Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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particular, had interests autonomous from Washington, was reﬂected in a

softer foreign policy on Finland, Turkey, Korea and Austria, and unilateral

reductions in armed forces, in part, expected to encourage more European

independence from the imperialist centre in the US. Recognition of difference

dramatically expanded the numbers and kinds of states with which the Soviet

Union could develop an interest in allying. Capitalistencirclementwasreplaced

by a zone of peace. And recognition of fallibility, of having made mistakes in

the past, made new alliances more probable and rendered existing alliances

less problematic.

In Eastern Europe, Soviet confessions that the Doctors’ Plot, the anti-

cosmopolitan campaign and other purges in the last ﬁve years had been mis-

guided put local Communists who had been trying to implement the Soviet

model in awkward positions. Those most closely identiﬁed with the Stalinist

model were discredited; those they had replaced, imprisoned or executed were

politically reborn. Wl

adislaw Gomulka and Imre Nagy, for example, returned

to power in Poland and Hungary, respectively. But, less dramatically in the rest

of Eastern Europe, Stalinist leaders were compelled to rehabilitate those they

had just purged, many posthumously.

One of the most dramatic changes in Soviet foreign policy came in rela-

tions with Yugoslavia. Just three months after Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union

returned its ambassador to Belgrade. Tito was visited by Khrushchev and a

large and apologetic entourage in 1955. New Soviet identity relations helped

make this alliance possible. Whereas before, Tito’s national brand of socialism

was deemed dangerous, by 1955 it was understood as an example of tolerable

difference from the Soviet model. In addition, Moscow remained the centre

of the world Communist movement, and therefore, Yugoslavia remained sub-

ordinate to that centre, at least from Moscow’s perspective. Yugoslavia was

understood as a younger Slavic brother to the Russian nation. This Slavic

fraternity helped mitigate concerns about deviations from the Soviet model.

Finally, the Soviet leadership confessed to having erred in its treatment of

Yugoslavia in the past.

Each of these understandings was resisted by Molotov. At the July 1955 CC

plenum devoted to Yugoslavia, Molotov branded Tito a dangerous deviant,

denied the relevance of ethno-national Russian identity to the Soviet model,

defended earlier Soviet actions and concluded that the Soviet conferral of a

57 Murashko and Noskova, ‘Repressii kak element’, pp. 544–73; B. I. Zhelitski, ‘Budapesht–

Moskva: god 1956’, in Nezhinskii, Sovetskaia vneshniaia politika,pp.241–82; Volokitina,

‘Oformlenie i funktsionirovanie’, pp. 272–302; and Vladislav Zubok, ‘The Case of Divided

Germany, 1953–1964’, in Taubman, Khrushchev and Gleason, Khrushchev,p.289.

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

socialist identity on Tito would only encourage further deviations from the

Soviet model in Eastern Europe.

Molotov’s fears were justiﬁed. Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech enumer-

ating Stalin’s errors at the Twentieth Party Congress was followed by unrest

in Poland.

In the June 1956 Pozna

n demonstrations, workers demanded reli-

gious freedom and made anti-Soviet and anti-Communist speeches. Seventy

were killed and 500 wounded. The Polish party was split between supporters

of the orthodox Soviet model and proponents of a Polish path to socialism.

In August, Gomul

ka’s party membership was restored, and in October he

rejoined the Politburo, becoming ﬁrst secretary once again on 17 October. Two

days later, Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich and Khrushchev arrived in Warsaw.

Khrushchev refused to shake hands and called Poles traitors. Gomul

ka greeted

Khrushchev by saying, ‘I am Gomul

ka, the one you kept in prison for three

years.’ The day after the Soviet delegation left, tens of thousands of Poles

participated in pro-Gomul

ka rallies, culminating in 500,000 demonstrators in

War saw on 24 October.

This mass support for the embodiment of Polish

difference was noted in Politburo meetings in Moscow, as was Gomul

ka’s

assurance that Poland had no intentions of leaving the Warsaw Pact.

Poland had just missed violating the boundaries of permissible difference;

Hungary would not, becoming accused of dangerous deviation for the next

thirty years.

In June 1953 M

aty

as R

akosi was advised by Moscow to abandon

Stalinist methods of rule. R

akosi held out, hoping his allies in the Kremlin

would overcome this new tolerance of difference. His hopes were realised.

In April 1955,R

akosi had his reformist prime minister, Imre Nagy, removed

and expelled from the party.

But this return to orthodoxy was short-lived,

as Khrushchev was welcoming Tito’s Yugoslavia into the ranks of socialist

allies. As Molotov recalled, ‘the turning point was already completed with the

Yugoslav question’, not the Twentieth Party Congress.

Both Poles and Hun-

garians watched de-Stalinisation carefully, and still more, the rapprochement

58 Hopf, Social Construction,pp.106–23.

59 Unless noted otherwise, my account of the Polish crisis relies on A. M. Orekhov, ‘Sobytiia

1956 goda v Pol’she i krizis pol’sko-sovetskikh otnoshenii’, in Nezhinskii, Sovetskaia

vneshniaia politika,pp.217–40.

60 Mark Kramer, ‘New Evidence on Soviet Decision-Making and the 1956 Polish and

Hungarian Crises’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin 8–9 (1996/7): 361.

61 ‘ “Malin” Notes on the Crises in Hungary and Poland, 1956’, Cold War International History

Project Bulletin 8–9 (1996/7): 389.

62 Unless otherwise noted, my analysis of the Hungarian events relies on Zhelitski,

‘Budapesht–Moskva’, pp. 241–82; ‘ “Malin” Notes’, pp. 390–9; and Kramer, ‘New Evi-

dence’, pp. 362–76.

63 ‘Vengriia, Aprel’–Oktiabr’ 1956’, pp. 103–5. 64 Chuev, Molotov Remembers,p.351.

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with Yugoslavia, the Stalinists with Molotovian dread, the discredited reform-

ers, with hope.

After the Twentieth Party Congress, Hungarian demonstrators demanded

de-Stalinisation resume and that Nagy be restored. Iurii Andropov, the Soviet

ambassador to Hungary at the time, supported R

akosi, and called his oppo-

sition ‘dangerous counter-revolutionaries’. The reformist riots in Pozna

encouraged Hungarians to push for more reform. In July 1956, Mikoyan went

to Budapest to replace R

akosi with a less Stalinist ﬁgure. In the following weeks

and months, the peculiarly close alliance relationships between Moscow and

Eastern Europe were repeatedly demonstrated. Mikoyan participated in Hun-

garian Politburo meetings in July, J

anos K

ar in Soviet Politburo meetings in

November, and Liu Shaoqi in Soviet Politburo meetings about Hungary in the

autumn.

By October, student demonstrators had crossed a red line: they demanded

not only the restoration of Nagy, but the withdrawal of all Soviet armed forces.

Nagy was restored to the Politburo on 23 October, but the Soviet Politburo,

save Mikoyan, agreed to deploy Soviet troops against the Hungarian protestors

the same day. During Soviet Politburo discussions, Molotov took advantage of

the occasion to remind his colleagues how wrong Khrushchev had been about

tolerating difference, especially with regard to Yugoslavia. Khrushchev himself

was having second thoughts, coming to see Nagy as a dangerous acolyte of

Tito. Molotov preferred Ferenc M

unnich, who had spent half his life in the

Soviet Union, as Nagy’sreplacement.Therest of the Politburopreferred K

ar,

because he had been imprisoned by the Stalinist R

akosi. Molotov opposed him

for the very same reason!

The pivotal day was 30 October. In a document on relations between the

Soviet Union and other socialist countries adopted that day, Moscow admitted

it had erred, violated its allies’ sovereign equality and was committed to re-

examining its troop deployments in Eastern Europe, save Germany. But later

the same day, Suslov and Mikoyan reported from Budapest that the Hungarian

army could not be trusted and that Nagy had asked that negotiations begin on

Hungarian withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Difference had already become

dangerous disloyalty.

Fear of falling dominoes, loss of credibility and promises of a short war were

all evident in Soviet decision-making on Hungary. As Khrushchev told the rest

65 Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev,p.148.

66 At the June1957 plenum,Khrushchevthanked China for its advice on Hungary in October

1956. ‘Posledniaia “Antipartiinaia” Gruppa’, Istoricheskii Arkhiv 1 (1994): 67.

67 Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev,pp.200–1. Quoted in Kramer, ‘New Evidence’, p. 374.

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

of the Politburo on 31 October, ‘If we leave Hungary . . . the imperialists, the

Americans, English, and French, will perceive it as weakness on our part and

will go on the offensive.’ At the same time, a series of intelligence and foreign

ministry reports from embassies, especially in Romania and Czechoslovakia,

spoke of the degenerative effect of Hungary on the political situations in these

countries. Hungarians along the Romanian border had begun to seek support

in Romania; ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Czechoslovakia had begun

to manifest sympathy for events in Budapest; and Romanian students demon-

strated in support of Nagy. In Moscow and other Soviet cities students were

meeting in support of Nagy. By 1 November, Presidium members began invok-

ing the fears of their allies in Eastern Europe, arguing that these friends were

losing conﬁdence in Moscow. Finally, Marshal Konev promised Khrushchev

and the Politburo that it would take only three to four days to crush the

counter-revolution in Hungary. He was right.

The invasion of Hungary stalled the Thaw in the Soviet Union. The limits of

tolerable difference had been reached and breached. Hungarian events alerted

Soviet elites to the danger of difference at home. Often when Khrushchev

wouldconsider revivingthe Thaw he was met by references to Hungary, before

which ‘he would retreat’.

And there was reason for such fears. Especially in

the Baltic republics, local party leaders reported growing unrest, support for

Gomul

ka and Nagy and anti-Soviet, nationalist and religious demonstrations.

On the night of 2 November, for example, in Kaunas, Lithuania, at the Tomb of

theUnknown Soldier, 35,000 Lithuanians,mainlystudents,gatheredtodemand

that Russians end their Communist occupation. In Vilnius, people questioned

why the Soviet declaration on relations with other socialist countries did not

apply to them, as well!

Reformist Communists abroad were so worried about the orthodox reac-

tion that they petitioned the Kremlin not to purge their more tolerant allies

in Moscow.

Orthodox Soviet allies in the GDR, Romania, Bulgaria and

Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, took advantage of Moscow’s fear of devi-

ation.

Richter shows how Hungary empowered Molotov, Malenkov and

Kaganovich in foreign policy, leading to their June 1957 attempt to depose

Khrushchev.

But Khrushchev, too, had learned the limits of difference.

Khrushchev came to regard Tito increasingly as China did, a dangerous deviant

68 Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation,p.203.

69 ‘SSSR: Narody i sud’by’, pp. 246–70.

70 English, Russia and the Idea of the West,pp.87–8. 71 Kramer, ‘New Evidence’, p. 377.

72 Richter, Khrushchev’s Double Bind,pp.93–6.

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within the ranks.

The threat from Hungary was reﬂexively linked to the

threat from the US; deviation there was closely associated with US intentions

to undermine socialism in Eastern Europe in general. Many future initiatives

of Khrushchev in the area of arms control and troop withdrawals from East-

ern Europe were opposed by other Politburo members invoking the lessons

of Hungary.

One might expect that the discourse of difference would have soured rela-

tions with Stalinist China. This prediction is inaccurate, but only in timing.

While national roads to socialism violated Chinese adherence to a single Stalin-

ist model, and they did oppose treating Tito’s Yugoslavia as a socialist country,

Soviet admissions of past mistakes compensated for the toleration of deviance.

Moreover, Khrushchev’s decision to use force in Hungary, sanctioned and

urged by the Chinese leadership at the time, reassured Beijing that there were

some limits Khrushchev would thankfully not tolerate.

Soviet aid in the construction of industrial and defence plants accelerated

after Stalin’s death. In May 1953, the Soviet Union agreed to an additional

ninety-one enterprises, and to the replacement of ﬁghter aircraft and tanks

with newer models.

During Khrushchev’s ﬁrst visit to China in October

1954, Mao asked to acquire nuclear weapons. Khrushchev suggested China

concentrate on economic reconstruction, pledging it could rely on the Soviet

deterrent, but did offer a civilian nuclear reactor. In March 1955, Moscow

agreed to build another 166 industrial enterprises and help China build an

atomic reactor and cyclotron. Seventy per cent of China’s foreign trade in the

1950s was with the Soviet Union.

Mao cautiously supported Khrushchev’s campaign against Stalin, though

not the discourse of difference more generally. As Mao told the Soviet ambas-

sador, Iudin, in May 1956, if he ‘had always followed Stalin’s advice, he would be

dead by now’.

Mao wasdissatisﬁed with the ambiguity created by the ongoing

debates in the Soviet Union between difference and orthodoxy. In April 1956,

Mao published his own interpretation of the Twentieth Party Congress, craft-

ing the 70 : 30 rule of thumb about Stalin: he was 70 per cent right (about

the economic and political development model) and 30 per cent wrong (on

73 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War,p.187.

74 Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation,p.190.

75 Chen Jian, Mao’s China,pp.150–6.

76 Boris T. Kulik, Sovetsko-kitaiskii raskol (Moscow: Institut Dal’nego Vostoka RAN, 2000),

p. 95.

77 Shu Guang Zhang, Economic Cold War: America’s Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet

Alliance, 1949–1 963 (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001), pp. 110–66.

78 Westad, Brothers in Arms,p.15.

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

treatment of China and murder of colleagues).

Mao fashioned his own Thaw,

the Hundred Flowers campaign launched in January 1957. But it was aimed

not at expanding the boundaries of difference, but at ﬂushing out ‘Rightists’

who would then be arrested.

In the decolonising world, the discourse of difference greatly expanded

potential Soviet allies beyond Communist Parties. The experience of Central

Asia provided living proof that a vanguard in Moscow could substitute for the

absence of a proletarian vanguard abroad. US support for its allies in the Third

World made Soviet support for NLMs that much more natural.

In April 1955, the non-aligned movement was born in Bandung, Indone-

sia. From the perspective of the new discourse of difference in the Soviet

Union, non-aligned meant not aligned with imperialism, permitting closer

relations with Moscow. Nehru, Sukarno and Nasser became friends in the

struggle against imperialism in the newly christened zone of peace. In August

1955, Moscow approved the sale of Czech arms to Egypt. In November and

December 1955, Khrushchev spent fourweeksinIndia, Burma and Afghanistan,

during which he compared these three countries to Central Asia. Reading the

decolonising world through the Soviet experience in Central Asia, Khrushchev

declared that the road to socialism was possible for anybody in the developing

world, no matter how meagre their material resources. One need only rely on

Soviet experience and help.

Molotov found preposterous the idea of socialism in places like India as he

did on difference at home and in Yugoslavia. While not denying the possibility

of normal relations with Delhi, he rejected the idea that leaders such as Nehru

could ever escape their petit bourgeois nationalist identities, and consequent

roles as imperialist lackeys.

On 1 June 1956 Molotov was replaced as foreign

minister by Dmitrii Shepilov, who had played a key role in the Soviet opening

to Egypt in 1955.

At the June 1957 CC plenum, Molotov was accused by

Mikoyan of not recognising the obvious differences between India, Egypt and

Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Pakistan, the Philippines and Iraq, on the

other. Instead ‘Molotov says the bourgeois camp is united against us...Heisa

bygone conservative . . . This is a left-wing infantile disease in which we cannot

indulge . . .We should not be fetishists or dogmatists.’ Khrushchev summed

matters up: ‘Comrade Molotov, if they accept you as one of our leaders, you

will ruin your country, take it into isolation . . . Molotov is a hopeless dried-up

old man.’

79 Chen Jian, Mao’s China,p.65. 80 Ibid., p. 69.

81 Hopf, Social Construction,pp.86–9, 134–42. 82 Richter, Khrushchev’s Double Bind,p.85.

83 ‘Posledniaia “antipartiinaia” gruppa’, pp. 33–8.

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Cold peace at home: cold war abroad, 1957–85

At a May 1957 Kremlin meeting with the intelligentsia, Khrushchev warned

them that if they ever tried to create a ‘Peto



ﬁ circle’ of reformist intellectuals

like they had in Budapest the year before, we ‘will grind you into dust’.

Khrushchev’s fulminations were characteristic of the rest of his rule: support

for pushing the boundaries of difference with periodic eruptions of vitriol

against what he deemed transgressive. Khrushchev charged Pasternak and

others with a lack of patriotism after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Lit-

erature in October 1958. But in May1960 Khrushchevapproved the publication,

in Pravda no less, of an anti-Stalinist poem by Andrei Tvardovskii. Two years

later, Khrushchev was railing at the Manezh exhibit of contemporary Soviet

art about ‘all this shit’ they were producing. But almost simultaneously he was

approving, along with the Politburo, which met twice over the manuscript,

the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic anti-Stalinist novel, One Day

in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The removal of Khrushchev from power in October 1964 did not narrow

the boundaries of permissible difference. Indeed, Mikhail Suslov, in reading

the bill of particulars before the CC, praised ‘Khrushchev’s positive role in

unmasking the cult of personality of Stalin’, and agreed with the removal of

Molotov in 1957.

Under Brezhnev and his two successors, the main targets

of ofﬁcial repression were those who engaged in public dissent, especially

after August 1968.

The Siniavskii/Daniel’ trials of February 1966 were an

early manifestation of ofﬁcial intolerance. But it grew more comprehensive

and more directed against those with manifest political demands to change

the Soviet political system.

Solzhenitsyn, for example, was ﬁnally exiled in

February 1974, at Andropov’s personal behest.

A 1979 KGB report on avant-

garde artists could have been written in 1955: ‘they produce individualistic

works...based strictly on personal perceptions’.

Thisstruggleover differenceat home wasnotisolatedfromidentity relations

with the outside world: China was a prominent player. The removal of Molotov

in 1957 not only marked the triumph of difference over the NSM, but also the

84 ‘Plenum, TsK KPSS, Iiun’ 1957’, p. 73.

85 Taubman, Khrushchev,pp.384–8, 527–8, 594–602.

86 ‘Plenum, TsK KPSS, Oktyabr’ 1964 goda. Stenograﬁcheskii otchet’, Istoricheskii Arkhiv 1

(1993), pp. 7–9. See also Georgi Arbatov, The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New

York: Times Books, 1992), p. 134; and English, Russia and the Idea of the West,p.108.

87 Ibid., p. 135.

88 Condee, ‘Cultural Codes of the Thaw’, pp. 160–2.

89 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and the Shield,pp.312–18. 90 Ibid., p. 330.

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

irreversible turn towards alienation from China. China’s Stalinist model helped

proponents of differenceat home point out what restoration of the NSM would

mean for socialism in the Soviet Union. This domestic role for Chinese identity

continued until the Chinese alliance with the United States after the death of

Mao in the late 1970s. By then, however, a new external Other had emerged

on the revisionist side of the spectrum: Eurocommunism, or National Social

Democracy, personiﬁed by Enrico Berlinguer in Italy.

Soviet identity was publicly contested in the discourse of permissible differ-

ence in relationship to Chinese dogmatism, Eurocommunist revisionism and

competition with the imperialist camp headed by the United States. Mean-

while, identiﬁcation with Europe was a counter-discourse within the Soviet

party elite and intelligentsia. Its public manifestations, whether as Eurocom-

munism or as Andrei Sakharov’s ‘Letter to the Soviet Leadership’, were ofﬁ-

cially repressed as anti-Soviet, but identiﬁcation with European Social Democ-

racy as the desirable Soviet future was already emerging as the alternative

beyond the boundaries of permissible difference in the 1950s. Ironically, both

the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the accession to the Helsinki Treaty

in 1975 energised identiﬁcation with Europe among Soviet elites.

By the 1960s,

a discourse on ethno-national Russianidentitywasemerging,especiallyamong

the ‘village prose writers’, led by Valentin Rasputin. While granted more ofﬁ-

cial tolerance to publish its views, it was not as deeply institutionalised as its

European alternative.

If the early years of the Thaw were characterised by the de-

institutionalisation of Stalinism, then the next thirty years witnessed the insti-

tutionalisation of both the dominant discourse and its competitors. There are

several related issues here: the institutionalised lack of unbiased information

available to decision makers; the position of General Secretary within the

decision-making process; the split between the MFA and Central Committee

International Department (CCID); the development of research institutes; and

the persistence of the intelligentsia as a carrier of the discourse of difference.

Khrushchev, despite making agriculture his primary domestic avo-

cation, continued to receive inﬂated statistics on harvests, yields and

91 Cherniaev, Moia zhizn’ i moe vremia (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1995),

p. 342; Georgii Shakhnazarov, S vozhdiami i bez nikh (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001), p. 271;and

Elizabeth Wishnick, Mending Fences (London: University of Washington Press, 2001),

p. 53.

92 Cherniaev, Moia zhizn’, p. 292 and Arbatov, The System,p.132.

93 English, Russia and the Idea of the West,pp.72–91, 122, 136–41, 194; and Ilya Prizel, National

Identity and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 191–211.

683

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technological innovationthroughout his tenureasGeneral Secretary.

Georgii

Shakhnazarov, an aide to both Andropov in the 1960s and 1970s, and then Gor-

bachev in the 1980s, relates how party elites, such as CCID secretary Boris

Ponomarev and Defence Minister Dmitrii Ustinov, remained in a state of delu-

sion about the economic conditions of the country, reporting their election

excursions to the countryside, where all had been made ready for them, as if it

were a representative sample of Soviet reality.

But this delusion extended to

foreign and security policy as well. It was not until 1990, for example, that Sovi-

ets found out that the May 1960 shootdown of Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane had

required thirteen missiles, and had only inadvertently been hit.

Soviet ambas-

sadors, especially in the developing world, reported to Moscow just like an

obkom secretary would, exaggerating the industrial, agricultural and political

accomplishments of the piece of territory they considered to be their own.

Oleg Grinevskii, for example, recalls the ‘false, at times even absurd, infor-

mation the KGB and CCID fed the Politburo’, representations that reinforced

the Soviet identity of world revolutionary vanguard with regard to coun-

tries where a revolutionary situation hardly existed.

This discursive bias,

the twin exaggerations of socialism’s prospects and imperialism’s hostility,

manifested itself with especially baleful consequences in the decision-making

on Afghanistan in 1978–9, but was commonplace.

The apocrypha about

Soviet negotiators at arms control talks learning Soviet military secrets from

their Western counterparts are true. Gorbachev himself noted that not even

Politburo members could get basic information about the military-industrial

complex, or even the economy.

100

In response to Andropov’s conclusion as

KGB chairman in May 1981 that the US was preparing to launch a nuclear war,

local KGB ofﬁcers around the world, for the next three years, dutifully col-

lected evidence to support the view held in Moscow.

101

Information contrary

to Soviet policy, such as a memorandum recommending withdrawal from

Afghanistan in early 1980 that went unread until 1986, was ignored, rarely

94 Taubman, Khrushchev,p.261.

95 Shakhnazarov, S vozhdiami,pp.90–1. 96 Taubman, Khrushchev,p.378.

97 Oleg Grinevskii, Tainy sovetskoi diplomatii (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), p. 136.

98 Ibid., p. 9.On the CCIDand decision-making onAngola, see Odd Arne Westad, ‘Moscow

and the Angolan Crisis’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin 8–9 (1996/7): p. 22.

99 English, Russia and the Idea of the West,p.121.

100 Ibid., pp. 73, 323 nn. 32, 33. Vitalii Vorotnikov writes that, as a Politburo member in

1987, he still could not get a copy of Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Party

Congress. V. I. Vorotnikov, Abyloetotak...(Moscow: Sovet veteranov knigoizdanii,

1995), p. 153; and Raymond L. Garthoff, A Journey through the Cold War (Washington:

Brookings Institution Press, 2001), p. 218.

101 Andrew and Mitrokhin, Sword and the Shield,pp.213–14.

684

Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

contemplated, written up or submitted.

102

As Evgenii Primakov noted in his

memoirs, ‘we [journalists and scholars who opposed the decision to intervene

in Afghanistan] were led mainly by the established custom of unreservedly

supporting all decisions taken from above’.

103

The General Secretary’s position was an institution of authority and power.

As Shakhnazarov, writing as a political scientist, concluded, the Soviet Union

and its socialist allies had one ‘basic principle in common, its functioning

was one-third deﬁned by institutions and two-thirds by the personality of the

leader’. While ‘no one would challenge the right of the General Secretary to

have the last word in resolving any question, this right did not belong so much

to the man as to the position’.

104

Shakhnazarov recounts Andropov receiving

a phone call from Khrushchev: ‘before my eyes this lively striking interesting

man was transformed into a soldier ready to fulﬁl any order of the commander.

Even his voice changed, with tones of obedience and submissiveness.’

105

The norm of party elite unity reinforced this authority and helps explain

how the General Secretary preserved the prevailing discourse. After the post-

Stalinist discourse of difference was ﬁxed after 1957, Khrushchev staved off

attacks from more orthodox quarters. Only when there was an overwhelm-

ing consensus, as in October 1964, did other elites join the attacks.

106

Elite

fear of difference helped preserve the norm of unity. The discursive power

concentrated in a particular General Secretary also accounts for the possibil-

ity of a dramatic shift in discourse once a General Secretary dies, as in the

case of Stalin in 1953 and Chernenko in 1985. The institution of the General

Secretary, combined with the institutionalised bias for agreeable information,

helps explains the staying power of the predominant discourse, as well as the

structural disadvantages faced by challengers.

107

The discourse of difference implied recognition of the decolonising world

as a zone of peace, rather than as a zone of imperialist lackeys. This recognition

was institutionalised within the CCID, which had responsibility for relations

with these revolutionary nationalist movements. The CCID and MFA were

competitors for the next thirty years. The MFA, especially after Shepilov’s

replacement by Gromyko in February 1957, became still more closely associ-

ated with the reproduction of a Great Power Soviet identity in competition

102 Carolyn M. Ekedahl and Melvin A. Goodman, The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze, 2nd

edn (Washington: Brassey’s, 2001), p. 184.

103 Evgenii Primakov, Gody v bol’shoi politike (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1999), p. 51.

104 Shakhnazarov, S vozhdiami,pp.166, 219–21. 105 Ibid., p. 103.

106 Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation,pp.148, 463.

107 Andrew Bennett, Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall and Reprise of Soviet-Russian

Military Interventionism, 1973–1 996 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 113–15.

685