Macmillan, Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis, 1958-1960

Kitty Newman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415649810
• eBook ISBN: 9781134257423
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

This new study casts fresh light on the roles of Harold Macmillan and Nikita Khrushchev and their efforts to achieve a compromise settlement on the pivotal Berlin Crisis.

Drawing on previously unseen documents and secret archive material, Kitty Newman demonstrates how the British Prime Minister acted to prevent the crisis sliding into a disastrous nuclear conflict. She shows how his visit to Moscow in 1959 was a success, which convinced Khrushchev of a sincere effort to achieve a lasting settlement. Despite the initial reluctance of the French and the Americans, and the consistent opposition of the Germans, Macmillan's subsequent efforts led to a softening of the Western line on Berlin and to the formulation of a set of proposals that might have achieved a peaceful resolution to the crisis if the Paris Conference of 1960 had not collapsed in acrimony. This volume also assesses Khrushchev's role, which despite his sometimes intemperate language, was to secure a peaceful settlement which would stabilize the East German regime, maintain the status quo in Europe and prevent the reunification of a resurgent, nuclearized Germany, thereby paving the way for disarmament.

This book will be of great interest to all students of post-war diplomacy, Soviet foreign policy, the Cold War and of international relations and strategic studies in general.

1
THE BACKGROUND TO THE BERLIN CRISIS, 1958–1960

In 1958, the crisis envisaged by Western leaders was not the possibility of the Russians erecting a Berlin Wall to close off the Eastern sector of the city, as happened in 1961, but of Khrushchev signing a peace treaty with the DDR and thereby forcing the Allies to deal with the DDR – a state which they had not recognised. In this eventuality, Allied leaders believed the East Germans would be likely to obstruct Western traffic and threaten the freedom of the city, which was the front line of NATO and the West during the Cold War, and which the US was ultimately prepared to defend in the last resort with nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Western agreement to the Soviet proposals would have amounted to de facto recognition of the DDR and acquiescence in the ‘two Germany’ solution and the status quo in Europe, which by 1958 was the preferred Soviet option. The Soviet initiative was thus perceived by the Western powers as initiating the most important Cold War crisis since the Berlin airlift of 1948–1949 as, in the event of a crisis, the Eisenhower administration did not envisage an airlift but a series of measures which could potentially escalate to nuclear war.

The motivation of Khrushchev and Macmillan during the crisis and their promotion of an accommodation on Berlin should be seen within the wider context of two factors: first, their common, long-term foreign policy objectives of détente and disarmament; and second, the wider question of Berlin and Germany’s place in post-war Europe and the relations of the US and Western Europe with the Soviet Union.

Nikita Khrushchev’s personality and foreign policy objectives

Khrushchev’s main objectives were to reform the Soviet Union by shifting manpower and resources from the defence to the domestic sector of the economy, and to achieve his policy of peaceful coexistence with the West by negotiating at a summit a settlement of the German question and, ultimately, détente and disarmament. Because of his long-term goals, Khrushchev was prepared to envisage a provisional settlement on Berlin as long as the West promised negotiation. Khrushchev maintained that without determining the future of Berlin it was impossible to solve the German problem and ensure the status quo of borders and the demilitarisation in Europe.¹

Nikita Khrushchev was born into a peasant family in Kalinovka, Kursk, in 1894, and started work in the Donbass mines at the age of fifteen. He was soon involved in the Donbass Workers’ Movement, becoming a Bolshevik sympathiser, a member of the Communist Party by 1918, and later, during the Civil War, a political commissar in the Red Army. In 1929 the local party sent him to the Industrial Academy in Moscow, where he came to the notice of Stalin. Thereafter, he rose rapidly through the Party ranks to become number two in the Moscow Party in 1932, First Secretary in the Ukraine from 1938–1949, and a member of the Politburo in 1938. Not surprisingly, he was deeply implicated in the Stalinist regime, as symbolised by Ernst Neizvestny’s sculpture on his coffin showing half of his face in light and the other half in darkness. Khrushchev himself readily admitted the dual source of his personality. Before his death, he told the poet Evgeny Yevtushenko: ‘one man inside me understood something, the other something completely different’.² Thus, his conception of the wider international scene was limited by his communist preconceptions, but his breadth of vision allowed him to strive for a new order in domestic and foreign policy.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party and a member of the collective leadership. He rose rapidly to the top, demonstrating his immense cunning, ambition and flexibility on policy by ousting and superseding Lavrentii Beria and Georgii Malenkov in 1953, Viacheslav Molotov in 1955, and Nikolai Bulganin in 1957, whom he replaced as Soviet Premier. Khrushchev’s views on the new course the Soviet Government should adopt after 1953 were common to the collective leadership. They sought the relaxation of internal terror, the easing of draconian rule in Eastern Europe, and concentration on raising living standards for the long-suffering Soviet people by transferring resources from defence to economic reconstruction. Indeed, Khrushchev has sometimes been seen as the harbinger of perestroika and détente under Mikhail Gorbachev. Nikita Khrushchev, his grandson, has recently observed that ‘he was the last romantic of communism’.³

An essential concomitant to his programme was a reduction of tension with the West. At the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev denounced Stalinism and enunciated a revolutionary approach to international affairs, based on his belief in the inevitable failure of capitalism and the emergence and ultimate triumph of socialism in the world system through peaceful competition. His prediction was based on the correlation of forces in favour of communism, demonstrated by the extension of Marxism–Leninism to Eastern Europe; the growth of the military and economic power of the Soviet Union vis-à-vis the West; the decline of colonialism; and the subsequent emergence of anti-Western nationalism in the Third World.

Khrushchev rejected the ‘inevitability of global war’, and even asserted that communism could be attained by parliamentary means. He preached the idea of peaceful coexistence between capitalism and socialism, and emphasised the ideological and economic struggle for hearts and minds, rather than the military struggle between East and West. This reassessment of the international scene enabled Khrushchev to move from ‘an endless arms race towards arms control and disarmament’, and to broach the possibility of transferring several missile plants to peaceful production.⁴

In 1957, Khrushchev’s policies of destalinisation and reform within the Soviet Union, and his revolutionary attitude to foreign policy, provoked opposition to his rule. However, to ensure his dominance he thwarted the anti-Party coup by Molotov, Malenkov and Kanganovich, who opposed détente. He then sacked Marshal Zhukov from his post as Minister of Defence and replaced him with Marshal Malinovsky, who was totally dependent on him for his advancement. Thereafter, as Titular head of State, Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and First Secretary of the Party, he dominated both the State and the Party apparatus. Whilst outwardly observing collective decision-making through the Praesidium, like Macmillan’s, his was the dominant voice in foreign policy.⁵

One can understand why in 1958, Sir Patrick Reilly, the British Ambassador to the Soviet Union, saw this superbly confident man, who had no serious challenger and who was the dominant voice in government, as a formidable adversary. He reported that Khrushchev appeared to be conducting foreign policy in public, and Gromyko’s role as Foreign Minister seemed in decline as Khrushchev favoured Mikoyan as his emissary abroad.⁶ Khrushchev’s dominance of foreign policy was confirmed by his son Sergei, his son-in-law and foreign policy advisor Alexsei Adzhubei, his biographer Yury Aksuitin (a former Communist Party historian and member of the Central Committee) and, more recently, Soviet and Western historians.⁷ The speculative ideas current in the West during the 1960s and 1970s that the divisions within the Praesidium as regards foreign policy accounted for the schizophrenic nature of Khrushchev’s foreign policy and forced Khrushchev’s hand on the Berlin question have largely been discounted.⁸

Khrushchev’s personality is thus central to any analysis of the Berlin Crisis. The overriding public impression of Khrushchev in the West, both then and now, is of a crude, reckless, uneducated and bombastic man, who enjoyed indulging in horseplay with unsuspecting foreign statesmen – as Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary, discovered to his discomfort during his stay in Moscow.⁹ Undoubtedly these attributes were an intrinsic part of his personality, but as Western statesmen and diplomats became better acquainted with Khrushchev they recognised his natural abilities, his imagination, his wisdom, his humanity and, above all, his genuine and passionate belief in communism.¹⁰ Macmillan’s portrayal of the Soviet leader as a petulant and sometimes impossible but not unlovable extrovert provides the best key to his character:

Khrushchev is impulsive; sensitive of his own dignity and insensitive to any one else’ feelings; quick in argument, never missing or overlooking a point; with an extraordinary memory and encyclopaedic information at his command; vulgar, and yet capable of a certain dignity when he is simple and forgets to show off; Khrushchev is a mixture between Peter the Great and Lord Beaverbrook. Anyway he is the boss and no meeting will ever do business except a summit meeting.¹¹

Denis Healey considered that Khrushchev was:

one of the half-dozen greatest political figures of this century. His outstanding characteristics are pragmatism and self confidence … his faith is all the more formidable because it is not over dogmatic … summit conferences may have a special value in dealing with the Russians today, providing the West can produce leaders of comparable ability.¹²

Soviet Nobel Prize winner, physicist Andrei Sakharov, who came into contact with Khrushchev in connection with the development of the hydrogen bomb, believed that ‘his innate intelligence and an ambition to be worthy of his post ensured that his accomplishments would outweigh his mistakes and even his crimes in the scales of history’.¹³ Contemporary Soviet historians likewise consider his natural abilities were extraordinary and compensated for his great lack of elementary culture.¹⁴

Like his counterpart, Macmillan, Khrushchev, a dominant and extrovert statesman, favoured the personal conduct of important negotiations at summit level with a new generation of Western leaders whom he hoped would acknowledge the Soviet Union’s rightful place in the world. As David Dunn has observed, and as Khrushchev, Macmillan and President Eisenhower found during the Berlin conflict, it was an important means of breaking down the barriers of mutual suspicion in the Cold War, of educating their domestic constituencies and, most importantly, of summing up their opponents.¹⁵ After the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow and his meeting with the President at Camp David, Khrushchev was keen to develop more informal personal relationships and regular meetings with them. Another striking aspect of the Soviet leader’s conduct of foreign policy during later stages of the Berlin Crisis was his use of secret diplomacy to avoid undue tension in relations with the West. According to Alexsei Adzhubei, his son-in-law and foreign policy advisor, his link with the White House was Pierre Salinger.¹⁶

Khrushchev’s desire for disarmament and rapprochement with the West may be attributed first to his desire to reduce Soviet defence expenditure in favour of economic development to benefit the Soviet people, and second to his fear of a nuclear holocaust. The Soviet historian Vladimir Zubok sees Khrushchev as the last ‘true believer’ among the post-Stalinist leaders, whose adherence to the ideals of the Revolution had little to do with fanaticism, Marxist theory or Leninist ideology, but a lot to do with his gut feelings about social justice derived from his peasant, working-class background and his experiences of the deprivations of the ordinary people during the war and the Stalinist era.¹⁷ In the 26 February 2006 edition of the Observer, Marina Okrugina, now ninety-five, wrote of her full rehabilitation after her release from the Gulag in 1956, following Khrushchev’s famous speech: ‘we former prisoners were very thankful for Khrushchev’s bravery’.¹⁸ Détente and domestic reform for the benefit of his people were thus an intrinsic part of his reform programme, announced at the Twenty-First Party Congress in January 1959.¹⁹

In early 1959 Khrushchev cut troop strength from 5,763,000 to 3,623,000, and in January 1960 a further 1,200,000 men were demobilised so that Soviet forces were only a half of those in Stalin’s time.²⁰ Sergei Khrushchev said that his father’s aim was to free human and other resources for economic development, but these steps were opposed by the military, who felt they were losing their position and privileges:

Father was adamant. He knew their ways well and had no intention of dancing to a primitive military tune. Father’s view of the future only allowed for minimal deterrent forces, and he was in a hurry to put his plan into practice.²¹

Khrushchev was acutely aware of the terrible impact of atomic warfare on the human race. He told a former Soviet Ambassador to Bulgaria that he was the only member of the Soviet leadership who had seen an atomic explosion, and that this experience had totally changed his view of the arms race.²² In 1954 a report prepared by four eminent nuclear scientists including Igor Kurchatov, Director of the Soviet nuclear effort since 1943, warned Khrushchev and the other members of the Troika that ‘mankind faces an enormous threat of extermination of all life on earth’.²³ They recommended a ‘complete ban on the military utilisation of atomic energy’. In 1958, with Khrushchev’s specific authorisation, Kurchatov also encouraged Andrei Sakharov to write about the effects of radiation from the so-called ‘clean bomb’, and the dangers of nuclear testing, in an article in a scientific journal. Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs that as Head of the Soviet Delegation at the Geneva Conference of 1955, he realised for the first time that Western statesmen shared his fear. This conference ‘convinced us once again, that there was no pre-war situation in existence at that time and our enemies were afraid of us in the same way as we were of them’.²⁴

Further indications of the Soviet desire to promote disarmament were Khrushchev’s announcement on 31 March 1958 of a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, and the considerable progress which was achieved at disarmament sessions at Geneva.²⁵ At Camp David, the Soviet leader told the President that part of the reason for his visit was to see whether some sort of agreement on disarmament could come out of their meetings and talks.²⁶ Disarmament was also a constant theme at the 1959 Party Congress, and then in 1960 there was a breakthrough in negotiations for a Test Ban Treaty when the Russians indicated that they would accept the American proposal providing for a phased treaty as long as it was accompanied by a moratorium covering those tests which were not banned.²⁷ However, Khrushchev had a problem in convincing the West that he was sincere about disarmament and détente. This was largely because of his exuberant and often aggressive style, his use of earthy peasant vocabulary, and his ...

Table of contents

• COLD WAR HISTORY SERIES
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE BACKGROUND TO THE BERLIN CRISIS, 1958–1960
• 2 SOVIET POLICY ON THE BERLIN QUESTION, NOVEMBER 1958–FEBRUARY 1959
• 3 BRITISH REACTION TO THE SOVIET INITIATIVE ON BERLIN, NOVEMBER 1958–FEBRUARY 1959
• 4 THE PRIME MINISTER’S VISIT TO THE SOVIET UNION, 21 FEBRUARY–3 MARCH 1959
• 5 BRITAIN SEEKS TO CONVERT HER ALLIES TO THE MACMILLAN INITIATIVE, FEBRUARY–MAY 1959
• 6 THE GENEVA FOREIGN MINISTERS’ CONFERENCE, 11 MAY–5 AUGUST 1959
• 7 EAST–WEST NEGOTIATIONS ON AN INTERIM AGREEMENT FOR WEST BERLIN, SEPTEMBER 1959 UNTIL THE PARIS SUMMIT CONFERENCE, MAY 1960
• 8 THE U-2 CRISIS, MAY 1960
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDICES
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX