The year 1956 was a memorable one in Soviet foreign policy. Khrushchev's February speech denouncing Stalin further shook the discipline in the Communist world. On the other hand, the improvement in Soviet-Yugoslav relations, which had begun with Bulganin's and Khrushchev's visit to Belgrade in 1955, received a boost, the break between the two states now being blamed on Stalin himself as well as on Beria. In April 1956 the Cominform was dissolved, and in June Shepilov replaced Molotov as foreign minister. The ferment in the Soviet satellite empire finally led to explosions in Poland and in Hungary. In late June 1956, workers in Poznan clashed with the police and scores of people were killed. Polish intellectuals and even many Polish Communists clamored for a relaxation of controls and a generally milder regime. On October 19, Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had been imprisoned as a Titoist and had been reinstated in
August, became the Party secretary. That same day Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders flew to Warsaw to settle the crisis. In spite of extreme tension, an understanding was reached: the U.S.S.R. accepted Gomulka and a liberalization of the Communist system in Poland and agreed to withdraw Soviet troops from that country.
Events in Hungary took a graver turn. There, under the influence of the happenings in Poland, a full-scale revolution took place in late October, during which the political police were massacred. The army sided on the whole with the revolutionaries. The overturn was spearheaded by young people, especially students and workers. The new government of a revisionist Communist, Imre Nagy, constituted a political coalition rather than single-party rule and withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Treaty. But on November 4, after only a few days of freedom, Soviet troops began storming Budapest and crushed the revolution. The imprudent attack on Egypt staged at that time by Great Britain, France, and Israel over the issue of the Suez Canal helped the Soviet move by diverting the attention of the world, splitting the Western camp, and engaging some of its forces. While crushing the Hungarians, the U.S.S.R. championed the cause of Egypt and threatened its assailants. But the moral shock of the Hungarian intervention proved hard to live down: it led to the greatest popular condemnation of the Communist cause and the most widespread desertions from Communist party ranks in the free world since the Second World War. There were strikes, demonstrations, and protests even in the Soviet Union.
As already suggested, Khrushchev might have been lucky to survive these grave perturbations in the Communist world. Yet he did defeat and dismiss Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich, together with Shepilov who sided with them, in the spring and summer of 1957. After Bulganin's fall in March 1958, the first secretary, now also prime minister, became the undisputed chief of Soviet foreign policy, while Andrei Gromyko headed the foreign office. Khrushchev's behavior on the international scene showed a certain pattern. He remained essentially intransigent, pushing every advantage he had, be it troubles in newly independent states, such as the Congo, or Soviet achievements in armaments and space technology. Nevertheless, he talked incessantly in favor of coexistence and summit conferences to settle outstanding issues. Also, he paid friendly visits to many countries, including the U.S.A. in 1959. The summit conference in the summer of 1960 was never held, for two weeks before it was scheduled to begin Khrushchev announced that an American U-2 spy plane had been brought down deep in Soviet territory. But in 1961 Khrushchev met the new American president, John F. Kennedy, in Vienna. In the summer of 1962 both aspects of Soviet foreign policy stood in bold relief: fanned by
the U.S.S.R., a new Berlin crisis continued to threaten world peace; yet, on the other hand, Khrushchev emphasized more than ever coexistence abroad and peaceful progress at home, having made that his signal theoretical contribution to the program that was enunciated at the Twenty-second Party Congress. To be sure, as officially defined in the Soviet Union, coexistence meant economic, political, and ideological competition with the capitalist world until the final fall of capitalism. But that fall, Soviet authorities came to assert, would occur without a world war.
However, in the autumn of that same year, Khrushchev overreached himself and brought the world to the brink of a thermonuclear war. The confrontation between the United States and the U.S.S.R. in October 1962 over the Soviet missiles in Cuba, which resulted in a stunning Soviet defeat, can be explained, at least in part, by the Soviet leader's enthusiasm and his conviction that the United States and capitalism in general were on the decline and would retreat when hard pressed. The outcome, no doubt, strengthened the argument for peaceful coexistence and emphasized caution and consultation in foreign policy, symbolized by the celebrated "hot line" between Washington and Moscow. The Soviet Union proceeded to measure carefully its reactions and its involvement even in such complicated and entangling crises as the Israeli-Arab wars of 1967 and 1973 and the Vietnam War. In the latter conflict, the Soviet Union denounced of course "American imperialism" and provided extremely valuable materiel to North Vietnam, but it avoided escalation. Yet, following the complete victory of communism in Indo-China in 1975 and the shattering impact of the catastrophic American policy in Vietnam on the American public, the Soviet Union might have felt that it had a freer hand on the international stage, in Angola or elsewhere.
With the Soviet Union as well as the United States acquiring a second-strike capability, that is, the ability to retaliate and inflict "an unacceptable damage" on the enemy after absorbing a nuclear blow, a true balance of terror settled on the world. Ever-improving technology made virtually all established strategic concepts obsolete. Numerous bases and indeed whole sections of the globe lost their importance in terms of the possible ultimate showdown between the two nuclear giants.
From the mid-seventies it was authoritatively estimated in the West-and apparently realistically in contrast to earlier alarms about alleged "missile gaps" and the like - that the U.S.S.R. had caught up with the United States in overall nuclear military strength, and indeed had perhaps moved slightly ahead. Even the Soviet navy, insignificant compared with its American rival at the end of the Second World War, had risen to be, according to many indices, the strongest fleet in the world, although still behind the Americans in aircraft carriers and perhaps in such intangibles as naval tradition and
the expertise and spirit of its personnel. Yet the enormous economic burden, terror, and inconclusiveness of the arms race did not lead to a full negotiated settlement. Important results were achieved, to be sure. Following the earlier banning of nuclear tests in the atmosphere, the nuclear non-proliferation agreement was signed by the two superpowers and other states in early 1968. Other agreements were reached concerning outer space, where 1975 witnessed the celebrated joint effort of the Russians and the Americans. The crucial issue of military limitations itself was tackled in numerous negotiations, including the so-called S.A.L.T. II talks and President Ford's discussions with Brezhnev in Vladivostok in 1974. Still, in spite of a considerable measure of agreement, the S.A.L.T. II talks remained inconclusive, primarily because of the problems of the Backfire bombers on the Soviet side and of the cruise missile on the American. Moreover, as Edward Teller and other scientists have pointed out, the difficulty in the negotiations resides not only in the entire complex of aims, attitudes, and policies of the two superpowers, but also in the very nature of scientific and technological advance, which rapidly makes prearranged schemes of limitation obsolete.