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International News Title: Russian Roulette Some leaders have cut a dashing figure on the world stage -- articulate, sophisticated, well dressed, self-assured and charismatic. And then there was Nikita Khrushchev. Boorish and lacking formal education, the Soviet leader seemed ill-suited to dominate the international realm. And yet, at the height of the Cold War, Khrushchev was at the center of world attention, thanks in large part to his brinksmanship in relations with the United States, most notably his ultimata regarding Berlin and his ill-considered decision to ship nuclear weapons to Cuba. In their magisterial book, "Khrushchev's Cold War," Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali provide a fascinating tour of foreign policy during the Khrushchev years. The authors capitalize on extraordinary access to Soviet archival materials, shedding new light on Khrushchev's behavior during the most dangerous period of the Cold War. Khrushchev's failed gambles with Berlin and Cuba in the early 1960s led his Kremlin colleagues to finally overthrow him in October 1964. But his foreign-policy problems had begun years before. A particularly difficult moment came in October 1956, when Khrushchev was confronted with two major crises. Britain, France and Israel launched an attack on Egypt following the nationalization of the Suez Canal by a new Soviet ally, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Meanwhile, Hungarian leader Imre Nagy not only sought to allow greater freedom at home but declared on Oct. 31 his intention to take his country out of the Warsaw Pact. Khrushchev was caught by surprise in both instances. The authors reveal that Soviet intelligence provided the Kremlin leaders with nearly all messages sent from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to Washington during this time. Because of this, Khrushchev knew that the United States was not prepared to start a war over Nasser's actions in Suez, and mistakenly assumed that the West Europeans would follow suit. But Britain and France proved willing to go to war even without the United States. Nasser survived only because U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower opposed the attack. Tied down in Hungary and embarrassed at not being able to do more, Khrushchev belatedly threatened nuclear strikes against Britain and France, a sign of the reckless behavior for which he would become more famous later. Meanwhile, indecisive about how to handle Hungary, Khrushchev lost control of the situation as Nagy made his moves to leave the Soviet orbit. Khrushchev then became so angry that he initiated a brutal assault resulting in some 20,000 Hungarian casualties. While Khrushchev kept Hungary in the Soviet bloc and saw Nasser survive, both were illusory victories and should have been seen as an early signal of the ultimate weakness of Soviet power. Although Fursenko and Naftali do not focus on Soviet weakness as much as they might, that is ultimately the underlying story of these years and those to follow. Khrushchev crushed the rebellion in Hungary, but did not leave the Soviet Union able to control the East European populations without resorting to the threat or use of force. And though his nuclear threats might have appeared to help Nasser, in fact it was U.S. opposition to the war that was key, and by the 1970s, the Egyptians were looking to the United States for assistance. The Soviets never forced the West out of Berlin, and in 1990, German unification occurred within NATO. Similarly, the Cuban missile crisis not only weakened Khrushchev at home, but cost him the respect of the Chinese, who a decade later would be forming relationships with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. AP Khrushchev's decision to ship nuclear missiles to Fidel Castro's Cuba ultimately weakened his position at home. Tantalizingly, the authors make clear from the archival documents that in the winter of 1959-60, Khrushchev, impressed by the living standards he had seen during his visit to the United States, was determined to end the Cold War in order to shift resources to his domestic agenda. But after the Soviets shot down U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers that spring, and Eisenhower accepted responsibility for the U-2 spy mission, Khrushchev angrily turned away from more peaceful pursuits. The authors recognize that the United States' unwillingness to sacrifice West Berlin and Khrushchev's unwillingness to allow intrusive inspections of nuclear sites would have anyway been stumbling blocks to a real detente. But this story leaves little question that the capture of the U.S. pilot (the authors are the first to see the records of the interrogation) was a major event in shaping Khrushchev's calculations. A year later, Khrushchev decided to pursue a highly confrontational approach. Fursenko and Naftali reveal that on May 26, 1961, the Soviet leader outlined to his Presidium colleagues a plan on Berlin that would dare the United States to go to war, a war from which he believed the United States would shy away. Though U.S. officials during this period (and earlier) attributed Khrushchev's tough talk to other Kremlin hard-liners, Fursenko and Naftali show that it was all Khrushchev. "There is more than a 95 percent probability that there will be no war," Khrushchev told colleagues as he described his plans to sign a peace treaty with the East Germans and to turn over the Berlin access routes to them. (This would have caused a major breach with the Western powers with which the Soviets had agreed on access rights after World War II.) "We don't encroach on West Berlin, we do not declare a blockade; [but] we cut off air traffic," Khrushchev proposed. Western planes would have to land in East Germany, and, he told his colleagues, the Soviet Union would shoot down any plane trying to land in West Berlin. A few weeks later, at a meeting with John F. Kennedy in Vienna, Khrushchev privately bullied the U.S. president and publicly announced a Dec. 31 deadline for reaching a settlement of the Berlin issue on terms satisfactory to him. Yet by October, the Berlin Wall was built, and Khrushchev was no longer willing to force the Americans to reach an agreement by December as he had earlier threatened. As the world would learn again in Cuba the following year, despite his reckless actions, Khrushchev was in fact unwilling to go to war. But he cost himself and his country a great deal by behaving so erratically. The unsung hero of the book is Presidium member Anastas Mikoyan, Khrushchev's reasonable and thoughtful Kremlin ally, who tried to rein in the boss's worse impulses. Mikoyan didn't want the Soviets to attack civilians in Budapest, deliver ultimata on Berlin, or send submarines through the U.S. naval quarantine of Cuba in 1962. Amazingly, at the October 1964 Presidium meeting during which Leonid Brezhnev and his fellow plotters proclaimed themselves fed up and removed Khrushchev from power, it was Mikoyan who stood up for Khrushchev, saying, "In foreign policy, at first Khrushchev did not understand very much, but he quickly became proficient in it." The details provided in this important book would suggest that Mikoyan was being rather generous in his assessment of one of history's more unpredictable characters.
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