On 12 April 1961, at 9.06 a.m. Moscow time, Yuri Gagarin turned the launch key of his Vostok spacecraft to the ‘go’ position and lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, shouting ‘Poekhali!’ (Let’s go!). ‘I heard a whistle1 and an ever-growing din,’ he wrote. ‘I felt how the gigantic rocket trembled all over, and slowly, very slowly, began to tear itself off the launch pad. The noise was no louder than one would expect to hear in a jet plane, but it had such a range of musical tones and timbres that no composer could hope to score it, no musical instrument or human voice could ever reproduce its magnificence.’
For 108 minutes, Gagarin orbited the Earth, travelling at 18,000 mph, shooting eastwards across his homeland, then onward over the Pacific and North America. Above West Africa, Vostok’s retro-rockets kicked in for a jolting 40-second burst and the spacecraft decelerated, turned and began its descent back to the Earth’s atmosphere, back to its everlasting place in the history of scientific endeavour and human achievement.
When the Soviet media announced the mission’s success, it was the first time the Soviet people had even heard of the project. So dubious were the Kremlin leadership of the quality of their space technology that the very existence of a manned rocket had been kept secret. Gagarin’s own parents learned that their son had become the first man in space only when they heard the news on the radio. Before the launch2, three envelopes had been sent to the Soviet news agency TASS, each containing a different statement depending on the outcome of the mission: one for success, one for the possibility that Gagarin had been forced to land outside the Soviet Union, and one for complete failure.
When he ejected from Vostok and landed safely in the countryside outside Saratov in central Russia, Gagarin found himself surrounded by villagers who approached him with fear and suspicion. They took Gagarin for a spy, and their apprehension was allayed only when he pointed to the letters ‘CCCP’ emblazoned on his helmet. ‘I am Russian,’ he told them proudly. ‘And you have just met the world’s first spaceman!’
Yuri Gagarin was an instant celebrity. He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union, and paraded through the streets of Moscow in an open-top limousine with Khrushchev at his side. As with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the USSR had again beaten the USA, and for Khrushchev it was a chance to claim vindication. ‘Arrogant commentators3 told us that Russians with their bast [birch bark] shoes and footcloths would never be a great power,’ he said as he toasted the new cosmonaut. ‘But once-illiterate Russia has pioneered the path into space. That’s what you’ve done, Yuri! Let everyone who has sharpened their claws against us know this! Let them know that Yurka was in space; that he saw everything; that he knows everything!’
Gagarin was dispatched on a global victory tour. When he met Queen4 Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, thousands turned out to greet him and The Times reported that he received ‘a welcome bordering hysteria’. Gagarin was a natural: he handled the media with charm and good nature. And he was an effective ambassador for Soviet collectivist values, saying repeatedly that he may have been the man in the capsule, but that his success would have been impossible without the dedicated work of thousands of Soviet scientists, workers and technicians over many years.
The history of space exploration in Russia had begun even before the revolution. The visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who lived from 1857 to 1935, was the pioneer of multi-stage rockets and is widely acknowledged to be the father of astronautics. His work was taken up by Soviet scientists in the 1930s and one of them, Sergei Korolyov, would go on to develop both the rocket that took Gagarin into space and the Soviet Union’s first intercontinental ballistic missiles. But science under Stalin was a dangerous occupation and any hint of disloyalty was ruthlessly punished. In 1938, Korolyov was denounced by a rival physicist: sentenced to ten years in a labour camp, he was so severely beaten under interrogation that his jaw was broken and he lost most of his teeth. For the rest of his life he would find it hard to open his mouth and to turn his head.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Korolyov was transferred to a special camp for engineers, where he worked on the development of military aircraft, and at the end of the war he returned to rocket building. His identity, and that5 of his fellow scientists was kept secret, so Korolyov received no public recognition for his role in Gagarin’s triumph. The Vostok spacecraft was also hidden from view in order to preserve the secrets of its design. Only years later was it revealed that Soviet spaceships were almost fully automated; cosmonauts had few tasks to carry out and were discouraged from using their own initiative to solve problems. There is no record6 of Gagarin touching the controls at all after take-off, and Korolyov boasted that Vostok was so sophisticated that even ‘rabbits could fly it’. Cosmonaut training at the secret Star City complex outside Moscow focused on repetition, emotional stability and the capacity to remain calm under stressful conditions. Gagarin’s main rival to be the first in space had been Gherman Titov, an educated man who liked to recite Pushkin in the isolation chamber; but Gagarin was preferred partly because he came from a peasant background, which better reflected the Soviet Union’s image as a proletarian state.
By 1963, Valentina Tereshkova had become the first woman in space, allowing Khrushchev to vaunt ‘the equality of men and women in our country’. But the race with the Americans to put the first man on the moon drove the Kremlin to demand ever greater advances from its scientists and to take ever bigger risks with the safety of its cosmonauts. Korolyov was ordered to launch the first multi-manned space missions and did so by stripping Vostok of all its safety features, cramming three men into a capsule designed for one and sending them into orbit with no means of rescue in an emergency.
In March 1965, Alexei Leonov became the first person to ‘walk’ in space during the Voskhod II mission, but once again Korolyov had been hurried into launching a spacecraft before its technical problems had been properly tackled. A flimsy detachable airlock attached to the side of the capsule meant Leonov was almost stranded in space as his suit expanded and prevented him re-entering. He was forced to manually lower the pressure of his suit, nearly causing him to pass out as he squeezed back into the craft. The automatic guidance system then failed and the cosmonauts were forced to pilot their way home manually, eventually landing in Siberia 1,500 miles away from their target, where they spent a night stuck in trees, in freezing conditions with wolves circling below them.
By now, the whole Soviet space programme was flying on a wing and a prayer. In October of that same year Leonov, Gagarin and Titov signed a letter to the Soviet leadership warning that ‘the situation has changed: the US has caught up and even surpassed us in certain areas … Unfortunately in our country there are many defects in the planning, organisation and management of vital work.’ They received no response. In January 1966, Sergei Korolyov died at the age of 59, his life shortened by the merciless beatings he suffered in the Gulag. It was the beginning of the end. The space scientists had been working towards a flight that would see two Soyuz crafts meet and dock in space, but the programme had been dogged with technical problems. The Kremlin insisted that the mission should go ahead to coincide with the 1967 May Day celebrations, and the experienced cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was chosen to lead it. Komarov knew the ship was not space-worthy. His KGB minder, Venyamin Russayev spoke to him shortly before the launch and later recalled the conversation:
As [Komarov] was seeing7 us off, he said straight out, ‘I’m not going to make it back from this flight.’ I asked him, ‘If you’re convinced you’re going to die, why don’t you refuse the mission?’ He answered, ‘Because if I don’t make the flight, they’ll send Yura [Gagarin], and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.’
Film of the launch pad on 23 April 1967 shows an unsmiling Komarov, a downcast Gagarin and some subdued technicians. Soon after take-off, the craft’s guidance computers failed and mechanical failures began to occur. Komarov complained to ground control: ‘This devil ship8! Nothing I touch works properly.’ After 26 hours, the mission was aborted and Komarov was told to re-enter the atmosphere, but when he tried to alter course he found it impossible to line the ship up correctly. In Washington, an agent of the National Security Agency who was monitoring communications between Komarov and ground control heard the drama play out.
They knew they had9 problems for about two hours before Komarov died, and were fighting to correct them. [Deputy Premier Alexei] Kosygin called Komarov personally. They had a video-phone conversation and Kosygin was crying. He told him he was a hero … Komarov’s wife got on too, and they talked for a while. He told her how to handle their affairs, and what to do with the kids. It was awful. Towards the last few minutes, he was falling apart.
As Soyuz plummeted into the steppe at 400 mph, Komarov called out to those who had sent him into space in an unready craft, ‘You have killed me …’
After the Soyuz tragedy, Gagarin returned to his former job as a fighter pilot, and on a routine training flight the following year was involved in a near collision that sent his plane crashing to the ground. His remains were cremated and his ashes placed in the Kremlin wall close to those of Komarov, his friend and comrade. The Soviet space programme was in meltdown. The dead hand of central planning, excessive meddling from the leadership and a focus on propaganda victories at the expense of long-term development had undone all the scientific achievement and all the individual heroism. In 1969, the Americans put the first men on the moon; no Soviet cosmonaut would ever follow in their footsteps.
The space race typified the best and worst of the Khrushchev era, promising much but ending in failure. As first secretary, Khrushchev strove to revive the Soviet Union after the dark days of Stalin, to modernise a country whose development had been stifled by decades of repression; but he was weighed down by the legacy of the past and by the fatal flaws of the system he inherited.
The consequences of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ of 1956 reverberated through Soviet society. Millions of Stalin’s victims would eventually be rehabilitated, many of them posthumously; barely a family in the country was unaffected. Prisoners released from the camps began returning to their homes, recounting their experiences and revealing the full extent of the injustices and abuses. Anna Akhmatova wrote of a nation divided between victims and torturers: ‘Now the arrested10 will return and two Russias will look each other in the eye: the one that sent people to the camps and the one that was sent away.’ The secret speech convinced a generation of Communists that the party was abandoning oppression as a means of control and returning to what Khrushchev dubbed ‘Lenin’s true path’. (Years later Mikhail Gorbachev would describe himself and his reformist allies as ‘the children of the Twentieth Congress’.)
Expectations were high, and Khrushchev was quick to raise them higher. In 1961, he announced that the conflict between the social classes had now been won; society was united, and the state was ruling for ‘all the people’. Since 1936, when Stalin declared that socialism had been achieved in the USSR, Kremlin leaders had urged the Soviet people to strive to build Communism; Communist perfection was viewed as a distant nirvana. But the irrepressible Khrushchev announced that nirvana was at hand. The building of Communism, he declared, would be completed in the Soviet Union by 1980. A new Communist Party Programme (the third of its kind) even set out a specific 20-year timetable:
In the course of the 1970s11, housing, public transport, water, gas and heating will become rent-free for all citizens. There will be free medical services, free use of sanatoria and free medicines. The transition to free meals at factories and collective farms will begin. Prices will fall … Income tax will be abolished … There will be a 34-hour week (30 hours for those doing arduous work) … and a 500 per cent rise in output, giving the USSR the highest output per head in the world. Real incomes will rise by three and half times so that the Soviet people will have the highest standard of living in the world.
The concluding sentence of the Third Party Programme became a national slogan, appearing on posters and banners:
The party solemnly12 declares that today’s generation of Soviet people will live under Communism!fn1
Khrushchev continued his campaign of de-Stalinisation, pinning the blame for the newly revealed atrocities on Stalin alone, playing down his own role and that of his allies. The dictator’s body was removed from Lenin’s mausoleum and buried under a marble bust beside the Kremlin wall. Streets and towns were renamed: Stalingrad, symbol of Soviet resistance during the Great Patriotic War, became Volgograd. The legal system was reformed and the ad hoc ‘emergency tribunals’, which had convicted so many innocent people, were abolished. The favourite charges of Stalin’s show trials, ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ and ‘terrorist intentions’, were removed from the criminal code.
But one institution not reformed was the KGB. The Soviet Union was still a police state. Freedom of speech and association remained severely restricted and critics of the regime were likely to be expelled or, increasingly, declared insane. A condition known as ‘creeping schizophrenia’ was invented; it was impossible to disprove that you suffered from it and it allowed the state to confine sufferers in hospitals for ‘psychiatric treatment’.fn2 The Serbsky Institute in Moscow was one of several psykhushkas (mental hospitals) that acquired grim reputations for the abuse of dissidents. As a result, Khrushchev14 was able to declare in 1961 that there were ‘no more political prisoners’ in the Soviet Union.
Under Stalin, the Soviet Union had largely ignored Western opinion about its internal politics. Military power was reputation enough. The party’s monopoly on the dissemination of information kept the Soviet people in ignorance of Western achievements, including the superior living standards in Europe and North America. Khrushchev continued to deride the failings of capitalism in order to glorify the advantages of Communism (with characteristic pithiness he described capitalism as ‘a dead herring15 in the moonlight, gleaming brilliantly as it rots’), but he showed a new enthusiasm for competition with the West.
In May 1957, he told a conference of agricultural specialists that the USSR would ‘catch up with and overtake America’. When the phrase was reported in the West, it was taken as an indication of military aggressiveness in the escalating nuclear arms race, but the context makes clear that Khrushchev was talking in economic terms. His goal was to raise Soviet standards of living above those of America; posters implored the Soviet people to work together to ‘Catch up and overtake16 the United States in per capita production of meat, milk and butter.’ Soviet pride was at stake – the target of ‘beating the Americans’ was intended to boost performance in all sectors of the economy. It was a gamble by Khrushchev: as Soviet leader, he had at least a broad grasp of the economic realities on both sides of the Iron Curtain and he knew how far Moscow was trailing behind; but his enthusiasm and pugnacity got the better of him.
Khrushchev needed to deliver on his boast. In the early 1960s, he launched a large-scale programme of house building. Thousands of concrete tower blocks were erected across the country and by the middle of the decade the availability of housing in cities had been greatly improved. In his memoirs, Khrushchev would proclaim, ‘To use the words17 of John Reed, we “shook the world” with our massive drive to build housing for our people.’ But the success was only relative and the results remained poor by US standards. The average Soviet city dweller18 still had only 9 square metres of living space and in 1965 more than half the urban population was still living in the cramped kommunalki (communal flats). The new apartments had been put up fast and suffered for it. Many of the prefabricated multi-storey blocks would need replacing only a few years later, and they quickly gained the nickname of khrushcheby – ‘Khrushchev’s slums’.fn3 The building boom inspired jokes and urban myths; even Shostakovich was moved to use it as the subject of an operetta, Cheryomushki (1958), where a young couple fight Soviet bureaucracy to secure a new apartment, with satirical results.
The economy was slow to respond to Khrushchev’s urgings. He had repealed many of Stalin’s draconian labour laws: workers could no longer be punished as criminals if they changed jobs without official permission or if they arrived at work more than 20 minutes late. But there were few financial incentives to make people work hard and there was more than a grain of truth in the familiar joke that ‘they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work’. By 1961, Khrushchev was again flirting with Stalinist methods of coercion. His ‘Moral Code of the Communist Worker19’ reinstated the old warning ‘He who does not work shall not eat’ and created a new offence of ‘parasitism’, punishing those who shirked work or did not work hard enough with imprisonment or menial jobs in distant regions. People were once again encouraged to ‘be intolerant towards the violation of public interests’, in effect to inform on work colleagues who did not pull their weight.
Khrushchev’s biggest challenge was agriculture. He was the son of peasants himself and he took personal responsibility for improving the country’s disastrous food production. He set specific targets in the race to ‘catch up with America’, but the collective farms responded tepidly. His demand in 1957 for a threefold increase in meat production was so unrealistic that most agricultural specialists declared it impossible. Khrushchev needed an example to prove himself right, and he found it in the leadership of the Ryazan region south of Moscow. The local party boss20, Alexei Larionov, pledged that he would meet the target within a year, and in January 1959 Khrushchev unveiled the promise in Pravda, challenging other regions to do the same. Larionov was awarded the Order of Lenin and held up as an example for others, but he had little idea how he was going to fulfil his pledge. His solution was to slaughter the whole of the region’s beef stock and much of its dairy herd; cattle reared privately by collective farm workers were expropriated and additional meat supplies were bought from neighbouring districts. The measures bankrupted the Ryazan budget and left its agricultural infrastructure in ruins. But at the Communist Party plenum of December 1959 Khrushchev triumphantly announced that the target had been met and that the quota for the following year was being raised even higher. Larionov’s irresponsible methods were soon exposed and the region’s meat production plummeted to a fraction of its previous levels. He was fired and committed suicide soon afterwards.
The Alice in Wonderland character of Khrushchev’s miracle cures extended to much vaster agricultural projects. His Virgin Lands scheme, launched in 1954, was designed to open up the uncultivated steppes of western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. In a large-scale mobilisation not seen since the 1930s, a quarter of a million young people migrated to create what they hoped would be a major new grain-growing area for the Soviet Union. The campaign was glorified in novels and songs; films and posters reminiscent of the collectivisation era showed happy young men and women working the land, joyfully ensuring that the USSR would never again go hungry. There was enthusiasm and idealism in the spontaneous expression of the Russian frontier spirit. But what the propaganda failed to show was that alongside the mainly Slav volunteers, the ethnic groups deported by Stalin during the war were also being exploited. Chechens, Volga Germans, Ingush and Crimean Tartars all contributed to the early successes of Khrushchev’s scheme. Although some of them were allowed to return to their native lands after the ‘secret speech’ of 1956, the Tartars and Germans were deemed invaluable to the success of the project and had to stay.
By 196021, tens of millions of hectares of new land had been ploughed and national wheat output was up by over 50 per cent. The Virgin Lands scheme was trumpeted as a success, but a few years later success had turned sour. The new lands were fertile, but lay on the edges of the central Asian desert. In the rush for quick results, the soil had not been properly prepared or fertilised and a ‘dustbowl’ effect developed, similar to that seen in America in the 1930s. As the soil crumbled, ever greater areas of land became barren. Bad weather in the spring22 and summer of 1962 produced a poor harvest across the whole of the Soviet Union, and of the 37 million hectares of land sown with corn, only 7 million were successfully harvested. Despite Khrushchev’s promises of self-sufficiency, Moscow had to buy 20 million tons of grain from Canada to avoid the threat of famine.
In parallel with the Virgin Lands campaign, Khrushchev embarked on another speculative scheme. Soviet delegations to the United States had returned with awestruck accounts of huge and highly productive cornfields in the American Midwest. The superior yield of the US growers was attributed to a hybrid strain of corn developed by a farmer and seed company executive from Iowa named Roswell Garst. Garst was invited to23 visit the Soviet Union and struck up an unlikely friendship with the Communist Party first secretary, persuading Khrushchev to purchase 5,000 tons of hybrid corn seeds to be planted across the country. When Khrushchev made the first state visit by a Soviet leader to the US in 1959 he insisted on visiting Garst’s farm and was photographed smiling broadly amid the towering cornfields, waving a corncob and declaring that the Soviet Union would make an even greater success of its agriculture. ‘Up to now, you Americans have worked better than we do,’ he announced. ‘So we will learn from you. And once we’ve learned, we’ll work even better than you do. So you will have to jump onto the running board of the train of socialism, which is about to leave for the future. Otherwise you’ll be left far behind, and we will wave goodbye to you from the rear platform of the last carriage.’
Khrushchev’s enthusiasm for corn earned him the popular nickname kukuruznik, ‘little corn-man’ or ‘corn nut’; his optimism was infectious, but his self-belief led him to disregard any advice that contradicted his own convictions. When Soviet agronomists warned him to plant corn only in the warm southern regions of the Soviet Union, he refused to listen, ordering it to be sown in the climatically unsuitable area of European Russia. The decision led to disastrous harvests and catastrophic shortages in other, more traditional crops, such as wheat and potatoes, that the new cornfields had displaced.
Khrushchev had gambled on disastrous schemes, and the vast scale of his mistakes brought Soviet agriculture to the edge of catastrophe. The cheap food the Soviet people were accustomed to was no longer available. When meat and dairy prices were raised, a wave of discontent spread through the country. At the Novocherkassk24 locomotive works in southern Russia, several thousand workers went on strike, and in June 1962 many of them took to the streets, demanding the return of cheap food and better wages. When the workers refused to disperse, troops shot indiscriminately into the crowd, killing at least 16 people and wounding dozens more. Over a hundred people were arrested and brought to trial; seven alleged ringleaders were sentenced to death for fomenting ‘banditry’.fn4
Bread queues appeared across the country, and the state was forced to spend precious foreign currency reserves to buy food from abroad. Before the revolution, Russia had been a net exporter of grain, but now the Soviet Union could not even feed itself. Khrushchev’s son Sergei recalled that the food crisis convinced his father something was deeply amiss with the Soviet system:
Father didn’t understand25 what was wrong. He grew nervous, became angry, quarrelled, looked for culprits but didn’t find them. Deep inside, he began subconsciously to understand that the problem was not in the details. It was the system itself that didn’t work. But he couldn’t change his beliefs.
The economic crisis forced Khrushchev to take tough decisions. The military budget was cut to fund spending on food imports and on the massive housing programme of the early 1960s. Khrushchev concluded that the Soviet Union could not afford to compete with the United States on all fronts. He consequently announced that the East–West antagonism of Stalin’s final years would be replaced by a new doctrine of ‘peaceful coexistence’. It was a difficult policy to explain to the Soviet military leadership, and Khrushchev seems to have done it in a singularly insensitive way, telling the commanders of the armed forces that they were largely redundant now that the Soviet Union had developed the atomic bomb, and that there was no longer any need to ‘waste’ money on conventional weapons.
To replace the traditional Soviet reliance on the strength of its usual military forces, Khrushchev developed a two-pronged approach to international relations. He sought to create allies out of newly independent African and Asian states, touring India, Afghanistan and Burma in 1955, and befriending Egypt’s President Nasser by helping him build the Aswan Dam. The victory of Fidel Castro’s Communist forces in the Cuban revolution of 1959 brought Moscow another strategically placed ally that could be exploited to exert pressure on Washington. At the same time, Khrushchev attempted to disguise the pressures on the Soviet defence budget by a campaign of bluff and intimidation. He told a gathering of Western ambassadors in Moscow that the triumph of Communism was inevitable. ‘Like it or not26,’ he said, ‘history is on our side. We will bury you.’ The remark was a restatement of the classic Marxian belief contained in the Communist Manifesto that ‘the proletariat will be the gravedigger of capitalism’, but Khrushchev did little to discourage Western speculation that he was threatening nuclear conflict.
Sergei Khrushchev recalls27 that during his father’s visit to England in April 1956, ‘he casually enquired … if his hosts knew how many nuclear warheads it would take to wipe their island off the face of the Earth. An awkward silence followed. But Father did not drop the subject, and with a broad smile on his face, he informed those present that if they didn’t know, he could help them, and he mentioned a specific number. Then he added, quite cheerfully, “And we have lots of those nuclear warheads, as well as the missiles to deliver them.”’ In his usual colourful language, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union was ‘producing missiles like sausages’, but his son later wrote that this too was a bluff:
When I asked him how he could say that, since the Soviet Union had no more than half a dozen intercontinental missiles, Father only laughed: ‘We’re not planning to start a war, so it doesn’t matter how many missiles we have. The main thing is that Americans think we have enough for a massive strike in response. That’ll make them think twice about attacking us.’
In 1959, an American trade exhibition was held at the Sokolniki Park exhibition halls on the outskirts of Moscow, where the latest US domestic technology, including fridges, washing machines, televisions and dishwashers was laid out in dazzling displays. Khrushchev got into a very undiplomatic and very public exchange of views with the US vice-president Richard Nixon, who had come to open the exhibition. Khrushchev refused to believe Nixon’s claim that the average American could afford a home equipped with all the devices on show and argued fiercely but implausibly that Soviet television sets were better than American ones. He mocked the American obsession with ‘gadgets’ and asked if they had invented a machine to ‘stuff food into people’s mouths’. As the argument grew more heated, Khrushchev famously told his guest, ‘We’ll show you Kuzma’s mother!’ – a piece of Russian slang meaning roughly, ‘We’ll show you what for!’ The exchange, which was shown in part on Soviet television, annoyed many viewers, who felt ashamed at their leader’s peasant manners and lack of culture. The sophistication of the US exhibits had impressed those who saw them, and the free glasses of Pepsi Cola handed out to visitors were a big hit. A popular joke recounted how people, when asked for their opinion of this capitalist drink, would reply ‘Revolting!’ before running to the back of the queue to get another glass.fn5
When Khrushchev visited the US later that year, he was determined and proud to sing the praises of Soviet accomplishments. ‘Who would have guessed28 it,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘that the most powerful capitalist country in the world would invite a Communist to visit? Who would have thought that the capitalists would invite me, a worker? This is incredible. Today they have to take notice of us. They have to recognise our existence and our power. Look what we’ve achieved … From a ravaged, backward, illiterate Russia we have transformed ourselves into a Russia whose successes stun the world.’
In a speech in Pittsburgh he repeated his pledge to ‘catch up with and overtake America’, laughingly adding, ‘I think this slogan29 has frightened some of you. But why? … We will stand up for ourselves and we will overtake you. We are warning you to buck your ideas up if you don’t want to be lagging way behind us …’ Khrushchev got annoyed when journalists attacked him for the invasion of Hungary three years earlier, but in general the visit was a good-natured one. He was determined to control his temper and not to express too much admiration for what he saw. In Los Angeles he went to the 20th Century Fox studios, where he met Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, who had been told to wear her tightest, sexiest dress and to leave Arthur Miller at home. Much to his chagrin, he was not allowed to visit Disneyland, because the Los Angeles police said they could not guarantee his safety. In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev’s visit was given blanket coverage. His feisty treatment of his hosts played well with the hardline nationalists, but others found it embarrassing. His competiveness was widely mocked. A popular joke imagined Eisenhower responding to Khrushchev’s jibes by suggesting they run a foot race to see who would ‘catch up with and overtake’ whom. When the athletic Eisenhower wins easily, the Soviet media are forced into some ingenuity to put the correct gloss on it. ‘Our leader Nikita Khrushchev has captured second place in a world-class field,’ Pravda reports, ‘while the US president finished a humiliating second to last.’
Khrushchev’s visit to the US had been credited with taking some of the heat out of the Cold War, but soon the temperature rose again. On 1 May 1960 an American U-2 spy plane operating from a secret US base in Pakistan was shot down as it flew over Siberia photographing intercontinental ballistic missile sites. When the pilot, Gary Powers, ejected and was captured by the Soviets, it gave Khrushchev a perfect opportunity to take the moral high ground. He announced the shooting down of a spy plane, but did not mention the pilot. Eisenhower assumed Powers had died in the explosion and authorised a cover story, that an American ‘weather plane’ had ‘crashed somewhere north of Turkey’. Washington declared that30 ‘there was absolutely no deliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace and never has been’. On 7 May, in a speech to the Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev revealed the truth with a triumphant flourish. ‘I must tell you a secret … When I made my first report, I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and well … and now just look how many foolish things the Americans have said.’fn6
The US and Soviet leaders met two weeks later for a ‘Peace Summit’ in Paris, where Khrushchev used the U-2 incident to attack Eisenhower, demanding an apology, a formal promise that it would never happen again and punishment for those responsible. When the Americans refused, Khrushchev made an intemperate speech, haranguing Eisenhower for his ‘betrayal’, and stormed out of the meeting. Many in the Soviet delegation found his conduct hugely discomforting, and Khrushchev would later claim that the U-2 crisis marked the beginning of the problems that would ultimately end his political career. In 1969, he told a visiting American doctor that ‘Things were going well31 until that happened. But from the moment Gary Powers was shot down I was no longer in full control. Those [Kremlin hardliners] who felt America had imperialist intentions and that military strength was the most important thing now had the evidence they needed. After the U-2 incident, I no longer had the ability to overcome that feeling.’
Further evidence of Khrushchev’s volatile behaviour was displayed at the UN General Assembly in October 1960, when he repeatedly interrupted a speech by the British prime minister Harold Macmillan. When Macmillan criticised the Soviet Union for its oppressive policies in Eastern Europe, Khrushchev banged a shoe on his desk in protest. (Film of the event seems to show Khrushchev still wearing both shoes, suggesting perhaps that he had borrowed a shoe from one of his aides.) He seemed pleased32 with the effect his ranting had produced, telling his adviser Oleg Troyanovsky, ‘You really missed something! It was great fun!’ Later he would claim he was inspired by stories he had heard about the Duma of 1905 in which people were not afraid to use extreme measures to get their point across. But several members of the Soviet delegation, as well as Khrushchev’s opponents in the Central Committee back in Moscow, were appalled. There was a growing consensus that his actions were beginning to undermine his reputation and that of the Soviet Union.
When Khrushchev next met an American president, the newly elected John F. Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961, he set out deliberately to show the younger man who was boss. He was condescending and domineering, relentlessly complaining about the recent Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles had been vainly dispatched to overthrow Castro’s Communist regime. The two leaders also clashed about the status of Berlin, as Khrushchev continued to demand its incorporation into the DDR. Ever since the division of Germany after the Second World War, citizens of the DDR had been using Berlin’s open borders to escape to the West, and Walter Ulbricht, the East German Communist leader, had urged Khrushchev to take action to stop the exodus. Khrushchev agreed: in August 1961, barbed wire was erected between the Western and Soviet sectors. When the West did nothing to remove it, he authorised the construction of a permanent wall surrounding the Western sector on all sides, blocking access from any part of East German territory. Again the West didn’t respond. Khrushchev concluded that he had tested Kennedy and come out on top. The successful building of the Berlin wall would foster a misplaced confidence that Moscow could bully the young American leader with impunity.
In fact, Kennedy and his administration were increasingly worried by Khrushchev’s unpredictable behaviour and bellicose rhetoric. In October 1961, the USSR’s test of the so-called ‘Tsar bomb’ (see here), the largest nuclear weapon so far produced, heightened tensions throughout the world; the nuclear clock seemed to be approaching midnight. Khrushchev’s memoirs suggest he regarded the nuclear arms race in terms of a personal game of chicken with the US leader.
I remember President33 Kennedy once stated that the United States had the nuclear missile capacity to wipe out the Soviet Union two times over, while the Soviet Union had enough atomic weapons to wipe out the United States only once … When journalists asked me to comment, I said jokingly, ‘Yes, Kennedy is quite right. But I’m not complaining … We’re happy to finish off the United States first time round. What good does it do to annihilate a country twice? We are not a bloodthirsty people.’
Khrushchev may have been ready to employ nuclear weapons only as a bargaining tool, with no intention of actually using them. But his outbursts had convinced the US administration that he was erratic and possibly unbalanced. Washington’s belief that Moscow might, under certain circumstances, trigger a nuclear conflict would lead to the most dangerous moment of the Cold War.
Castro’s takeover in Cuba had given the Soviets the opportunity to challenge the Americans close to home. The US had deployed missiles in Turkey, within striking distance of Moscow, and Khrushchev wanted to rebalance the nuclear equation. In early October 1962, US spy planes spotted unusual building work at Soviet bases and identified what looked like batteries of surface-to-air missiles (SAM), capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The US military chiefs of staff argued strongly for a pre-emptive airstrike to destroy the missile bases, but Kennedy hesitated. By mid October, the world was on the brink of nuclear war; JFK made clear that he did not want to fight, but if the Soviets forced him into it, he would not hesitate. His brother Robert Kennedy confirmed later that the American threat was real:
We had to have a commitment34 by tomorrow that the bases would be removed. I was not giving them an ultimatum but a statement of fact. They should understand that if they did not remove those bases, we would remove them. Perhaps [they] might feel it necessary to take retaliatory action; but before that was over, there would be not only dead Americans but dead Russians as well.
Khrushchev’s aim35, as he later wrote, was ‘to protect Cuba’s existence as a socialist country’ and ‘provide an example to the other countries of the region’. Khrushchev’s personal credibility was at stake, and he seemed committed to seeing things through to the end. ‘We hadn’t had enough time to deliver all our shipments to Cuba’, he recalled, ‘but we had already installed enough missiles to destroy New York, Chicago and the other industrial cities, not to mention a little village like Washington. If any of our big missiles survived [an attack], there wouldn’t be much of New York left … I don’t think America had ever faced such a real threat of destruction.’
After his success in Berlin, Khrushchev apparently expected another bloodless victory. He asked rhetorically, ‘How can I deal36 seriously with a man who is younger than my own son?’ but he had underestimated Kennedy. The White House announced that US warships would impose an exclusion zone around Cuba and that any Soviet vessels trying to breach it would be destroyed. A Soviet flotilla en route to the island with a presumed cargo of more missiles was within days of triggering military confrontation. But with the endgame seemingly at hand, Washington and Moscow simultaneously came up with proposals to defuse the crisis. If the Soviets would dismantle the missiles, the US would guarantee never to stage another invasion like the Bay of Pigs; in return, the Soviet Union promised not to attack Turkey if the US weapons stationed there were removed. On 28 October, Radio Moscow carried a statement by Khrushchev that all Soviet missiles in Cuba were being withdrawn. The US kept its promise to remove its missiles from Turkey, but refrained from announcing this publicly, with the result that Moscow seemed to have accepted a humiliating climb-down. Kennedy told his staff that he had ‘cut Mr K’s balls off’ and the US news media declared victory for America.
The Soviet Presidium were far from impressed with Khrushchev’s handling of the affair. It had been his miscalculation to deploy the missiles in the first place, and it was he who wrongly believed he could bully Kennedy into submission. Moscow had been made to appear weak in the eyes of the world; their ally Castro was furious that his country’s future had been decided without consulting him, and China – still smarting from the perceived humiliation of Moscow’s de-Stalinisation process – denounced the whole episode as ‘misguided adventurism followed by capitulation’.
The Cuban debacle and the failure of his agricultural schemes had undermined Khrushchev’s authority. By the time the space programme started to implode, he was already yesterday’s man. His last official act as Soviet leader was to congratulate the crew of the first multi-manned Voskhod mission on 12 October 1964. He made the call from his holiday home on the Black Sea, and later the same day he received a message from the Presidium in Moscow. They had arranged an emergency Central Committee meeting to discuss the agricultural situation and asked him to return for it. When he got there, his reception was brutal. The instigator of the coup was Khrushchev’s own protégé, Leonid Brezhnev, and the rest of the Presidium supported it. The ideology chief, Mikhail Suslov, read out an indictment of Khrushchev’s mistakes as party secretary, lambasting his erratic, self-aggrandising behaviour, denouncing his failures over agriculture, the Cuban missile crisis and the break with China, and calling for his resignation. Khrushchev was alone; he asked for the same mercy as he had shown the plotters of 1957. ‘Comrades, forgive me37 if I am guilty of anything,’ he said. ‘We worked together. It’s true that we didn’t accomplish everything we had hoped for … Now obviously it will be for you to do as you wish. What can I say? I’ve got what I deserved.’ He then offered his resignation ‘for reasons of health’. It was accepted, and the next day the Central Committee, which Suslov had already won over, gave its vote of approval.fn7
The Pravda editorial38 on 16 October spoke of ‘subjectivism and drift in Communist construction, hare-brained scheming, half-baked conclusions, hasty decisions and actions divorced from reality, bragging and bluster, a penchant for rule by fiat, and unwillingness to take into account what science and practical experience have already worked out’. This was ignominy. Khrushchev was viewed by many as a brutish peasant who had embarrassed the Soviet Union on the international stage and nearly blundered into a war that could have ended the world. His boundless self-belief, allied to the limitless power conferred on him in the post of first secretary, had led him to pursue disastrous schemes.
But he had managed the transition from the dark abuses of Stalinism to a society that was more open, less haunted by the spectre of arbitrary repression. ‘I am old and tired39,’ he told a friend on the night of his dismissal. ‘Let them cope by themselves. I’ve done the main thing. Could anyone imagine telling Stalin that he wasn’t wanted any more and telling him to retire? He would have annihilated them. Everything is different now. The fear has gone; we can talk as equals. That is my contribution.’
fn1 It was not until the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 that the party finally acknowledged the hopeless over-optimism of Khrushchev’s claims. ‘Much has changed in13 our life since the adoption of the Third Party Programme,’ Mikhail Gorbachev would admit. ‘Not all the estimates and conclusions turned out to be correct. The idea of translating the tasks of the full-scale building of Communism into direct practical action has proved to be premature … And as for the chronological limits in which the party’s targets are to be attained, they do not seem to be needed.’ The advent of Communism was being postponed indefinitely.
fn2 It was never overtly stated, but the underlying assumption was that ‘if someone opposes the people’s state, which is destined to bring happiness to all mankind, he or she must by definition be mad.’
fn3 In the course of his construction programme, Khrushchev tore down the historic Arbat district of Moscow, with the loss of many valuable buildings. The series of apartment blocks that now protrude incongruously on the main avenue of the district are still referred to as ‘Khrushchev’s false teeth’.
fn4 The Novocherkassk events were never referred to in the Soviet media, and details of the massacre remained classified until 1992.
fn5 Thirteen years later, Pepsi would sign a reciprocal deal with Stolichnaya Vodka to sell their products in each other’s country. Throughout the Brezhnev era, Pepsi was one of the few Western commodities that could be freely bought in the USSR.
fn6 Powers was tried in Moscow for espionage and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment followed by seven years’ hard labour. He was released early, in 1962, in exchange for a captured Soviet spy.
fn7 In 1964, the Soviet system of ‘democratic centralism’ was still functioning smoothly: the web of party domination radiating out from the Kremlin ensured that the commands of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) would be obeyed throughout the land. Whoever controlled the top Communist bodies also controlled the vast administrative structure that filtered down into all levels of society, bringing with it the obedience of the civil service, the army, the militia and the state security services. So it took only a limited ‘palace coup’ like the one carried out in October 1964 to effect an automatic and total transfer of authority. It is worth noting, as the next time such a coup would be attempted – in August 1991 – conditions would have changed so fundamentally that the plotters’ expectations of a similar smooth transition would be dramatically dashed.