The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (95 page)

The 1950s and 1960s were quite different. In both the West and the East, economic growth rates rose to unprecedented heights. Average per capita growth rates for the period 1950–73 were higher than those for 1913–50 in almost every major economy except India’s. In Spain growth was 34 times higher; in Germany and Austria just under 30 times higher; in Japan 9 times higher; in Italy 6 times higher. The Eastern Bloc economies also fared well; Stalinist planning proved a remarkably effective way of reconstructing economies ruined by war. Hungarian growth was eight times higher in the 1950s and 1960s than it had been in the era of world wars and depression; Eastern Europe as a whole enjoyed per capita growth of nearly 3.8 per cent, more than four times the pre-1950 figure. The Soviet Union achieved annual growth of just under 3.4 per cent, nearly a full percentage
point higher than the United States (2.4 per cent). Ironically, the highest growth rates of all were achieved in the vanquished Axis countries. Moreover, the vulnerability of the major economies to cyclical slumps declined markedly. Between 1945 and 1971 the volatility of growth in the world’s seven biggest economies was less than half what it had been between 1919 and 1939.

Economic rivalry began to take over from strategic conflict, a change vividly illustrated by Vice-President Richard Nixon’s visit to Moscow in July 1959. His host loved to taunt the West. ‘Whether you like it or not, history is on our side,’ Khrushchev famously warned: ‘We will bury you.’ Nixon’s inauguration of the American Exhibition at the Sokolniky Park in Moscow was the American reply. The highlight of the exhibition was an all-mod-cons kitchen, complete with dishwasher, electric cooker and – the American domestic goddess’s most cherished possession – a huge refrigerator. It was, Nixon declared expansively, ‘like those of our houses in California’. ‘We have such things,’ replied Khrushchev. Nixon seemed not to hear him: ‘This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installation in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women.’ Khrushchev shot back: ‘Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism.’ No matter what Nixon showed him, Khrushchev flatly refused to be impressed. If the American kitchen was ahead of the Soviet kitchen, it was merely a matter of historical happenstance:

KHRUSHCHEV
: How long has America existed? Three hundred years?
NIXON
: One hundred and fifty years.
KHRUSHCHEV
: One hundred and fifty years? Well then, we will say America has been in existence for 150 years and this is the level she has reached. We have existed not quite forty-two years and in another seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we catch you up, in passing you by, we will wave to you.

It was all bluster. For ordinary Russians, accustomed to the primitive facilities of cramped communal housing, the exhibit was a glimpse of a parallel universe. Around 50,000 visitors came to see it every day; in all, it was visited by 2.7 million Soviet citizens. Richard Nixon’s domestic critics used to ask: ‘Would you buy a used car from this
man?’ Most people in Eastern Europe would gladly have bought a used fridge from him.

Nixon’s icebox looked like a Cold War-winning weapon. As Khrushchev rightly said: ‘What we were really debating was not a question of kitchen appliances but a question of two opposing systems: capitalism and socialism.’ The Americans understood this too. Another attraction at the American exhibition was the latest IBM RAMAC 305 computer, which enabled visitors to have their questions answered about American culture and material achievements. It responded to some 10,000 enquiries during the first ten days:

VISITOR
: What is meant by the American dream?
IBM
: That all men shall be free to seek a better life, with free worship, thought, assembly, expression of belief and universal suffrage and education.

The Soviet Union might not be able to offer its citizens those freedoms. Yet its leaders always insisted that it could more than match the West when it came to economics. Stalin himself had built a Park of Soviet Economic Achievement in Moscow as a showcase for Communist consumer durables to come. One Russian propaganda film even featured a flying car, a kind of Soviet Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The American Exhibition made it painfully clear how far the Soviets were from realizing such visions.

Yet it would be to misunderstand the Cold War to dismiss it as a one-horse race, which the United States was always bound to win. For all its economic limitations, the Soviet Union had other formidable weapons at its disposal. It was not only in the realms of culture and sport that the Soviets could hold their own, though it did no harm to Russian self-esteem that they were nearly always the favourites in chess matches, piano competitions and ice hockey matches.
*
Not
many Americans made high-profile defections to the other side of the Iron Curtain, as did some Russian ballet stars, notably Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. But the Soviets undoubtedly had greater success in penetrating the other side’s intelligence agencies through the undetected recruitment of equally mercurial characters, notably Kim Philby and Guy Burgess. In the realm of global strategy, too, the Soviet Union was a match – and sometimes more than a match – for the United States. That was why, for more than forty years, the outcome of the Cold War was anything but certain. And that was also why there were many parts of the world where the Cold War was not cold at all. For the third determinant of global conflict – imperial decline – continued to operate in the 1950s and 1960s. Now, however, it was different empires that were declining in different parts of the world. The decline and fall of the British Empire was attended by bitter intercommunal violence between Hindus and Muslims in India; between Israelis and Arabs in Palestine; between Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq; between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. It was never entirely clear, and remains hard to say even today, which was the better option: to cut and run (as in India) or to hang on and fight (as in Kenya). Suffice to say that there were comparatively few happy endings as the European empires expired, and even where the transition to independence went smoothly, a descent into violence was not long in coming. That was the pattern throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa.

Among the waning empires that spawned this host of conflicts was the more or less informal American empire in Central America and the Caribbean. In 1952 Guatemala’s left-wing government, led by President Jacobo Arbenz, enacted Decree 900, a reform that took idle land away from some of the country’s biggest estate owners and redistributed it to poor peasants. Among the landowners dismayed by this development was the American United Fruit Company, which owned around 10 per cent of Guatemala’s prime agricultural land. In February 1953 the Arbenz government confiscated a quarter of a million acres of company land, offering in return government bonds worth just over $1 million, a twentieth of what United Fruit said the land was worth. When the Guatemalan Supreme Court struck down the reform as unconstitutional, the government fired the judges. ‘One can live without tribunals,’ one trade union leader declared, ‘but one
can’t live without land.’ United Fruit had friends in high places (the future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was one of its lawyers, his brother Allen was Deputy Director of the CIA) but it did not need United Fruit’s lobbyists to convince American politicians that Arbenz’s government was a Soviet Trojan horse in America’s back yard. The US ambassador to Guatemala, James Puerifoy, summed up the official line when he said: ‘Communism is directed by the Kremlin all over the world, and anyone who thinks differently doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ In the words of a National Security Council staff member, Guatemala was to be ‘a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism’. Something similar seemed to be afoot in Iran. The answer in both cases was a CIA-sponsored coup. First in Iran in 1953, then in Guatemala the following year, Eisenhower gave the green light for regime change.

In fact, the anti-Communist invasion launched in June 1954 was almost a fiasco. But the crisis gave the Guatemalan army its cue to seize power from Arbenz. The new military government received Washington’s official blessing from none other than Vice-President Richard Nixon. On a visit to Guatemala, Nixon alleged that the Soviet Union had sent ‘mountains and mountains of literature… attempting to change the minds of the people and warp them over to supporting international communism’. There was, he alleged, clear evidence that Arbenz’s government had been under ‘direct control from the international Communist conspiracy’. The message to Moscow was unambiguous. In the words of the American ambassador to the United Nations: ‘Stay out of this hemisphere and don’t try to start your plans and your conspiracies over here.’ Yet the reality was that the Soviets did not really need to intervene directly in Latin America, for there were Marxists in Latin America who felt they could overthrow capitalism without any need for Soviet assistance – which had, in any case, been non-existent in Guatemala. Not for the last time, a CIA covert operation had unforeseen consequences. Shortly before the military takeover, an impressionable young Argentine doctor had arrived in Guatemala. In the wake of the coup, he fled to Mexico where he met another political refugee, a flamboyant Cuban lawyer. Five years later, the doctor, Ernesto Guevara, helped the lawyer, Fidel Castro, to take over Cuba.

The Cuban Revolution was a grave setback for the American anti-Communist strategy, undoing at a stroke the success of the Guatemalan coup. Despite repeated attempts, the CIA could not pull off the same trick in Havana. Yet the American assumption that Cuba had now become a kind of Caribbean branch office of the Soviet Communist Party was in many ways mistaken. As the Soviets later admitted, they had only limited influence over Castro. For Castro was Pinocchio, a puppet who had no strings. With scarcely any prompting from Moscow, he pursued a strategy of his own to spark off revolution right across what was coming to be called the Third World. He and Guevara sought to foment copy-cat revolutions in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Haiti. Later, Castro sent Cuban weapons to Algeria and Cuban troops to Congo, Guinea-Bissau and Ethiopia. In 1975 Castro ordered his biggest intervention yet, sending a Cuban army to repel a South African invasion of newly independent Angola. Unbeknown to the Americans, he did so in defiance of orders from Moscow to stay out.

Angola was typical of the kind of place where the Cold War was distinctly hot. On one side, there was the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which seized power in Luanda after independence from Portugal was finally granted in 1975; on the other, two rival guerrilla organizations, UNITA and the FNLA. And just as the majority of the troops sent to support the MPLA were Cuban rather than Russian, so UNITA derived the bulk of its military support from South Africa rather than the United States. In September 1987, when the war in Angola came to a head at Cuito Cuanavale, a remote military base in the south-east of the country not far from the Namibian border, the Angolan government forces were equipped with Soviet-made T-55 tanks and MiG fighters, but the tank crews and pilots were mainly Cuban. On the other side, the 8,000 UNITA troops were supported by around 3,000 South Africans – an infantry company from the 32nd ‘Buffalo’ battalion, a heavy artillery battery equipped with sixteen huge G-5 guns and the 61st Mechanized Battalion Group with their Ratel-90 armoured cars – assisted by the South African Air Force, which flew sorties against MPLA positions along the Lomba River.

Faraway battles like these make it absurd for us to remember the
Cold War fondly as a time of peace and stability. The reality is that the second half of the twentieth century was not much less violent than the first. Altogether between 1945 and 1983 around 19 or 20 million people were killed in around 100 major military conflicts. It was just the venues of violence that had changed. Instead of fighting head on, as they came so close to doing in Cuba in 1962, the superpowers now fought one another through intermediaries in what they regarded as peripheral theatres. But to those caught up in them there was nothing peripheral about these numerous hot wars. The degree of superpower sponsorship varied from case to case. Sometimes, as in Vietnam or Afghanistan, American and Soviet troops were in the front line. More often, they were behind the lines, training or supplying local armies. Sometimes, as in Africa and the Middle East, the support itself was subcontracted to other countries. Yet here, as in so many other respects during the Cold War, the United States found that it was at a fundamental disadvantage.

When Trotsky had called for world revolution after 1917, the results had been disappointing. But when Khrushchev spoke buoyantly of ‘an era when socialism, communism and global revolution will triumph’, it was a different story. All over the Third World there were popular nationalist movements which aimed to overthrow the last vestiges of West European colonial rule and establish some form of popularly based self-government. The Soviets proved remarkably good at persuading many such movements to adopt their own political and economic model. Decolonization was the wave the Soviets rode; ‘popular liberation’ was a phrase they knew well how to use. Of course, the American political system had also been the product of a revolt against imperial rule. Yet somehow Lenin, Stalin and Mao had more appeal in the 1960s and 1970s than Washington, Jefferson and Madison. The Americanmodelofdemocracy pluscapitalism hadfarfewer takersthan the Soviet alternative of one-party rule plus socialism. This was partly because poor former colonies like Guatemala, Cuba and Angola had a large, impoverished peasantry, of the sort that had been decisive in backing the Russian and Chinese revolutions, but only a small middle class, of the sort that had made the American one. Partly it was because ambitious Third World ‘freedom fighters’ liked the opportunities the distinctly unfree Soviet system had tooffer them. Inaone-party system,
the first winner takes all; there is no danger of his being asked to hand over power to some rival within just a few years. And with a planned economy, the new political rulers can acquire any economic asset they like in the name of ‘nationalization’.