Berlin 1961 (6 page)

Standing at the center of Moscow’s newest and grandest field house for indoor sports, the Soviet leader told a gathering of Polish communists that he planned to renounce the postwar agreements that had been the basis for Europe’s fragile stability. He would abrogate the Potsdam accord that had been signed with wartime allies and unilaterally change Berlin’s occupied status, with the aim of liquidating the city’s western part altogether, and removing all military forces from the city.

The venue for his remarks, the Palace of Sports, which rested beside Lenin Central Stadium, had opened to great fanfare two years earlier as a state-of-the-art stage to show off Soviet athletic accomplishment. Since then, however, its most memorable moment had been the stunning defeat of the Soviets by the Swedes at the 1957 ice hockey world championships, which had been tainted by the boycott conducted by the U.S. and other Western hockey powers in protest against the Soviet crackdown in Hungary. The Swedish victory had come after a defenseman had head-blocked a puck before the goal, producing a gusher of blood and the championship.

Khrushchev’s Polish audience had anticipated far less drama. Having stayed on in Moscow following a celebration of the forty-first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, they had expected the routine rhetoric of one of communism’s countless friendship meetings. Instead, they sat in stunned silence as Khrushchev declared, “The time has obviously arrived for the signatories of the Potsdam Agreement to discard the remnants of the occupation regime in Berlin and thereby make it possible to create a normal situation in the capital of the German Democratic Republic.”

The Poles weren’t the only surprised party. Khrushchev had failed to give advance notice either to the Western signatories of the Potsdam agreement or to his socialist allies, including the East Germans. He had acted without even seeking the blessing of his own Communist Party leadership. Only shortly before the speech did Khrushchev share what he planned to say with the leader of the Polish delegation, the stunned Communist Party First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka. If Khrushchev meant what he said, Gomulka feared he could trigger a war over Berlin.

Khrushchev explained to Gomulka that he was acting unilaterally because he had wearied of Berlin diplomacy that was leading nowhere. He was prepared to risk a confrontation with the West, and he argued that he was in a better position to succeed than Stalin in 1948 because Moscow had now overcome the American nuclear weapons monopoly. Under a project called “Operation Atom,” Khrushchev would deploy a nuclear deterrent on East German territory within weeks. Twelve medium-range R-5 missiles would give Khrushchev the capability to respond to any U.S. nuclear attack on East Germany with counterstrikes on London and Paris—if not yet New York. Without reference to those still-secret weapons, Khrushchev told Gomulka, “Now the balance of forces is different…. Today America has moved closer to us; our missiles can hit them directly.” Though not literally true, the Soviet leader was newly in a position to annihilate Washington’s European allies.

Khrushchev did not share any details about the timing or implementation of his new Berlin plan, because he had not worked them out yet himself. What he told his Polish audience was that the Soviets and the Western Allies, according to his plan, would over time remove all their military personnel from East Germany and East Berlin. He would sign a war-ending peace treaty with East Germany and then hand over all Soviet functions in Berlin to that country, including control of all access to West Berlin. Thereafter, U.S., British, and French soldiers would need to seek East German leader Walter Ulbricht’s permission to enter any part of Berlin by road or air. Khrushchev told the Palace of Sports crowd he would consider any resistance to East Germany’s exercise of these new rights—which could include blocking air and road access to West Berlin—as an attack upon the Soviet Union itself and its Warsaw Pact alliance.

Khrushchev’s shocking escalation of the Cold War had three sources.

Above all, it was an attempt to win the attention of President Eisenhower, who had been disregarding his demands for Berlin negotiations. It seemed that no matter what Khrushchev did, he could not win the respect of American officials that he so craved.

His party rivals rightly argued that the U.S. had given him scant credit and no reward for a series of unilateral measures he had taken to reduce Cold War tensions since Stalin’s death. He had gone far beyond simply replacing the concept of inevitable war with peaceful coexistence. He had also cut Soviet troop numbers unilaterally by 2.3 million men between 1955 and 1958, and had withdrawn Soviet forces from Finland and Austria, opening the way for those countries’ neutrality. He had also encouraged political and economic reform among Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

The second source of Khrushchev’s impulsive Berlin move was his growing confidence in power after having put down the so-called anti-party coup against him in June 1957, led by former premiers Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov and his onetime mentor, Lazar Kaganovich. They had attacked him partly because of just the sort of reckless leadership style he was now demonstrating over Berlin. Unlike Stalin, he hadn’t killed them but exiled them to lesser roles far from Moscow’s power center: Molotov to Mongolia as ambassador, Malenkov to Kazakhstan to run a hydroelectric plant, and Kaganovich to the Urals to direct a small potassium factory. He thereafter removed from power his popular defense minister Marshal Georgy Zhukov, whom he also suspected of plotting against him.

To justify his bold action on Berlin, he had told his party leadership just four days before his speech that the U.S. had already abrogated the Potsdam accord first, by bringing West Germany into NATO in 1955, and then by preparing to give it nuclear weapons. After outlining his plan of action, he closed the meeting without taking the usual vote of his Presidium on matters of such significance, having sensed the possibility of opposition.

The third source of Khrushchev’s speech was Berlin itself, where the refugee bleed was accelerating. Despite his greater self-assurance in power, Khrushchev knew from personal experience that problems in the divided city could end careers in Moscow. Shortly after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had used the threat of East German implosion to help destroy his most dangerous rival, former secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, after Soviet troops put down the East German workers’ uprising of June 17, 1953.

At the time, Khrushchev had been only a dark horse candidate for Stalin’s succession among the collective leadership that had replaced the dictator. He was a foreign policy neophyte who saw German policy primarily through a domestic political lens. As part of his power play, Beria had led a proxy campaign against Stalinist East German leader Walter Ulbricht and his harsh policy of
Aufbau des Sozialismus
, or “construction of socialism.” Ulbricht had been countering internal opposition and the growing refugee numbers through escalated arrests and repression, forced collectivization of farms, accelerated industrial nationalization, greater military recruitment, and expanded censorship. The result had been an even greater out-flow of refugees in the first four months of 1953—122,000 East Germans, twice the rate of the previous year. The March 1953 figure of 56,605 was six times larger than a year earlier.

At a decisive party leadership meeting, Beria had said, “All we need is a peaceful Germany. Whether it is socialist or not isn’t important to us,” even if it were “united, democratic, bourgeois and neutral.” Beria wanted to negotiate substantial financial compensation from the West in exchange for Soviet agreement to a neutral, unified Germany. He had even assigned one of his most loyal lieutenants to explore such a deal with Western countries. “What does it amount to, this GDR?” Beria had asked, using the abbreviation for East Germany’s misleading official name. “It’s only kept in existence by Soviet troops, even if we do call it the German Democratic Republic.”

The post-Stalin collective leadership did not heed Beria’s call to abandon the socialist cause in East Germany, but it did demand that he reverse what it called his “excesses.” Following Soviet orders, Ulbricht stopped new agricultural collectives and ended large-scale political arrests; introduced an amnesty for many political prisoners; reduced the repression of religious freedoms; and expanded the production of consumer goods.

Khrushchev took little active part in the debates that produced this abrupt policy change, but he also didn’t oppose the reforms. He then watched the loosening of Stalinist controls inspire an uprising that might have prompted East Germany’s collapse if Soviet tanks had not intervened.

A little more than a week after the uprising, Khrushchev masterminded the June 26 arrest of Beria. Among other charges, Khrushchev argued that Beria had been willing to abandon socialism altogether in a Germany that had been conquered at such great Soviet human cost during World War II. At the party plenary that sealed Beria’s fate and set in motion events that resulted in his execution, fellow communist leaders branded him as an unreliable socialist and called him a “filthy people’s enemy who should be expelled [from the party] and tried for treason.” It called his willingness to give up East German socialism a “direct capitulation to the imperialist forces.”

Khrushchev came away from the Beria experience with two lessons he would never forget. First, he had learned that political liberalization in East Germany could result in the country’s collapse. Second, he had seen that Soviet mistakes made in Berlin could end careers in Moscow. Three years later, in 1956, Khrushchev would grease his own rise to power by renouncing Stalinism’s criminal excesses at the 20th Party Congress. However, he would never forget the contradictory lesson that it was only Stalinist-style repression that had saved East Germany and allowed him to remove his most dangerous adversary.

In the first days following Khrushchev’s Palace of Sports speech, President Eisenhower chose not to respond publicly, hoping, as had happened so often in the past, that the Soviet leader’s bluster would not be accompanied by concrete action. Khrushchev, however, would not be ignored. Two weeks after the speech, on America’s Thanksgiving Day, he transformed his Berlin speech into an ultimatum that would require a U.S. response. He had softened some of his demands to gain his Presidium’s backing in a declaration delivered to the embassies of all interested governments.

Khrushchev backed off from his threat to immediately discard all Soviet obligations under the Potsdam agreement. Instead, he would give the West six months to negotiate with him before unilaterally altering the city’s status. At the same time, he fleshed out his plan to demilitarize and neutralize West Berlin in a manner that would leave it both outside the Soviet bloc and the West.

Khrushchev summoned U.S. correspondents, who were in their Moscow apartments carving Thanksgiving turkeys, to tell them about some knife-work he planned of his own. During his first press conference as premier, evidence itself of Berlin’s growing significance to him, Khrushchev told reporters, “West Berlin has turned into a sort of malignant tumor of fascism and revanchism. That’s why we decided to do some surgery.”

Referring to the text of the twenty-eight-page diplomatic note, Khrushchev told the correspondents that it had been thirteen years since the war had ended, and thus it was time to accept the reality of two German states. East Germany would never give up socialism, he said, nor would West Germany ever succeed in absorbing East Germany. Hence, he was giving Eisenhower a choice: within six months, he could negotiate a peace treaty that would demilitarize and neutralize West Berlin, or Moscow would act unilaterally to achieve the same outcome.

Khrushchev’s son Sergei, then twenty-three years old, worried that his father was giving Eisenhower no escape route from a collision course that could lead to nuclear conflict. He told his father that the Americans would never accept his proposed terms. Although Russians were known as chess players, Sergei knew that in this case—as in so many others—his impetuous father had not thought out his next move.

Khrushchev laughed off Sergei’s fears: “No one would start a war over Berlin,” he said. He told Sergei all he wanted was to “wring consent” out of the U.S. to start formal Berlin negotiations and preempt the exasperating diplomatic process of an “incessant exchange of notes, letters, declarations and speeches.”

Only by setting a tight deadline, Khrushchev told his son, could he move both sides toward an acceptable solution.

“What if we can’t find it?” Sergei asked.

“We’ll look for another way out,” Khrushchev said. “Something will always turn up.”

In answer to similar doubts posed by his longtime interpreter and foreign policy adviser, Oleg Troyanovsky, Khrushchev paraphrased Lenin when he explained that he planned to “engage in battle and then see what happens.”

KHRUSHCHEV’S KREMLIN OFFICE, MOSCOW
MONDAY, DECEMBER
1, 1958

A few days after Thanksgiving, during one of the most extraordinary meetings ever between a Soviet leader and an American politician, Khrushchev made clear that his Berlin ultimatum for the moment was far more about getting President Eisenhower’s attention than it was about altering Berlin’s status.

Giving him only a half hour’s notice, Khrushchev summoned visiting Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey to his Kremlin office for the longest meeting any American official or elected politician had ever had with any Soviet leader. Though scheduled for only an hour from three p.m., their talks ended just before midnight, after an eight-hour, twenty-five-minute exchange.

To show off his knowledge of matters American, Khrushchev expounded on the local politics of California, New York, and Humphrey’s home state of Minnesota. He joked about “the new McCarthy”—not anticommunist Joe but the left-of-center congressman Eugene, who would later run for president. He shared with Humphrey a secret “no American has heard of,” telling him of the successful test of a Soviet five-million-ton hydrogen bomb using only a tenth of the fissionable material previously required to produce an explosion of its magnitude. He also spoke about the development of a missile with a 9,000-mile range, for the first time sufficient to strike U.S. targets.