Its real goal was the overthrow of Tito. Stalin privately boasted that "I will move my little finger and Tito will
fall." Instead, the Yugoslav party rallied around Tito. For the first time. Stalin had been defied by communists, loyal to their own state in an unequal conflict Western observers compared to the Biblical contest of David and Goliath.
The first open conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union occurred in Germany, brought about by the new Allied policy toward the western German zones.
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The Soviet Empire
Stalin's death in 1953 ended his brutal rule, but not the communist dictatorship that he had put in place in the Soviet Union and the states of eastern Europe. His heirs, a handful of men in the Communist party's Politburo (then called the Presidium), reverted to the pattern of collective party leadership that Lenin had created and took firm control of the secret police. They vied for leadership of the country until, in 1955, Nikita Khrushchev managed to take control of the party and state, bringing new policies to his country and the states under Soviet domination. For the next decade Soviet foreign and domestic policies were shaped, on the one hand, by the communist policies and institutions in
place since the 1920s and, on the other hand, by the personality and aims of their new leader. Born in a poor peasant family, Khrushchev rose through the ranks of the Communist party in Stalin's years to become The West and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, 1953-1991 343 a member of the leadership group around the dictator. He, like his colleagues in the Presidium, never doubted the fundamental truths of Marxism-Leninism-the superiority and inevitable triumph of socialism over capitalism and the necessity for communist dictatorship. Their attitudes and methods of rule were formed in the harsh world of Stalinist Russia during years of revolution and war. This political culture nurtured in them a suspicious, antagonistic view of the West; it sustained their dogmatic conviction that they knew what was best for the Soviet people and for the "socialist camp" of satellite countries. It is not surprising, therefore, that they believed it indispensable to preserve the essential institutions of the Soviet command economy collectivized agriculture, nationalized industry, and central command planning. On one point they broke with the Stalin
years. The entire party leadership was determined to end Stalin's terrorist system. The power it gave to the secret police threatened their own political dominance and violated the Leninist system of single-party rule. They proceeded to remove from office and to execute for" crimes against the people" the head of the secret police, Lavrenty Beria. The laws authorizing terror were abolished, and thousands of Stalin's victims were released from jail or prison camp. This quiet "destalinization" did not proceed fast enough for Khrushchev. In early 1956, he denounced at a
party congress Stalin's crimes and the" cult of the personality" that had surrounded the dictator with an aura of superiority. Russians opposed to all forms of Stalinism took heart when they heard of his speech, and peoples in eastern Europe looked forward to an end of the Stalinist sphere of domination over their lands. In fact, the Soviet leaders still relied on the secret police (now called the Committee of State Security, or KGB) to crush political dissenters, still commanded their censors to enforce the monopoly on truth of Marxism- Leninism, and were determined to keep intact the "socialist camp," by force if necessary. Khrushchev himself remained in power only as long as the collective leadership was in fundamental agreement with his policies. He undertook a series of economic and social reforms to raise the very poor living conditions of the Soviet people; he even promised them in 1961 that they would live in conditions of abundance within a few years. His vision of "communism in our generation" took the shape of a grandiose welfare state, offering its inhabitants free housing, schooling, transportation, and health care. To him,
a communist society (the highest stage of history, according to Marx) meant collective consumption; the Western consumer society of private cars, stereos, blue jeans, and jazz records embodied the evils of corrupt capitalism.
While his colleagues shared his pride in Soviet socialism, they were not prepared to let him undermine their political stability and privileges. He came to believe that his reforms were obstructed by "bureaucratism," by which he meant corruption and disregard for the needs of the people by bureaucrats in the state and even in his own party. He failed
in his efforts to end the abuses of bureaucratism, however, for bureaucratic institutions constituted the essential mechanism by which the party retained its monopolies of political power, of property, and of expression in what critics called the "USSR Inc." Even his own colleagues in the Presidium finally turned against him, voting in 1964 to send him into "early retirement." They undid many of his reforms and ended public denunciation of Stalinist crimes, preferring to keep tight control over the population, the vast state-run economy, and the Soviet empire.
The Stalinist system remained in place for another twenty years until, too late, another party reformer attempted to remedy its grave defects.
In those years, the Soviet leadership's confidence in this system was bolstered by its apparent success in other parts of the world. Khrushchev and his successors looked upon the Third World as an arena where capitalism and socialism contended for dominance; their Marxist-Leninist ideology promised that their side would win, but in the short
time they were prepared (as Stalin had not been) to assist non-communist regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America sympathetic to their ideals. Their new "world policy" had the added advantage of counteracting the efforts by the United States to establish military and diplomatic alliances in these regions, since the basic condition of their military and economic assistance was rejection by any government of such alliances. In Latin America, Fidel Castro found a warm welcome when he appealed in late 1959 to Moscow to help his infant government construct socialism in Cuba. In Africa, socialist-led regimes in Angola in the west, and Ethiopia in the east, obtained in the 1970s
not only Soviet aid but the military assistance from Cuban armed forces in defeating their internal enemies (backed by the United States). When a group of Afghan Communists seized power in 1977 in their country, Soviet assistance came immediately. But power politics was never far removed from Soviet global policies; Soviet missiles reached
Cuba in 1962 primarily because Khrushchev hoped to benefit Soviet strategic interests. The Cold War occupied a central place in this new Soviet world policy. Khrushchev and his successors believed that the communist regimes of Eastern Europe had to remain in power even when their peoples rebelled against them. They recognized, however, that the terrorist system of rule and the policies of economic exploitation that Stalin had put .in place there had to end. They permitted living conditions to improve and let communist governments encourage the national cultural traditions of their countries. But they were prepared to use military force to prevent the peoples of these countries from freeing themselves from Soviet domination. When late in 1956 Hungarian political reformers, supported by the entire population, announced their intent to end the dictatorship and break their ties with the Soviet Union, Soviet leaders acted quickly and forcefully to reimpose communist rule. Launched at the start by Hungarian students and workers, demonstrations quickly turned into a mass uprising against Stalinism in their country. In Budapest, one of the demonstrators' first acts was to destroy a giant forty-foot statue of Stalin in the middle of the city. For a few days, the uprising produced an independent government, consisting of reform Communists, non-communists, and even officers from the army. The new leaders introduced a series of reforms to restore civil and political liberties, and declared their intention to make Hungary a free, neutral state. Their dream clashed with Soviet insistence on military control in eastern Europe and on the preservation of communist dictatorship. Khrushchev did not permit desertion from the "socialist camp." A week after the uprising began, Soviet troops invaded the country to destroy the rebellion and to place in power Communists loyal to the Soviet Union. Hungary lost its attempt at independence.
The single most important border in Europe separated the communist from the noncommunist countries. That line ran through the middle of Germany. To the east, 15 million Germans in the German Democratic Republic were under communist rule. Although no serious unrest broke out there after a brief revolt in 1953, the discontent of many East Germans at their political and economic conditions was so great that many fled each year to West Germany. The drain on the economy of the Soviet satellite was so damaging that the Soviet leaders resolved to take forceful action.
Their principal objective was the withdrawal of the Western powers out of West Berlin. But the West refused to make any concessions. Risking international crisis and possibly war, Khrushchev decided in 1961 to turn the open border around West Berlin into an impenetrable physical barrier. Suddenly that August, East German workers protected by Soviet troops encircled West Berlin with concrete walls topped by barbed wire and watched by border guards. The "Iron Curtain" had closed the last small opening between East and West. The U.S. government preferred not to challenge the Soviet action for fear of provoking a military confrontation. Europe remained divided between communist and Western military alliances, the legacy of Stalinism and the Cold War. The Berlin Wall became, to many Europeans, a symbol of the failure of postwar peacemaking. In the two decades that followed, the Soviet leaders had to turn three times to their armed forces when popular resistance in satellite countries threatened the power of their collaborators in these governments. In Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Communist party appeared unable to stem a popular movement-within the labor unions, within parliament, even among its own members for internal freedom. Czech reformers (all Communists) sought Soviet acceptance of their program by promising allegiance to the Soviet alliance. But the Soviet leaders feared their empire was a risk if communism disappeared there. In August of that year, their military forces occupied the country and forced upon the Czechs a compliant government of their choosing. Shortly afterward, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev stated publicly what Red Army troops had already demonstrated. The "Brezhnev Doctrine" asserted the right of the Soviet Union to intervene in the affairs of any allied state in the "socialist camp" to enforce communist rule. In 1979, it was applied once again when Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan to maintain in power the communist regime, unable to repress a revolt by the country's
Muslim population. Nearly 100,000 Soviet troops went to fight Afghan rebels in a war they found they could not win.
The weakness of communist satellite governments was made most apparent in Poland. There, opposition to the Communist party came from intellectuals, workers, and the powerful Catholic church. In 1980, underground
resistance came into the open when Polish workers throughout the country supported a general strike to protest their lack of freedom as well as harsh living conditions. This massive but peaceful revolt culminated in the formation of a nationwide free labor movement, called Solidarity, with which the government was forced to negotiate that year.
The Polish Communist party was powerless to repress Solidarity, whose leader, Lech Walesa, had greater influence on the people than it did. For a year, communist rule ceased to function in that country. Finally, in 1981 Polish generals, aware of impending Soviet military intervention, ended that brief moment of political freedom. They declared
martial law, outlawed Solidarity, arrested many of its supporters, and turned Poland into a military dictatorship.
Soviet control of the states of eastern Europe remained intact until the late 1980s. Moscow's orders were executed by submissive political leaders in those small states, whose stability was ensured only by the presence of Soviet
troops ready to intervene to repress popular revolt. Eastern Europe remained still the borderlands
of the Soviet empire.
The Cold War and the Arms Race
The combination of Soviet postwar rule in the satellite countries and the Stalinist dictatorship had created among Western governments and their peoples a profound suspicion of Soviet expansionism (see Chapter 6). The U.S. policy of containment had swelled by the early 1950s to include military alliances around the world, the most important of which was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)in Europe. It also included a
concerted effort to develop armaments so devastating that Soviet leaders would never consider launching an offensive war. U.S. military forces possessed by then both atomic and hydrogen bombs. Technological advances
gave them ever more effective and expensive means of destroying the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1950s,they had the capacity to launch nuclear weapons on Soviet targets from supersonic bombers, from nuclear-powered submarines, equipped with ballistic missiles, that patrolled' along the Soviet coast, or from land-based intercontinental
ballistic missiles in the United States capable of striking any region of the Soviet Union. This "triad" of armaments was the military foundation of the U.S. policy of containment. It was also a spur to the escalating arms race
with the Soviet Union. After Stalin's death, the Soviet leaders continued his program of Soviet nuclear armaments.
They came to see that the weapons were so devastating that they could not conceivably win a war, yet they believed their country's security and influence in the world depended upon rivaling the military might of the United States. Khrushchev announced in 1956 that, contrary to Stalin's grim forecast, war with the capitalist states was avoidable
because Soviet military advances held aggressive Western states in check. It was a claim to strength that included a recognition of the terrible consequences of modern war. The previous year Soviet scientists exploded their first hydrogen bomb. In 1957, they launched the first space satellite, Sputnik, which dramatically confirmed Soviet technological skill and proved that their military possessed long-range ballistic missiles (rockets carrying nuclear weapons). In the mid- 1960s, the Soviet military forces expanded still further to include for the first time a
multiocean navy, with its own nuclear submarines capable of launching ballistic missiles. The United States and the Soviet Union by then possessed the capacity to destroy the other country many times over. Soviet and U.S. leaders each in their own way came to recognize that the arms race had no winners, only losers. The cost of weapons build up was terribly high, especially for the Soviet economy. The United States spent 5 percent of its yearly national income on total defense expenditures; the Soviet economy, less than half as wealthy as the United States, had to commit 20 to 25 percent of its output on defense. Secret cities in the Soviet Union were entirely devoted to weapons development. This financial burden, plus the realization that the arms rivalry worsened relations and heightened the risk of war, gradually made leaders on both sides look to some means of agreeing on limits to the arms race.
But first, they had to resolve a local conflict that threatened to escalate to nuclear war. The Cuban missile crisis grew out of the Castro revolution (see Chapter 9). Castro's fears of another U.S.-backed invasion strengthened his pleas in late 1961 and early 1962 to Soviet leaders for military protection. But instead of ,offering him a military alliance, Khrushchev proposed to station a complete rocket division on Cuban soil, so close to the United States that Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles could strike any part of the United States. The reasons for his reckless offer are
still not clear. The most likely explanation is that he anticipated from this move an enormous boost to Soviet global power and influence and to the spread of Soviet-type regimes. He did not, however, allow the Cubans control over the nuclear weapons on their soil. This foreign initiative was strictly a Soviet undertaking.