Berlin 1961 (21 page)

Khrushchev’s aspiration in Siberia had been to create the world’s leading center of scientific endeavor, but like so many of his dreams, this one, too, had fallen short. Just that week he had fired a geneticist whose theories he disliked, and he had ordered four of nine stories chopped off the plans for a new academy so that it conformed to a more standard Soviet size. Akademgorodok’s frustrations only added to a growing list of Soviet failures that were taking a toll on the Soviet leader’s confidence.

Khrushchev’s ongoing agricultural tour of the country had taken a physical and emotional toll, making him all the more aware of his country’s economic shortfalls. Albania had shifted its allegiance from Moscow to China in a heretically public manner, a worrisome crack in Khrushchev’s leadership of world communism. Moscow’s ally in the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, had been murdered, for which Khrushchev blamed UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.

More fundamentally, the capitalist world was proving far more resilient than his propagandists had predicted. Decolonization in Africa had failed to damage the West’s standing in the developing world as much as his experts had envisioned. For all the Soviet efforts to divide the alliance, NATO’s integration was deepening, and the West German Bundeswehr was expanding its capabilities so quickly that it was altering the European military balance. Both in his rhetoric and his defense spending, President Kennedy was acting more anticommunist than Eisenhower. And each month, the East German refugee numbers hit new records. If Khrushchev’s luck didn’t turn soon, the Soviet leader had to worry that his October Party Congress would become a struggle for survival.

Facing such an array of new challenges, Khrushchev agreed to meet Thompson only after the U.S. ambassador had leaked to
New York Times
correspondent Seymour Topping—and to any number of diplomats in Moscow—that the Soviet leader was giving him the cold shoulder at a time when Kennedy was trying to reach out. On March 3, Topping had reported dutifully that Thompson had been frustrated in his efforts to pass Khrushchev a crucial message from Kennedy in hopes of “seeking to head off a serious mishap in relations.” Topping wrote that Thompson had a new mandate “to initiate a series of exploratory conversations looking to substantive negotiations on a range of East-West differences.”

Even after that, Khrushchev agreed only reluctantly to see Thompson. Khrushchev’s adviser Oleg Troyanovsky had seen his boss’s high hopes for a new start in U.S.–Soviet relations come “quickly to evaporate” in the four months since Kennedy’s election. There were few better barometers of the U.S.–Soviet temperature than Troyanovsky, the ever-present Khrushchev adviser who had attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., while his father served as the first Soviet ambassador to Washington in the mid-1930s. He could quote Marx and speak American slang with equal fluency.

Troyanovsky had seen Khrushchev weary of the Kennedy waiting game, having lost the opportunity he had sought to reach the new American leader before he could be infected by what Khrushchev considered Washington’s anti-Soviet bias. A little less than a year after the U-2 incident and the failed Paris Summit, Khrushchev could not politically afford another failed meeting with an American president. Yet that now seemed the most likely outcome of any such summit, given Kennedy’s determination to drag his feet on Berlin and to press for a nuclear test ban agreement that the Soviet military didn’t want. Khrushchev was already in hot water with his military brass over troop cuts, and they would resist any measures that would constrain their nuclear development or leave them open to intrusive inspections.

Khrushchev’s farm visits en route to Novosibirsk had fed his discontent. A new Soviet statistical yearbook showed the Soviet Union had achieved some 60 percent of America’s gross national product, but that was certainly an exaggeration. The CIA pegged it at closer to 40 percent, and other experts estimated that the Soviet economy’s size was no more than 25 percent of the U.S. level. Agricultural productivity was but a third of the U.S. level, and shrinking.

During his travels, Khrushchev had seen the ugly truth behind overly optimistic reports from provincial sycophants. Soviet farming was failing because of erratic planting, bad harvests, and dreadful distribution systems that often left crops to rot. Every week Khrushchev fumed at a new list of incompetent subordinates, some of whom fudged numbers to conceal their failures while others conceded their shortcomings but failed to fix them. In confessing his inadequacy, one party secretary named Zolotukhin, from the western Russian provincial capital of Tambov on the Tsna River, pulled down his trousers and asked Khrushchev three times to lash him.

“Why is it that you want your pants whipped off to show us your ass?” Khrushchev had barked. “Do you think you will give us some sort of thrill? Why would we keep such secretaries?”

At one local Communist Party gathering after another, Khrushchev demanded his underlings match American economic and agricultural benchmarks and exceed U.S. milk and meat productivity, goals that had been his fixation since his 1959 visit to the American heartland. When comrades questioned the wisdom of benchmarking against imperialists, Khrushchev said America was “the highest stage of capitalism,” while Soviets were only just getting started building the foundation for the house of communism—“and our bricks are production and consumer goods.”

The Soviet public’s awareness of the country’s failings had produced a bumper crop of humor, told in the food lines as Khrushchev hopscotched the country:

Q. What nationality were Adam and Eve?

A. Soviet.

Q. How do you know?

A. Because they were both naked, had only an apple to eat, and thought they were in paradise.

Some of the jokes involved the new U.S. president:

President John Kennedy comes to God and says: “Tell me, God, how many years before my people will be happy?”

“Fifty years,” replies God.

Kennedy weeps and leaves.

Charles de Gaulle comes to God and says: “Tell me, God, how many years before my people will be happy?”

“A hundred years,” replies God.

De Gaulle weeps and leaves.

Khrushchev comes to God and says: “Tell me, God, how many years before my people will be happy?”

God weeps and leaves.

As sour as Khrushchev’s mood had been when Thompson arrived, it worsened as the Soviet leader read the Russian translation of Kennedy’s letter. Khrushchev could not find a single word on Berlin. Speaking calmly and wearily, Khrushchev told Thompson that Kennedy must understand that he would never back off his demand to negotiate “the German question.” Over time, Khrushchev said, he had converted Eisenhower to the realization that Berlin talks could not be avoided, but then U.S. militarists “deliberately exploded relations” with their U-2 flight.

Under instructions not to be drawn on Berlin, Thompson responded only that Kennedy was “reviewing our German policy and would wish to discuss it with Adenauer and other allies before reaching conclusions.”

Fed up with what he considered U.S. delay tactics, Khrushchev scoffed at the notion that the world’s most powerful country must consult with anyone before acting, given his own dismissive treatment of Warsaw Pact allies. “West Berlin is a bone in the throat of Soviet–American relations,” Khrushchev told Thompson, and it would be a good time to remove it. “If Adenauer wants to fight,” he said, “West Berlin would be a good place to begin conflict.”

Though Kennedy was not ready to negotiate Berlin with Khrushchev, the Soviet leader eagerly laid out his own negotiating position for Thompson so that he could relay it to the president. He told Thompson that he was ready to stipulate in any agreement that West Berliners could maintain the political system of their choice, even if it was capitalism. However, he said, the Americans would have to take the notion of German unification off the table, even if both the U.S. and Soviets might desire it over time. Abandoning the language of unification was necessary, he said, if the Soviet Union and the U.S. wanted to sign a war-ending treaty that recognized both Germanys as sovereign states.

For his part, Khrushchev assured Thompson he would not expand the Soviet empire any farther westward, but he also wanted Washington to refrain from any rollback of what was already his. Employing a voice calculated to project intimacy between old friends, Khrushchev told Thompson it was his “frank desire” to improve relations with Kennedy and make nuclear war impossible. However, he said, he could not do so alone.

Khrushchev was pushing Thompson far beyond his approved talking points. The American ambassador warned Khrushchev not to expect rapid change in the U.S. position on Berlin, further cautioning the Soviet leader that if he acted unilaterally he would only increase tensions. “If there is anything which will bring about a massive increase in U.S. arms expenditures of the type which took place at the time of the Korean War,” Thompson said, “it would be the conviction that the Soviets are indeed attempting to force us out of Berlin.”

Khrushchev dismissed Thompson’s warning. “What attracted the West so much to Berlin anyway?” he countered.

It was because America had given its solemn commitment to Berliners, Thompson responded, and thus it had its national prestige invested in their fate.

Khrushchev shrugged that it was only Germany’s World War II capitulation that had brought Western powers to Berlin. “Let us work out together a status for West Berlin,” he said. “We can register it with the UN. Let us have a joint police force on the basis of a peace treaty which can be guaranteed by the four powers, or a symbolic force of four powers could be stationed in West Berlin.” Khrushchev said his only precondition was that East Berlin would have to be left out of any such planning, as the Soviet zone of the city would remain the capital of East Germany under any new plan.

Because Berlin lacked political significance for Moscow, Khrushchev repeated that he would provide the U.S. whatever guarantees it wanted to protect its prestige and ensure West Berlin’s current political system. He was prepared to accept West Berlin as a capitalist island in East Germany, he said, because in any case the Soviet Union would surpass West Germany in per capita production by 1965, and then surpass the United States five years later. To further illustrate West Berlin’s insignificance, Khrushchev said that since the Soviet population grew each year by 3.5 million, the total population of West Berlin at two million was just “one night’s work” for his sexually active country.

Playing devil’s advocate, Thompson responded that even if West Berlin were unimportant to the Soviets, “Ulbricht was very much interested,” and would be unlikely to endorse Khrushchev’s guarantee for its democratic, capitalist system.

With a dismissive wave of the hand, as if swatting away a troublesome gnat, Khrushchev said he could compel Ulbricht to approve whatever he and Kennedy would decide.

In an effort to find safer ground than Berlin, Thompson changed the subject to U.S.–Soviet trade liberalization. On that matter, he did have an offer he hoped would mollify Khrushchev. He said the U.S. was hoping to lift all restrictions on Soviet crabmeat imports to the United States.

Instead of embracing the gesture, Khrushchev shot back his outrage at a recent U.S. decision to cancel, on national security grounds, the sale to Moscow of advanced grinding machine tools. “The USSR can fly its rockets without U.S. machines!” he snarled. He railed further against the delayed approval of a urea fertilizer factory sale, also due to its potential military application, ostensibly for chemical weapons. Khrushchev said such urea technology was so widely available that he already had purchased three such plants from Holland.

However, no amount of fertilizer could approach the importance of Berlin to Khrushchev, and the Soviet leader returned to the issue time and again until Thompson reluctantly engaged him. He assured Khrushchev that the president knew the situation was unsatisfactory to both sides, was “re-examining the whole problem of Germany and Berlin,” and would be “disposed to do something to help relaxation.” But Thompson repeated that he could not reflect Kennedy’s views until the president had consulted personally with allies—and he would do that during meetings in March and April before their own proposed summit.

Khrushchev complained that Kennedy did not understand fully what was at stake in Berlin. If he and Kennedy could sign a treaty ending the city’s postwar status, he told Thompson it would calm tensions all around the world. If they were unable to solve their Berlin disagreements, however, their troops would continue to confront each other in a situation “not of peace but of armistice.” Khrushchev dismissed Kennedy’s notion that arms reduction talks could build the confidence necessary to take on the more difficult matter of Berlin. Quite the contrary, he said; only U.S. and Soviet troop withdrawal from Germany would create the right atmosphere for weapons cuts.

After so many weeks of angling to meet Kennedy, Khrushchev now balked at the president’s invitation. He said only that he was “inclined to accept” Kennedy’s offer to get together the first week of May, some two months away, following visits to Washington by Britain’s Macmillan and West Germany’s Adenauer, and after a stop Kennedy would make in Paris to see de Gaulle. Kennedy had offered as a venue either Vienna or Stockholm. Although he preferred Vienna, Khrushchev said, he would not rule out Sweden. The Soviet leader shrugged that it would be useful to get to know Kennedy, noting they had met only briefly in 1959 when the then senator had arrived late for the Soviet leader’s visit to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Without accepting or declining the invitation, however, Khrushchev told Thompson it “would be necessary to work out a reason for the meeting.”

At the end of the lunch that followed, Khrushchev raised a glass of his favorite pepper-flavored vodka in a lukewarm toast to Kennedy that was in striking contrast to his enthusiastic New Year’s message. Khrushchev dispensed with the usual wishes for Kennedy’s health: “Being so young, he does not need such wishes.” Having withdrawn his invitation to Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union a year earlier, he regretted the time still was not ripe for him to extend his country’s traditional hospitality to Kennedy and his family.