Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The overthrow of Beria was followed by an extensive curtailment of the secret police and its powers. Most of the latter went to the Interior Ministry, while its forces were subjected to separate control, and its system of secret courts was abolished. Many of its prisoners were released, and there was considerable relaxation of the censorship, especially in literature. Some of the powers of the police were taken over by the party.

In February 1954, a large conference of agricultural leaders in Moscow was thunderstruck by a suggestion from Khrushchev for a radical new approach to the chronic agricultural shortages. This “virgin-lands” scheme advocated opening for cultivation in Asia large areas of grassland which had never been cultivated before. Khrushchev’s plan was detailed and dazzlingly attractive. It entailed use of over 100,000 tractors and great hordes of manpower to cultivate grain on 6 million new acres in 1954 and an additional 25 million acres in 1955. The scheme, carried out in an atmosphere of heated discussion, was not supervised by Khrushchev. Its requirements in machinery and equipment were so great that it represented a sharp restriction on Malenkov’s shift of emphasis from heavy industry to consumer goods, while Khrushchev’s refusal to supervise it placed the responsibility for its success at Malenkov’s door. At the same time, Malenkov’s public advocacy of a “thaw” in Soviet-American relations was equally weakened by the secret Soviet drive to perfect the H-bomb.

While the undermining of Malenkov was thus in process in 1954, Khrushchev began to undermine Molotov in the foreign field by organizing a series of spectacular foreign visits without the foreign secretary. One of the first of these, in September 1954, took Bulganin, Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and others to Peking to celebrate the fifth birthday of Red China. During the visit Khrushchev apparently made a personal alliance with Mao Tse-tung as well as a complicated commercial treaty which offered Soviet finance, equipment, and specialized skills for an all-out industrialization of China (the so-called “great leap forward”).

These events made it possible for Khrushchev to organize a campaign against Malenkov during the winter of 1954-1955. Ostensibly this was based on Malenkov’s desire to relax the intense emphasis on heavy industrialization, but, in fact, Malenkov’s lack of aggressiveness in foreign policy was equally significant. In combination the two issues created pressure which Malenkov could not resist. On February 8, 1955, his resignation was read to the Supreme Soviet. He assumed responsibility for the unsatisfactory state of Soviet agriculture, and relinquished the post of premier, although remaining on in the Central Committee in the new post of minister of power stations. The new premier was Bulganin, who released his previous post of defense minister to his deputy, Marshal Zhukov, hero of World War II.

These struggles within the Kremlin are based on persons, not on issues, since the latter are used chiefly as weapons in the struggle. In the shift from Malenkov to Bulganin, the critical issues were the chronic agricultural problem and the choice between Stalin’s policy of relentless industrialization, regardless of the cost to peasants and workers, and a new policy of increased consumers’ goods. In this last issue the needs of defense brought Khrushchev support from Marshal Zhukov, the armed forces, and the “Stalinists,” such as Molotov and Kaganovich. Zhukov was rewarded with a ministry and a seat in the Presidium, the only army officer ever to have the latter.

The gradual elimination of Molotov found Khrushchev on the opposite side of the Stalinist versus anti-Stalinist debate, as champion of a “thaw” in the Cold War. This involved a rejection of Stalin’s doctrine of the inevitable enmity of nonsatellite countries and the inevitable onset of imperialist war from capitalist aggression. In this struggle Khrushchev found support in Bulganin, Mikoyan, and probably Zhukov. The new policy was established while Molotov was still foreign minister through a series of elaborate state visits by Bulganin and Khrushchev (“B and K,” as they were called) to foreign countries. The most significant of these visits, because it marked a sharp reversal both of Stalin and of Molotov, was a six-day visit to Tito in Yugoslavia in May 1955. This acceptance of Titoism is of great importance because it showed Russia in an apologetic role for a major past error and because it reversed Stalin’s rule that all Communist parties everywhere must follow the Kremlin’s leadership.

The “Belgrade Declaration” admitted that different countries could “walk different roads to Socialism” and that such “differences in the concrete application of Socialism are the exclusive concern of individual countries.” Khrushchev and Tito both knew that this statement was playing with fire. The former’s motives are obscure; it was probably done simply as a challenge to Molotov’s whole past record; Tito unquestionably hoped the dynamite would explode sufficiently to blow the East European satellites out of Soviet control. With his customary shrewdness Khrushchev did not sign the Belgrade Declaration himself, but had Bulganin, the new premier, do it, thus protecting himself from direct responsibility if anything went wrong.

This declaration was not the only stick of dynamite which Khrushchev was juggling as he returned from Yugoslavia. En route home he stopped off in Bucharest and Sofia. In the latter capital he placed the fuse in another, even larger, stick of dynamite, by a secret denunciation of Stalin personally as a bloodthirsty tyrant.

Back in Moscow in early July, Molotov made an uncompromising attack on the Belgrade Declaration, denouncing it as encouragement to the satellites to pursue independent policies, a consequence which all agreed would be totally unacceptable to anyone in the Kremlin, but Khrushchev won over the majority by arguing that the loyalty of the satellites, and especially their vital economic cooperation, could be ensured better by a loose leash than by a club. He scorned Molotov’s opposition to an agreement with Tito by contrasting it with Molotov’s agreement of August 1939 with Ribbentrop. The solidity of the satellites was to be preserved by the Warsaw Pact of May 14, 1955, which established a twenty-year alliance of the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and East Germany. This was the Communist riposte to NATO, which the newly sovereign West German state had joined, as a fifteenth member, five days earlier (May 9, 1955).

Straight from his arguments with Molotov in the Central Committee, Khrushchev dashed off with Bulganin, Molotov, and Zhukov to the 1955 “Summit Meeting” in Geneva. There he kept quietly in the background, while his companions discussed the fate of Germany with President Eisenhower, Dulles, Eden, and Premier Faure of France.

The 1955 Summit Conference at Geneva on July 18-24 was Anthony Eden’s contribution to the “thaw.” Dulles participated most reluctantly, but there had been increasingly unfavorable comment on his inflexible attitude toward the Russians, and he felt compelled to yield to Eden’s insistence in order to help Eden’s Conservative Party in the British General Elections of May, 1955. Once these were successfully passed, the meeting had to be carried out, but Dulles had no hopes of its success. He contributed little in this direction himself when he insisted that disarmament must be discussed before German reunion. Outsiders, trying to interpret the Russian attitude toward the “thaw” on the basis of no reliable information, placed much greater hopes in the Summit Meeting than Dulles did, chiefly because of the surprising Soviet shift which had produced the Austrian Peace Treaty of May 15, 1955, with its subsequent evacuation of Austria by Russian troops. The Austrian treaty restored the country’s frontiers of January 1938 and promised free navigation of the Danube, while prohibiting any union with Germany and binding Austria to neutrality.