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The Cold War after
Stalin’s Death
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THE HARVARD COLD WAR STUDIES BOOK SERIES
Series Editor
Mark Kramer, Harvard University
The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation:
Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism
Bradley F. Abrams
Resistance with the People: Repression and Resistance
in Eastern Germany 1945–1955
Gary Bruce
Triggering Communism’s Collapse:
Perceptions and Power in Poland’s Transition
Marjorie Castle
At the Dawn of the Cold War: The Soviet-American Crisis
over Iranian Azerbaijan, 1941—1946
Jamil Hasanli
Mao and the Economic Stalinization of China: 1948–1953
Hua-yu Li
Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948
Edited by Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak
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The Cold War after
Stalin’s Death
A Missed Opportunity
for Peace?
Edited by Klaus Larres and Kenneth Osgood
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Oxford
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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowmanlittlefield.com
P.O. Box 317, Oxford OX2 9RU, UK
Copyright © 2006 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Printed in the United States of America
` ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
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For Rachel and Joseph Osgood and
in memory of Norbert Larres (1961–2005)
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Contents
Preface
Klaus Larres and Kenneth Osgood
ix
Introduction: International Politics in the Early Post-Stalin Era:
A Lost Opportunity, a Turning Point, or More of the Same?
Mark Kramer
xiii
Part I The Soviet Union and the United States after Stalin
1 The Elusive Détente: Stalin’s Successors and the West
3
Vojtech Mastny
2 The Perils of Coexistence: Peace and Propaganda in
Eisenhower’s Foreign Policy
Kenneth Osgood
27
3 A Missed Chance for Peace? Opportunities for Détente
49
in Europe
Jerald A. Combs
4 Poisoned Apples: John Foster Dulles and the “Peace Offensive”
73
Lloyd Gardner
Part II The Peace Offensives in Cultural Context
5 Meanings of Peace: The Rhetorical Cold War after Stalin
Ira Chernus
vii
95
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Contents
6 Stalin’s Ghost: Cold War Culture and U.S.-Soviet Relations
115
Jeffrey Brooks
Part III Fragile Coalitions, East and West
7 The Road to Geneva: Anglo-American Relations and Western
Summit Diplomacy
Klaus Larres
137
8 Alliance Politics after Stalin’s Death: Franco-American
Conflict in Europe and Asia
Kathryn C. Statler
157
9 Coexistence and Confrontation: Sino-Soviet Relations
after Stalin
Qiang Zhai
177
10 The New Course: Soviet Policy toward Germany and the
Uprising in the GDR
Hope M. Harrison
193
Part IV Assessing Peaceful Coexistence
11 Cold War, Détente, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution
213
Csaba Békés
12 The Robust Assertion of Austrianism: Peaceful Coexistence in
Austria after Stalin’s Death
Günter Bischof
13 The Lure of Neutrality: Finland and the Cold War
233
257
Jussi M. Hanhimäki
14 Treacherous Ground: Soviet-Japanese Relations and the
United States
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
277
Index
303
About the Contributors
000
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Page ix
Preface
When Joseph Stalin died on 5 March 1953, Cold War tensions were at their
worst. Meaningful diplomatic negotiations between the communist and capitalist adversaries had long since ceased, and the nuclear arms race was entering a new and more dangerous phase with the development of thermonuclear
weapons. An atmosphere of hysteria and suspicion gripped the world’s two
superpowers. In Moscow, the aging despot had spent his last days laying the
groundwork for another murderous purge while, in Washington, Senator
Joseph McCarthy continued his elusive pursuit of the spectre of communism.
Soviet-American relations were further poisoned by Moscow’s “hate-America” campaign. This visceral propaganda campaign including charges that
Washington had been conducting “bacteriological warfare” in Korea—where
a brutal and bloody war was grinding into an agonizing stalemate. General
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s victory in the 1952 election, moreover, brought to
power a new administration promising to “win the Cold War,” leading Soviet
intelligence officials to conclude that World War III was a real possibility.
Then Stalin died. Almost overnight, the whole atmosphere of the Cold War
seemed to change. Stalin’s heir apparent, Georgi Malenkov, promptly announced his government’s willingness to resolve international disputes peacefully, thus inaugurating a peace blitz that continued in fits and starts for nearly
a decade. Only a few months after Stalin’s death, the dictator’s mantra of irreconcilable conflict between the capitalist and communist camps had been
replaced by “peaceful coexistence” as the professed doctrine of Soviet foreign policy. Between 1953 and 1955 cease-fires were achieved in Indochina
and Korea; the Soviet and Chinese governments indicated their willingness to
normalize relations with Japan; an Austrian peace treaty was signed; and the
heads of the American, British, and French governments met in Geneva with
ix
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their Soviet counterparts at the first Cold War summit conference—the first
such meeting since the 1945 Potsdam conference. Around the globe, world
leaders spoke urgently and eloquently of the very real possibility of creating
a “just and durable peace.”
But despite these positive signs, the Cold War continued as Stalin lay entombed on Red Square. Indeed, by the end of the decade the most divisive issues remained unsettled despite repeated pledges by both sides of their willingness to resolve the East-West conflict as soon as possible. By 1960 the
U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals and the capacity to deliver these weapons
had grown exponentially. Less than ten years after Stalin’s death, the superpowers found themselves perilously close to war over the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. The few substantive agreements reached in the
mid-1950s as well as the test ban treaty signed in 1963 did nothing to slow
down the arms race. No meaningful form of “coexistence” developed. After
Stalin’s death the Cold War continued for nearly four more decades consuming untold riches and claiming countless lives.
Did this have to be? Was an opportunity missed to overcome and terminate
the Cold War? Was there a possibility for the creation of a more stable, less
threatening, and less costly world in both human and material terms?
Such questions about the possibilities of missed opportunities after Stalin’s
death have occupied scholars, journalists, and policy makers for decades. Years
after his tenure as ambassador, Charles Bohlen expressed regret that the United
States had not responded more positively to Soviet peace feelers in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death. “There might have been opportunities for an
adjustment of some of the outstanding questions, particularly regarding Germany,” he observed. In retrospect Bohlen regarded Malenkov as an affable figure, less ideological and “with a more Western-oriented mind than other Soviet
leaders.” Twenty years after Stalin’s death Bohlen had arrived at the conviction
that Malenkov was someone with whom the West could have conducted fruitful negotiations.1 His feelings have been shared by many other observers over
the years, including former national security advisors Zbiginiew Brzezinski and
Henry Kissinger—hardly apologists for the Soviet system.2
Despite the sudden end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, inquiries into possible missed opportunities after Stalin’s death continue apace. Revelations
from once-closed Soviet archives and the publication of numerous memoirs
from former Soviet officials have shed much light on the nature of Soviet domestic and international policies during this crucial period of the Cold War.
Numerous analysts have suggested that at least two of the Kremlin’s new leaders, Georgi Malenkov and secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, were seriously
interested in a relaxation of tensions, perhaps including a neutralized, reunited
Germany and a form of global disarmament. This also raises the question
whether or not it was “inevitable” that the Cold War lasted as long as it did.
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xi
The essays in this volume trace the evolution of the Cold War after
Stalin’s death from an international perspective. Some of them focus on the
first few months of the Stalin succession, when the international atmosphere was most fluid, and others take a longer view, assessing the policy of
peaceful coexistence from Stalin’s death until the late 1950s and early
1960s. Although the opportunities and challenges created by Stalin’s death
guide all of the essays, they are not concerned with rehashing old Cold War
debates about the ultimate intentions of Stalin’s successors. Instead, the
chapters in this book seek to arrive at a more nuanced historical understanding of this crucial period of the Cold War, assessing both the possibilities for change and the obstacles to détente. Some of the articles focus primarily on the United States and the Soviet Union, analyzing superpower
foreign policies and personalities as well as rhetoric and political culture.
Others explore intra-alliance politics in both East and West to uncover the
influence of actors in Eastern and Western Europe as well as in Asia and
elsewhere in influencing Moscow and Washington and shaping Cold War
geopolitics. Still other essays assess the “new courses” in Soviet foreign
policy through the eyes of countries such as Austria, Finland, Japan, and the
German Democratic Republic.
Recognizing that, as John Lewis Gaddis has written, “few if any historians
will master all of archives and all of the languages required for comparative
comprehensive Cold War international history,”3 this book draws from the
collective talents of an international group of scholars with a wide range of
historical, geographical and linguistic expertise. All of the essays are based on
original research, many of them drawing from previously inaccessible
archival documents from both East and West. Collectively the book represents research in seven different languages from nearly twenty archival collections in ten countries—a task well beyond the abilities of any single
scholar. The editors have attempted to ensure that all the chapters constitute
independent works which can stand on their own; at the same time overlaps
have been avoided as much as possible so that the volume also constitutes an
integrated and coherent whole which can be read from cover to cover.
The book thus attempts to do justice to the multi-dimensional nature of the
Cold War after Stalin’s death. At the most basic level, the essays in this volume illustrate how the death of Stalin and the ensuing changes in Soviet foreign policy had worldwide implications that varied dramatically from place
to place. The view from Moscow or Washington looked quite different from
that of Paris, London, Tokyo, Helsinki, Vienna, Beijing, Budapest, and
Berlin. It is our hope that the book will not only contribute to scholarly understanding of this crucial period in international politics, but that its global
perspective will provide students with insights into the new international history of the Cold War.
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The planning and preparation of this book was as multinational as the essays it contains, with Klaus Larres in Belfast and Kenneth Osgood in Santa
Barbara and Boca Raton communicating to contributors spread widely across
North America and Europe. The book was facilitated by a productive conference—sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara—that brought our international contributors together
for a dialogue about the changing nature of the Cold War after Stalin. We are
most grateful to Fredrik Logevall, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, and Leonard Wallock
for their valuable support in planning this event and indeed to the many participants in the conference for their help in turning our original ideas into a
united and coherent project. For the generous funding that made the conference possible, we are indebted to the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, the History Department and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at
UC Santa Barbara, and the University of California’s President’s Office. Finally, we would like to thank Mark Kramer and the editorial staff of Rowman
and Littlefield for all their help and support.
Klaus Larres
Belfast
Kenneth Osgood
Boca Raton
NOTES
1. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1973), 369–72.
2. Zbiginiew Brzezinski, “How the Cold War Was Played,” Foreign Affairs 51
(October 1972): 205. In this article, he observed, “A more active policy, combining
a willingness to contrive a new European relationship (including perhaps a neutralized Germany) with a credible inclination to exploit Soviet difficulties in Eastern Europe, might have diluted the partition of Europe and maybe even transformed the rivalry into a less hostile relationship.” Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1994).
3. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997), ix.
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Introduction: International Politics in the
Early Post-Stalin Era: A Lost Opportunity,
a Turning Point, or More of the Same?
Mark Kramer
Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with an iron hand for a quarter of a century. So long a shadow did he cast both at home and abroad that his death on
5 March 1953 sent shockwaves around the world. Because Stalin had been so
crucial in the onset of the Cold War and the dangerous crises that ensued in
the late 1940s and early 1950s, his demise introduced a striking degree of fluidity into the international system. The changes that occurred in the USSR
immediately after Stalin’s death were so important that many observers
nowadays from across the political spectrum have looked back at this period
and asked: Was an opportunity missed to bring an early end to the Cold War?
The fourteen essays that follow explore this question from a broad, international perspective by analyzing the impact of the early post-Stalin succession
on Cold War politics in the Soviet Union and the United States as well as in
Great Britain, France, Austria, Finland, Hungary, Germany (East and West),
China, Japan, and Indochina. Although few if any of the authors believe that
a lasting East-West settlement was possible in 1953 and that a real opportunity was missed, the essays leave no doubt that Stalin’s death was a turning
point in the Cold War.
The potential for momentous change on the international scene in 1953
is something I emphasized in 1999 when I published a series of articles titled “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in EastCentral Europe.”1 The articles showed how internal events in the Soviet
Union in 1953—specifically, the death of Stalin in March and the early
post-Stalin succession struggle—affected Soviet foreign policy, which in
turn had a far-reaching impact on internal developments in Eastern Europe
and on the whole nature of Soviet-East European relations. By tracing the
linkages between internal events and external policies and outcomes, I
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sought to highlight the fluidity of the early post-Stalin era. Not only was it
a time of rapid domestic flux in the Soviet Union, but it was also a period
in which long-standing assumptions about Soviet foreign policy were up for
reconsideration. The internal-external dynamic in 1953 ultimately worked
against fundamental change in Soviet foreign policy and in East-West relations (the sort of change that occurred at the end of the 1980s under Mikhail
Gorbachev), but my reassessment of this period led me to conclude that the
prospect of a reorientation of Soviet foreign policy after Stalin’s death
was—at least for a short while—not as far-fetched as most scholars had previously believed.
This does not necessarily mean, however, that the early post-Stalin era was
a “lost opportunity” to end the Cold War. The period of greatest fluidity on
the Soviet side, from mid-March to late June 1953, was very brief—barely
three months. It came to an end not because of any Western actions but because of exogenous developments in East Germany (the June 1953 uprising)
and in the Soviet Union itself (the downfall and denunciation of Lavrentii Beria). Many U.S. officials, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, recognized the importance of Stalin’s death and wanted to encourage an easing of
repression in the Soviet Union, but in the short term they could not be certain
that Soviet foreign policy would change in any meaningful way, much less
that a genuine opportunity would exist to restructure East-West relations.
Although U.S. policymakers welcomed the initial flurry of domestic reforms in the USSR, they suspected that the peace overtures from Moscow in
the spring of 1953 might simply be a form of political warfare intended to
sow disunity within the North Atlantic alliance—a ploy that Stalin had often
used in the final years of his life.2 The ambivalence felt by many U.S. officials in the aftermath of Stalin’s death was evident at a meeting of the U.S.
National Security Council (NSC) on 8 April 1953. The new director of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Allen Dulles, presented a detailed briefing to the NSC on the post-Stalin changes in the Soviet Union. After noting
that “the CIA had originally believed that after Stalin’s death [the new leaders in Moscow] would play a very cautious game [and] . . . would faithfully
adhere to Stalin’s policies for a very considerable time,” Dulles acknowledged that “neither of these estimates had actually proved to be true.” He reported that the new Soviet leaders were adopting “quite shattering departures
. . . from the policies of the Stalin regime,” including bold steps in foreign
policy as well as major domestic reforms that in his view were not only “significant” but “astonishing.” Dulles conceded that this new course “had come
much earlier and was being pursued much more systematically than the CIA
had expected.” But instead of regarding all these developments as an opportunity for the United States to pursue a different relationship with the USSR,
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he simply concluded that there was “no ground for the belief that there [will]
be any change in the basic hostility of the Soviet Union to the free world.”3
Eisenhower himself was more optimistic than Dulles about the prospects
for improving ties with Moscow, but he, too, could not be confident that the
remarkable changes under way in the Soviet Union would last indefinitely.
Moreover, even if Eisenhower had felt certain that the “astonishing” reforms
adopted by Stalin’s successors would lead to a permanent moderation of Soviet foreign policy, he would not have had enough time to carry out the radical adjustments that would have been required to overcome the Cold War. The
sweeping reorientation of East-West relations in the latter half of the 1980s
occurred over several years, giving policymakers on both sides sufficient leeway to adjust and to “learn” new ways of interacting.4 By contrast, the window of opportunity in 1953—insofar as it existed at all—was much too compressed to allow for fundamental adjustments and learning on either side.
Deep reservoirs of mistrust and suspicion in both Washington and Moscow,
as reflected in Allen Dulles’s comments, could not be dissipated overnight,
and any headlong attempt to surmount the East-West divide would have been
vulnerable to derailment. This is precisely why the aging British prime minister, Winston Churchill, encountered such strong skepticism and resistance
within his own government (and within the Eisenhower administration) when
he proposed to end the Cold War in one fell swoop.5 Except in the immediate
aftermath of war, drastic change in international relations is apt to require a
lengthy period of gestation.
Furthermore, even if U.S. officials had been inclined to push immediately
for a wholesale accommodation with the Soviet Union in the spring of 1953,
the domestic barriers to any precipitate action would have been formidable.
Although opinion polls in late March and early April 1953 revealed that a
large majority (78 percent) of Americans were in favor of having Eisenhower
and Churchill meet with Soviet Prime Minister Georgii Malenkov “to try to
settle world differences,” this did not mean that the leeway for compromise
was unlimited.6 The United States at the time was still in the throes of McCarthyism, and U.S. troops were still fighting in Korea, a war that had resulted in tens of thousands of American deaths over the previous few years.
The Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s had imposed harsh Communist rule in Eastern Europe and had engaged in ugly anti-Semitic repressions both at home and in Eastern Europe, underscoring the odious nature of
Stalin’s regime. Moreover, in the two years before Stalin died, the Soviet and
East European armed forces had been engaged in a huge military buildup, a
development that raised concern about Soviet military intentions vis-à-vis
Western Europe.7 Although Western commentators and government officials
were pleased that Stalin’s death had led almost immediately to what Allen
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Dulles described as a “relaxation of domestic pressures in the Soviet Union”
and a less bellicose Soviet approach to the outside world, memories of the
Stalin era were still vivid. These memories caused many to be wary of acting
too hastily, lest they find that the situation in the USSR and the direction of
Soviet foreign policy would suddenly revert back to the policies of the Stalinist regime.
The residue of the early Cold War years meant that any U.S. official in the
spring of 1953 who would have publicly called for a much more conciliatory
policy toward the Soviet Union—a policy going far beyond the idea of simply holding a high-level meeting—would likely have been accused of being
“soft on Communism.” Eisenhower had won the presidency in November
1952 on a platform of “rolling back” Communism and “liberating” the oppressed countries in Eastern Europe. Although Stalin’s death changed the political equation, a radical departure from that declared line—or even from the
more modest goal of containing Soviet expansion—at the start of the Eisenhower administration would have been infeasible even if the state of affairs
in Moscow had been less murky. Not only would there have been domestic
opposition, but U.S. policymakers also were worried about the likely reactions of U.S. allies in Western Europe and East Asia. At an NSC meeting on
11 March 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (the elder brother of
Allen) claimed that the West European countries and Japan “favored a policy
of proceeding with great caution” and that “we must not jeopardize the unity
of our own coalition.”8
Given these constraints, Eisenhower fluctuated between more conciliatory
and more aggressive options in the spring of 1953. On the one hand, he, unlike some of his advisers, was relatively optimistic that “the advent of new
men” in Moscow would enable the two sides to “begin talking to each other”
with a “clean slate.”9 At the NSC meeting on 8 April, the president said it was
“quite possible that the [new] Soviet leaders may have decided that the time
had come” to shift resources from military programs into consumer production and to adopt a less threatening posture abroad. He instructed the NSC and
the State Department to “study the problem constantly in an effort to determine whether the Soviets [are] really changing their outlook, and accordingly
whether some kind of modus vivendi might not at long last prove feasible.”10
On the other hand, Eisenhower was tempted by the arguments of those like
C. D. Jackson, his chief adviser on psychological warfare, who viewed the
post-Stalin interregnum as a time to press American advantages and to seek
changes in Soviet policy that would settle the Cold War on America’s own
terms. Although Eisenhower did not share the pessimistic outlook expressed
by Jackson or Secretary of State Dulles or some other senior U.S. officials
(including Jackson’s associate, William Morgan, who urged the president “to
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do everything [possible] to encourage and promote chaos within the USSR”),
he wanted more evidence that the spate of changes in the Soviet Union and
the new tenor of Soviet foreign policy would be preserved.11 The East German uprising and the downfall of Beria caused Eisenhower to shift more in
the direction of the rollback policies he and John Foster Dulles had espoused
during the campaign. Although the president remained committed to the
“chance for peace,” he also was intent on rectifying U.S. vulnerabilities,
shoring up Western military alliances, and pursuing victory in the Cold War.
In hindsight we can see that the fluid nature of Soviet foreign policy during the first few months after Stalin’s death may have allowed for greater
change in East-West relations than actually occurred, but policymakers in the
new Eisenhower administration had no benefit of hindsight and were still getting acclimated to their jobs when Stalin died. They, like many observers,
took for granted that the Soviet Union, even if it underwent significant
change, would remain fundamentally at odds with the democratic polities of
the West. Although Eisenhower left open the possibility that “basic changes
in Soviet policy” toward the United States and its allies might eventually materialize, he could not be confident, at least in the near term, that “the basic
hostility of the Soviet regime toward the free world” would sharply and permanently diminish.12 Throughout the Cold War, leaders on both sides were
often deeply uncertain about the other side’s motivations and intentions, and
the period immediately after Stalin’s death was no exception.
Nonetheless, even though the Cold War persisted long after 1953, the
changes that ultimately occurred in East-West relations during the first two
years after Stalin’s death, including the signing of the armistice in Korea in July
1953, the Geneva conference on Vietnam and Korea in April 1954, the conclusion of the Austrian State Treaty in May 1955, and the “spirit of Geneva” conference in July 1955, were by no means insignificant. None of these developments would have been conceivable under Stalin. Further improvements in
East-West relations seemed likely in the first several months of 1956 after
Nikita Khrushchev launched a de-Stalinization campaign at the 20th Soviet
Party Congress with a “secret speech” denouncing Stalin. The speech generated
widespread political ferment in Eastern Europe and even, to a degree, in
China.13 But the bounds of permissible change in the Soviet bloc were made
clear in November 1956 when Khrushchev sent Soviet troops into Hungary to
crush an anti-Communist uprising and to restore a pro-Soviet Communist
regime. We now know, from declassified Soviet archival materials, that
Khrushchev and his colleagues initially decided on 30 October 1956 to let the
Communist regime in Hungary collapse and to pull all Soviet troops out of
Hungary, but they reversed that decision the following day and approved an invasion.14 The Stalinist legacy in Eastern Europe endured for another 35 years.
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Thus, whatever opportunities may have briefly existed in 1953, Stalin’s
death ultimately marked not the end of the Cold War but merely a turning
point in it. The belligerence of Soviet policy vis-à-vis the West diminished after Stalin, and the prospects for East-West cooperation and arms control increased, but dangerous East-West crises still cropped up periodically during
the post-Stalin era, most notably in October 1962. The two sides continued to
deploy immense numbers of combat-ready troops and nuclear weapons
against one another in Europe and elsewhere. The Soviet bloc supported
Marxist guerrillas in the Third World and provided training and weapons to
leftist and Palestinian terrorists. Charles Gati rightly observed in 1980 that
Stalin’s legacy was still evident in Soviet foreign policy under Khrushchev
and Leonid Brezhnev.15
Yet even though Stalin’s legacy in Soviet foreign policy outlived him by
some three-and-a-half decades, his legacy in Soviet domestic politics was
modified in important ways that ultimately permitted the rise of a new generation of leaders who were willing to undertake a fundamentally new course
in foreign policy. Stalin’s death brought an end to violent mass terror in the
Soviet Union and led, within a few years, to the release of millions of people
from the gulag and the return of deported nationalities to their homelands.
The cultural thaw and greater openness under Khrushchev did not last after
Brezhnev came to power, but even in the Brezhnev era Soviet citizens had
much greater contact with the outside world and greater access to a range of
cultural and literary materials than they ever could have imagined when
Stalin was alive. The Soviet Union remained a repressive dictatorship until
the latter half of the 1980s, but the changes that occurred after Stalin’s death
brought a measure of relief for those living under Soviet Communism.
These internal changes also eventually had momentous consequences for
Soviet foreign policy. Gorbachev and other officials who became the leading
proponents of sweeping political reform and “new thinking” in Soviet foreign policy in the late 1980s would never have risen as far as they did in the
climate that prevailed under Stalin. After Gorbachev came to office in 1985
and encountered resistance to his initial reform program, he realized that unless he eliminated the pernicious residue of Stalinism in the Soviet Union he
would be unable either to carry out “revolutionary changes” in the political
system or to transform Soviet foreign policy. Although Khrushchev’s deStalinization campaign in the 1950s and early 1960s was the first crucial step
in dismantling the vestiges of the Stalin era, Khrushchev’s condemnation of
Stalin was highly selective. Moreover, Brezhnev had abandoned and partly
reversed the de-Stalinization campaign after he ousted Khrushchev in 1964.
One of the hallmarks of the Gorbachev era was an attempt to expose the full
magnitude of Stalin’s crimes. The wide-ranging denunciation of Stalinism in
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the late 1980s and early 1990s facilitated radical changes in both domestic
politics and foreign policy—changes that Gorbachev explicitly claimed
would “overcome Stalin’s legacy once and for all.”16 The dissolution of
Stalin’s legacy, both at home and abroad (particularly in Eastern Europe),
ended the Cold War.
The fourteen essays in this book take us back to the early post-Stalin era and
offer a panoramic view of the impact of Stalin’s death in numerous parts of
the world. Whereas my articles focused mainly on the political fallout in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the contributors here go well beyond that,
looking at Western Europe, Scandinavia, the United States, China, Japan, and
Indochina as well as Eastern Europe and the USSR. Although the book does
not include any chapters on Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, or
Africa, that is mainly because Stalin attached little importance to these parts
of the world.17 Not until decolonization gained pace and the number of independent countries in Africa and Asia sharply increased in the 1950s and 1960s
(and until a Communist regime came to power in Cuba in 1959) did the competition for influence in the Third World—a competition involving China and
Cuba as well as the United States and the Soviet Union—become a salient
feature of the Cold War.
The authors of the fourteen chapters present varied perspectives on the opportunities that existed after Stalin’s death and the magnitude of the changes
that ultimately occurred. None of the contributors believes that the Cold War
could definitely have been ended for good in 1953, but several do contend
that greater room was available to move toward the kind of détente that eventually emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Vojtech Mastny provides an overview of U.S.-Soviet relations in 1953 and
highlights the sundry obstacles to a broad accommodation between the two
sides. Drawing on former East-bloc as well as Western archives, Mastny argues that “the Cold War adversaries [were] working at cross-purposes” during most of 1953 and that, under those circumstances, no opportunity to end
the Cold War really existed. He contends that by the time “the best moment
for [pursuing] détente [came] on the Western side” in September 1953, the
fleeting window of opportunity on the Soviet side had already been “lost for
extraneous reasons.” Although one might question whether the policies of the
two sides were as much out of sync as Mastny suggests, there is little doubt
that insufficient time was available for a far-reaching rapprochement.
Kenneth Osgood, in a chapter focusing on the United States and its psychological warfare programs, is more inclined than the other contributors to
leave open the question of whether the Eisenhower administration “missed an
opportunity to bring an early end to the Cold War,” but he concedes that
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American sources alone tell us little if anything about the Soviet Union’s true
intentions in 1953. Osgood avers that, in the first few months after Stalin’s
death, some of the most influential U.S. policymakers assumed that nothing
of importance would change in the Soviet Union. Most of these officials, he
argues, were wont to disregard evidence to the contrary. This characterization
is not appropriate for Eisenhower (who was surprisingly optimistic in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death about the prospects for meaningful negotiations with the new leaders in Moscow), but it would apply reasonably well
to officials like C. D. Jackson, William Morgan, and John Foster Dulles, all
of whom were supremely skeptical about the desirability of offering any concessions to the Soviet Union. Osgood faults the U.S. government for “never
[having] tested the Soviet leadership’s intentions through negotiations” and
for “never seriously [having] entertained the prospect” that “a chance for
peace” was at hand, though it is difficult to see how, in light of the factors discussed above, the United States could have responded in a timely enough
manner to take advantage of opportunities that may (or may not) have been
briefly available.
Indeed, an overly hasty response, as Jerald Combs emphasizes in his chapter on the military situation in Europe and its diplomatic implications, most
likely “would have failed and [would] probably [have] left matters worse than
they already were.” Some of the key goals that would have been under consideration in high-level U.S.-Soviet talks, Combs contends, “were neither
achievable nor desirable, in part because of their impact on the balance of
power in Europe.” In particular, he argues that two extremely ambitious objectives—the unification of a neutral Germany and total nuclear disarmament—were at odds with the military realities in Europe. In that sense, no opportunity to end the Cold War truly existed. Combs does, however, fault the
Eisenhower administration (and also the Soviet Union) for not having seriously pursued limited bilateral arms control negotiations that could have ensured a more stable conventional force balance in Europe and that might have
kept the two sides from eventually amassing tens of thousands of nuclear
warheads and bombs. Combs maintains that “with a little more flexibility on
both sides,” the obstacles to nuclear and conventional arms control “might
have been resolved.” The U.S. position on these matters, he argues, not only
was inflexible but was essentially designed to forestall any progress.
Lloyd Gardner’s chapter examines how the Eisenhower administration, particularly Secretary of State Dulles, responded to a series of diplomatic challenges after Stalin’s death. Gardner avers that Dulles and several other senior
U.S. officials were so committed to the “reconstruction of [West] Germany
and Japan” and the reestablishment of a “liberal free-market world economy”
that they did not really consider the possibility of meaningful change in Soviet
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foreign policy or “an early end to the conflict between East and West” (a point
also stressed by Osgood). Far from seeking direct talks with the new Soviet
leaders, Dulles was determined to avoid the risks that a high-level meeting
might entail. The secretary of state attempted to deflect pressure both at home
and abroad to open meaningful contacts with the USSR. Gardner acknowledges that there may not have been “a real chance for [comprehensive] negotiations in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death,” but he maintains that
“on the American side there was little inclination to risk alliance cohesion or
domestic willingness to ‘stay the course’ to probe those possibilities.”
Ira Chernus’s chapter analyzes the rhetorical discourse of the Cold War in
the immediate wake of Stalin’s death, as reflected in four key “peace
speeches” delivered by Eisenhower and Soviet Prime Minister Georgii
Malenkov in 1953.18 Chernus emphasizes that U.S. and Soviet leaders “had
different rhetorical visions of peace because they began from different places,
given the power inequity between them.” Eisenhower, as the leader of the
stronger power overall, “constructed a meaning of peace that entailed a static,
divided world,” whereas Malenkov “spoke of peace as a way of creating and
maintaining dynamic interaction between the two poles of the divided
world,” allowing change to take place that would favor Soviet interests and
objectives. Chernus contends that this rhetorical disparity helped “set in motion a fateful process of historical change” that resulted in greater cooperation
between the two countries but prevented them from reaching a broader and
more durable accommodation until the late 1980s.
Jeffrey Brooks arrives at a similar conclusion in his chapter on the tenacity
of Cold War culture and rhetoric among senior U.S. and Soviet officials during the first few months after Stalin’s death. Brooks persuasively argues that
in this “critical period when messages on both sides were framed, delivered,
interpreted and misinterpreted, parsed, and pondered,” neither side “proved
capable of escaping the patterns of thinking and communicating that had become ingrained in [both sides’] cultures.” Brooks avers that “if a window of
opportunity opened on Stalin’s death, neither side used it to envisage a nonManichean discourse,” and he therefore concludes that “rhetorical constraints,
largely of expression on the Soviet side and of perception on the American
side, closed the window before anyone had a chance to consider the view.”
Klaus Larres and Kathryn Statler consider the impact of Stalin’s death on
two key U.S. allies, Great Britain and France, and how the two countries affected Western policy toward the Soviet Union during the early post-Stalin
period. Larres focuses on the role of Winston Churchill, who was much more
inclined than any other senior Western official to pursue a far-reaching reconciliation with the USSR.19 Larres shows that Churchill’s motives were
complex—the British prime minister genuinely believed there was a chance
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for a “lasting peace” in the wake of Stalin’s death, but he also wanted to “enhance and maintain Britain’s position as a great power,” reduce British dependence on the United States, and “go down in history as a peacemaker, and
perhaps win the Nobel Peace Prize which he coveted.” Whatever the precise
reason, Churchill, who by then was nearly 80 years old, made a vigorous effort in the spring of 1953 to convene a high-level U.S.-British-Soviet summit
that would seek to resolve all the major issues dividing East and West. He encountered strong resistance from U.S. and West German leaders and from
senior officials in his own government, especially the Foreign Office.
Churchill suffered a debilitating stroke in June 1953 shortly after the East
German uprising and a few days before the arrest of Beria. The combination
of these three events derailed Churchill’s bid for a trilateral summit in 1953.
Larres acknowledges that Churchill’s approach, emphasizing high-level summitry and an inflated role for Britain, was “partially based on unrealistic assumptions” and was not a “sensible concept for the future,” but he argues that
Churchill’s campaign also had a “very positive and constructive side” that ultimately bore fruit with the Geneva summit in July 1955 and that contributed
to greater cooperation in avoiding war.
Statler, for her part, shows that disagreements between France and the
United States about two key issues—the ongoing war in Indochina and the
proposed formation of a supranational European Defense Community (EDC)
that would include a rearmed West Germany—sparked tensions in U.S.French relations after Stalin’s death. She points out that by 1953 the French
public was demanding an end to the costly war in Indochina and was ambivalent about the EDC because of continued anxiety about German rearmament. By contrast, Secretary of State Dulles repeatedly urged France to continue fighting the Vietminh and to ratify the EDC treaty. This divergence,
Statler argues, ultimately stemmed from conflicting French and American assessments of Soviet intentions in the wake of Stalin’s death. She maintains
that “French leaders viewed the Soviet peace offensive [in 1953–1954] as a
genuine opportunity to reduce Cold War tensions,” whereas most U.S. officials regarded it as a “menacing strategy to weaken the West.” Secretary of
State Dulles, in particular, was convinced that the new leaders in Moscow
were engaging in a cynical peace campaign to expedite a Communist victory
in Indochina and to thwart West German rearmament.20 “In the end,” Statler
writes, “American predictions of allied disunity became a self-fulfilling
prophecy.” The USSR’s newfound willingness to facilitate a settlement in Indochina, culminating in the April 1954 Geneva conference and the accords
signed two months later, created a more positive image of the USSR within
France and thus undercut the French public’s already faltering support for the
EDC.21 In August 1954 the French parliament voted against ratification of the
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EDC treaty. The ensuing rift between France and the United States adumbrated the more serious divisions that emerged in subsequent years.
The chapters by Qiang Zhai, Hope Harrison, and Csaba Békés shift the focus from the Western alliance to three Soviet allies, namely, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and Hungary. Zhai avers that Stalin’s death “did not affect Mao [Zedong]’s perception
of the Cold War” and that the Chinese leader continued to see “no alternative
to close alignment with the Soviet Union.” What changed the Sino-Soviet relationship, Zhai argues, was not Stalin’s death but Khrushchev’s decision in
1956 to launch the de-Stalinization campaign.22 “Mao and his colleagues,”
Zhai writes, “were enraged by Khrushchev’s failure to consult with them in
advance on such an important issue.” Moreover, Mao believed that
Khrushchev had gone too far. Although the Chinese leader disliked some aspects of Stalin’s policy toward China, Mao was, according to Zhai, still firmly
convinced that Stalin had been “a great Marxist” whose achievements far outweighed his mistakes. With the Soviet leader gone, Mao gradually began pursuing a “more independent approach to building socialism in China” even as
he preserved a close alliance with the USSR. Mao’s changing domestic priorities, Zhai argues, led in turn to a gradual reorientation of his policies
abroad, as he increasingly “doubted the ability of Khrushchev to lead [the international Communist] movement.” Among other things, Mao believed that
Khrushchev was too timid in confronting the United States and in supporting
anti-Western guerrillas in the Third World. Mao’s bid to pursue a more militant anti-American posture and to challenge the Soviet Union’s leadership of
the Communist movement deepened the Cold War and helped bring on the
Sino-Soviet rift.
Harrison’s chapter focuses directly on the early post-Stalin era. She traces
how Soviet policy toward the GDR changed dramatically in the first few
months after Stalin’s death but was then derailed by developments on the
ground in East Germany and by the post-Stalin succession struggle in
Moscow. Because popular expectations in the GDR had been raised by the
sudden introduction of sweeping reforms after years of Stalinist repression,
pressure from below quickly gave rise to a violent rebellion. Through a fluke
of timing, the uprising was followed within days by the ouster of Beria. The
combination of the East German revolt and Beria’s downfall soon resulted in
a long-term hardening of Soviet policy.23 Harrison argues that if the changes
in Soviet policy prior to the East German uprising had been sustained, they
“might have led to very different developments in the GDR and probably in
Germany as a whole.” She contends that “in both 1953 and 1956 there was
some chance” that the Cold War could end through “a mellowing of Soviet
policies, but popular movements for more rapid and far-reaching change in
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Eastern Europe, combined with domestic politics in the Kremlin,” induced Soviet leaders in both cases to “retract their more liberal policies.” She concludes
that this episode, with its unintended twists, confirms that “the dynamics of the
Cold War made its perpetuation much easier than its mellowing.”
Csaba Békés, in his chapter on Hungary, deals less with the immediate
post-Stalin period than with the broader trends he believes were in place by
the time of the Hungarian revolution in October–November 1956. He argues
that “the most important trend” from 1953 to 1956 was “the gradual realization and acceptance of the necessity of [U.S.-Soviet] coexistence.” Békés
contends that “a tacit agreement between the opposing power blocs emerged
during these years, one that accepted the status quo in East Central Europe established at the end of World War II.” Despite the Eisenhower administration’s rhetoric of “rollback” and “liberation,” the United States never really
intended to come to the aid of a violent rebellion in Eastern Europe, for fear
that it would provoke a war with the Soviet Union.24 The Hungarian revolution, according to Békés, was “inconvenient for the Western powers” because
it exposed what they had not been willing to enunciate publicly—namely,
their acceptance of the post-1945 status quo in Europe and their inability to
“roll back” the Soviet sphere of influence. Largely for this reason, the tragic
outcome in Hungary caused senior U.S. officials to “abandon the rhetoric of
liberation once and for all,” easing Soviet concerns about Western policy during future crises in Eastern Europe.25
Günter Bischof’s chapter looks at an issue that changed a great deal as a result of Stalin’s death—the signing of the Austrian State Treaty. Stalin had
been a fatal obstacle to any progress in negotiations about the status of Austria, which, like Germany, had been divided into four occupation zones at the
end of World War II. Bischof argues that “Soviet moves in the spring and
summer of 1953,” especially the easing of its occupation regime, “were a
striking example of a ‘new course’ unleashed by Stalin’s successors.”26 Although the USSR subsequently “exhibited continued intransigence in the
four-power diplomacy on the Austrian question,” the changes that began
shortly after Stalin’s death “led to a dramatic rise of faith that progress on the
Austrian treaty would be possible.” The new Soviet policy, as Bischof points
out, also resulted in a greater willingness on the part of the Austrian government to safeguard its own interests, a factor that ultimately encouraged
progress in the four-power talks. After Khrushchev displaced Georgii
Malenkov and outflanked Vyacheslav Molotov in early 1955, the Soviet
Union no longer hindered the negotiations. The successful conclusion of the
Austrian State Treaty in May 1955—an achievement that would have been
impossible under Stalin—paved the way for the “spirit of Geneva” two
months later.
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Jussi Hahnimäki’s chapter explores a topic that has been given scant treatment in the literature on the Cold War—the “role of neutrality in East-West
relations in Europe.” Neutrality was widely seen as a possible solution to two
key problems in Europe in the early and mid-1950s—the status of Germany
and Austria—but only in the latter instance did it actually prove feasible.
Hahnimäki looks not at these two cases but at Finland, a country that fought
an intense war with the Soviet Union in 1939–1940. At the end of World War
II, the Soviet Union formally annexed parts of Finnish territory but eventually withdrew its troops from Finland and did not set up a Soviet-style regime
there. In return for being allowed to keep a democratic capitalist system, Finland subordinated its foreign policy to Moscow’s preferences. Finland’s status was therefore not one of strict neutrality à la Switzerland; instead, as Hahnimäki puts it, it was a form of neutrality that enabled Moscow to “hold the
Finns on a leash.”27 Hahnimäki argues that after Stalin’s death “the Finns
gradually searched for further openings to the West that were made possible
by the emerging thaw in East-West relations.” With Moscow’s approval, Finland joined the United Nations in 1955 and the Nordic Council in 1956. But
the peculiar nature of Finnish “neutrality” was underscored in February 1956
when the Soviet Union “manipulated internal Finnish politics to secure the
election of its favored candidate,” Urho Kekkonen, as Finnish president. Hahnimäki shows that the “new Soviet policy of coexistence” with the West after
Stalin’s death was designed in part “to spread Finnish-style neutrality to the
rest of Scandinavia,” particularly Norway and Denmark, which were firmly
allied with the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO). The Soviet Union’s efforts in the mid-1950s to encourage Norway
and Denmark to abandon their NATO membership in favor of Finnish-style
neutrality sparked “concern among a number of American [and British] policymakers about the ‘specter of neutralism’ in Scandinavia.” In the end, however, the Soviet Union’s own actions, notably its invasion of Hungary in November 1956, its domineering behavior toward Finland, and its “intermittent
intervention in Finnish domestic politics,” greatly “diminished the lure of
neutrality elsewhere in Cold War Europe.”
The final chapter in the book, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, considers how the
U.S.-Japanese-Soviet relationship evolved in 1953–1956.28 Stalin had sought
to prevent Japan from becoming closely aligned with the United States after
the war, but he was unable to deter Tokyo from signing a mutual security treaty
with Washington in 1951. Stalin’s death, according to Hasegawa, “marked a
new departure for Soviet policy toward Japan.” By August 1953, Stalin’s successors were making “overtures to Japan [regarding the] normalization of relations.” After a new Japanese government came to power in December 1954
under Hatoyama Ichiro, Japan agreed to open talks with the Soviet Union to
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normalize relations. The Eisenhower administration was wary of the Soviet
overtures to Japan, in part because of concern that a settlement of the SovietJapanese territorial dispute might induce the Japanese public and government
to call on the United States to return Okinawa to Japan. In addition, U.S. officials worried that improved ties between Tokyo and Moscow might eventually
spur Japan to seek a rapprochement with Communist China as well. The U.S.
government tried, through a variety of means, to ensure that the Japanese
would not be unduly swayed by Moscow. The Soviet authorities, for their part,
tried to shift Japanese nationalism increasingly against the United States and
to undermine the U.S.-Japanese military alliance. A series of bilateral SovietJapanese normalization talks that dragged on from January 1955 through October 1956 ultimately resolved these competing objectives in favor of the
United States. Although the Soviet Union and Japan adopted a Joint Declaration in late 1956 that ended the state of war between them, they failed to conclude a formal peace treaty. The two countries’ inability to resolve their dispute over the southern Kurile Islands was partly the result of U.S. policy, but
it stemmed even more from what Hasegawa aptly describes as the “profound
differences [between Tokyo and Moscow] over historical memory about the
war and the psychological need to cling to the myths they had created.” The
persistence of these myths in both countries even after Stalin’s death was
bound to forestall a full-fledged rapprochement.
Some of the issues discussed in this book, such as the status of Germany, were
resolved long ago, but other problems covered here—notably the territorial
dispute between Tokyo and Moscow and the continued division of the Korean
peninsula—remain as far from resolution now as they were during Stalin’s
time. Other topics, notably the difficulty that U.S. leaders encountered in
dealing with European allies (especially France), also have a contemporary
resonance. Although frictions within NATO grew more acute after the Suez
crisis of 1956, the chapters by Kathryn Statler, Jerald Combs, and Klaus Larres make clear that intra-alliance tensions had emerged well before then, particularly in connection with the abortive attempt to set up the European Defense Community. By the time Stalin died, the NATO member-states had
already begun to diverge significantly in their priorities vis-à-vis the Soviet
Union, and those differences became more pronounced amid the uncertainty
that prevailed during the early post-Stalin era.
Some readers of this book may ask: Does it really matter whether the Cold
War could have been ended or at least greatly diminished soon after Stalin’s
death? The Cold War eventually came to an end anyway in the West’s favor.
Why should we care nowadays whether it ended in 1953 or 1956 or 1989?
Three points are worth emphasizing in response.
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First, the prolongation of the Cold War exacted high costs in large parts of
the world. In the three-and-a-half decades after Stalin’s death, the United States
and the Soviet Union expended vast amounts of resources on their respective
military establishments. Although military spending to some degree can help
stimulate a broader economy, important economic tradeoffs were unavoidable
on both sides, particularly in the USSR.29 No doubt, the level of military spending would have been much lower if the Cold War had ended in 1953. The continuation of the Cold War also meant that the East European countries had to
live for another 36 years under repressive Communist dictatorships and inefficient state-controlled economies. Not until the Cold War finally ended were
they able to adopt liberal democratic systems and free-market economies. Likewise, a broad rapprochement in 1953 between the United States and the Soviet
Union might have led to a moderation of the Communist system in China and
helped to avert the tens of millions of deaths that resulted from Mao’s domestic policies in the late 1950s and 1960s. By the same token, if the Cold War had
ended in 1953, the United States would not have felt compelled to continue supporting authoritarian regimes in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia. The
spread of democracy to many Third World countries as the Cold War waned and
ended was by no means accidental.
Perhaps most important of all, if the Cold War had ended shortly after
Stalin’s death, the United States almost certainly would have been spared its
debacle in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union would likely have avoided its enervating war in Afghanistan. Many of the roughly 1 million Vietnamese and 1.5
million Afghans who died in these wars would have survived, and so would
the 58,000 Americans and 14,450 Soviet soldiers. Some 1.5 million Cambodians who were slaughtered by Pol Pot’s regime in 1977–1978, in the wake of
the Vietnam War, would also have been spared.30 Similarly, if the Cold War
had ended in 1953, a long series of civil wars in Africa and Central America
from the 1960s through the 1980s that were fueled by the Cold War—wars that
cumulatively killed millions of people and destroyed large swaths of territory—would likely have been settled more easily and with far less bloodshed.
The major Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973, as well as lesser conflicts in the
Middle East such as the Yemeni civil war in the 1960s, the War of Attrition in
1969–1970, and the Lebanese civil war in the mid-1970s, might have been
averted or kept at lower levels of intensity if the Cold War had ended in 1953.
The Soviet Union, as part of its Cold War rivalry with the United States, fueled these conflicts by transferring vast quantities of weapons and providing
direct military support to the Arab states opposing Israel.
A landmark study published by the University of British Columbia’s Human
Security Centre in 2005 underscores the enormously beneficial effect of the
end of the Cold War. The report reveals that the number of interstate conflicts,
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civil wars, battle-deaths, and military coups all declined sharply after the early
1990s.31 The report highlights a number of contributing factors but attributes
the bulk of the decline to the end of the Cold War. If the East-West standoff
had been settled in 1953 rather than 1989, a sizable portion of the human and
material losses associated with conflicts in the intervening 36 years might have
been averted.
Second, a reconsideration of the opportunities that may or may not have
existed in 1953 is valuable not only in enriching the historical record but also
in shedding light on theoretical debates in the social sciences. In my own
work on Soviet-East European relations and the early post-Stalin succession
struggle, I found that a reassessment of those events was helpful in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of contending theories about the link
between domestic and international politics. The essays in this book help illuminate those same theories as well as other theoretical work on foreign policy decision making, political rhetoric and culture, alliance politics, and realist conceptions of international relations.
To illustrate this point, we need only consider one of the most salient findings in the book, namely, the extent to which some U.S. policymakers at the
time assumed that nothing significant would change in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. Although Eisenhower himself did not subscribe to that
view, several of his closest advisers clearly did. Officials such as John Foster
Dulles and C. D. Jackson never seriously questioned this premise even after
disconfirming evidence arose in the late spring of 1953. The book, in making
clear the strength of their assumptions, bears out key propositions in Robert
Jervis’s work on foreign policy decision making.32 Jervis emphasizes the likelihood that policymakers will fit new information into their existing images
and beliefs—in other words, they “tend to perceive what they expect.” This
is not to say that leaders are behaving irrationally when they adjust incoming
information to make it compatible with their existing beliefs. On the contrary,
as Jervis points out, “it would be unwise [for senior officials] to revise [their
deeply-held views] in the light of every bit of [new] information that does not
easily conform to them.” Decision makers constantly face the “dilemma of
how ‘open’ to be to new information,” especially at a time of great flux and
uncertainty on the international scene, as in the spring of 1953:
Instances in which evidence seems to be ignored or twisted to fit the existing
theory can often be explained by this dilemma instead of by illogical or nonlogical psychological pressures toward consistency. This is especially true of decision-makers’ attempts to estimate the intentions of other states, since they
must constantly take account of the danger that the other state is trying to deceive them.33
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The dilemma facing senior officials is even more acute when the incoming
information is of a contradictory or uncertain nature. In the spring of 1953, for
example, Soviet leaders continued to use rhetoric typical of the Stalin era, even
as they as they took steps that in effect repudiated some of the most basic aspects of Stalinism. In light of these ambiguities and of decision makers’ inclination to stick with their existing beliefs and images, it is not surprising that
when proposals for high-level talks with the Soviet Union were broached during the initial post-Stalin period, Secretary of State Dulles was unreceptive because he was worried that the administration and the wider public might be
lulled into complacency. Memories of Stalin’s malevolence were still fresh,
and prudence alone dictated that U.S. officials be on their guard when dealing
with the new Soviet leaders, all of whom had loyally served Stalin.34
The downside, of course, is that decision makers may end up being too
averse to new information and too wedded to their existing assumptions.
Even when a persistent stream of evidence raises serious doubts about their
assumptions, they may disregard or downplay it. Some contributors to this
book believe that the information flowing into Washington in the spring of
1953 was sufficiently persuasive to have merited a more accommodating U.S.
response. Others would likely argue that the window of opportunity was too
ephemeral to have permitted meaningful adjustments. Regardless of which
position one takes, the point to be stressed here is that a reassessment of this
period can provide valuable empirical evidence for tests of cognitive explanations of foreign policy decision making and of sundry other social science
theories.
Third, by having a better understanding of the impact of Stalin’s death on
numerous countries and regions of the world, we are likely to gain a much
more solid basis for comparisons with other turning points in both the Cold
War and the post–Cold War era. This book permits us to see how the events
of 1953 compare with the upheavals in the Communist world in 1956, the unrest and turmoil in many countries in 1968, the end of the Cold War in 1989,
the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and developments following the
terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. What features of the
early post-Stalin period are unique, and which ones are similar to those we
find in some or all of these other periods? When, if at all, did leaders on either side of the Cold War sense that 1953 (or 1956 or 1968 or 1989 or 1991)
was a watershed moment and that the course of events had been changed irrevocably? To what extent were events in fact changed? Did some officials
tend to overstate the degree of change, or did they consistently understate it?
Comprehensive answers to these questions are beyond the scope of this book,
but the wealth of information here about the early post-Stalin period provides
a foundation for future comparative work.
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NOTES
1. See Mark Kramer, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals
in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy-Making (Part 1),”
Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 3–56; Mark Kramer, “The Early
Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: InternalExternal Linkages in Soviet Policy-Making (Part 2),” Journal of Cold War Studies 1,
no. 2 (Spring 1999): 3–39; and Mark Kramer, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession
Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet
Policy-Making (Part 3),” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 3–66.
2. See the chapters in this volume by Kenneth Osgood, Lloyd Gardner, and Ira
Chernus.
3. All quotations here are from the summary report, “Memorandum: Discussion
at the 139th Meeting of the National Security Council on Wednesday, April 8,
1953,” 16 April 1953 (Eyes Only/Top Secret), declassified 20 April 1987, 3–4; full
scanned text available in Declassified Documents Reference System, Doc. No.
CK3100240898.
4. On “learning” in foreign policy and in East-West relations, see George W.
Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock, eds., Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991).
5. On Churchill’s position, see the chapter in this volume by Klaus Larres. See
also the insightful account in Larres’s book, Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2002), 189–355.
6. George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971, (New York:
Random House, 1972), 2:1136. The question asked of respondents was: “Would you
favor or oppose a meeting between President Eisenhower, Prime Minister Churchill,
and Premier Malenkov of Russia to try to settle world differences?” In addition to the
78 percent who favored a meeting, 15 percent were opposed, and 7 percent expressed
no opinion. The same question was asked in mid-October 1953, and the results were
essentially identical, with 79 percent in favor, 12 percent opposed, and 9 percent with
no opinion. See ibid., 1182–83.
7. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, “National Intelligence Estimate: Probable
Developments in the European Satellites Through Mid-1956,” NIE 12–54 (Top
Secret), 24 August 1954, p. 19, in Dwight D. Eisenhower Library (DDEL), White
House Office (WHO), National Security Council Staff (NSCS), Papers, 1948–1961,
Executive Secretary’s Subject File Series, Box 1, Miscellaneous File.
8. “Memorandum of Discussion,” 11 March 1953 (Top Secret), reproduced in
U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), vol. VIII (Eastern Europe, the
Soviet Union), 1117–25. For further discussion, see the chapters below by Lloyd
Gardner, Kenneth Osgood, and Kathryn Statler.
9. Cited in Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the
Eisenhower Years (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 103–4.
10. “Discussion at the 139th Meeting of the National Security Council on Wednesday, April 8, 1953,” 4.
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11. “Implications of Stalin’s Passing,” Memorandum from William J. Morgan to
Horace S. Craig, 4 March 1953 (Secret), in DDEL, WHO, NSCS, Papers, 1948–1961,
Psychological Strategy Board, Central Files, Box 8, File 1 (USSR), Folder 2.
12. “Discussion at the 139th Meeting of the National Security Council on Wednesday, April 8, 1953,” 4.
13. On the ferment in China, see “Otchet posol’stva SSSR v Kitaiskoi Narodnoi
Respublike za 1956 god,” Report no. 146 (Top Secret), 22 April 1957, from Soviet
Ambassador P. F. Yudin to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, in Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (Moscow), Fond 5, Opis’ 28, Delo 409, List 153.
14. Mark Kramer, “The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland:
Reassessments and New Findings,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 2 (April
1998): 163–214. My analysis of Soviet policy during the Hungarian revolution differs
from the view expressed by Csaba Békés in his essay below.
15. Charles Gati, “The Stalinist Legacy in Soviet Foreign Policy,” in The Soviet
Union Since Stalin, ed. Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Robert Sharlet
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 279–98.
16. During Gorbachev’s first three years in office, he was cautious in confronting
the Stalinist legacy. Although in a major speech in early November 1987 he described
Stalin’s crimes as “enormous and unforgivable,” he then claimed that only “thousands” had died during the Stalin era. But soon thereafter the policy of “glasnost” (official openness) spurred Soviet journalists and commentators to denounce Stalin
much more forcefully and to acknowledge the millions of victims. By the spring of
1988, prominent Soviet scholars and journalists were also condemning Stalin’s foreign policy. Similar criticism was eventually expressed by such high-ranking officials
as Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and Gorbachev himself. From then on, Soviet newspapers, journals, and books featured a torrent of revelations about the Stalinist terror, the mass deportations, the gulag, the destruction of the Soviet peasantry
in the 1930s, and Stalin’s viciously anti-Semitic policies of the late 1940s and early
1950s. It is no small irony that Stalin was subjected to much sharper criticism in the
Soviet Union in the early 1990s than he has been in Russia since Vladimir Putin came
to power. Soon after taking office, Putin condoned a partial rehabilitation of Stalin as
the “leader of a great power.” Putin’s admiration of Stalin has helped give rise to an
unsavory nostalgia for the Stalin era in current-day Russian society.
17. For detailed coverage of the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to prevent Soviet inroads in the Third World, see the seventh volume in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series: Andrew Johns and Kathryn Statler, eds., The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
18. For background on this subject, see Chernus’s book, General Eisenhower: Ideology and Discourse (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002), esp. 117–51.
19. For a more extensive discussion of Churchill’s views of East-West relations
and his belief in the value of personal diplomacy both before and after Stalin’s death,
see Larres, Churchill’s Cold War.
20. In a conversation with Eisenhower on 8 May 1953, Dulles emphasized that
“the existing threat posed by the Soviets to the Western World is the most terrible and
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fundamental in the latter’s 1000 years of domination. This threat differs in quality
from the threat of a Napoleon or a Hitler. It is like the invasion by Islam in the tenth
century. Now the clear issue is: can western civilization survive? . . . The present
course we are following is a fatal one for us and the free world.” The president responded that “we must convince ourselves and our friends of the rightness of any
course we adopt. . . . We cannot live alone: we need allies.” Quoted from U.S. State
Department, “Solarium Project: Principal Points Made by JFD,” 8 May 1953 (Top Secret/Security Information), declassified 17 October 1986, 1, 3; scanned full text available in DDRS, Doc. No. CK3100116401.
21. For an illuminating discussion of Soviet policy on this matter, see Ilya Gaiduk,
Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), esp. 1–63.
22. On this same point, see Chen Jian and Yang Kuisang, “Chinese Politics and the
Collapse of the Sino-Soviet Alliance,” in Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the
Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963, ed. Odd Arne Westad (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 246–94, esp. 258–64.
23. For further discussion of all these points, see the three parts of Kramer, “The
Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe.”
24. On this point, Békés’s chapter is in line with other recent scholarship on the subject, including László Borhi, “Rollback, Liberation, Containment, or Inaction? U.S. Policy and Eastern Europe in the 1950s,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 3 (Fall 1999):
67–110; Chris Tuda, “‘Reenacting the Story of Tantalus’: Eisenhower, Dulles, and the
Failed Rhetoric of Liberation,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 3–35;
and Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the
Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
25. Békés makes a stronger claim that Western inaction in 1956 gave Soviet leaders “a firm guarantee that in resolving future conflicts within the boundaries of their
empire they would not have to consider the point of view of Western states.” This assertion is not borne out by archival evidence. The Soviet Politburo’s deliberations in
1968 reflected some degree of concern about the possibility of intervention by Western countries if the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. The likelihood of a Western response was not deemed high, but Soviet Politburo members did believe that
they had to take at least some account of “the point of view of Western states.” Similarly, during the 1980–1981 crisis in Poland, Soviet leaders expressed concern about
the possibility that Western governments would enact sanctions against the USSR in
retaliation for the imposition of martial law in Poland. See Mark Kramer, “The
Czechoslovak Crisis and the Brezhnev Doctrine,” in 1968: The World Transformed,
ed. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 111–74; and Mark Kramer, Soviet Deliberations during the Polish
Crisis, 1980–1981, CWIHP Special Working Paper No. 1 (Washington, DC: Cold
War International History Project, 1999).
26. For an analysis of Soviet policy in the lead-up to the treaty (though focusing
predominantly on the Stalin period), based in part on declassified Soviet documentation, see Wolfgang Mueller, Die sowjetische Besatzung in Österreich 1945–1955
und ihre politische Mission (Vienna: Böhlau, 2005). For a valuable collection of de-
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classified Soviet documents pertaining to Soviet policy vis-à-vis Austria from 1945
to 1955, see Wolfgang Mueller et al., eds., Sowjetische Politik in Österreich
1945–1955: Dokumente aus russischen Archiven (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005). Unfortunately, the relatively small number of documents from the post-Stalin era in this 1,119-page book shed almost no
light on Soviet policymaking and high-level debates. Further valuable documents are
available in the first volume (titled Dokumente) of Stefan Karner, Barbara StelzlMarx, and Aleksandr Chubaryan, eds., Die Rote Armee in Österreich: sowjetische
Besatzsung, 1945–1955, 2 vols. (Vienna: R. Oldenbourg, 2005), but these items, too,
afford relatively little insight into Khrushchev’s decision making regarding the
treaty. The second volume of the book contains useful essays on this topic by the
Russian archivists Mikhail Prozumenschikov (“Nach Stalins Tod: Sowjetische
Österreich-Politik 1953–1955,” 729–53) and Irina Kazarina (“Die Sowjetische
Armee in Österreich 1953–1955 im Spiegel von Dokumenten des ZK der KPdSU,”
755–72), but they do not really explain how the leadership struggle affected Soviet
policy. A forthcoming essay on the topic by the historian Aleksei Filitov, “The PostStalin Succession Struggle and the Austrian State Treaty,” to be published in Arnold
Suppan, Gerald Stourzh, and Wolfgang Mueller, eds., Der österreichische Staatsvertrag (Vienna: Böhlau, 2006), is intriguing and insightful, but a good deal of murkiness remains. For a definitive history of the Austrian State Treaty, along with documentation and an extensive bibliography, see Gerald Stourzh, Um Einheit und
Freiheit: Staatsvertrag, Neutralität und das Ende der Ost-West-Besetzung Österreichs 1945–1955, 4th ed. (Vienna: Böhlau, 1999).
27. For earlier assessments of Finnish neutrality, see Roy Allison, Finland’s Relations with the Soviet Union, 1944–84 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); George
Maude, The Finnish Dilemma: Neutrality in the Shadow of Power (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976); and Burkhard Auffermann, “Die Aussenpolitik Finnlands,
1944–1991: Ein Sonderfall europäischer Ost-West-Beziehungen in der Ära des
Kalten Krieges,” Ph.D. Thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, 1994. See also Hahnimäki’s
own earlier book, Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the “Finnish Solution” (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997).
28. For a more detailed analysis of (and different perspective on) the issues discussed
by Hasegawa, see V. P. Safronov, SSSR—SShA—Yaponiya v gody “kholodnoi voiny,”
1945–1960 gg. (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii, 2003), which draws extensively on
declassified archival documents. See also Kimie Hara, Japanese-Soviet/Russian Relations Since 1945: Difficult Peace (New York: Routledge, 1998), 87–95.
29. See, for example, G. Kh. Shakhnazarov, Tsena svobody: Reformatsiya Gorbacheva glazami ego pomoshchnika (Moscow: Rossika-Zevs, 1993), 42, 49.
30. Estimates of the number killed under Pol Pot vary considerably, but the total
cited here, roughly 1.5 million, is the one used by Ben Kiernan in his The Pol Pot
Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge,
1975–1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). For a meticulous discussion
of the problem of estimating the number of deaths, as well as a riveting (if depressing) account of the slaughters, see Jean-Louis Margolin, “Cambodia: The Country of
Disconcerting Crimes,” in The Black Book of Communism, ed. Stéphane Courtois and
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trans. by Mark Kramer and Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 577–635, esp. 588–91.
31. Human Security Centre/University of British Columbia, The Human Security
Report 2005: War and Peace in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005).
32. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), esp. 145 ff.; Robert Jervis, “Hypotheses
on Misperception,” World Politics 20, no. 3 (April 1968): 454–79; and Robert Jervis,
The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1970).
33. Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” p. 459.
34. Also relevant here is the tendency of decision makers to perceive rival states
as more hostile than they actually are. See Jervis, Perception and Misperception, 168,
310; Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” 475; and Ole Holsti, “Cognitive Dynamics and Images of the Enemy,” in Enemies in Politics, ed. David J. Finlay, Ole R.
Holsti, and Richard R. Fagen (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), 27–28.