project a more appealing image to the world, while at the same time allowing Soviet energies and resources, which had previously been devoted to the military, to be shifted to civilian uses.
Khrushchev's first major achievement was the Austrian State Treaty, signed in May i955, under which Soviet occupation forces pulled out in return for an Austrian declaration of neutrality. Next came the four-power Geneva summit conference in July 1955. The main issues discussed at Geneva (the German question, European security and disarmament) offered no room for compromise, but Khrushchev's main impression from the meeting, that 'our enemies probably feared us as much as we feared them', would soon encourage him to practise nuclear blackmail so as to play on Western fears.[135] When Israel attacked Egypt, with British and French support, in October i956, Premier Bulganin ominously asked Prime Minister Anthony Eden, 'What situation would Britain find itself in if she were attacked by stronger states possessing all kinds of modern destructive weapons?' Later, after a Suez ceasefire was agreed to, Khrushchev claimed it was the 'direct result' of this Soviet warning.[136] In fact, it was American rather than Soviet pressure that forced Egypt's attackers to cease fire, for Soviet threats had been issued only after that outcome was no longer in doubt.
The Soviet invasion of Hungary, which coincided with the Suez crisis, put Khrushchev's detente campaign on hold. He resumed it in 1957 and 1958, including a series of hints that he would welcome an invitation to come to the United States for informal talks with President Eisenhower, but got little response.[137] In the meantime, the German situation worsened, with East Germany lagging behind West Germany economically, and steadily losing skilled workers and professionals to the West, and with West Germany seeming likely to gain access to nuclear weapons. By the autumn of 1958, recalled Khrushchev's foreign policy adviser, Oleg Troianovskii, West Germany was 'being drawn ever deeper into the Western alliance; the arms race was gathering steam and spreading into outer space; disarmament negotiations were getting nowhere with defence spending weighing more heavily on the economy; East Germany was isolated and under pressure as before; the Soviet Union was being surrounded by American military bases; new military blocs were being set up in Asia and the Middle East'. To make matters worse, Troianovskii remembers 'voices saying ever more distinctly that if the Soviet Union had to choose between the West and China, preference should be given to the latter'.[138]
Khrushchev's answer to practically all these problems was the Berlin ultimatum that he issued in November 1958: If the West did not recognise the German Democratic Republic, Moscow would give it control over access to Berlin, thus abrogating Western rights established in the post-war Potsdam accords. If the West tried forcibly to prevent East Germany from carrying out its new duties, the USSR would fight to defend its ally. This ultimatum was Khrushchev's way offorcing the Western powers into talks, but his 'plan' had several serious flaws. He was not sure exactly where he was going or how to get there. Nor did he realistically assess the obstacles in his way, particularly the shrewdly stubborn German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, the imperiously disdainful French president, Charles de Gaulle, the well-disposed but insufficiently influential British prime minister, Harold Macmillan and the unexpectedly unreliable President Eisenhower.
The Berlin ultimatum produced a deadlock until Eisenhower suddenly invited Khrushchev to visit the United States in September 1959. While
Khrushchev's reception was mixed, the very fact of the visit, the first ever by a Soviet leader, was stunning. But the diplomatic results were also mixed: Khrushchev's only concession was to lift the ultimatum, or rather, not to deny that he had done so. All he got in return was Eisenhower's promise to attend Khrushchev's long-sought summit, which neither committed NATO allies to do so, nor ensured that useful accords would ensue if they did.
After a delay of several months (occasioned by French and German resistance), the four-power summit convened in Paris in May i960, or rather, failed to convene because of a crisis triggered by an American U-2 spy plane's overflight of the USSR on 1 May. Once the summit collapsed, after Eisenhower rejected Khrushchev's demand that he apologise and promise never to do it again, the Soviet leader angrily gave up on Eisenhower and placed his hopes for progress in the next American president, John Kennedy. But their bilateral summit, in June i96i in Vienna, produced a further stalemate, while convincing Khrushchev that Kennedy was weak. 'What can I tell you?' Khrushchev said to Troianovskii after his first negotiating session with Kennedy. 'This man is very inexperienced, even immature. Compared to him, Eisenhower was a man of intelligence and vision.'[139] So that when the summit was followed by an exchange of threats, which further accelerated the flight of East German refugees, Khrushchev dared to authorise construction of the Berlin wall. The wall was a second-best substitute for the more general German solution he had been seeking since i958, but Khrushchev was pleasantly surprised when President Kennedy accepted it, an impression that convinced him that he could pressure Kennedy again, thus setting the stage for the most explosive Cold War crisis of all in Cuba.
In the summer and early autumn of i962, Moscow secretly sent to Cuba missiles capable of reaching the American homeland. The crisis that ensued after Washington discovered the rockets lasted until Khrushchev agreed to remove them in return for an American promise not to invade Cuba, as well as a secret American undertaking to remove US missiles stationed in Turkey. Historians have cited several Soviet motives for the missile deployment: to protect Cuba from an invasion following on from the failed intervention at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961; to rectify what had turned out, despite Khrushchev's atomic boasting, to be a strategic nuclear imbalance in Washington's favour; to prepare a new move to achieve the larger German solution which had eluded Khrushchev since 1958. In fact, all three motives probably played a role, as filtered through the mind of a man who by 1962 was also besieged by agricultural and other troubles at home and was looking for a Cuban triumph that might solve, or at least overshadow, all these problems.[140]
When the crisis was over, Khrushchev declared a kind of victory: it had proved possible, he told the USSR Supreme Soviet on 12 December, 'to prevent the invasion', and to 'overcome a crisis that threatened thermonuclear war'.[141]'He made a show of havingbeen brave,' his Presidium colleague Petr Demichev recalled, 'but we could tell by his behaviour, especially by his irritability, that he felt it had been a defeat.'[142]
136
Veljko Micunovic,
138
Oleg Troianovskii,