To justify his bold action on Berlin, he had told his party leadership just four days before his speech that the U.S. had already abrogated the Potsdam accord first, by bringing West Germany into NATO in 1955, and then by preparing to give it nuclear weapons. After outlining his plan of action, he closed the meeting without taking the usual vote of his Presidium on matters of such significance, having sensed the possibility of opposition.
The third source of Khrushchev’s speech was Berlin itself, where the refugee bleed was accelerating. Despite his greater self-assurance in power, Khrushchev knew from personal experience that problems in the divided city could end careers in Moscow. Shortly after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had used the threat of East German implosion to help destroy his most dangerous rival, former secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, after Soviet troops put down the East German workers’ uprising of June 17, 1953.
At the time, Khrushchev had been only a dark horse candidate for Stalin’s succession among the collective leadership that had replaced the dictator. He was a foreign policy neophyte who saw German policy primarily through a domestic political lens. As part of his power play, Beria had led a proxy campaign against Stalinist East German leader Walter Ulbricht and his harsh policy of Aufbau des Sozialismus, or “construction of socialism.” Ulbricht had been countering internal opposition and the growing refugee numbers through escalated arrests and repression, forced collectivization of farms, accelerated industrial nationalization, greater military recruitment, and expanded censorship. The result had been an even greater out-flow of refugees in the first four months of 1953—122,000 East Germans, twice the rate of the previous year. The March 1953 figure of 56,605 was six times larger than a year earlier.
At a decisive party leadership meeting, Beria had said, “All we need is a peaceful Germany. Whether it is socialist or not isn’t important to us,” even if it were “united, democratic, bourgeois and neutral.” Beria wanted to negotiate substantial financial compensation from the West in exchange for Soviet agreement to a neutral, unified Germany. He had even assigned one of his most loyal lieutenants to explore such a deal with Western countries. “What does it amount to, this GDR?” Beria had asked, using the abbreviation for East Germany’s misleading official name. “It’s only kept in existence by Soviet troops, even if we do call it the German Democratic Republic.”
The post-Stalin collective leadership did not heed Beria’s call to abandon the socialist cause in East Germany, but it did demand that he reverse what it called his “excesses.” Following Soviet orders, Ulbricht stopped new agricultural collectives and ended large-scale political arrests; introduced an amnesty for many political prisoners; reduced the repression of religious freedoms; and expanded the production of consumer goods.
Khrushchev took little active part in the debates that produced this abrupt policy change, but he also didn’t oppose the reforms. He then watched the loosening of Stalinist controls inspire an uprising that might have prompted East Germany’s collapse if Soviet tanks had not intervened.
A little more than a week after the uprising, Khrushchev masterminded the June 26 arrest of Beria. Among other charges, Khrushchev argued that Beria had been willing to abandon socialism altogether in a Germany that had been conquered at such great Soviet human cost during World War II. At the party plenary that sealed Beria’s fate and set in motion events that resulted in his execution, fellow communist leaders branded him as an unreliable socialist and called him a “filthy people’s enemy who should be expelled [from the party] and tried for treason.” It called his willingness to give up East German socialism a “direct capitulation to the imperialist forces.”
Khrushchev came away from the Beria experience with two lessons he would never forget. First, he had learned that political liberalization in East Germany could result in the country’s collapse. Second, he had seen that Soviet mistakes made in Berlin could end careers in Moscow. Three years later, in 1956, Khrushchev would grease his own rise to power by renouncing Stalinism’s criminal excesses at the 20th Party Congress. However, he would never forget the contradictory lesson that it was only Stalinist-style repression that had saved East Germany and allowed him to remove his most dangerous adversary.
In the first days following Khrushchev’s Palace of Sports speech, President Eisenhower chose not to respond publicly, hoping, as had happened so often in the past, that the Soviet leader’s bluster would not be accompanied by concrete action. Khrushchev, however, would not be ignored. Two weeks after the speech, on America’s Thanksgiving Day, he transformed his Berlin speech into an ultimatum that would require a U.S. response. He had softened some of his demands to gain his Presidium’s backing in a declaration delivered to the embassies of all interested governments.
Khrushchev backed off from his threat to immediately discard all Soviet obligations under the Potsdam agreement. Instead, he would give the West six months to negotiate with him before unilaterally altering the city’s status. At the same time, he fleshed out his plan to demilitarize and neutralize West Berlin in a manner that would leave it both outside the Soviet bloc and the West.
Khrushchev summoned U.S. correspondents, who were in their Moscow apartments carving Thanksgiving turkeys, to tell them about some knife-work he planned of his own. During his first press conference as premier, evidence itself of Berlin’s growing significance to him, Khrushchev told reporters, “West Berlin has turned into a sort of malignant tumor of fascism and revanchism. That’s why we decided to do some surgery.”
Referring to the text of the twenty-eight-page diplomatic note, Khrushchev told the correspondents that it had been thirteen years since the war had ended, and thus it was time to accept the reality of two German states. East Germany would never give up socialism, he said, nor would West Germany ever succeed in absorbing East Germany. Hence, he was giving Eisenhower a choice: within six months, he could negotiate a peace treaty that would demilitarize and neutralize West Berlin, or Moscow would act unilaterally to achieve the same outcome.
Khrushchev’s son Sergei, then twenty-three years old, worried that his father was giving Eisenhower no escape route from a collision course that could lead to nuclear conflict. He told his father that the Americans would never accept his proposed terms. Although Russians were known as chess players, Sergei knew that in this case—as in so many others—his impetuous father had not thought out his next move.
Khrushchev laughed off Sergei’s fears: “No one would start a war over Berlin,” he said. He told Sergei all he wanted was to “wring consent” out of the U.S. to start formal Berlin negotiations and preempt the exasperating diplomatic process of an “incessant exchange of notes, letters, declarations and speeches.”
Only by setting a tight deadline, Khrushchev told his son, could he move both sides toward an acceptable solution.
“What if we can’t find it?” Sergei asked.
“We’ll look for another way out,” Khrushchev said. “Something will always turn up.”
In answer to similar doubts posed by his longtime interpreter and foreign policy adviser, Oleg Troyanovsky, Khrushchev paraphrased Lenin when he explained that he planned to “engage in battle and then see what happens.”
KHRUSHCHEV’S KREMLIN OFFICE, MOSCOW
MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1958
A few days after Thanksgiving, during one of the most extraordinary meetings ever between a Soviet leader and an American politician, Khrushchev made clear that his Berlin ultimatum for the moment was far more about getting President Eisenhower’s attention than it was about altering Berlin’s status.
Giving him only a half hour’s notice, Khrushchev summoned visiting Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey to his Kremlin office for the longest meeting any American official or elected politician had ever had with any Soviet leader. Though scheduled for only an hour from three p.m., their talks ended just before midnight, after an eight-hour, twenty-five-minute exchange.
To show off his knowledge of matters American, Khrushchev e
xpounded on the local politics of California, New York, and Humphrey’s home state of Minnesota. He joked about “the new McCarthy”—not anticommunist Joe but the left-of-center congressman Eugene, who would later run for president. He shared with Humphrey a secret “no American has heard of,” telling him of the successful test of a Soviet five-million-ton hydrogen bomb using only a tenth of the fissionable material previously required to produce an explosion of its magnitude. He also spoke about the development of a missile with a 9,000-mile range, for the first time sufficient to strike U.S. targets.
After asking Humphrey to name his native city, Khrushchev bounced to his feet and drew a bold blue circle around Minneapolis on a map of the United States hanging on his wall—“so that I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly.” Khrushchev struck Humphrey as a man infected with personal and national insecurity, “somebody who has risen from poverty and weakness to wealth and power but is never wholly confident of himself and his new status.”
In recounting his meeting the following day to Ambassador Thompson, so that the U.S. envoy could relay it to President Eisenhower, Humphrey said Khrushchev returned perhaps two dozen times to the matter of Berlin and his ultimatum, which the Soviet leader said had followed “many months of thought.” Humphrey concluded the chief purpose of their marathon meeting was “to impress him with the Soviet position on Berlin and to convey his words and thoughts to the President.”
Khrushchev wielded an arsenal of metaphors to describe the city. It was alternatively a cancer, a knot, a thorn, and a bone in his throat. He told Humphrey he intended to cough the bone loose by making West Berlin a “free city” that would be demilitarized and guaranteed by United Nations observers. To convince Humphrey he wasn’t trying to trick the U.S. into giving up West Berlin to communist control, he recalled at length how he had personally ordered the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Austria in 1955, thus ensuring its neutrality. Khrushchev told Humphrey that at the time he had argued to Foreign Minister Molotov that Russian troops were only useful in Austria if he intended to expand westward, and he didn’t want to do that. So, he said, “a neutral Austria was established and a source of conflict was removed.”
His argument was that Soviet behavior in Austria should serve for Eisenhower both as a model for West Berlin and as reassurance about its future. Because of that, he said, the U.S., Britain, and France had no need to leave any troops in Berlin. “Twenty-five thousand troops in Berlin are of no importance unless you want to make war,” he said in a calm voice. “Why do you maintain this thorn? A free city, a free Berlin, could lead to the breaking of the ice between the USSR and the USA.”
Khrushchev insisted to Humphrey that by solving the Berlin problem, he and Eisenhower could improve their personal relationship and together achieve a historic thaw in the Cold War. And if the U.S. president didn’t like the details of his Berlin plan, Khrushchev told Humphrey, he would be open to a counterproposal. Khrushchev said he could accept any alternative suggestions from Eisenhower as long as they didn’t include either German unification or “the liquidation of the socialist system in East Germany.” For the first time, he was painting his red lines for any Berlin talks.
Khrushchev shifted so rapidly between seduction and threats that Humphrey was reminded of his father’s treatment for chilblains back in South Dakota, which involved the frequent shifting of his feet between hot and cold water. “Our troops are there not to play cards, our tanks are not there to show you the way to Berlin,” Khrushchev blurted to Humphrey at one point. “We mean business.” At the next moment, however, the Soviet leader’s eyes would moisten as he spoke with dripping sentimentality about losing a son in World War II and his affection for President Eisenhower. “I like President Eisenhower,” he told Humphrey. “We wish no evil to the United States or to Berlin. You must assure the President of this.”
Eisenhower responded to Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum just as the Soviet leader had hoped. He signed on to a four-power foreign ministers’ meeting in Geneva, which East and West German representatives would attend as observers. Although progress there proved disappointing, Eisenhower thereafter invited Khrushchev to be the first Soviet Communist Party leader to visit the United States.
Khrushchev congratulated himself, considering Eisenhower’s agreement to receive him in the capitalists’ lair “as a concrete result of the Berlin pressure he had been exerting on the Western powers.”
He felt he had finally extracted from America the respect he so profoundly craved for himself and his homeland.
KHRUSHCHEV’S U.S. VISIT
SEPTEMBER 15–27, 1959
As the departure date for his trip to America drew closer, Khrushchev grew increasingly concerned that his hosts were planning a “provocation,” a damaging slight upon his arrival or at other points during his visit. That in turn could be used against him at home by his now silenced but far from vanquished rivals as evidence that his high-profile U.S. visit was both naive and harmful to Soviet interests.
For that reason, Khrushchev’s considerations about how he would negotiate Berlin’s future in the U.S. were secondary to his scrutiny of every aspect of the itinerary to ensure he didn’t suffer what he referred to as “moral damage.” Though Khrushchev was a communist leader ostensibly representing the proletariat vanguard, his advance team demanded that he be treated with the pomp and circumstance of a visiting Western head of state.
Khrushchev balked, for example, when he learned his most crucial talks with Eisenhower would occur at a place called “Camp David,” a place none of his advisers knew and which sounded to him like a gulag, or internment camp. He recalled that in the first years after the Revolution, the Americans had brought a Soviet delegation to Sivriada, in the Turkish Princes’ Islands, where the stray dogs of Istanbul had been sent to die in 1911. Thinking to himself that “the capitalists never missed a chance to embarrass or offend the Soviet Union,” he feared “this Camp David was…a place where people who were mistrusted could be kept in quarantine.”
Khrushchev only agreed to the meeting after his advance team, following investigation, reported that the Camp David invitation was a particular honor, as Eisenhower was taking him to a country dacha built by Roosevelt in the mountains of Maryland during World War II. Khrushchev would later express shame about how the episode revealed Soviet ignorance. More important, however, was what it said about the potent mixture of mistrust and insecurity with which Khrushchev approached every aspect of his relationship with the U.S.
Disregarding the advice of his pilot, Khrushchev flew across the Atlantic in a still-experimental Tupolev Tu-114, which had not yet passed its required tests and had microscopic cracks in its engine. Despite the risks, Khrushchev insisted upon this means of travel, as it was the only aircraft in the Soviet fleet that could reach Washington nonstop. He would thus arrive aboard a plane that had the world’s largest passenger capacity, longest range, greatest thrust, and fastest cruising speed. That said, Soviet fishing boats, cargo ships, and tankers formed a line under the plane between Iceland and New York as a potential rescue party should the engine fissures expand and force a crash landing at sea.
Khrushchev would recall later that his “nerves were strained with excitement” as he looked from the window of his plane as it circled over its landing area and he considered the trip’s deeper significance: “We had finally forced the United States to recognize the necessity of establishing closer contacts with us…. We’d come a long way from the time when the United States wouldn’t even grant us diplomatic recognition.”
For the moment, Berlin was an afterthought to this larger national purpose. He relished the notion that it had been the might of the Soviet economy, its armed forces, and the entire socialist camp that had prompted Eisenhower to seek better relations. “From a ravaged, backward, illiterate Russia, we had transformed ourselves into a Russia whose accomplishments had stunned the world.”
To Khrushchev’s relief and delight, Eisen
hower greeted him at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C., with a red carpet and a twenty-one-gun salute. Khrushchev would later recall that he was “immensely proud; it even shook me up a bit…. Here was the United States of America, the greatest capitalist power in the world, bestowing honor on the representative of our socialist homeland—a country which, in the eyes of capitalist America, had always been unworthy or, worse, infected with some sort of plague.”
It was more a result of this improved mood than any deeper Berlin strategy that moved Khrushchev to tell President Eisenhower during their first meeting on September 15 that he would like to “come to terms on Germany and thereby on Berlin too.” Without providing further details, Khrushchev said, “We do not contemplate taking unilateral action.” For his part, Eisenhower called the Berlin situation “abnormal,” language the Soviet leader considered encouraging for Berlin talks that would come at the end of the trip.
The coast-to-coast journey that followed was marked by dramatic highs and lows that illustrated both sides of Khrushchev’s complex emotional relationship with the U.S.: the eager suitor seeking approval from the world’s greatest power, and the insecure adversary scanning for the slightest offense.
He and his wife, Nina Petrovna, sat between Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra during a lunch at Twentieth Century–Fox, at which Marilyn Monroe wore her tightest dress, but the Soviet leader railed like a spoiled child at being denied entry to Disneyland—wondering whether it was because the amusement park had cholera or a missile launching pad. Khrushchev saw conspiracy in the choice of Russian-born Jewish movie mogul Victor Carter as his Los Angeles escort, blaming much of what went wrong in the city on the evil intent of the émigré whose family had fled Rostov-on-Don.
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