To Dare Even More Boldly: The Promised Land Fallacy; Khrushchev's Ill-Fated 'Wars of National Liberation Strategy, Part 2
Nikita Khrushchev was born in 1894 in the village of Kalinovka, close to the present-day border between Russia and Ukraine. The son of poor peasants, the future leader of the Soviet Union received only four years of formal schooling, working to help feed his family from a very young age. Eventually, Khrushchev found a trade, becoming a skilled metal worker.
Meanwhile, in the tumult of the 1920s USSR, Khrushchev advanced quickly through the Communist ranks. Initially a protege of Lazar Kaganovich, a major Party figure, Khrushchev was tasked by Stalin with helping to rule Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s second-most-important republic. In 1934, in recognition of his rising status, Stalin brought Khrushchev to Moscow itself, where he was made Party leader and set about constructing the city’s subway system. In late 1937, as he unhesitatingly supported Stalin in his murderous purges, he was sent back to Ukraine as head of the Communist Party. Khrushchev was made a full member of the Politburo in March 1939, on the eve of the Second World War.
During the war, Khrushchev served as a senior political commissar, a vital liaison between Stalin and his generals. He was present for the pivotal Battle of Stalingrad, a fact of which Khrushchev remained proud for the rest of his life. After the war, the icy Stalin—who was surprisingly affectionate toward his bumptious aide—installed Khrushchev as one of his senior advisors.
During the latter part of Stalin’s reign, Khrushchev continued to alternate between assignments running Ukraine (which he governed for over a decade in total) and serving as Party chief in Moscow, at the centre of Stalin’s court. At one late-night drunken dinner with the Soviet dictator, Stalin dangerously insisted that Khrushchev, then almost 60, burst into traditional Ukrainian folk dance, which Khrushchev—despite the intense humiliation—immediately did. When later asked about it, Khrushchev, displaying his native cunning for survival in Stalin’s shark tank, said simply, ‘When Stalin says dance, a wise man dances.’
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev, with the firm support of the Soviet military, somewhat surprisingly emerged the victor in a complicated, many-sided power struggle with Georgy Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria, and his former patron, Kaganovich. However, though from 1953-1964 Khrushchev was the preeminent Soviet leader, he enjoyed nothing like the absolute control Stalin had possessed.
On February 25, 1956, at the Soviet Twentieth Party Conference, Khrushchev finally laid Stalin’s homicidal ghost to rest. In a secret speech, he shockingly (to senior Party ears) denounced Stalin’s reign of terror, inaugurating a less repressive era in Soviet history. Khrushchev set about doing away with the special tribunals that had been operated by Beria’s secret service, which had been the means to carry out the purges. In direct contrast to his bloodthirsty predecessor, no major political show trials were conducted under Khrushchev’s leadership.
But if the Khrushchev era was a time of domestic relaxation, in terms of foreign affairs it signalled the tensest days of the Cold War. The Suez Crisis, the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolt of 1956, the U-2 spy plane crisis, ongoing tensions over Berlin, the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna summit debacle with JFK, and most importantly, the Cuban Missile Crisis—all were moving the world perilously close to the brink of all-out nuclear war.
The was partly the result of the West perpetually underestimating the new Soviet leader. Short, stocky, and accustomed to wearing ill-fitting suits, Khrushchev at times revelled in playing the role of the Russian peasant he had long since ceased to be. Yet the act often took in supposedly more worldly observers. Then British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan, upon meeting the loud, ebullient, Soviet leader, wondered, ‘How can this fat, vulgar man with his pig eyes and ceaseless flow of talk be the head—the aspirant Tsar—of all those millions of people?’
Yet this was the same man who worried incessantly that the huge, bloated Soviet military would continue to consume his country’s limited resources, making his longer-term goal of improving the lot of the average Soviet citizen impossible to achieve. This was the impetus for the major cuts the Soviets made in conventional military forces, hoping instead to strategically rely on nuclear weapons and improved missile technology for national defence, as Eisenhower (unlike Kennedy) had done in America in the 1950s.
In 1955, Khrushchev—unlike the kaiser—overturned Stalin’s plans for constructing a large navy to challenge American maritime dominance. Likewise, in January 1960, Khrushchev took advantage of a momentary thaw with the Americans to order a massive one-third cut in the overall size of the Soviet armed forces.
Yet Khrushchev was ultimately trying to change the nature of the strategic game, not to end the USSR’s rivalry with the US or to acquiesce in Western dominance. Convinced that Moscow could not challenge American pre-eminence through continuing the tired old Stalinist policy of maintaining the vast, bloated Red Army and focusing almost obsessively on Eastern Europe—which made the Soviet Union only a regional power at best—Khrushchev sought to globalise the Soviet Union’s contest with America, contradictorily at the very same moment he was cutting back on conventional capabilities.
These realities directly led to Khrushchev’s reach almost always exceeding his grasp as he carried out his ‘wars of national liberation’ policy. Ginned up by his brinkmanship, the Kremlin would have to brandish the threat of nuclear war. If the West failed to back down, that left Moscow with only the option of a debilitating climb-down. As such, the USSR’s search for a promised land strategy to overturn Western dominance, in the form of the ‘wars of national liberation’ policy, led directly to the humiliating outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In October 1962, the USSR, in an effort to further its ‘wars of national liberation’ strategy by bolstering the Castro regime, sought to install medium-range nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba, having the effect of dangerously altering the global strategic balance of power, as Castro sat a mere 90 miles off the US coast.
Eventually found out by irrefutable American U-2 spy plane evidence, Khrushchev, true to form, almost immediately adopted a defensive posture, in line with geopolitical realities. Fearing an overwhelming US invasion of the island, Khrushchev crucially ordered the Soviet troops stationed there to resist by all means short of nuclear weapons. There were obvious limits to how far this past master of bombast was prepared to go.
By October 25, 1962, in the face of the creative and forthright resistance of the Kennedy administration, Khrushchev decided that the offending missiles would have to be withdrawn from Cuba. Khrushchev’s bluff had been called. By October 27, terms with the Americans had been hammered out.
The Soviets agreed to withdraw the missiles from Cuba and to allow UN inspections to determine that this had been accomplished. In turn, the Kennedy administration made assurances not to again attempt to invade Castro’s Cuba. Further, in a secret protocol, Khrushchev managed to elicit a promise from the Kennedy White House to withdraw obsolete Jupiter missiles from Turkey, where they were perched all too close to the Soviet heartland.
On its surface, these terms were not unduly unfavourable for the USSR. Although they had been humiliatingly found out in trying to alter the global strategic equation on the sly, on its merits the ‘wars of national liberation’ strategy ought not to have come unstuck by the Cuban Missile Crisis. A major ally in that policy, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, had just been guaranteed its continuing existence, right under America’s nose. Further, the offending Jupiter missiles in Turkey would not be removed, in line with the strategic reciprocity of the deal, much as the missiles of October so obviously worried the US.
Yet less than two years later, Khrushchev was unceremoniously unseated, largely as a result of the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fursenko and Naftali are right to point out how the basic contradictions in Khrushchev’s overall ‘wars of national liberation’ policy contributed to his demise. Prior to Cuba, ‘Khrushchev increased the number of Soviet commitments overseas, providing weapons at cost or below to Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Laos, North Vietnam, Congo and Cuba. The effect was to make him (Khrushchev) increasingly reliant on the appearance rather than the reality of Soviet power.’
Khrushchev’s strategy rested precisely on his bluffs not being called, but whenever they were he backed down, both because he did not have a preponderance of military power behind him to secure his strategy, and because—despite all the bombast—he had no intention of starting World War III.
The USSR’s relative rise was nowhere near great enough strategically to accommodate this dramatic increase in ambition. This disconnect left the Soviet leader perpetually bluffing until, over the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration finally called his relatively weak hand. Like the kaiser, Khrushchev had bet everything on the promised land strategy, and lost. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, like the Wizard of Oz, Khrushchev was shown to be blustering in a desperate attempt to hide his weakness. After Cuba, Khrushchev’s credibility had been fatally undermined.
Before the Cuban Missile Crisis, in June 1962, food prices had begun to rise in the USSR. This was particularly true of the staples of meat and butter, which shot up in price by an astronomical 25-30 percent, inciting domestic discontent. This would be exacerbated by the drought that struck the Soviet Union in 1963. Along with the seeming humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the time was ripe for Khrushchev’s downfall.
Khrushchev himself made things easy for Leonid Brezhnev and the other plotters, as he was absent from Moscow for a total of five months between January-September 1964. At last, Brezhnev and his cronies struck in October 1964, as Khrushchev was met at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport by KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny, a supposed ally, who had come supported by guards from the intelligence agency. Bluntly informed of his ouster and told not to resist, Khrushchev bowed to this last insult, as he had earlier acquiesced in dancing for Stalin.
Pensioned off by the coup plotters, Khrushchev was allowed an apartment and even a small dacha in the countryside. Nevertheless, the man used to frightening the world fell into a deep depression upon his forced retirement, as he was largely ignored, becoming the last Soviet ‘nonperson.’ When Khrushchev died of a heart attack on September 11, 1971, he was denied a state funeral by his enemies.