Berlin 1961 (4 page)

As the Kuranty clock of the sixteenth-century Spasskaya Tower ticked over Red Square toward its thunderous midnight chime, Khrushchev generated his own heat inside St. George’s Hall. He hand-clasped some guests and bear-hugged others, nearly bursting from his baggy gray suit. It was the same energy that had carried him to power from his peasant birth in the Russian village of Kalinovka near the Ukrainian border, through revolution, civil war, Stalin’s paranoid purges, world war, and the leadership battle following Stalin’s death. The communist takeover had provided many Russians of humble beginnings with new opportunities, but none had survived as skillfully nor risen as far as Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.

Given Khrushchev’s increased capability to launch nuclear-tipped missiles at the West, it had become a consuming occupation of U.S. intelligence agencies to fathom Khrushchev’s psychological makeup. In 1960, the CIA had assembled some twenty experts—internists, psychiatrists, and psychologists—to scrutinize the Soviet leader through films, intelligence files, and personal accounts. The group went so far as to inspect photo close-ups of Khrushchev’s arteries to assess rumors of their hardening and his high blood pressure. They concluded in a highly classified report—which later would reach President Kennedy—that despite Khrushchev’s mood swings, depressions, and drinking bouts (which they reported he had recently brought under greater control), the Soviet leader exhibited the consistent behavior of what they called a “chronic optimistic opportunist.” Their conclusion was that he was more of an ebullient activist than, as many had believed until then, a Machiavellian communist in Stalin’s mold.

Another top-secret personality sketch prepared by the CIA for the incoming administration noted Khrushchev’s “resourcefulness, audacity, a good sense of political timing and showmanship, and a touch of the gambler’s instinct.” It warned the newly elected Kennedy that behind the often buffoonish manner of this short, squat man lay a “shrewd native intelligence, an agile mind, drive, ambition and ruthlessness.”

What the CIA didn’t report was that Khrushchev took personal responsibility for Kennedy’s election and was now seeking the payoff. He boasted to comrades that he had cast the deciding vote in one of America’s closest presidential elections ever by refusing Republican entreaties that he release three captured American airmen—the downed U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, and two crew members of an RB-47 reconnaissance plane shot down by the Soviets over the Barents Sea two months later—during the height of the election campaign. Now he was working impatiently through multiple channels to land an early summit meeting with Kennedy in hopes it would solve his Berlin problem.

During the campaign, the Soviet leader’s instructions to his top officials had been clear, regarding both his desire for a Kennedy win and his distaste for Richard Nixon, who as Eisenhower’s anticommunist vice president had humiliated him in Moscow during their so-called Kitchen Debate over the relative advantages of their two systems. “We can also influence the American presidential election!” he had told his comrades then. “We would never give Nixon such a present.”

After the election, Khrushchev had crowed that by refusing to release the airmen he had personally cost Nixon the few hundred thousand votes he would have required for his victory. Just a ten-minute walk from his Kremlin New Year’s party, the American captives languished as a reminder of Khrushchev’s electoral manipulation inside the KGB’s Lubyanka Prison, where the Soviet leader was keeping them as political pawns to be traded at some future moment for some other gain.

As the countdown to his New Year’s toast continued, Khrushchev bathed in the crowd more like a populist politician than a communist dictator. Though still vigorously youthful, he had aged with the accelerated speed of so many other Russians, having already turned gray at age twenty-two after a serious illness. As he bantered with comrades, he often threw back his nearly bald head and exploded in mirth at one of his own stories, unself-consciously showing bad teeth with a center gap and two golden bicuspids. Closely cropped gray hair framed a round, animated face with three large warts, a slit scar under his pug nose, red cheeks with deep laughter lines, and dark, piercing eyes. He waved his hands and spoke short, staccato sentences in a loud, high-pitched, nasal voice.

He recognized many faces and asked after comrades’ children by name: “How is little Tatyana? How is tiny Ivan?”

Given his purpose that evening, Khrushchev was disappointed not to find among the crowd Moscow’s most important American, Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, with whom he had remained close despite the decline of the U.S.–Soviet relationship. Thompson’s wife, Jane, apologized to Khrushchev that her husband was home nursing ulcers. It was also true that the ambassador was still smarting from his encounter with the Soviet leader at the previous New Year’s gathering, when an inebriated Khrushchev had nearly declared World War III over Berlin.

It had been two in the morning when Khrushchev, in an alcoholic haze, escorted Thompson, his wife, the French ambassador, and Italy’s Communist Party leader into a newly built anteroom of St. George’s Hall, curiously decorated with a running fountain filled with colored plastic rocks. Khrushchev spat at Thompson that he would make the West pay if it didn’t satisfy his demands for a Berlin agreement that would include Allied troop withdrawal. “We have thirty nuclear weapons earmarked for France, more than enough to destroy that country,” he said, tilting his head toward the French ambassador. He added for good measure that he was reserving fifty each for West Germany and Britain.

In an awkward attempt to restore a lighter mood, Jane Thompson had asked how many rockets Khrushchev had earmarked for Uncle Sam.

“That’s a secret,” Khrushchev had said with a wicked smile.

In an attempt to reverse the degenerating tone, Thompson had offered a toast to the upcoming Paris Summit with Eisenhower and its potential for improved relations. The Soviet leader, however, only escalated his threats, discarding his commitment to Eisenhower that he would refrain from any unilateral disruptions over Berlin until after the Paris meeting. Thompson was able to end the vodka-soaked session only at six in the morning, when he walked away knowing superpower relations would depend on Khrushchev’s inability the next morning to recall anything he had said that night.

Thompson had dispatched a damage-control cable to President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Christian Herter that same morning, relating Khrushchev’s remarks while at the same time declaring they should not be “taken literally,” given the Soviet leader’s intoxicated condition. He offered that the Soviet merely wished “to impress upon us the seriousness” of the Berlin situation.

A year later, and with Thompson safely at home, Khrushchev was in a more sober and generous spirit as the clock struck twelve. Following the bells welcoming the arrival of 1961, and the lighting of the forty-foot New Year’s tree inside St. George’s Hall, Khrushchev raised his glass and offered a toast that would be taken as doctrinal direction by party leaders and repeated in diplomatic cables around the world.

“Happy New Year, comrades, Happy New Year! No matter how good the old year has been, the New Year will be better still!”

The room exploded in cheers, embraces, and kisses.

Khrushchev ritually toasted the working people, the peasants, the intellectuals, Marxist-Leninist concepts, and peaceful coexistence among the world’s peoples. In a conciliatory tone he said, “We consider the socialist system to be superior, but we never try to impose it on other states.”

The hall grew silent as he turned his words to Kennedy.

“Dear Comrades! Friends! Gentlemen!” said Khrushchev. “The Soviet Union makes every effort to have friendly ties with all peoples. But I think no one will reproach me if I say that we attach great importance to improving our relations with the USA because this relationship greatly molds others. We would like to believe that the USA strives for the same outcome. We hope that the new U.S. president will be like a fresh wind blowing away the stale air between the USA and the USSR.”

The man who a year earlier had counted the atomic bombs he would drop on the West was striking a peacemaker’s pose. “During the election campaign,” Khrushchev told the crowd, “Mr. Kennedy said if he had been president he would have expressed regret to the Soviet Union” about sending spy planes over its territory. Khrushchev said he as well wanted to put “this lamentable episode in the past and not go back to it…. We believe that by voting for Mr. Kennedy and against Mr. Nixon, the American people have disapproved of the policy of Cold War and worsening international relationships.”

Khrushchev raised his refilled glass. “To peaceful coexistence among nations!”

Cheers.

“To friendship and peaceful coexistence among all peoples!”

Thunderous cheers. More embraces.

Khrushchev’s choice of language was calculated. The repetitive use of the term “peaceful coexistence” was at the same time a declaration of intent toward Kennedy and a message of determination to his communist rivals. Recognizing Soviet economic limits and new nuclear threats, Khrushchev, in his famous secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, had introduced the new thinking that communist states could peacefully coexist and compete with capitalist states. His opponents, however, favored a return to Stalin’s more aggressive notions of world revolution and more active preparations for war.

As 1961 opened, the ghosts of Stalin endangered Khrushchev far more than any threat from the West. After his death in 1953, Stalin’s bequest to Khrushchev had been a dysfunctional Soviet Union of 209 million people and dozens of nationalities stretching over one-sixth of the world’s land-mass. World War II’s battles had depleted a third of the Soviet Union’s wealth and had left some 27 million dead while destroying 17,000 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages. That didn’t count the millions Stalin had killed previously through man-made famine and his paranoid purges.

Khrushchev blamed Stalin for then launching an unnecessary and costly Cold War before the Soviet Union had been able to recover from its previous devastation. In particular, he condemned Stalin for the botched Berlin blockade of 1948, when the dictator had underestimated American resolve and overestimated Soviet capabilities at a time when the U.S. still retained its nuclear monopoly. The result had been the West’s breaking of the embargo, then the 1949 creation of NATO and the founding in the same year of a separate West Germany. What accompanied that was an American commitment to dig into Europe for a longer stay. The Soviet Union had paid a high price because Stalin, in Khrushchev’s view, “didn’t think it through properly.”

Having extended the olive branch to Kennedy through his New Year’s toast, a still-sober Khrushchev at two a.m. took aside West German Ambassador Hans Kroll for a private talk. For Khrushchev, the sixty-two-year-old German was the second most important Western ambassador after the absent Thompson. However, the two men were far closer personally than Khrushchev was to the American envoy, connected both by Kroll’s Russian fluency and his conviction, not unusual for Germans of his generation, that his country was more closely connected culturally, historically, and potentially also politically to Moscow than to the U.S.

Accompanied by Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and Presidium member Alexei Kosygin, Khrushchev and Kroll retreated to the same odd anteroom where the Soviet leader had threatened Thompson one year earlier. That year as well, Kroll had stormed out of the New Year’s celebration in protest after the Soviet leader used his toast to condemn West Germany as “revanchist and militaristic.”

This time, however, Khrushchev was in a seductive mood, and he summoned a waiter to pour Kroll Crimean champagne. While nursing a light Armenian red wine, the Soviet leader explained to Kroll that under doctor’s orders he was not drinking vodka or other hard drinks. Kroll savored such personal exchanges with Khrushchev, and it was his practice at such moments to draw him near physically and speak in hushed tones to underscore their closeness.

Kroll had been born four years later than Khrushchev in the then Prussian town of Deutsch Piekar, which in 1922 would be ceded to Poland. He learned his first Russian while fishing as a boy on the river that divided the German and Czarist empires. His first two years as a diplomat in Moscow had come in the 1920s when post–World War I Germany and the new communist Soviet Union, then two of the most vilified countries in the world, struck the Rapallo agreement that broke their diplomatic isolation and formed an anti-Western, anti–Versailles Treaty axis.

Kroll’s view was that European hostilities could only be calmed through an eventual accord enabling West Germany and the Soviet Union—“the two most powerful countries in Europe”—to get along better with each other. He had worked in that direction since leading the East–West trade department of the Economics Ministry in 1952, when West Germany was only three years old. His convictions had brought him into frequent conflict with the United States, which remained wary that too cozy a relationship could open the way to a neutral West Germany.

Khrushchev thanked Kroll for his help the previous autumn in getting West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to approve new economic agreements with the communist world, including the renewal of an East–West German trade accord, which had been interrupted a few months earlier. Though East Germany was the Soviet client, Khrushchev considered West Germany to be of far greater importance to the Soviet economy, due to the unique access it provided him to modern machinery, technology, and hard-currency loans.

So the Soviet leader raised his glass in a toast to what he called the Federal Republic of Germany’s remarkable postwar reconstruction. Khrushchev told Kroll that he hoped Chancellor Adenauer would use his growing economic strength and thus greater independence from the U.S. to distance himself from Washington and further improve relations with the Soviets.

Kosygin then asked Kroll for permission to raise his own toast, which the ambassador granted. “You are for us the ambassador for all the Germans,” he said, reflecting Khrushchev’s own view that the Soviet Union would be far better off if it had been the West Germans, with all of their resources, who had become their allies, rather than the burdensome East Germans with their constant economic demands and substandard goods.