Chapter 10
You’re Cold as Ice! The Cold War
In This Chapter
Dividing Europe into eastern and western blocs
Discovering how the Cold War brought the whole world to the brink of destruction
Seeing how the Cold War ended
From the 1940s to the 1980s the world was cut in two in a frightening stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States that often threatened, but never quite managed, to tip over into full-scale war. Each side suspected the other of planning to invade or subvert it, and sent spies to find out what the other side was up to. The whole world was caught up in this frosty atmosphere of East–West suspicion and distrust: People called it the ‘Cold War’.
Things Can Only Get Better! (Can’t They?)
After the Second World War, people all round the world were determined that this time lessons would be learnt and war would never be resorted to again. The tired old League of Nations was to be given a decent funeral and replaced with a new, improved, body with attitude: The United Nations. (If you’re not sure why the League of Nations was so tired, see Chapter 8.)
Churchill and Roosevelt mooted the idea of the United Nations when they met in 1941 and drafted the Atlantic Charter, saying they wanted to establish certain basic freedoms after the war. In 1944 representatives from the different Allied nations, including China, came together at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington DC, to plan how such an organisation might work, and on 26 June 1945, representatives of fifty-one nations met in San Francisco and signed the Charter of the United Nations Organisation. Here’s how it worked:
A Security Council to keep world peace: The place for the big decisions: The Security Council can impose sanctions and order military action, unlike the poor old League of Nations. Five permanent members: The USA, USSR, China, Britain, and France, each with the power of veto. Non-permanent members (originally two, nowadays ten) are elected for two years by the General Assembly.
A General Assembly to represent the world: Every member state has one vote. Simple majority needed for most decisions but big issues require two-thirds. The General Assembly has limited powers and is mostly a place for airing opinions.
Special UN agencies: UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) looks after children’s welfare, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) encourages the spread of education, the World Health Organisation (WHO) co-ordinates medical research, and the Economic and Social Council deals with population growth and human rights. Many of these agencies had been inherited from the League of Nations, which goes to show that the League did have a few good ideas worth keeping!
Other: The United Nations also runs an International Court of Justice to decide legal disputes and an International Monetary Fund to lend money to countries in financial difficulties.
When Two Tribes Go to War: A Bit of Background
Any quarrel the size of the Cold War has causes that go back a long way. To explain why the Cold War happened, you have to go back to the early years of the century.
World revolution? No thanks!
When revolution broke out in Russia in 1917 (Chapter 4 tells you how) most Americans were horrified at the idea of world revolution pulling down the capitalist free enterprise system they believed in, but some Americans welcomed the news. The labour unions liked the sound of it and American communists, like the journalist John Reed and the anarchist Emma Goldman, openly supported the Bolsheviks. They had their work cut out defending their views, though. Bosses employed private armies to break up union meetings and beat up any communists they found there. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer launched a series of raids to find America’s communists and either locked them up or deported them.
When the American economy collapsed after the Wall Street Crash (Chapter 8 has the details), many communists thought America’s revolution would happen at any minute. Not a chance: The authorities stamped on even the least hint of communist activity during the Depression.
Then President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (see Chapter 8) set America’s right-wing communist-finders’ noses twitching. ‘Big building projects?’ they said. ‘All paid for by the State? Sounds familiar. That’s just what Stalin’s doing in Russia. I knew it: Roosevelt’s a red!’ True, if you just looked at newsreel of people building dams or factories, the New Deal did look a bit like Stalin’s Five-Year Plans (see Chapter 4); the small-but-vital difference was that Stalin was using unpaid slave labour whereas the New Deal was using America’s unemployed – and paying them, too. Even so, a hard core of American Republicans remained convinced that Roosevelt was in the pocket of the communists. When Roosevelt started co-operating with Stalin during the war and US government posters appeared praising ‘Uncle Joe’ and saying what a grand country the Soviet Union was, you could hear Roosevelt’s critics muttering ‘Told you so’ into their morning newspapers.
Whoa there, Winston! Leave Berlin to Joe
As the war closed, Churchill wanted Roosevelt to tell Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander, to race forward to Berlin to stop the Russians getting it. But Roosevelt thought Churchill was scaremongering and Eisenhower reckoned that charging ahead without clearing the land on either side was far too risky. So the Western Allies stuck to their slow-but-sure advance along a wide front while the Russians charged forwards and took Berlin. And then took over eastern and central Europe, just as Churchill had said they would.
A whole new world!
By 1945 everyone agreed that the world could not afford such a destructive war ever again. The post-war world was to be new, exciting, and happy, with peace and plenty for everyone. All they had to do was make it happen.
Tough talking at the table: Yalta and Potsdam
During the war the Allied leaders held summit meetings to decide on strategy and to start planning for after the war. The most important summits were:
Yalta, a very nice holiday resort on the Black Sea, February 1945: Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill discussed plans for Germany and Poland. They rejected US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s plan to dismantle German industry and send the country back to the Middle Ages and decided instead to divide Germany into four zones, Russian, American, British, and French. (The French were insisting on being equal with the Big Three and giving them a zone in Germany seemed a good way to keep them quiet.) The Russians promised to declare war on Japan three months after Germany surrendered and to set up democratic governments in all the countries they liberated. No, really.
Potsdam, the old imperial palace of the Kaisers outside Berlin, July–August 1945: Roosevelt had died and Churchill lost the British General Election, so the Big Three were now US President Harry S. Truman, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and Stalin. They agreed to extract reparations from their German zones and redrew the borders of Poland and Czechoslovakia so that millions of Germans would have to leave their homes. Stalin wrecked the happy atmosphere by putting a communist government in charge in Poland and refusing to allow the pre-war Polish government to come back from exile in London. Truman and Attlee could do little but grumble, but Truman did at least let Stalin into the deadly secret that the US had the atom bomb and was prepared to use it. If he thought Stalin would be scared, he was disappointed. Stalin didn’t seem surprised to hear the news at all. Fishy.
Nuremberg – the court of history
Churchill wanted to have the Nazi leaders shot, but the Allies decided instead to hold a proper trial in Nuremberg, scene of the big Nazi rallies. The prosecutors and judges were drawn from Britain, France, the USA, and USSR. Reconciling these different countries’ legal systems wasn’t easy: Britain and America based their systems on English Common Law, the French system was based on Roman principles, while the Soviet idea of a trial was to introduce the accused formally to his firing squad. Inevitably, many people have argued that the Nuremberg trial was ‘victors’ justice’ but most commentators agree that the Nazis got a fair trial: By no means all of them were sentenced to death and three were acquitted. The Nuremberg Trial was almost the last time the Allies worked together harmoniously; by the time the courts had worked their way down to the concentration camp guards who actually carried out the mass killings, the Allies were barely speaking to each other. The Americans decided to halt the trials in case they needed some of the accused to help fight the Russians.
Small weapon – mass destruction
By 1945 the United States was the only country in the world that knew how to construct nuclear weapons and to use them successfully. This situation gave America a massive advantage over every other nation. But for how long?
Money can’t buy me love – though it’s worth a try, General Marshall
The United States emerged from the war with the strongest economy in the world. The Americans could have turned their backs on Europe as they’d done in 1918, but with the Russians occupying eastern and central Europe, doing so simply wasn’t an option. No, America was going to have to keep troops in Europe and make friends with western Europeans. The trouble was that Europe was shattered – literally: Buildings and railways had been bombed to pieces, the shops had no food in them, and millions of refugees were trying to get home – or to find a new home, if they didn’t fancy living under Soviet rule in the old one. The Americans were worried that this poverty and misery would make people turn to communism. And then US Secretary of State George C. Marshall came up with a cunning plan.
The Marshall Plan offered American money, expert advice, food, machinery, and raw materials to any European state that signed up to it. These goodies were all free: No catch. ‘Yeah,’ thought Stalin, ‘right.’
Western European countries signed up for Marshall Aid eagerly, but Stalin reckoned the Marshall Plan was an American ploy to turn Europe into a set of capitalist puppet states, so he turned the offer down and told all the other east European governments to do the same.
You could see the contrast between those who took Marshall Aid and those who didn’t most starkly in Berlin. The western half of the city became a little island of capitalist wealth in the communist east. ‘Hmm,’ thought many Germans, ‘in the capitalist West they get toilet paper while we have to use old copies of Pravda. Work that one out.’ Increasing numbers of Germans slipped over into West Berlin or into the western zones of Germany to do just that.
Iron curtain and Truman Doctrine
By the spring of 1946 Truman was deeply worried about the way Soviet policy was going. Stalin broke his agreement to withdraw Soviet troops from Iran and only finally did so because Truman took a tough line with him. Truman invited Winston Churchill, no longer prime minister but still a world figure, to come to Fulton, Missouri, to accept an honorary degree and to make a speech about East–West relations. Churchill declared that the Soviet Union was isolating its half of Europe from almost any contact with the West: It was, he said, as if an ‘iron curtain’ had descended, cutting Europe in two. Good phrase: It stuck.
President Truman soon had a chance to show that the confrontation with the Soviet Union wasn’t just words. The chance came in Greece.
Like other wartime resistance movements, the Greek resistance was dominated by communist groups who expected to take the country over after the war. But the Allies agreed at Yalta that Greece should be in the non-communist zone – Churchill had insisted on it – so the British sent troops to help the Greek government fight the communists. By March 1946 Britain was running out of cash and its troops wanted to go home, so London asked Washington for help. Truman immediately went to Congress and announced a new policy: The United States would send military and economic help to Greece, or any other country, anywhere in the world, which was resisting a communist takeover. He called this policy the Truman Doctrine. Greece was its first big success.
Russia planning world takeover, stop
George F. Kennan was an experienced diplomat at the American embassy in Moscow. He was very concerned about Stalin’s intentions for the post-war world, and frustrated that no one in Washington seemed to think they had anything to worry about. So in 1946 he put his concerns into a long telegram to the State Department, outlining how the Russians had always felt themselves under siege from their enemies and how the drive to expand was built deep into the Russian psyche and the communist soul. At 8,000 words, the missive was more an essay than a telegram but it worked: Truman’s government began to take a much tougher line towards the Soviets. Mind you, you didn’t want to be there when the embassy finance department got the telegram bill.
Slicing salami, or how to take over a country without anyone noticing
Stalin had promised the Western Allies that he would hold free elections in eastern Europe. How could he hold free elections and still produce a set of communist governments? The trick was to start slicing little segments of democracy away gradually, like slicing salami, as the Hungarian communist leader Matyas Rakosi put it. Here’s how the tactic worked:
Stage 1. Form a coalition government with your political enemies. Remember to smile at them nicely. Make sure you hold the ministries which control the police, the intelligence services, and the armed forces. (If your coalition partners prove difficult about this, throw a tantrum and threaten to resign. Doing so usually brings them round.)
Stage 2. Use your control of the police, intelligence services, and armed forces to arrest or threaten your political opponents. (Hint: Either accuse them of something heinous or say you’re taking them into custody for their own protection. Someone will believe you.)
Stage 3. Sack any civil servants and other State employees who seem able to think for themselves. Replace them with Communist Party members who luckily just happen to be between jobs at the moment.
Stage 4. Hold an election. Make sure all the voters are thoroughly intimidated and that the only candidates are communists. (If some aren’t, go back to Stage 2.) You should aim for a 95 per cent vote for the Communist Party. Don’t get cocky and go any higher or people might think you’ve rigged things. Silly, I know, but people do get these ideas.
Thanks to salami tactics, the countries of central and eastern Europe fell to communist rule one by one. In 1947 the Russians set up the Cominform, an international organisation to make sure all these different communist governments did as they were told. Only two countries didn’t quite fit into Stalin’s salami tactics pattern:
Czechoslovakia: The Czechs dared to hold a democratic election and the communists lost. The Czechs wanted Marshall Aid, even though Stalin told them they didn’t need Western toilet paper when the woods were full of twigs. In 1948 Stalin authorised a military coup to get rid of this dangerously independent Czech government. All non-communists in the police and government were arrested and a new election was held, this time with all-communist candidates. Guess what? They won.
Yugoslavia: Yugoslavia was the only European country that liberated itself during the war without the help of Allied troops. The Yugoslav resistance was led by Josip Broz, codename: ‘Tito’, which sounds a lot better, you’ve got to admit. Tito was a proud Yugoslav nationalist and he didn’t like taking orders from Moscow. Tito told Stalin to stop trying to dictate Yugoslavia’s agricultural policy and, while he was at it, to call off his spies. Stalin raged and threw Yugoslavia out of the Cominform. ‘And he’ll get no economic aid off me!’ he added. Stalin confidently expected that Tito’s regime would collapse within weeks; instead Tito simply opened up economic links with the West.
Berlin’s blockade
Stalin hated the way the Western Allies were still based in West Berlin, deep in the heart of the Russian zone of Germany, watching and listening to what the Russians were up to. Worse than that, ordinary Germans could see how much better life was in the West every time they popped over to West Berlin to do some shopping. Many Germans went over to West Berlin and didn’t come back. West Berlin had become an escape route out of the Russian sector and Stalin was determined to close it. But how? Attacking West Berlin would mean war with the Western Allies and he didn’t feel ready for that. Then he had an idea: Starve them out.
In June 1948 the Russians suddenly announced that they were cutting all access to West Berlin. Road and rail links from the western zones of Germany were closed and no one was allowed in or out. Stalin hoped that the Western Allies would abandon West Berlin. No chance. The Western Allies decided to keep the city supplied with everything it needed to live – food, fuel, medical supplies – by air. They launched the massive Berlin Airlift, with hundreds of planes landing in the city every day. One plane landed every three minutes and the schedule was so tight that if you missed the runway you had to go all the way back to base and start again. Stalin couldn’t shoot any of the planes down because doing so would start a war. Eventually, on 12 May 1949 after eleven months of blockade, he admitted defeat and opened up the land links to West Berlin.
Where did THAT come from? The USSR goes nuclear
Stalin had a much nastier surprise for the East up his sleeve than blockading Berlin. In 1949 Western scientists monitoring the Soviet Union recorded high levels of radiation deep in Russia. They could only think of one possible explanation: The Russians had exploded an atomic bomb.
No one knew how the Russians had got hold of the formula for making an atom bomb, but the Americans didn’t wait to find out. They went all-out to build the much more powerful hydrogen bomb and in 1952 they tested it on a harmless little Pacific island called Eniwetok Atoll. The bomb worked. Americans could relax: They were still ahead of the Russians. Phew.
The next year the Russians exploded a hydrogen bomb too. Eek.
With all this posturing and provocation, you can easily see how two war-time allies eventually found themselves on different sides of the ideological battlefield. It was a strange war, with relations so icily suspicious that it became known as the ‘Cold War’. Luckily the Cold War never actually turned hot, though no one could discount the possibility of that happening, as the events of the following decades demonstrated only too graphically.
Spies ‘R’ Us!
Both sides in the Cold War were obsessed with the fear of spies and traitors. Just to make the paranoia complete, these fears weren’t entirely unfounded:
1948 Alger Hiss on trial: Hiss was a high-up official in the US State Department. He was brought before the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities (whatever those might be) and found guilty of passing secrets to the Soviet Union.
For many years historians assumed that Hiss was innocent, if only because the prosecution case was flawed and depended on information passed on illegally by the FBI. However, more recent evidence suggests that Hiss, who made no secret of his communist sympathies, had indeed passed on secrets and lied about it under oath.
1950 Klaus Fuchs caught: Fuchs was a German-born British scientist. He was a communist and had fled to Britain from the Nazis. In 1950 he was found guilty of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.
1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: An American husband-and-wife team, both of them staunch communists, they were found guilty of passing on the atomic secrets that enabled the Russians to perfect their atom bomb. They both died a horrible death in the electric chair.
1951 Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean: One of the most dramatic spy stories of the Cold War. These two British diplomats fled to Moscow when they got a tip-off that they were about to be arrested for passing intelligence secrets to the Russians. But who’d tipped them off?
1963 Harold ‘Kim’ Philby: Another high-ranking British diplomat and devoted communist agent, Philby was exposed as the ‘third man’ who’d tipped off Burgess and MacLean. Like them, he managed to escape to Moscow.
Why were all these people passing secrets to the Russians? They weren’t spying just because they believed in the communist system as a better alternative to the capitalist system: They also believed that only one country having nuclear weapons was dangerous and that if they evened the playing field and helped the Soviet Union catch up with America, the world would be safer. You won’t be surprised to hear that not many people in the West agreed with this view.
See? I’ve Got Friends! Cold War Alliances
The Berlin Airlift (see the earlier section ‘Berlin’s blockade’) convinced the Western Allies that they needed to start acting together to defend them-selves against the Soviet Union. In May 1949 they joined the western zones of Germany together into a new independent state, the Federal Republic of Germany or ‘West Germany’ for short. They couldn’t use Berlin as a capital in case it got cut off again, so instead they used Bonn, a quiet little town where nothing much had happened since Beethoven was born there. The first Chancellor of this new West Germany was Konrad Adenauer, a veteran anti-Nazi whose policy was to get close to the United States and stay there.
Not to be outdone, the Russians announced that their zone of Germany was also going to be a new state, the German Democratic Republic, known to its friends as East Germany. Capital: Berlin. Well, okay, the eastern half of Berlin. Its Chancellor was Walter Ulbricht, a communist who’d got out of Nazi Germany and spent the war in Russia. The Russians reckoned he was just the man to turn East Germany into a Soviet puppet state.
Settling the division of Germany was just the first step: Next, both sides had to organise their friends into fully-fledged military alliances.
NATO to the rescue!
With both sides starting to talk tough, the United States decided it was time to organise its allies into something more than a bunch of states who just sat round shaking their heads about how awful Stalin was. In 1949 eleven Western countries – the USA, Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Italy – signed up to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or ‘NATO’, saying they would all help if one of them was attacked by an unfriendly power. In 1952 Greece and Turkey joined, though the Americans had to stop them going to war with each other over who should get Cyprus. And in 1954, in a great symbolic coup, West Germany joined. Less than ten years after the end of the war, Germany, or at least its western half, was allied to her wartime enemies against the Russians. This state of affairs was just what the Nazis had always said would happen!
The French didn’t like other people commanding their armed forces, so in 1966 they pulled their troops out of NATO but, rather paradoxically, said they were staying in the alliance. Er, right. What really annoyed the Americans, though, was that they had to move NATO headquarters from Paris to a very boring office block in Brussels. They’ve never quite forgiven the French.
Two can play at that game, capitalists!
The Russians were never going to let the Americans get away with forming NATO, especially once they’d brought the Germans in. In 1955 Moscow announced the East European Mutual Assistance Treaty, though it was always known, after the place where it was signed, by the more catchy name of the Warsaw Pact. It worked as follows:
Members: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union.
Rules: 1. Do as Moscow says. 2. Do not question Moscow’s orders. 3. Make sure everyone else is obeying Rule 1.
Penalties for not obeying Rule 1: The other Warsaw Pact countries attack you. In a spirit of friendly comradeship, of course.
Western countries weren’t the only ones that were jittery about spies. Stalin had long feared that his enemies were out to get him. In 1953 he ‘discovered’ a ‘plot’ by a group of doctors to kill the head of the Leningrad Communist Party, Andrei Zhdanov. ‘Good,’ thought Stalin, who hated the city, ‘now I can shoot lots of people in Leningrad for helping the Doctors’ Plot.’ Even better: Most of the doctors were Jewish so Stalin, who was deeply anti-semitic, could have lots of Jews arrested too. The purge was well under way when Stalin died of a stroke in March 1953. He could possibly have survived a bit longer, but he didn’t trust anyone well enough to have a doctor to hand. Serve him right.
Are you now, or have you ever been, a liar, a bully, and a cheat?
In 1950 US Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin launched a bizarre campaign to ‘uncover’ communists in American public life. He accused the State Department of harbouring fifty-seven card-carrying communists and some two hundred communist sympathisers. When the Senate asked for a bit of proof, McCarthy just started throwing more and more accusations around, which wasn’t hard, since his idea of showing communist sympathies amounted to using the same coffee machine as a Red. But many Americans thought ‘their Joe’ might be onto something. McCarthy used his position as chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee to bully and intimidate writers, actors, scientists, and government officials into confessing they had been communists and to name others who had been too. He even accused Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had led the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb, because he’d had a change of heart about working on the hydrogen bomb. Not until 1954, when McCarthy turned on the US army and his hysterical antics were shown on television, did Americans finally realise he was a fraud. By then he had done a lot of damage to America’s reputation as a home of tolerance and free speech.
The Cold War Goes Global
At first the Cold War was concentrated around the stand-off in Europe, but in the 1950s other parts of the world began to come centre-stage.
Red flag in China
China had been gripped by civil war between Mao Zedong’s communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Kuomintang since the 1930s (Chapter 5 has the details). The two sides agreed to work together against the Japanese but as soon as the Japanese had been defeated they resumed fighting. US Secretary of State George C. Marshall offered to mediate but Chiang wouldn’t deign to speak to Mao, not even through the Americans. The Kuomintang had such a reputation for incompetence and corruption that huge numbers, even whole army divisions, changed sides and went over to the communists. In the spring of 1949 Mao crossed the Yangtze river and invaded the Kuomintang-held south. Chiang fled to the island of Formosa (modern-day Taiwan) while in Beijing, Mao announced the People’s Republic of China.
Chiang Kai-shek’s haven on Formosa soon became the centre of an international confrontation. The United States had invested a lot in the Kuomintang and simply would not accept that China was now a communist state. The US declared that the Kuomintang on Formosa was the only legitimate government of China. This declaration mattered, because the legitimate government of China had the right to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, complete with veto. So the Americans sent troops to Formosa and told Mao to keep his grubby paws off.
The Russians protested against the Americans for not allowing the People’s Republic of China to be represented at the UN and boycotted meetings of the Security Council. Bad move: Boycotting meant the Russians weren’t there when the UN decided to stop another Asian communist takeover: Korea.
War in Korea
The Russians and Japanese had fought over Korea back in 1904 (see Chapter 2). The Japanese had conquered the country and exploited it ruthlessly, enslaving the Koreans and trying hard to destroy Korea’s culture, language, and identity. Two Korean independence movements started, one in exile led by Syngman Rhee and a Russian-backed communist guerrilla movement in Korea itself led by Kim Il Sung. In 1945 the Russians rushed troops into the northern half of Korea and put Kim in charge; the Americans had to make do with the southern half, which they gave to Syngman Rhee. Kim and Rhee both claimed the whole of Korea and in 1950 Kim got permission from Stalin to launch a full-scale invasion of the South. The South Koreans appealed to the Americans for help, the Americans took their case to the United Nations and the UN voted to send military aid to South Korea, though this could only be done because the Soviets were boycotting the Security Council because the UN wouldn’t recognise communist China.
The UN forces were commanded by US General Douglas MacArthur. At first, everything went well. MacArthur halted the North Korean advance by landing troops at Inchon behind North Korean lines and forcing them to retreat. Why not press on into the North? he thought. Unfortunately, Truman had given MacArthur strict orders not to invade North Korea. What had begun well started to go bad:
MacArthur invades North Korea: President Truman is furious; MacArthur becomes a national hero. Truman can guess what’s coming.
China invades North Korea and forces the UN forces back: ‘Serves you right,’ thinks Mao, ‘for not letting me into the UN.’ MacArthur starts talking about dropping an atom bomb on Beijing, so Truman sacks him before he can spark off World War III. Or – as Truman strongly suspects he plans to do – take over the White House.
New UN commander Matthew Ridgeway pushes the Chinese back: The two sides stop fighting and the border between North and South Korea is settled at the 38th parallel – where it had been in the first place.
New Leaders – No Change
Stalin finally died in 1953 and the rest of the Soviet politburo (the Soviet governing committee) breathed a sigh of relief. They set up a collective leadership, sharing power between them and reassuring the world that the bad old days were over. In 1955 the joint Russian leaders Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev travelled to Geneva for a summit meeting with US President Eisenhower and the British and French prime ministers. East–West relations appeared to be on the mend. (See Chapter 16 for more on the messy political manoeuvring that followed Stalin’s death.)
Did he really say Stalin was a murderous tyrant?
At the twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev got up, cleared all the press out of the room, and made a remarkable speech, denouncing Stalin for his tyranny and wholesale murder. He wasn’t telling the delegates anything they didn’t know but no one dared say these things in public, even though Stalin had been dead for three years. That’s how scared they’d been of him!
News of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ (so-called because he’d had no press present) soon leaked out. Did this mean a new, more friendly Soviet Union?
MiGs in Space
The Cold War was the first conflict in history to be fought out in space. Science fiction films in the fifties were all about freedom-loving earthlings fighting off evil invaders from outer space (geddit?) while the Americans and Russians were racing to be the first into space for real. The Americans were pretty sure they were leading until, in 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik, the world’s first communications satellite. The Americans were still hyperventilating when the Russians launched Sputnik 2, with a little dog called Laika onboard who could wave her tail down to the panicking Americans. Then in 1961 the Russians got the first man into space, a fighter pilot called Yuri Gagarin who orbited the earth and reported back that God couldn’t exist or he’d have bumped into him. The Americans managed to get astronaut John Glenn up to do three orbits and in 1963 John F. Kennedy reassured his fellow Americans by announcing that the United States would send a man to the moon and bring him safely home again by the end of the decade. In theory the ‘space race’ was about stretching the boundaries of human knowledge and endeavour; in reality it was all about gaining the maximum political and military advantage.
Hungarian tragedy
The Hungarian communist leader, Imre Nagy (pronounced ‘Nodge’), thought that Khrushchev’s secret speech was a green light to start introducing a few changes, for example certain basic rights like freedom of speech, that had got rather overlooked in the Stalin years. Nagy also allowed farmers to indulge in a bit of free enterprise and even allowed non-communist parties to stand for election. When he announced that he was taking Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact, Khrushchev threw off his Mr Nice Guy mask and ordered his tanks into Hungary. The Hungarian people fought back with every weapon they could find, but they needed help. The West was sympathetic but was too taken up with the Suez crisis (Chapter 11 has the shameful details). Khrushchev crushed the Hungarians and put the hard-line dictator Janos Kadar in charge. And he had poor Imre Nagy shot.
Another brick in the (Berlin) Wall
During the night of 19–20 August 1961 teams of bricklayers watched by East German border guards began building a wall across the centre of Berlin. The East German government had finally worked out how to stop people slipping over to the bright lights and job opportunities of the West.
The Berlin Wall featured machine gun posts and a death strip, where anyone even approaching the wall would be shot. Even so, many East Germans risked their lives trying any means they could to climb, fly, tunnel, or trick their way past the Wall and into the West. President Kennedy flew in to reassure West Berliners that the West wouldn’t abandon them, but he couldn’t actually do anything about the situation without sparking off a war. And that meant nuclear war.
Are there missiles on Cuba?
In 1962 the Cold War – and the world – seemed to come within a hair’s breadth of nuclear destruction when the Soviet Union placed missiles on the Caribbean island of Cuba. The corrupt and oppressive – but pro-American – Cuban government was overthrown in 1959 by guerrillas led by Fidel Castro (Chapter 13 has more on this). Castro wasn’t particularly communist but when President Kennedy backed a botched invasion to get rid of him, Castro understandably decided to make friends with the Russians. He was delighted when Khrushchev decided to station a number of Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba, capable of reaching the United States.
When American spy planes reported seeing missile bases on Cuba, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island. The Soviet Union angrily denied everything until the Americans produced their aerial photographs in the Security Council. ‘Oh those missile bases,’ said the Russians, ‘Tell you what, we’ll move ours if you move your missiles in Turkey.’ Kennedy refused to budge; meanwhile, the Russian ships carrying the missiles themselves were getting closer to the US blockade. Nuclear war really did seem imminent, in mere hours, when the Russians suddenly backed down: Their ships turned back and they dismantled the missile sites. Kennedy became a national hero; Khrushchev was forced to resign. A few months later, the Americans very quietly dismantled their own missile sites in Turkey.
Easy like Sunday morning – not
After Cuba both East and West tried to calm things down. The buzz word in the 1970s was détente, which is French for ‘chill out’: Difficult when you don’t trust the other side farther than you can spit. The two sides negotiated a series of Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT), but these just meant ‘We’ll only build a few thousand missiles if you only build a few thousand’. And in the 1980s both sides tore up the SALT agreements and started arming to the teeth. Here’s why:
1968, Czechoslovakia: Czech communist leader Alexander Dubcek tries to reform the communist system, releasing political prisoners, ending press censorship, and allowing free elections. The Warsaw Pact is horrified, invades Czechoslovakia and, despite worldwide protests, crushes Dubcek’s government. Soviet leader Leonic Brezhnev announces the Brezhnev Doctrine, saying that the Soviet Union reserves the right to intervene in any communist country that seems to be off-message. ‘He ain’t kidding’ say the Czechs.
1979, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union invades to support an Afghan communist coup. The Americans boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest; more to the point, the Afghans keep up a deadly guerrilla campaign against the Russians. Note to Western leaders: (a) the Soviet Union hasn’t changed, and (b) don’t invade Afghanistan.
1981, Poland: The dockers’ trade union Solidarity, led by Lech Walesa and based at the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk, gathers enormous support for its demands for freedom of speech and free trade unions. In December 1981 the hardline Polish government bans Solidarity and imposes martial law.
Relations were so bad that in 1983, when NATO organised a military exercise codenamed Operation Able Archer, playing out an invasion of Russia, the Russians genuinely thought it was for real and got ready for all-out nuclear war. The crisis blew over when the NATO exercise ended, but it was the closest the world had come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Ending the Cold War
In 1980 America elected the screen actor Ronald Reagan as president. Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’ and started positioning Pershing and Cruise nuclear missiles on the territory of America’s NATO allies. The Russians did the same with their SS-20 missiles. In 1983 Reagan increased the stakes still further with the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), better known as ‘Star Wars’: The US would launch killer satellites into space that could shoot down Soviet missiles while they were still in the air. The Russians protested loudly at this unacceptable Yankee capitalist barbarism and urgently asked their scientists if they could do the same. Not, they learned, without the Soviet Union going bankrupt.
In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. He realised that the Russians would never sort out their own internal troubles while they were still trying to match the Americans missile for missile. Gorbachev met Reagan and the two men, who got on surprisingly well, agreed to start dismantling – yes, dismantling – their nuclear weapons. By 1988 the Cold War was effectively over.
Chapter 16 gives you more information about the changes within the Soviet Union in the run-up to the Cold War coming to an end. Turn to Chapter 18 to read about the backlash against communism that flared up in eastern Europe in the wake of these events.
Peace, man
Big protests against nuclear weapons started with marches to the atomic research centre at Aldermaston in England in the 1950s and by the 1980s they were a worldwide movement. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) called on governments to disarm unilaterally – that is, to get rid of your own weapons before your enemy gets rid of his. Opponents of the peace movement accused it of being naïve or even of helping the Soviet Union; the peace campaigners said they were the only ones with any sanity.