Stalin and Khrushchev: The Real Change:

...But it...

...Hence world-wide intervention must appear to them not only easier, but also more urgent than ever before...

...The other group of changes to which the Soviets are reacting concern the emergence of the Third World of ex-colonial nations...

...But he never doubted that at any given moment the "sphere of influence" in which he could act decisively was limited by the existence of one or more "enemy" spheres, the total area of which remained considerably larger than that of his own throughout his lifetime...

...For though it was Stalin who made his country into a potential world power, and though his long-term aims and his propaganda were world-wide in range, he never came to act like a world power: He never committed the power and prestige of the Soviet Union to any political action outside a geographically contiguous area in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East...

...It is also due, partly, to the accident that all the new Soviet initiatives for a world-wide competition against the West (and against the U.S...

...It is an odd fact that in 1954, when Georgi Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov were still heading the Soviet Government, the Chinese were the pioneers of the new policy: Chou En-lai traveled to India and Burma before Khrushchev, and signed the Five Principles of Co-existence with Nehru...

...As they had foreseen, it spells the end of colonial imperialism...

...Khrushchev, on the other hand, has not only recognized in principle (in the same programmatic speech at the 20th Congress) that the new nations have become truly independent in their foreign policy...

...The new outlook was finally contrasted to the old when Khrushchev endorsed First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan's remark that one could no longer talk about "capitalist encirclement"—because it was no longer clear who was encircling whom...

...In promoting this development, he is willing to try unorthodox tactics, to subordinate the local Communists temporarily to the need to consolidate the "national" anti-imperialist revolution (and to extend it to neighboring countries), and even to sacrifice them to the needs of Soviet diplomacy for a time as Stalin did in China in the '20s...

...It does not follow that Khrushchev is actually ready, any more than Stalin would have been, to stake the survival of the Soviet Union in a nuclear rocket war for the sake of some distant revolution...

...But Khrushchev came to power only in the new situation, and was thus able to take a fresh look at it...

...The crowning "superstructure" to this new worldwide political strategy is the far more active use made by Khrushchev of the United Nations Assembly...

...but in many cases (though by no means always) it proceeds without violent clash with the colonial powers and even with their assistance...

...By a double irony of history, he found himself saved during World War II by the failure of his enemies to behave according to his expectation, only to bring about after the war, by his own action, the very all-embracing, anti-Communist coalition he feared most...

...That overconfidence is partly a matter of personal temperament, partly a natural consequence of the release of the energies of a great power from the cramping rigidities of Stalin's last years...

...Even the rise of new Communist states (both satellite and independent) around him filled him with dread of treasonable conspiracies rather than with satisfaction that the age of isolation was ended at last...

...To Stalin, the advance of Communist revolution had come to seem strictly dependent on the geographical extension of the territory controlled by the Soviet Union, usually in the form of military occupation...

...The first new ex-colonial nations that emerged after World War II, with India in the van, were thus regarded by Stalinist doctrine as continuing to form part of the imperialist system, and their neutrality as a sham—was not the fact that India had been granted independence without violent conflict, and had chosen to stay in the British Commonwealth, irrefutable proof of that...

...He started with a plurality of Communist states...

...This comparison should help to explain what is perhaps the greatest apparent paradox about Khrushchev's mind—that he is, at once, far less rigidly doctrinaire than Stalin and inspired by a far more confident belief in the force of the Communist idea...

...But the subject is not really of much consequence, seeing that his efforts at alternately relaxing and heightening international tension—of putting a little more emphasis now on "peaceful coexistence" and now on "cold war" —take place within the same fairly rigid bounds as did the equally "dramatic" tactical zigzags in Stalin's time...

...EVEN BEFORE the assumptions underlying this new policy were proclaimed by Khrushchev ex cathedra in 1956, Soviet and Chinese policy had begun to develop in practice a whole arsenal of new methods for influencing the ex-colonial nations, ranging from "goodwill journeys," "coexistence agreements" and support for the Bandung Conference to economic credits and arms deliveries...

...Confident in Russia's new strength, he has shaken off the psychosis of isolation and the fear of capitalist attack, and has grasped the new opportunities for worldwide initiative offered by the balance of terror and the emergence of the uncommitted Third World...

...No, the real difference in the nature of Soviet foreign policy then and now is not in its basic attitude to its main opponents —the advanced industrial nations of the West...

...He genuinely believed that the capitalist powers were eager to pounce on the Soviet state at any moment, if only they could agree among each other...

...But China has since wearied of the tactical restraints required by this policy...

...But he believes profoundly in the possibility of gradually committing more and more of the uncommitted, ex-colonial states to support for the Soviet brand of anti-imperialism, even while they are ruled by nonCommunist governments...

...3) The advent of the "balance of terror" with the acquisition of the H-bomb by both sides...

...Nor would he exclude the possibility that one of these roads might be the evolution of an originally non-Communist revolutionary regime under the double impact of Western hostility and Soviet support, as in Cuba...

...To the end, he was desperately looking for ways to break up this self-created encirclement...

...He has yet to meet an awakened one...

...He has clearly far less confidence than Stalin had that the Western bloc might still be seriously split by its internal conflicts of interest, though he keeps trying to isolate, intimidate and chip off individual exposed member-states—now Iran, now Norway, now West Germany...

...in particular) were taken during a period when Western policy was unusually unimaginative and unsure, owing to the vacancy of American leadership in the now-ending Eisenhower era...

...For the first time in many years, the Communist rulers find themselves actually face to face with a world in revolution—but it is not necessarily, and indeed not generally, their kind of revolution...

...Far greater has been the success of the new approach to the uncommitted, ex-colonial nations...

...He feels strong enough to apply the full weight of Soviet diplomacy, with the ultimate backing of the Soviet military potential, at every crisis-point on the globe, without regard to geographical contiguity...

...To Khrushchev, who in his programmatic public speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union accepted the existence of a "Socialist World System" and the legitimacy of "different roads" to Communist power, Communist revolutions outside the area accessible to Soviet troops are both possible and desirable in principle...

...Like his aid agreements with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq's Abdul Karim Kassim, with Cuba's Fidel Castro and Guinea's Sekou Touré, they have been real policy moves, intended to stiffen the resistance of these governments to Western pressure or offers—and to establish the Soviet right to intervene in such traditionally Western-controlled regions as the Middle East, Africa and Latin America...

...He is not content to reach the minds of the people of all continents by his propaganda, in order to influence events in the future...

...Khrushchev's chief weakness is clearly overconfidence...

...I SUBMIT that the real change, and it is a change of historic proportions, lies in Khrushchev's far bolder concept of the area within which the Soviet Union can take effective action, and the independent revolutionary forces which it may confidently support...

...Khrushchev, on the other hand, has developed a truly world-wide policy...

...Again, the point of the good will visits and the aid agreements is not just the propagandistic one of winning crowd applause, or providing the local pro-Soviet elements with telling arguments...

...Even up to now, there have been disappointments as well as successes...

...In the Soviet case, the corresponding phrase would presumably refer to the acceptance of "the duties of world-wide solidarity in the anti-imperialist struggle...

...So vast is the change that, though everybody senses it and reacts to it in one way or another, few of us seem to be consciously aware of it...

...The change in the scale and style of Soviet foreign policy is, of course, largely a reaction to changes in the world power situation...

...A close student of the Communist movement in the Soviet Union, Western Europe and China, he writes frequently on internal Communist developments in these pages, as well as in Commentary, Problems of Communism, Encounter, the New York Herald Tribune and other publications...

...he has made the attempt to align these uncommitted, ex-colonial countries with the Soviet bloc in a "peace zone" and to win them for a common struggle against the Western "colonialists," one of the main axes of his diplomacy, in the United Nations and elsewhere...

...2) Western reaction to Soviet power expansion in the form of a peacetime system of military alliances, and the general growth of a new sense of Western unity (which made serious conflicts within the "imperialist camp" far less likely than before and tended to give the East-West contest a world-wide character...

...It is based on a new concept of the political use of power in the age of the nuclear rocket, of the prospects of Communist revolution outside the geographical neighborhood of the Soviet bloc, and of the character of the emerging "Third World" of ex-colonial, underdeveloped and uncommitted countries...

...Stalin's basic attitude to the UN was always a defensive one...

...But his successor started from the historic victory of Chinese Communism (as well as the Communist victories in Yugoslavia and Vietnam...

...Richard Lowenthal, who recently completed year's visit to the United States, is roving diplomatic correspondent for the London Observer...

...It is indeed remarkable how little effort he made to exploit the very real temporary cleavage that opened between Anglo-French and American policy in the Suez crisis...

...It is the political one of committing the uncommitted governments on specific issues likely to bring them in conflict with the West (e.g., by offering support to Indonesia on its claim to Dutch New Guinea, or to Afghanistan on its territorial demands against Pakistan), and likely to favor a course of economic development along the Soviet-Chinese road (e.g., priorities for heavy industrial investment, hence maximum sacrifice and Soviet-Chinese methods in the political field as well...

...But as the number of new, ex-colonial member-states has increased in recent years, he has come to see the Assembly more and more as an opportunity for winning their support on specific issues, and has developed a more and more active UN policy, culminating in his two personal appearances, his pressure for drawing the "neutrals" into the disarmament negotiations, and his proposals for "reforming" the UN's executive machinery...

...He strove from the start to limit its powers (not only of action, but even of discussion) by the veto wherever possible, and used them for attacks on Western policies at first only in "retaliation" for Western criticism of his own actions in Iran, Eastern Europe and Manchuria...

...As for his practice, he was as ruthless in establishing Communist rule throughout his Western-conceded military sphere in Eastern Europe as Khrushchev has been in preserving it...

...The change introduced by Khrushchev reflects not merely his awareness of the increased Soviet power potential and the world-wide nature of the conflict with the United States...

...Later that year, Khrushchev could suppress the Hungarian Revolution and send rocket threats to Britain at the same time because he was sure that "war is not fatally inevitable"—i.e., because he relied on the balance of terror...

...Whenever Communist parties tried to seize power independently by civil war (as they did successfully in Yugoslavia and China and unsuccessfully in Greece), he seems to have advised against the attempt and to have been embarrassed rather than pleased when it succeeded...

...So far he has been careful to confine his threats to situations where there was little risk of having to implement them (as in Suez and Cuba), and has behaved with commendable caution when American troops were actually in the area of conflict (as in the Lebanon crisis of 1958...

...Today, Eisenhower's successor confronts a Soviet state that is not only militarily stronger and industrially more mature than Stalin's Russia ever was, but that has strikingly enlarged the scale and transformed the style of its operations on the international scene: a self-conscious world power, at once holder in ambition, more flexible in action and more ideological in inspiration than would have been possible under the cautious, rigid and cynical Georgian...

...is still far from forging the general "anti-imperialist bloc" of Communist and ex-colonial states which is Khrushchev's strategic aim, and there is no good reason why it should achieve this while the West is willing to continue to aid uncommitted countries and support some of their demands (so long as they remain truly uncommitted and quite free to follow their own interests...

...Khrushchev is a flexible believer...

...Stalin's greatest personal limitation was his pathological distrust of all forces outside his direct control...

...So long as these countries were not taken over by Communist parties under Soviet guidance (and that seemed impossible outside the immediate geographical periphery of Russia and China), their "bourgeois nationalist" governments were bound to the imperialist powers by a thousand ties of economic and class interest...

...This was the basis for his concentration on building Russia's industrial strength, and for his later belief that Communism could and should spread only with the expansion of her military frontiers...

...Indeed, the long-distance rocket with its ability to cross land barriers and to emancipate military action from its former geographical limitations (just as the first arms-deal with Nasser jumped over the geographical barrier of the Baghdad Pact) is as symbolic for Khrushchev's diplomatic style as the earth-bound artillery was for Stalin...

...Where Stalin was a doctrinaire cynic...

...His famous directive to the Soviet military advisers in the Spanish Civil War—to "keep out of artillery range"—while difficult to obey literally, was characteristic of his thought: He did not wish to become directly involved outside the range of his own artillery, which to him symbolized the limits of effective Soviet power in a hostile world...

...Stalin's outlook was largely conditioned by the disappointment of the early hopes of immediate "world revolution" after the Bolshevik seizure of power—the failure of the revolutionary wave to engulf the advanced industrial countries which had left backward Russia alone under the Soviet regime...

...that it will ultimately permit the permanent consolidation of the alliance as Communists come to participate in the national government (and finally to control it...

...But it is still in part vitiated by ideological blinkers...

...Within this area, he sought to expand his sphere of definite control as real or apparent opportunities occurred, testing the resistance of his opponents to the advance of his military frontiers and seeking to influence developments beyond them by a combination of diplomatic maneuvering with Communist pressure from within, as in China in the '20s and in Western Europe in the '30s and again in the first postwar years...

...Neither the advent of the H-bomb nor the famous declaration that war is no longer "fatally inevitable" have made any difference here...

...True, Stalin did not revise the Leninist doctrine of the inevitability of imperialist war, but he never acted on the assumption that war was inevitable for the Soviet Union...

...To Stalin there could be no neutrals in the fundamental conflict of the "two camps...

...The new doctrine, proclaimed in February 1956, thus marked an increase not in pacific caution, but in confident militancy...

...Direct pressure on the West under the protection of the nuclear stalemate has thus hardly seemed to yield more than previously: So long as it is carried on with deliberately limited risk, its effect may be equally limited...

...4) The arrival of the long-distance rocket...

...Two years of pressure on Berlin have not so far gathered the fruit which Khrushchev thought was within reach after his visit to Camp David...

...But the specific nature of that reaction cannot be understood without taking into account the difference in the personal history and ideological outlook of Stalin and Khrushchev...

...Khrushchev also realized that this gave him increased opportunities for local advances if only he could develop appropriate methods of indirect action with limited risk...

...Even in the one case where he was clearly responsible for letting loose a war against the West owing to an understandable miscalculation— in Korea—he managed to avoid any direct military commitment...

...In his approach to the various national revolutions of the new countries, he refuses to be bound by doctrinaire rules about "the road to Communist power," and gets impatient if his Chinese allies remind him of these rules, for it is his experience that their main impact is to lay down in advance what cannot and must not be done...

...If the case of Cuba shows such a tendency, the contrary developments in Egypt and Iraq suggest that the outcome depends as much on the reaction of the West to the national revolution (and on the peculiar conditions of each case) as on the Soviet efforts to utilize the potential of anti-colonial ressentiment...

...To say that Khrushchev's policies are reactions to the changed realities of the contemporary world scene is not to imply that they are wholly realistic...

...Nevertheless, his threats have not been "mere propaganda...

...Stalin's formative experience as a ruler was that of isolation in a hostile world, his nightmare that of encirclement...

...Few of the underdeveloped societies have either a capitalist class or a substantial proletariat...

...Few of their leaders from the nationalist intelligentsia are much attracted by either Western parliamentary democracy or Soviet Communism...

...So far, Khrushchev has been vigorously "competing" against a drowsy opponent...

...Nor is there any evidence of a general tendency for "national revolutions" to grow "naturally" into Communist ones...

...But many of their leaders would like to take a less steep and painful road to their solution than that shown by the Communist example...

...All non-Communist states (and even independent and unorthodox Communist states, like Tito's Yugoslavia) were basically his enemies, though it might be necessary to maneuver so as to divide the enemies and even to conclude temporary alliances with one group against another...

...By the time of the Geneva Summit meeting of 1955, the Soviet and American leaders had mutually realized that each side understood the fact of the balance of terror, and that deliberate world war had therefore become fundamentally improbable...

...The new world-policy of the Soviet state makes it a more formidable antagonist of the West than in Stalin's time, both because it is based on far greater power combined with a revival of militant faith at the top, and because it is carried out with greater flexibility and realism...

...But he does so in the belief that on this devious road they will all the more quickly arrive at their final goal...

...BOTH THE DANGERS and the opportunities confronting the Soviet leaders of today are thus utterly different from those that confronted Stalin during most of his reign...

...It has been decisive in reducing Western diplomatic and military control of important regions of the world, and has gained definite support for some Soviet policies from some of the new nations—notably in Indonesia, parts of the Arab world and Ghana—and broad over-all support from a few, like Cuba and Guinea...

...Like Stalin, Khrushchev will not admit real peace, i.e., a permanent settlement blurring his irreconcilable conflict with the non-Communist world, nor risk real war, involving the Soviet Union, but remains determined to carry on the conflict by every means, both peaceful and violent, short of such direct war...

...He wants to make things move his way in the present by forcing every government to take Soviet reactions into account in deciding its actions...

...But equally, he never ceased to educate his Party in unceasing vigilance and distrust against the Western "imperialists," even during his wartime alliance with them...

...A large and populous part of the world is thus changing with unprecedented rapidity, but most of the flux does not seem to tend of its own accord in the direction desired by the Soviet leaders—unless they can find ways to make it so...

...On this point, the time has perhaps come to say a good word for "Uncle Joe," and to rescue the reputation of that great falsifier of history from the new falsifications spread, whether naively to consciously, by the eulogists of his successor...

...The rocket threats have failed to dislodge a single American base...

...The meaning of that doctrine is not that now at last the Soviet Union will seriously seek to avoid world war: It has always striven to avoid it...

...Most of the new states have problems of economic development of the same kind they had to overcome themselves, and of an even greater difficulty comparable with that confronting China...

...and though he is far from having solved the problems of maintaining unity among them, he is firmly convinced that the existence of a "Socialist world system" is a major source of strength in the contest with the non-Communist world...

...To survive, of course, these revolutions will need the backing of Soviet power, but that may be given by arms deliveries, economic credits and rocket threats...

...He thought he could divert it by clever diplomacy so that the imperialists would rather fight each other—a belief which misled him into hoping that he could avoid war even with Hitler, and which he nevertheless repeated in his very last pamphlet late in 1952...

...Though it is now largely forgotten, Stalin knew as well as his successor how to create periodic waves of hopeful excitement in the West by well-timed interviews about Russia's need for peaceful coexistence and his desire to concentrate on internal reconstruction and the welfare of the Soviet peoples...

...Moreover, he seems to hope that external cooperation in such a world-wide United Front will also strengthen the forces within each of the ex-colonial countries which press for an imitation of the Soviet model of development...

...The meaning is that now at last it is no longer seriously afraid of being attacked, or of risking "massive retaliation" to its own local moves at points not immediately vital to the West, even though its opponents are actually more united against it than ever before...

...It is perhaps inevitable that rivers of Western printers' ink should be made to flow in attempts to explain why Stalin's peripatetic successor puts out the hand of friendship on one day and his tongue on the next in dealing with Western statesmen...

...Just when the leading country of the West was settling back to a prolonged if unquiet digestive slumber, barely able to react to outside events but no longer willing to initiate new developments, its principal antagonist got the chance to shake itself free from the cramping stagnation which the old Vozhd had imposed on it...

...and it has no secret weapon that cannot be met by a similar combination of power, faith and flexible realism on the Western side...

...Dependence may thus be built up without occupation or even proximity...

...The chance might arise to maneuver some of them against some particular imperialist group on some specific issue, but that was not different in principle from the diplomatic opportunities offered from time to time by conflicts of interest among the old imperialist powers themselves...

...that this increase in Communist prestige will more than compensate for any initial neglect of the local Communists shown by Soviet diplomacy...

...What has happened to Soviet foreign policy may, in fact, be compared to the earlier awakening of the United States from "isolationism" (which never excluded regional power-politics) to a conscious acceptance of "world-wide responsibilities...

...Outside this area, Popular Front governments might prove useful for Soviet diplomacy, but could never hope to attain Communism...

...It was far easier for him to realize that the future of Communist revolution might lie in the underdeveloped countries and to take a hopeful view of Communist prospects in the Third World...

...Stalin and Khrushchev The Real Change By Richard Lowenthal By A STRANGE quirk of history, the opening of the Eisenhower era which is now drawing to a close was followed almost at once by the death of Stalin...

...He is far more convinced than Stalin (and fully as convinced as the Chinese) that in a world in revolution there must be some road to Communist power everywhere, and first of all in the excolonial countries...

...But wherever there was a risk of war with the West, Stalin drew back—in Manchuria and Iran, in Greece and Berlin...

...Khrushchev's Russia has not...

...It is the third change—the balance of terror—that forms the basis for the generally misunderstood Khrushchevian doctrine that "war is no longer fatally inevitable...

...Again and again he was forced to take his stand on national sovereignty against UN "interference"—over the investigation of satellite support for the Greek Communists, over the Berlin blockade, over the Korean War and German unity...

...While firmly holding on to his own sphere of influence and striving to expand it with the same cautious but relentless pressure as his predecessor, he also seeks to intervene in every critical situation far beyond its limits —in Suez, in Cuba, in the Congo or in Algeria—so as to deny to his Western opponents any secure sphere of their own...

...Indeed, the truly disturbing thing about most Western discussions of Soviet foreign policy remains their preoccupation with the "dramatic" short-term zigzags in Nikita Khrushchev's tactics and their comparative neglect of the historic changes in Soviet political strategy...

...Khrushchev, of course, has found himself in a similar situation over Hungary...

...In their direct relation to their Western antagonists, the Soviets are reacting to four closely interrelated changes: 1) The growth in the territory and powerpotential of the Soviet bloc (which made Russia a serious potential challenger of the United States even in Stalin's lifetime...