B.4.e. Postwar ArrangementsThe Soviet Union suffered grievous losses during World War II. Much of its European territory was devastated by mechanized warfare and the horrors of occupation. Official Soviet reports at the time stated that 20 million soldiers and civilians perished in the war, but it was later revealed, during Gorbachev's time in office in the 1980s, that a more realistic figure for Soviet losses was between 27 million and 28 million. At this astronomic price, the Soviet Union subdued its bellicose neighbors, expanded its frontiers, and moved its troops into Germany, Eastern Europe, and formerly Japanese-held parts of East Asia. Bargaining over postwar arrangements afforded it recognition as one of the great powers of the world. Stalin participated with the American and British leaders at the Tehran Conference in 1943, the Yalta Conference in February 1945, and the Potsdam Conference later in 1945 to decide the overall military and political strategy of the war and a common postwar European policy. The Soviets also played a leading role in the conferences leading to the establishment of the United Nations (UN) in 1945.
Instead of making a treaty immediately with defeated and disorganized Germany, the victor nations temporarily designated four occupation zones. The eastern zone was assigned to the USSR. Berlin, surrounded by the Soviet zone, was divided into four sectors; its eastern zone was also assigned to the USSR. All were to be administered as parts of one country, with free trade among them. German territory east of a line formed by the Odra (Oder) and Neisse rivers was consigned to Polish occupancy pending a final peace settlement. The northern part of East Prussia was awarded to the USSR. The Soviets exacted huge reparations in the form of machinery and raw materials from the Soviet-occupied areas of Eastern Europe. During the postwar reconstruction of the Soviet economy, which had been devastated in the war, Germany and former Nazi satellites such as Finland also made reparations to the Soviet Union.
C. The Cold War Begins
The wartime alliance was based on aversion to a common enemy, not on philosophical consensus or similarity of social system or way of life. Victory removed the mutual enemy and opened the coalition up to strains between the totalitarian Soviet Union and the two leading democracies, the United States and the United Kingdom. Stalin initially hesitated in his policy, unsure how far he could push Soviet interests and whether it would be necessary to alienate his wartime partners. At the Potsdam Conference, held on the heels of the victory in Europe, Stalin offended the United States and the United Kingdom by making demands they held to be in excess of the needs of Soviet national security. Despite the acrimony, the Allies reached agreement on the general lines of the occupation, on reparations policy, and on the German-Polish and Polish-Soviet demarcation lines.
Within several years, the Soviet Union violated many of these agreements and embarked on a sustained assault on the political, economic, and social structures of most of the countries it occupied. In late 1946 the former British prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, presciently remarked that an “iron curtain” was descending across the middle of Europe. The Soviets used force and threats to press their advantage and by 1947 and 1948 gave Communist groups in Eastern Europe the green light to govern in roughly the same repressive way the USSR itself was ruled. In July 1947 Soviet foreign minister Molotov served notice that the USSR would not participate in the Marshall Plan, the American program for reviving the postwar economies of Europe (seeEuropean Recovery Program). In a return to the spirit of an earlier age, the USSR established the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) as a successor to the defunct Comintern with the cooperation of eight other Communist countries. As Moscow shirked cooperation and turned inward, the Western countries committed themselves to the globe-girdling political, diplomatic, and economic conflict between blocs—and for the most part between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union—known as the Cold War.
C.1. Takeover in Eastern Europe
In the European countries where Soviet influence was paramount during and after World War II—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and East Germany—political structures were reorganized in stages. Local Communists first cooperated in coalition governments in which they controlled the ministries directing the police, the army, and the economy. This was followed, beginning in 1945, by the institution of "people's democracies," Soviet-type regimes under Communist control domestically and subservient to the USSR in foreign policy. Opposing political factions were isolated and then destroyed, large land holdings were expropriated, and (with the exception of Poland) farms were collectivized; virtually all industry was nationalized. Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in Eastern Europe between the two world wars, was the last to come under Communist control in February 1948, through subversion of a coalition government. That same year, Yugoslavia, having acquired a Communist regime led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, resisted Soviet efforts to dictate to it and was expelled from Cominform.
Developments in Eastern Europe, and the 11-month Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948-1949, alarmed the United States and Western Europe and led to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949. To coordinate the economies of the countries under its control, the USSR in 1949 established the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON or CMEA), with all the Communist states of Eastern Europe except Yugoslavia as members.
C.2. Relations with China
In August 1945 the Soviet Union concluded a treaty of friendship and alliance with the Republic of China's Kuomintang (KMT) government, granting it economic concessions and defense facilities, as previously agreed upon by the wartime Allies. Although the Soviets promised to respect KMT sovereignty in Manchuria, they stripped the region of nearly all of its industrial machinery, resisted efforts by the Chinese government to reestablish its authority, and gave arms taken from captured Japanese soldiers to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the KMT's adversary in a civil war. When Soviet troops withdrew, all Manchuria fell to the CCP. The subsequent victory of the Chinese Communists over the KMT in 1949 altered the balance of power in Asia to the momentary advantage of the Soviet Union.
D. Struggle for Leadership
Stalin, although increasingly erratic and paranoid as he grew old, remained in control until his death in March 1953. A collective leadership took power after his death. It was headed briefly by Georgy Malenkov, who was chosen CPSU first secretary and premier of the government. Other key figures included Molotov (reinstated as foreign minister), Beria (minister of internal affairs), Nikita Khrushchev (party secretary), Kaganovich and Nikolay Bulganin (first deputy premiers), and Kliment Voroshilov (ceremonial head of state).
The ruling group soon fell out among themselves. Malenkov lasted as chief organizer of the party for only one week and was eclipsed there by Khrushchev, whose title was elevated to CPSU first secretary in September 1953. The ambitious Beria was arrested in June and denounced for “criminal and antiparty activities”; in December 1953 the Kremlin announced he had been tried for treason, found guilty, and shot. Malenkov was demoted in February 1955 and replaced as head of government by Bulganin, a confederate of Khrushchev.
E. Khrushchev Era
The struggle for power finally resulted in the triumph of Khrushchev. Using many of the patronage techniques pioneered by Stalin in the 1920s, he packed the CPSU apparatus with officials friendly to him. The 20th Party Congress in February 1956 promoted many of his sympathizers to leading positions. In June 1957, in a climactic assembly of the party's Central Committee, he ousted Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and others. In 1958 he forced Bulganin to resign and stepped into the premiership, continuing as party first secretary. By 1960 Khrushchev was in complete ascendancy, receiving many accolades to his leadership at party gatherings.
E.1. Domestic Policies
The removal of Beria in 1953 gave the other CPSU leaders the opportunity to clip the wings of the political police. Inmates of the Gulag camps began to be freed in 1954 and tribunals started to process the posthumous “rehabilitation” of the reputations of many of those murdered under Stalin.
In a startling move at the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev delivered an address to a closed meeting of the delegates asserting that Stalin had replaced the legitimate Soviet leadership with a “personality cult” to his own glory, with catastrophic consequences for the party and the country. Among other things, Khrushchev charged that Stalin was guilty of “mass arrests and deportations” and of “the execution without trial and without normal investigation” of Communists and others. In addition, he said, Stalin had been morbidly suspicious of his Politburo colleagues, had not anticipated the German invasion and mishandled the war effort, and had jeopardized “peaceful relations with other nations.”
The “secret speech,” whose contents if not its exact wording soon leaked out into the press, stunned many Communists in the USSR and throughout the world. Khrushchev proceeded to implement a policy of de-Stalinization in which portraits of the late dictator were removed from public places, institutions and localities bearing his name were renamed, and textbooks were rewritten to deflate his reputation. At the conclusion of the 21st Party Congress in 1961, Stalin's body was removed from the mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow where it had rested beside that of Lenin.
Khrushchev did not follow up these moves with systematic changes in the regime, however. No legal protections for free expression and political activity were enacted, and Khrushchev took offense when intellectuals overstepped the permitted bounds. He intensified political education and increased pressure on religious believers. While allowing some criticism of the shortcomings of central planning by Yevsey Liberman and other economists, he had no coherent strategy for overhauling the economy. His major economic initiatives were to bring marginal lands in Kazakhstan and Siberia under agricultural cultivation and to relocate some industrial planning functions at the regional level. The first had some initial successes, but harvests deteriorated in the early 1960s; the regional reform of industry was ill-considered and had no positive impact.
E.2. Khrushchev's Fall
One effect of de-Stalinization was to reduce the level of fear within the Soviet leadership. With time, Khrushchev became overconfident and neglected to pay prudent attention to the performance of his appointees and to relations among them. Some of them lost faith in his impulsive leadership style; others were disillusioned by specific policy failures, such as poor harvests, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and his division of the CPSU apparatus into parallel industrial and agricultural hierarchies. In October 1964 the party leadership, having conspired for some time behind his back, stripped him of both his party secretaryship and the premiership. The plot was led by three members of Khrushchev's inner circle: Leonid Brezhnev, a veteran party administrator and as of July 1964 the second-ranking CPSU secretary; Nikolay Podgorny, a fellow CPSU secretary; and Aleksandr Shelepin, the head of the KGB. The announcement of the change of leadership indicted Khrushchev for “voluntarism” and “harebrained schemes.”
F. Brezhnev Era
Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as first secretary of the party (the position was changed back to general secretary in 1966). Aleksey Kosygin, a longtime industrial administrator, became chairman of the Council of Ministers, or premier, while Podgorny was appointed chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Mikhail Suslov, the party's chief of ideology, figured prominently in the leadership's work. Its early announcements stressed collective deliberation and “businesslike” procedures.Brezhnev asserted his primacy over his fellow leaders, but step by step and cautiously. Using his powers of appointment, he rewarded supporters with seats in the Politburo and other party organs at the CPSU congresses of 1971 and 1976. It was not until 1977 that he eased Podgorny into retirement and had himself selected head of state. Kosygin remained as premier until shortly before his death in 1980, although he was by then overshadowed by the general secretary. A Brezhnev personality cult blossomed in the late 1970s, as his memoirs were printed in huge editions and his patchy war record was extolled.
F.1. From Stability to Stagnation
The watchword of Brezhnev's 18 years in office was stability—continuity of personnel, procedures, and policy. He repudiated Khrushchev's frequent shuffles of officials and reorganizations of governmental and CPSU structures. Unsatisfactory Khrushchev reforms, such as the bifurcation of the party apparatus and the shift of industrial planning to regional organs, were quietly reversed. Brezhnev praised professional and technical specialists for their contributions to administration and lauded "scientific" methods that would take full advantage of expertise. Such changes of policy as did occur were slow to materialize and had leisurely schedules for implementation.
While such a style of rule may have been, for the officials below him, preferable to either Stalin's inhumanity or Khrushchev's bluster, and was enough to keep Brezhnev safe in office until his death, it proved to be very costly to the Soviet system. Timid changes in government operations were combined with severe and mounting intolerance toward expressions of preference for more fundamental changes in the regime. The Prague Spring of 1968, in which liberal Communists in Czechoslovakia attempted to craft “socialism with a human face,” showed that a reform-minded communism was a viable possibility in the Soviet bloc in at least the first half of Brezhnev's reign. When a Soviet-led invasion force, with Brezhnev's authorization, crushed the experiment, pessimism and cynicism about improvement of the system spread through Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. The second half of Brezhnev's time in power was characterized mostly by the growing feebleness of the top leader and his colleagues and by an ever more apparent stagnation in institutions, policies, and ideas.
G. Foreign Affairs
Once its system of satellite states was built up after World War II, Eastern Europe (and, for some time, China) was the area of most concern to the Soviet Union. With the United States and the Western alliance, relations were marked by alternating episodes of crisis and cooperation. An innovation of the post-Stalin years was the widening of contacts with the developing nations of the Third World, which Moscow saw as fertile ground for extension of its military, political, and economic influence.
G.1. Relations with Eastern Europe
Soviet military and political relations with its satellite states in Eastern Europe were mainly bilateral until the mid-1950s. Formation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955 gave the Soviet bloc a counterpart to NATO, increased military coordination, and provided a forum in which wider political issues could be considered. Cominform, founded in 1947 in an attempt to impose political uniformity on friendly states and movements, was disbanded in April 1956.
East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR), constituted as a sovereign state in 1949, remained of special concern to Moscow. In June 1953 Soviet troops helped put down a rebellion of workers in East Berlin. The status of Berlin, where the border between the two German states was open, became a more hotly contested issue as West German prosperity induced hundreds of thousands of East Germans to flee through the divided city. In August 1961 the Soviet Union and the East German government built the infamous Berlin Wall, which prevented East Germans from freely emigrating to the West.
Tito's Yugoslavia, which refused to cave in to Stalin in 1948, stuck to its separate identity and did not join either the Warsaw Pact or COMECON. Relations improved after the death of Stalin, only to decline again in the 1960s, especially after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. After 1961 the Soviet Union lost all influence in Yugoslavia's small neighbor, Albania, which until 1978 remained closely allied with China.
The principal instrument for economic integration of the Soviet bloc was COMECON. Under plans worked out by the Soviet Union, and accepted with some qualifications by the member states, each country was to produce what it was best prepared for and purchase other products from the other countries. Opposition to this supranational system under Soviet domination developed, notably in Romania, which rejected its role as a basically agricultural and oil-producing country. Despite such dissatisfaction, additional economic links were later established, including an International Bank of Economic Collaboration. Pipelines carrying Soviet oil and gas to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany further integrated the economies of these nations with that of the USSR.
G.1.a. Polish and Hungarian Crises
Soviet control of Eastern Europe was most seriously jeopardized in 1956, during the relaxation following the first wave of de-Stalinization. Popular discontent and rallies in Poland were followed by agreements in October and November 1956 providing for cancellation of some Soviet debts, the granting of additional credits, acceptance of the new Polish leadership under Wladyslaw Gomulka, and continuance of Soviet troops in the country. In Hungary, student and worker demonstrations on behalf of national independence led to a change of government, a Soviet military intervention which killed thousands, and the formation of a new pro-Soviet government under J´nos Kád´r.
G.1.b. Prague Spring
The next crisis, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, reflected the looser Soviet system of review after 1960 and the pressure for economic and social change within the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Clamor for reform resulted in the peaceful replacement of Antonín Novotný as head of the party and of the state by Alexander Dubcek and Ludvík Svoboda, both Communists long loyal to Moscow. Soviet leaders were alarmed by the Prague Spring, particularly by the termination of censorship and talk of closer economic relations with the West. After weeks of relentless pressure failed to get the Czechoslovaks to drop the reform program, 600,000 troops from the Soviet Union, and token troops from all other Warsaw Pact countries except Romania, invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia on the night of August 20, 1968. Passive resistance—such as changing street signs to confuse the invading troops—lasted throughout the occupation, but the Warsaw Pact forces gradually won their way. Dubcek was removed in April 1969, and the hated controls were reimposed.
The destruction of the reform movement in Czechoslovakia was reflected in tightened controls in the USSR and served to reassert the Soviet grip over all of Eastern Europe except Yugoslavia, Albania, and Romania. It split what remained of the international Communist movement apart, alarmed the West, and delayed negotiations on nuclear disarmament.
G.2. Relations with China
The Soviet Union immediately recognized the People's Republic of China (PRC) that was established under Communist leader Mao Zedong in 1949, allied itself with it, and backed its demand to be seated in the UN in place of the Kuomintang (KMT) government of the Republic of China (ROC), which was forced to relocate to Taiwan. Both the USSR and the PRC supported North Korea in the Korean War (1950-1953). The USSR extended technical and financial aid to China in the 1950s, and trade between the two countries increased.
Ties between the two largest Communist countries deteriorated after 1960. On the surface was an ideological disagreement over the interpretation of Marxism, especially with regard to revolutions in the developing countries. Underneath was the rivalry of two former empires, their leaders intensely nationalistic and eager for leadership of the rest of the Communist world. The jealousy surfaced in quarrels over their long common border and in the Soviet refusal to assist the Chinese in developing their nuclear technology. Clashes of border guards along the Amur and Ussuri rivers in 1969 raised the specter of war. Despite Soviet efforts to calm relations after Mao's death in 1976, Soviet-Chinese rivalry continued unabated, as China encouraged the East European states to seek greater autonomy and turned to the West for military and economic aid.
G.3. Relations with Other Asian Nations
The USSR supported the Communist forces of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam after World War II and signed an agreement of cooperation with Ho in 1950. In 1954 the USSR participated in the Geneva Accords that divided the country into North Vietnam and South Vietnam, and continued to support the Communist north, headed by Ho, when a struggle broke out between Communist forces seeking to reunite the country and U.S.-backed anti-Communists. As the Vietnam War (1959-1975) worsened during the 1960s, the Soviets staunchly supported North Vietnam and its guerrilla allies in the south. After the North Vietnamese victory in 1975, the Soviet Union supported a reunited Vietnam (Socialist Republic of Vietnam) in its conflict with China.
Soviet relations with other Asian countries were both conciliatory and aggressive. Premier Kosygin rendered an outstanding service to world peace in 1966 by mediating a new phase of the dispute between India and Pakistan over the territory of Jammu and Kashmir. In the 1971 war between India and Pakistan that ended with the formation of the state of Bangladesh, the Soviet Union supported victorious India, while both China and the United States sided with Pakistan. With Japan, a peace treaty ending World War II was never signed because of the Soviet Union's refusal to return several small islands in the Kuril chain it had acquired in 1945.
In December 1979 the Soviet Union sent a large military force across the border into Afghanistan in an attempt to shore up a faltering Marxist government there. Amid condemnation from most of the rest of the world, Soviet troops continued to fight Afghan nationalist resistance and occupy the country. The war eventually cost about 15,000 Soviet lives and the lives of between 700,000 and 1.3 million Afghans before the Soviet withdrawal in the late 1980s.
G.4. Relations with African Nations
Soviet interest in Africa was piqued by decolonization and the coming to power of leaders ready to see aid from Moscow as a solution to deep-seated problems. Attempts to gain influence suffered two notable setbacks in the 1960s. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Soviet-supported Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was killed in an uprising in 1961; in Ghana, President Kwame Nkrumah and his socialistic government were overthrown in 1966 and Soviet technicians were expelled. In the 1970s the Soviet Union, with the aid of Cuban troops, helped a friendly government come to power in Angola and, having previously allied itself with Somalia, assisted Ethiopia in driving back an invasion by the Somalian army. It backed the antigovernment Patriotic Front (PF) in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa.
The Soviet Union had close relations with Egypt, the largest of the Arab states, in the 1950s and 1960s. It supported Egypt when it nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, thus wresting it from British and French control. It also helped it build the Aswan High Dam and backed it in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In 1971 the two countries signed a 15-year treaty of friendship. The following year Egypt, concerned with interference in its internal affairs, ordered Soviet military advisers to leave. Soviet criticism of President Anwar al-Sadat's peacemaking visit to Jerusalem in 1977 further alienated Egypt.
G.5. Relations with Western Europe
In 1955 the Soviet Union, an occupying power in Austria, agreed to the independence and neutrality of that country. The same year it established full diplomatic relations with West Germany. The West German “economic miracle”—a reminder of the powers of the market economy—and the country's new Ostpolitik (German for “eastern policy”) to improve relations with the Soviet bloc increased the USSR's misgivings about its position in an Eastern Europe tempted by Western trade, technology, and ideas. The Soviet Union championed East Germany against West Germany and caused repeated crises in their relations. The problem of West Berlin, surrounded by East German territory, was particularly thorny. Relations with West Germany improved at the end of the decade with the advent of a Social Democratic government in Bonn. In August 1970 the Soviet and West German governments signed a treaty renouncing the use of force to settle disputes and accepting existing European frontiers, including the Odra-Neisse boundary between East Germany and Poland. Tensions were further reduced when West and East Germany granted each other diplomatic recognition in 1973.
G.6. Relations with the United States
Soviet relations with the United States after 1945 fluctuated with the general international climate and with the accidents of leadership in either country. The Cold War set limits to the cooperation each side could offer, yet the inherent dangers of the arms race forced the superpowers to maintain contact and continue to negotiate over differences. In 1962 the two countries had a dangerous clash over Soviet activities in Cuba, in what is known as the Cuban missile crisis. The USSR had maintained close relations with Fidel Castro's government in Cuba, promising help in case of an American attack. When the Soviets stationed nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in Cuba in October 1962, U.S. president John F. Kennedy demanded their withdrawal; Khrushchev yielded and ordered the rockets removed. Moscow continued to support the Cuban economy through trade, credits, and technical aid. Cuban advisers and soldiers helped advance Soviet policy in Africa and Asia after 1976.
G.6.a. Arms Control
In 1954 and again in 1959, the USSR suggested total disarmament and destruction of nuclear stockpiles, but this was mostly for propaganda value. The proposals were stymied when the Soviets rejected provisions for inspection to verify such an agreement. In 1960 Khrushchev unilaterally announced a reduction of about one-third in the Soviet military establishment. Again, the Western alliance nations would not respond in the nuclear sphere without inspection provisions more stringent than Moscow would accept. An issue of special interest was the limitation of tests of nuclear weapons. In 1963 the Soviet Union signed a treaty with the United States and Great Britain prohibiting all nuclear tests except underground. It also joined the United States in agreeing to keep outer space free of armaments. A series of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the two powers, begun in 1969, resulted in agreements in 1972, 1974, and 1979, placing quantitative and qualitative limits on nuclear weapons arsenals and delivery systems.
G.6.b. Détente
At the same time as it bulked up its military strength and actively sought to extend its influence, the Soviet Union showed a marked drive toward détente (a relaxing of tensions) with the West, especially the United States. General Secretary Brezhnev and Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko saw it as a mark of the USSR's superpower status that it could reach agreements with Washington on an equal basis. In May 1972, during a Moscow visit by U.S. president Richard Nixon, he and Brezhnev signed agreements on medical research, environmental protection, science and technology, space ventures, avoidance of incidents at sea, and arms limitations. After these came settlement of the World War II lend-lease debt, a trade pact, and cultural exchange programs.
Efforts to reach a new SALT treaty after 1975 were hampered by Soviet-bloc repression of dissidents, the USSR's involvement in Angola and other African countries, and continued Soviet support of the Arab cause against Israel. Nonetheless, agreement was reached in May 1979, and Brezhnev met with U.S. president Jimmy Carter in Vienna for a formal signing one month later. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December of that year doomed ratification of the accord by the U.S. Senate.
U.S.-Soviet relations worsened during the early 1980s. Washington condemned the Soviet role in the suppression of dissidence in Poland in 1981 and its shooting down of a South Korean civilian aircraft in Soviet airspace in September 1983.
II. HISTORY: The Soviet Union - Part 3
