624Chapter 31
Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and to become neutral.
A few weeks later, the Red Army invaded Hungary. The
Soviet intervention led to the flight of 200,000 Hun-
garians to the west, 25,000 casualties in combat, and
2,000 executions (including Nagy) in reprisal. The
NATO powers still chose not to go to war over Hun-
gary. Similarly, the Soviet Union did not intervene in
Western wars, such as the Anglo-French invasion of
Egypt in 1956 (an attempt to keep control of the Suez
Canal) known as the Suez War. When the United
States later fought a second Asian war based on the
policy of containing the spread of Communism, the
Vietnam War (1965–75), the USSR and China gave as-
sistance to North Vietnam and to the Communist guer-
rilla armies of the Viet Cong, but they both refrained
from directly entering the war.The USSR under Stalin and
Khrushchev, 1945–64
No country suffered more severely from World War II
than the Soviet Union. In the western quarter of the
country, more than seventy thousand villages were clas-
sified as “destroyed.” In a war zone of 800,000 square
miles (Germany and Poland combined occupy only
210,000 square miles), 50 percent of all residences and
eighty thousand schools were lost. Twenty-five million
dead overshadows every other tragedy in a century of
megadeath, and it explains why Stalin demanded post-
war security for the USSR.
Stalin began the reconstruction of the Soviet Union
by plundering defeated Germany. The Yalta and Pots-
dam agreements recognized a Soviet right to reparations
from Germany and permitted Stalin to collect them “in
kind.” This meant the confiscation and shipment to the
USSR of billions of dollars worth of surviving German
industry. Recovery was entrusted to the state planning
agency, Gosplan, which drafted a Five Year Plan for
1946–50. With severe enforcement, the Soviet Union
exceeded the production quotas set in this plan. Stalin
promised that Soviet output would triple prewar levels,
and by 1960 that standard had been met, although agri-
cultural recovery was slower. Ironically, the speed of the
Russian recovery increased cold war tensions because it
underscored the enormous potential of the Soviet
Union. And when the USSR launched Sputnikinto orbit,
no one could doubt Soviet technical potential.
Soviet security and recovery both rested upon
Stalin’s dictatorship. His brutality had not diminished
with age, and in 1948 he ordered another purge. TheDOCUMENT 31.2
Nikita Khrushchev: “Peaceful
Coexistence,” 1959
Nikita Khrushchev often used the annual party congress of
the Communist Party to make dramatic speeches. At the con-
gress of 1956, he opened the age of destalinization in Russia
in a speech attacking “the crimes of the Stalin era.” In 1959,
at the Twentieth Party Congress, he declared that the basis of
foreign policy should be the “peaceful coexistence” of states
with differing social systems, inviting a détente in cold war
tensions. Western nations did not start to trust this concept for
another decade.We all of us well know that tremendous changes
have taken place in the world. Gone, indeed, are
the days when it took weeks to cross the ocean
from one continent to the other or when a trip
from Europe to America, or from Asia to Africa,
seemed a very complicated undertaking. The
progress of modern technology has reduced our
planet to a rather small place; it has even become,
in this sense, quite congested. And if in our daily
life it is a matter of considerable importance to es-
tablish normal relations with our neighbors in a
densely inhabited settlement, this is so much more
necessary in the relations between states, in partic-
ular states belonging to different social systems.... What then remains to be done? There may be
two ways out: either war—and war in the rocket
H-bomb age is fraught with the most dire conse-
quences for all nations—or peaceful coexistence....
The problem of peaceful coexistence between
states with different social systems has become
particularly pressing.... The Soviet people have
stated and declare again that they do not want war.
If the Soviet Union and the countries friendly to it
are not attacked, we shall never use any weapons
either against the United States or against any
other countries.... Precisely because we want to
rid mankind of war, we urge the Western powers
to peaceful and lofty competition.
Krushchev, Nikita. “On Peaceful Coexistence.” In Ludwig
Schaefer et al., eds., Problems in Western Civilization.New
York: Scribner’s, 1965.