For the time being Khrushchev was accepted as
primus inter pares, but Soviet leadership was ulti-
mately a collective affair. There were hardliners
dissatisfied with Khrushchev’s efforts to achieve
detente. Others criticised his erratic course and
his opportunism. The ideologues wanted to
pursue a ‘pure’ Marxism–Leninism believing that
the revolutionary cause could be led only by the
proletariat. Khrushchev was more of a realist,
ready to take advantage of developments that
weakened the West and which in the longer term
would further the Soviet Union’s global interests.
In the Stalin era Third World communist parties
had been instructed to take up the revolutionary
struggle not only against the colonial imperialists,
but also against the ‘national-bourgeois lackeys’.
But the anti-colonial struggle in the Third World
was fiercely nationalist, led and supported by an
indigenous, educated middle class, rather than by
peasants or workers. While Third World radicals
included active groups who believed in the need
for socialist or even communist transformations of
society and in centrally planned economies to
break existing feudal elites, they were not in
favour of exchanging a dependency on the West
for a dependency on the East. The nationalists
were in any case broad coalitions united only by
a wish to get rid of their country’s colonial status.
In Egypt, they were led by army officers; else-
where they were led by civilian revolutionaries.
Khrushchev had thrown Russian support
behind President Nasser of Egypt in 1955. The
Soviet Union began to dispense its own financial
and military aid programme to win friends and
influence nations. It was on a smaller scale than
the American programme, but was carefully
applied where it seemed to serve Russian interests
best. Egypt and India received most aid; region-
ally, the Middle East was given priority, relatively
little going to Latin America; the sums devoted
to military aid were more than twice as large as
those earmarked for economic credits. Despite
the views of the purists, Khrushchev was prepared
to back anti-colonial movements, even if they
included bourgeois elements. This is what he
meant when he offered to help ‘national libera-
tion movements’.
At Vienna, Khrushchev reaffirmed his support
for ‘national liberation’ struggles, accusing the
US of representing the status quo and of inter-
vening to support it. Kennedy countered with the
argument that the balance of power between the
communist and non-communist worlds should be
preserved. There was thus no meeting of minds.
Kennedy returned to the US and in July that year
increased the defence budget and the strength of
the armed forces.
Khrushchev chose another method of breaking
the Berlin deadlock, which was also an infraction
of treaty agreements, but did not threaten
Western rights in West Berlin. Walter Ulbricht,
the East German communist leader, had been
pressing for effective action to stop the ever
increasing flow of East German citizens across the
open Berlin frontier to the West. The flow of
refugees had reached such proportions that the
stability of the East German state was endan-
gered. On 13 August 1961, barbed wire was
erected along the frontier right across Berlin, later
replaced by the Wall, complete with armed guard
towers. East Berlin and the German Democratic
Republic were turned into a gigantic prison. The
West protested but did not attempt to remove the
Wall by force. It was another compromise, but
one that was regarded as ending the Berlin crisis.
As the eventful year of 1961 drew to its close, the
conclusion of a Soviet peace treaty with the DDR
was once more postponed; no date was now set
for its conclusion.
Khrushchev’s world policies had brought the
Soviet Union few concrete benefits. The dispute
with China was growing; over Berlin, Khrushchev
had had to abandon his stand; and even the
success of Soviet missile development was clearly
being overtaken by the dynamic policies of
the Kennedy administration. Khrushchev badly
needed a dramatic coup, or at least the appear-
ance of one. That need probably inspired the bold
Soviet initiative that was to lead to the Cuban
missile crisis.