The Last Days of Stalin by Joshua Rubenstein

Author:Joshua Rubenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300192223
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER SIX

A CHANCE FOR PEACE?

American officials had long assumed that Stalin’s death would expose the fragility of his regime. As far back as February 1946, George Kennan advised that the stability of the Soviet state “is not yet finally proven. . . . [It would need to demonstrate] that it can survive [the] supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another. Lenin’s death was first such transfer, and its effects wracked Soviet state for 15 years after.”1 For Kennan, “Stalin’s death or retirement will be second” and could well lead to another protracted convulsion. Such advice governed American understanding of Kremlin politics.2 And if Soviet leaders—within the party, the government, or the army and security services—turned on each other then they might lose control of their own country and the satellite states in Eastern Europe. The United States could exploit such instability for its own advantage, or at least that was the hope.

Nearly seven years later the United States dreamed of disrupting succession plans in the Kremlin. After the announcement of the Nineteenth Party Congress in August 1952, when it was believed that Stalin might appoint a successor, State Department officials prepared “a script conjuring up a ‘Stalin Testament’ hoping to sow confusion within the Kremlin leadership by floating a false statement of its own.” The plan went nowhere.3 (The idea was to mimic Lenin’s earlier political testament. Following a series of debilitating strokes, Lenin had evidently dictated his famous Testament over the winter of 1922 and 1923 in which he criticized other Bolsheviks, including Stalin and Trotsky; he did not endorse any of them as his successor.) And just days before General Dwight Eisenhower’s election to the presidency, in November, 1952, the Psychological Strategy Board outlined a contingency plan in the event of Stalin’s death. It offered vague proposals, recognizing that “many uncertainties” were bound to arise and concluded that “strains must be presumed to exist between individuals and groups closely connected with the problem of succession.”4 Here again the US was hoping to aggravate tensions in a post-Stalin Kremlin. Echoing Kennan’s views, the logic was simple: a political crisis was likely to unfold in the Kremlin once Stalin died, allowing the United States to exploit the turmoil for its own advantage. But there were still no concrete ideas of what to do.

Eisenhower came into office after a campaign in which he and his principal foreign policy adviser, John Foster Dulles, who would soon become secretary of state, had emphasized their determination to “roll back” Soviet control of Eastern Europe and “mark the end of the negative, futile and immoral policy of ‘containment,’” as the Republican platform of 1952 declared.5 They were rejecting Kennan’s famous policy of containment, finding it too accepting of Soviet gains which, they argued, both Roosevelt and Truman should have resisted. They wanted to replace what Foster Dulles called the “treadmill policies” of the Truman administration with a “policy of boldness.”6

Probably no secretary of state in American history has come to office with greater experience or sense of purpose than John Foster Dulles.

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