Khrushchev Doctrine

...Khrushchev's doctrine is small comfort for the West...

...Our present leaders and even their most responsible critics are conditioned to worry most about the arms race, partly because they at least have a simple cure to offer for what ails us—the appropriation of another two to three billion dollars in military expenditures...

...Khrushchev's use of Soviet military power is not new...

...When I was in Cuba in the spring, I found that Cuban Communists already understood and were exploiting this Soviet policy...

...The manner rather than the matter of the Soviets' new course best reveals the nature of the change...

...In effect, Khrushchev has given the world Communist movement a shot in the arm such as it has not had in many years...

...But in these times the Communist parties themselves are not as useful to the Soviets as the national-revolutionary movements which are willing to make alliances with the Communists...

...But Khrushchev has applied and spelled out the doctrine of Soviet military protection of revolutionary movements throughout the world with such clarity, or rather crudeness, that it deserves to be linked with his name...

...There was more than a hint in his attitude that Castro owed the Cuban Communists something for this service and that it was made available to Castro only on the condition that his ties with the Cuban Communists were not broken...

...Khrushchev has also chosen to make his fight and stamp his personal imprint on the Communist world by forcing a showdown on an issue of doctrine versus reality—and he expects to win...

...At Geneva, the Soviet and satellite delegations walked out in a similarly demonstrative fashion...

...He shifted the balance overwhelmingly in favor of the Communist party leader at the expense of the head of Government...

...While most of the responsible and critical political leaders in the United States are chiefly preoccupied with "catching up with the Russians in the arms race," the Russians are using the arms race to give themselves freedom of action in other types of races...

...As long as neither side can afford to risk a major war, military power will underlie all other forms of power but will not take precedence over them as a matter of practical policy...

...The technique was first tried at the height of the Suez crisis in 1956 and Premier Nikolai Bulganin's threat to intervene in behalf of Egypt later enabled Soviet propagandists to claim credit for having forced the British and French to capitulate...

...But the national revolutionary movements are most baffling to them, and all they can think of is again and again to cry "Communist," as if that would exorcise the evil...

...But, as Khrushchev sums it up, the balance is far too close to permit the Soviets to risk a third world war...

...But the Soviet move was not taken very seriously at the time, and the strange alignment of the United States with the Soviet Union in the United Nations prevented the issue from becoming clear-cut...

...This precedent shows that Khrushchev's intervention in the present Cuban crisis is no hasty improvisation...

...Khrushchev is 21 years older...

...Stalin was only 45 years old when Lenin died in 1924...

...Khrushchev's performance in Paris and the Soviet delegation's act in Geneva were public demonstrations that belonged in the same category of revolutionary tactics, though scarcely on the same scale, as the near-insurrections led by the Japanese and Italian Communists...

...They have been able to do so because they have succeeded in establishing a new military balance behind which their political and economic forces can go over to the offensive with unprecedented recklessness and striking power...

...Until then, for some years, Soviet policy was mainly based on the relation between states, primarily between itself and the United States...

...Meanwhile...

...The turning point, at least publicly, was of course signalled by Nikita Khrushchev's exhibition in Paris and the vanishing act of the summit conference...

...Khrushchev candidly admits that times have changed and that Lenin's dictum on the inevitability of war with imperialism must be revised...

...In the end, the difference is not so great because the Soviets will play the role of revolutionary guardian just as long as it serves their ends and no longer...

...From the summit to the Congo, the new changes of Soviet policy have followed the Khrushchev Doctrine By Theodore Draper It is abundantly clear by now that the Soviet leadership has executed a sharp and significant turn in tactics...

...The contrapuntal character of the new world Communist orchestral arrangement can hardly be accidental...

...If Khrushchev intended or expected to use his rockets and missiles, he would not now be embroiled in a factional campaign to revise Lenin's teachings on the inevitability of war: but if he did not have the rockets and missiles to use, if necessary, he would not be carrying on his agitation with such boldness and on such a broad scale...

...It is as if Khrushchev had said: "If you won't give it to us, we'll take it...

...All of them made the turn together...

...The appeal of a Castro in Latin America far exceeds that of the Cuban Communists and makes it much more difficult for the United States to call Khrushchev's missiles-and-rockets bluff...

...For it is of the essence of this strategy that the revolutionary agitator should continually brandish rockets and missiles...

...Stalin succeeded in imposing his new dispensation on the Communist world in part because "socialism in one country" seemed more nearly to correspond with reality at a time all hope of a non-Russian revolution had been shattered by events...

...It is not so abundantly clear that this turn has been fully understood in the United States or that we know what to do about it...

...In truth, Khrushchev acts like a man in a hurry...

...He shed every pretense of correct diplomatic form, for which Soviet representatives can be sticklers when they are operating in terms of relations between states...

...But at Paris and in his latest junket to Austria, the agitator really let himself go...

...Life is short...

...All other forces were held in leash or coordinated with the main factor of Soviet-American relations...

...It may be one of inferiority in some respects and superiority in others...

...This basic policy decision in the strictly military sphere accounts for Khrushchev's willingness to stake his position in the Communist world on the seemingly doctrinal question of the "inevitability of war...

...Thus, a peculiar turn of events has permitted and inspired Khrushchev to play the revolutionary card with a freedom and candor that were not open to Stalin...

...It has moved from the principally diplomatic and parliamentary plane to what used to be called "mass action...

...The means short of war available to Khrushchev are not without the threat of war...

...But we do not need to guess at the nature of that change...

...The Soviets have shifted from diplomacy to mass action before but never with such eclat and on such a broad front...

...Stalin used the revolutionary movement as an arm of Soviet power...

...In the present circumstances of an uneasy, indecisive military equilibrium, the struggle must be waged by all means short of war—this is the real meaning of Khrushchev's doctrine of the non-inevitability of war...

...He may have said this half-jokingly, but the half-serious part is entirely compatible with his temperament...

...I had a long talk with one of the top Cuban Communists, reputedly the smartest, in the course of which he remarked that only the Soviet Union could ensure the survival of Fidel Castro's regime...

...But they deliberately chose a method which was most brutally (or scandalously, as the French delegate put it) undiplomatic and least resembled the normal etiquette of relations between states...

...In both cases, axioms long associated with Lenin's name had to be challenged...

...said Khrushchev in Austria, "and I want to see the Red flag fly over the whole world in my lifetime...

...he seems driven by an aging man's impetuosity, which constantly causes him to overreach himself, a trait that may yet be his greatest flaw...

...They might have chosen other ways of breaking up a futile and barren conference...

...In this case, the style is not only the man but also the policy...

...Khrushchev is using Soviet power as an arm of the revolutionary movement...

...The congresses of one or another of the Eastern European parties provide the occasion for gatherings of Communist chieftains such as the Comintern in its heyday used to offer at its annual plenums...

...Stalin tried to bluff his way out and insisted that "socialism in one country" was Leninist orthodoxy...

...Recently it has even begun to feature regular contributions by American Communists...

...It promises to do for him what the debate over "socialism in one country" did for Stalin in the 1920s...

...he patiently and cautiously wove his plots like a man with plenty of time before him...

...The possibilities are much greater and more varied today than ever before, and Khrushchev gives every evidence of willingness to take advantage of them...

...At present we can only speculate about all the forces and motives that went into the change of Soviet and international Communist policy...

...His formula was: "Without the Soviet Union there could be no Cuban revolution...

...A coordination and discipline reminiscent of the days of the Comintern are now visible in Communist parties continents apart...

...Meanwhile, Khrushchev is playing from strength, or at least from our weakness...

...The new military balance may be one of near-equality or equality with the United States, or even better...

...If Russia should ever hope to win a war without risking mutual annihilation, however, we may be sure that Khrushchev, or his successor, will discover that the "objective situation" has changed again and that the old doctrine of the inevitability of war has not exhausted its usefulness...

...While the Soviets had steered a basically diplomatic course, the Japanese and Italian Communists had contented themselves with a predominantly parliamentary orientation...

...Even in his most diplomatic missions, Khrushchev has always behaved far more like the agitator than the statesman...

...A monthly publication, World Marxist Review, serves exactly the same function as the old Communist International...

...And if Cuba and the Congo today, why not Algeria tomorrow...