PEACEFUL CO-EXISTENCE?

What was Khrushchev Up To?

For many historians, Khrushchev’s foreign policy presents a conundrum.  He attended Summit meetings with western leaders, significantly reduced the size of the Soviet armed forces, including the number of long-range bombers; as he told a press conference in 1958:

"We are against the arms race, against the threat of a new war.  We stand for peaceful competition in the economic sphere."

… and yet at the same time he boasted about the Soviet Union’s military capabilities, provoked the most dangerous confrontations with the Western states, and publicly threatened to destroy them all. 

Khrushchev’s bragging

One of Khrushchev’s most famous statements was made in 1956, in a speech at the Polish embassy in Moscow, where he said:

“About the capitalist states, it doesn't depend on you whether or not we exist.  Whether you like it or not, history is on our side.  We will bury you!"

Although he later clarified:

"I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it.  Of course we will not bury you with a shovel.  Your own working class will bury you"

Khrushchev’s words were taken in the West as a direct threat. 

Khrushchev was particularly loquacious about the Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles. 

    •  After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, he bragged that his country's factories “were turning out missiles like sausages”

    •  In August 1958 he told the Chinese leader Mao Zedong, “Now that we have the [inter-]continental missile, we also hold America by the throat.  They thought that America is out of reach.  But this is not so.”

    •  In December 1958 he boasted openly about the successful testing of an ICBM with an impressive 8,000-mile (13,000 km) range

    •  In 1960, he claimed that “the Soviet Union is now the world’s strongest power”. 

So what was Khrushchev up to?

In January 1959 a US memo on his speech to the 21st Congress of the Soviet Union reported that he had said (in his 7-hour speech):

“We already have so many nuclear weapons, both atomic and hydrogen, and the necessary rockets for delivering these weapons that we would be able literally to wipe the countries which attack us off the face of the earth.”

Not a Bragger

There are some historians who represent Khrushchev as a buffoon, bragging to impress, because he could not control his tongue, because he had got over-excited in the heat of the moment. 

But look at what he was saying in his 21st Congress speech.  He was NOT stressing the hugeness of Soviet weaponry as a threat of war, but as a DETERRENT. 

Khrushchev had realised that the destructive power of nuclear weapons was now so great that – whilst the USSR would win a nuclear war, he believed – the cost to both sides would be so great that war between capitalism and communism was no longer (as Stalin had believed) a realistic possibility … only a madman would go to war!  As Khrushchev told the 20th Congress in 1956:

"There are only two ways - either peaceful co-existence or the most destructive war in history.  There is no third way."

Peaceful Co-existence

When WE think of ‘peaceful co-existence’ we imagine ‘live-and-let-live’.  That was not Khrushchev’s imagining of the phrase. 

War might be impossible, but for him there was no ‘being friends’ with capitalism, he told a French journalist in 1958. 

In a world where the Soviet Union possessed the preponderance of nuclear weapons, war was no longer “fatalistically inevitable”, he said in March 1959:

“not because the imperialists have become wiser or kinder, but because they have become weaker.”

In the Soviet newspaper Pravda in March 1959 he likened the West a hungry wolf yearning to destroy communism ...  only now it was a wolf with blunt fangs, lusting to kill a powerful lion. 

(He was, btw, absolutely correct in his assessment of the West, which throughout his term was intent on ‘rolling back’ communism.)

As a Marxist-Leninist, Khrushchev believed that capitalism and communism were incompatible, that they were in competition with each other, and that eventually one would destroy the other:

At a meeting with delegates from East Germany (1958):

"We shall defeat capitalism without war.  We shall defeat it in peaceful competition

In a speech at the Polish Embassy (1958):

"The socialist countries do not need war.  They need peace to advance their economy, to raise the living standards of the working people.  We stand for peaceful co-existence, for peaceful competition between the two systems—socialist and capitalist.  And we are convinced that our system will triumph. 

Peace was good, and Khrushchev was prepared to promote it.  But it was only for him a means towards an end. 

The Effect of the Nuclear Deterrent on Khrushchev’s thinking

How was it that a Soviet leader who wanted ‘peaceful co-existence’ in fact provoked the west and deliberately did things that raised international tensions … to the brink of nuclear war?

It seems to me that – whilst he thought that in the past the Soviet Union had had to restrain its influence to the Iron Curtain because it feared an attack from a superior military power – knowing that this was now never going to happen, because of the Soviet deterrent – made Khrushchev feel that he could ‘take the gloves off’. 

He was free to conduct an aggressive foreign and economic policy because he knew that the USA could not do anything about it. 

According to Khrushchev’s former colleague Oleg Troyanovsky, there was a turning point in Khrushchev’s policy in 1958, which led Khrushchev to issue his November 1958 ultimatum to the US, UK and France to get out of West Berlin within six months.  Why this after all his attempts to ease Soviet-West tensions?  The answer, says Troyanovsky (2000), is that - after the West had snubbed Soviet peace proposals for five years – Khrushchev resolved to FORCE the Western powers to listen.