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

The neutralization of Austria gave rise, in 1955, to a good deal of vague talk about “disengagement” in Europe. The idea, however defined, had considerable attraction in Europe, even for experienced diplomats like Eden. Nothing very definite could be agreed upon as making up “disengagement,” but everyone was eager for anything which would reduce the threat of war, and the Germans especially had longing thoughts of a neutralized and united country. France, which was deeply involved at the time in Indochina and in the Muslim countries, particularly Algeria, was eager for any relaxation in Europe which would allow a breathing spell to devote to its colonial problems. To help the discussion along, the Russians spoke favorably about disarmament, Europe for the Europeans, and German reunion. When details of these suggestions appeared, however, they usually justified completely Dulles’s skepticism. Disarmament, for example, meant to the Russians total renunciation of nuclear weapons and drastic cuts in ground forces, a combination which would make the United States very weak against Russia while leaving Russia still dominant in Europe. Sometimes this result was sought more directly: withdrawal of both the United States and the Soviet Union from Europe, the former to North America, thousands of miles away, and the latter merely to the Russian frontiers. Another Russian suggestion was to replace NATO with a European security pact which would include only European states.

The Soviet suggestions for Germany were equally tricky and show clearly their fear to subject their East German satellite to a popular election and their real reluctance to see Germany united. They demanded unification first and elections later, while the United States reversed the order. The merging of the two existing German governments, followed by a peace treaty along the lines of the Austrian treaty, would have given the Russians what they wanted in Europe, a Germany freed from Western troops ruled by a coalition government, which would allow elections when it judged best.

The Americans wanted elections first to establish an acceptable central German government with which a final peace could be made. The creation of two sovereign German states in 1954 made any settlement remote because the Kremlin insisted that its East German satellite regime, which was not recognized by the United States, must be a party to any settlement and thus be recognized by the United States. This same point became a permanent obstacle also to any agreement to unify Berlin, since the United States was willing to negotiate with Russia but not with East Germany. Eden’s own contribution to these discussions was that a demilitarized zone be established along the line of physical contact between East and West in Europe with international inspection of armed forces in Germany.

Suddenly, on the fourth day of the conference, President Eisenhower made a speech which jolted the delegates, and even more the world, out of their casual attention. This was his “open-skies” plan, which never came to anything but which gave the United States a propaganda advantage the Soviet Union could not overcome. It had two parts: the two super-Powers “to give to each other a complete blueprint of our military establishments, from beginning to end, from one end of our countries to the other”; and “Next, to provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other country.” Nothing could be more repugnant to the ingrained Soviet love of secrecy except full inspection of the country on the ground, but nothing could more clearly show the world that the United States was as frank and honest as its President’s own face: neither had anything to hide.

Nothing significant was achieved at the Geneva Conference, but the discussions were conducted in an unprecedented atmosphere of friendly cooperation which came to be known as the “Geneva spirit,” and continued for several years. In fact, it was never completely overcome even when matters were at their worst in the weeks following the U-2 incident of May 1960 and the Cuban crisis of October 1962. This was because the Soviet Union, having emerged from the isolation imposed on it by Stalin’s mania, never returned to it completely but continued to cooperate with non-Communist countries in scientific interchange, athletic events, and social intercourse. From 1955 onward, speakers of Russian and of English were in cooperation somewhere on some project. The most amazing of these projects was the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958, in which scientists of sixty-six countries cooperated over eighteen months to wring from the physical universe of earth, sea, and sun some of its secrets.

Returned to Moscow from Geneva, Khrushchev abandoned his unwanted quiet and resumed his stalking of Molotov. In September 1955, the harassed foreign minister had to make a public confession of error, admitting that he did not know what point the Soviet Union had reached in its progress along the road to Socialism. In February he had told the Supreme Soviet that the foundations of the Socialist society had been built. It now appeared that the society itself was built. Such a mistake, regarded as picayune in the outside world, could inflict almost irreparable damage on a Soviet leader if publicly confessed, as this was. It was a clear indication to other such leaders that Molotov was on the way out.

During all this, Khrushchev had held no office in the Soviet government, and had functioned only as party leader, but what he did in that capacity was of vital significance. Systematically he replaced party functionaries on all levels, moving upward those he could depend on and eliminating those he could not trust to support him personally. The other rival leaders in the government knew what was going on, but ignored it, since they made the one basic error which could not be remedied: they believed that the government was the ruling structure in the Soviet Union, while Khrushchev, quietly at his work within the party structure, looked forward to the day on which he would demonstrate their error.

In February 1956, in what is unquestionably one of the most significant events in the history of Communism, Khrushchev lighted one of his sticks of dynamite. The subsequent explosion is still echoing, and the resulting wound to international Communism still bleeds freely.

Khrushchev’s preparation for a Party congress was as careful as Stalin’s had ever been: it was to be a sounding board for coordinating party policy by speeches to his hand-picked subordinates. In July 1955 the congress was called for February 14, 1956. At the same time, two Khrushchev agents were added to the Presidium, Mikhail Suslov and Igor Kirichenko, and three Khrushchev agents were added to the party secretariat: Averkv Aristov, Ivan Belyaev, and Dmitri Shepilov. The last, who was editor of Pravda , the party newspaper, gave the speech on foreign policy at the congress, although Molotov was still foreign minister and was not replaced by Shepilov until August. Aristov soon took over the role Poskrebyshev had previously played for Stalin, in charge of loyalty purges within the party.

The Twentieth Party Congress met for eleven days, February 14-25, 1956, within the Kremlin walls. Its 1,436 hand-picked delegates formed the oldest congress which had ever assembled, with 24 percent over fifty years of age, compared to 15.3 percent over fifty at the Nineteenth Congress, and only 1.8 percent over fifty at the Eighteenth Congress of February 1941. These men were fully prepared to support whatever was told them, but none could have anticipated the shocking revelations they would hear.

It all began in a rather routine fashion. The first speech, of 50,000 words, delivered by Khrushchev over seven hours (one hour less than Malenkov’s parallel speech in October 1952), was full of factual details. It was notable only for its frequent reference to the urgent need for coexistence with the West and its infrequent use of the name “Stalin.” The emphasis on co-existence was part of the campaign against Molotov, and, as is usual in Communist speeches, was filled with references, by volume and page, to the writings of Lenin. Most of these references proved, on examination, to be embedded in a context expounding the inevitable clash between Communism and Capitalism. The delegates, fully trained in such dialectic, had no difficulty in seeing the point: coexistence was merely a temporary tactic in the larger framework of inevitable struggle. Similar references were made to the possibility of peaceful, rather than revolutionary, change from capitalism to Socialism in single countries. In this case, examples were given: the Baltic States, the East European satellites, and China! The reference to Lenin (Volume XXXIII, pages 57-58) made perfectly clear that the “peaceful road to “Socialism” could be followed only where a small capitalist state was overrun by a powerful Communist neighbor.