Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

In the air there was the question of disarmament. War might lead to the victory of the proletariat, but it could wipe out the planet as well. Malenkov had said as much, but was driven out by Khrushchev for saying it. Now, accompanied by an old-order totem, Bulganin, Khrushchev started to do his world rounds, visiting the United Nations, England, the USA and elsewhere, and saying much the same things as Malenkov had been overthrown for saying. He had a sort of rough charm, and was at any rate memorable, dropping peasant wisdoms like a caricature Russian: socialism was to have a human face again, and Stalin’s mistakes had to be made good. The moment was quite propitious. A business-minded Right, now mainly dominant in the West, had various uses for the USSR. It could for a start neutralize the public opinion that backed it. When Eisenhower won the election of 1952, he did so on a strongly anti-Communist platform, and his Vice-President, Richard Nixon, had made a name for himself as persecutor of Communists in general. The period of Joseph McCarthy was not long over, and public opinion in some places was strongly in favour of the use of American power: General MacArthur himself had argued for a nuclear strike against the Chinese ports, though Truman had sidelined him over this. In practice, the death of Stalin came as a huge present to Eisenhower, and let him off the Korean hook. He really wanted to go down in history as the man who had stopped a nuclear war. Business should be done.

How should the USSR respond? It mattered that Khrushchev himself had great faith in Communism, and was confident of the future, but for the moment he needed calm. After all, the USSR had made enemies of all of her neighbours except China, and China was a potential rival: Mao wanted the bomb. This time, in the context of possible German reunification, a new idea emerged in Moscow: a ‘security plan’ that involved ‘security guarantees in Europe’ and ‘a project for a treaty of collective security in Europe’. It was meant to establish permanent pan-European institutions, and not to include the Americans or NATO; foreign forces were to be withdrawn. The proposals were intelligent enough, and the immediate aim was clearly to prevent any European Defence Community. Appeal needed to be made to German pacifism — to rope the Germans into some overall European ‘structure’, which would be neutral. Beyond that lay the hope of detaching Europe from the USA. The Russians were generally agile when it came to managing these large-scale multinational bodies, their own foreign affairs being on the whole less messily conceived and executed than other countries’. Eventually, Molotov’s plan, put forward again and again, was realized with the Helsinki Conference of 1975, and it had some temptations in a Europe that might otherwise be the scene of nuclear war and was anyway on occasion resentful of the Americans. In 1954, in the very short run, the Molotov suggestion was successful enough in France, when the Paris parliament failed to ratify the EDC on 30 August. But that failure was not very significant: German rearmament was anyway going ahead.

Khrushchev needed to show that Communism did not need to mean labour camps. His Stalin speech was symbolic: rules would prevail henceforth. The Party, which was the essential institution, would be restored, whereas Stalin had considered just abolishing it and Beria had meant to turn it into a sort of baroque Scout and Girl Guide organization. The Central Committee, expanded by one third to 340 souls, met more often (six times in 1958) and congresses were held every four years, although the speeches, vetted beforehand, were ritualistic and, to an outsider, an ordeal: as John Keep says, ‘only by close examination could one detect here and there a slight emphasis that reflected some local or occupational interest’. Even the word glasnost was used, when its proceedings were published, but its real nerve was a secretariat, employing thousands, that operated in extreme secrecy. There was a Department of Agitation and Propaganda which covered the media and cultural life generally, and the number of people involved rose from 6 million in 1957 to 36 million in 1964. Party members doubled, to 12 million. The proportion of ‘specialists’ — engineers, for instance — went up, and there was more room for men in their thirties. At the 20th Congress, that of the Stalin speech, more than half of the eighty-four national or regional secretaries were replaced, and Khrushchev finally defeated the old guard in 1957 because over half of the Central Committee members were new appointments. In 1960-61 he repeated the anti-Stalin drive, and replaced fifty-five of the (now) 114 national and regional secretaries. At any rate, the personnel, if not the structure, was de-Stalinized, and there were no more mass killings. When Khrushchev was finally overthrown in 1964, he took pride in the fact that he had not been killed. That went together with a certain cultural liberalization, in that books open about some of the horrors of Stalin’s time were published, though there were limits. Still, whatever these limits, observers in the West could safely conclude that things were getting better, that business could be done. By 1955, when Khrushchev had established his authority, a half-thaw occurred in the Cold War.

The first sign of movement in Moscow came when on 8 February 1955 Molotov at last said that there might be a Staatsvertrag (‘state treaty’) over the restoration of Austria — no need to wait for a German treaty, he said. Earlier, the USSR had refused any Austrian arrangement: the country was on the Czechoslovak and Hungarian borders, and might make these countries unstable. But Austrian independence was a useful carrot to have on offer. Now, fearing that the western zones of Austria might be incorporated in the new western Germany, and wanting to show the Germans what might be achieved, the Russians recognized and evacuated Austria. A Staatsvertrag was signed in the Belvedere Palace on 15 May, and the Red Army moved out quite quickly. The Austrian chancellor, Julius Raab, spent three days in Moscow discussing these arrangements, and Austrian neutrality was solemnly declared by the parliament in October. In this case, the neutrality meant certain rewards — for instance, the placing of international bodies (including the new Atomic Energy Commission) in Vienna — but it also had its questionable side, in that Vienna became something of an espionage capital, and, like Finland, a place where Moscow might maintain agents of influence. The most obvious of these was one Kurt Waldheim, who slipped and slithered his way from the staff of an Army Group in the Balkans to the Austrian foreign ministry, where he connived in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and was rewarded to become secretary-general of the United Nations. In this same period, the Soviet bases in Finland were also given up, partly on the grounds that they made the Swedes nervous, and caused them secretly to co-operate with the West. This again, as with Austria’s Waldheim, was to prove its uses with Sweden’s Olof Palme. In May 1955 Khrushchev visited Tito, in an attempt to make up, but there, one Communist seeing through another, he had a guarded welcome, and Tito was enjoying his role as arbiter between East and West; Yugoslavia also became an important pioneer of the ‘Third World’, made money out of Arab shipping, oil and construction, and was cheerfully represented as every country’s favourite neutral. West Germany was once more well and truly on the map, and in 1955 Adenauer was invited to Moscow for resumption of diplomatic relations — one present being the return to Germany of the prisoners of war who had been cruelly kept back, including the few thousand survivors of Stalingrad and the men who had been in Hitler’s Bunker to the very end.