Therein lay the makings of a grand strategic stalemate, like the one that perpetuated the Peloponnesian War. Its roots lay in frustrated hopes: those of Soviet leaders that capitalism would collapse; those of American leaders that it would be enough simply to ensure that capitalism survived. The Cold War shifted now to strategies for breaking this stalemate, none of which proved decisive. Their effect instead was to stabilize and therefore prolong the Cold War - to transform it into a new international system that closely resembled a very old one.
The first of these efforts focused on reforming Marxism-Leninism. Stalin saw little need to make his dictatorship popular because he assumed that capitalist economic crashes and the wars they produced would do that for him. But as his successors watched the growing prosperity and political legitimacy ofpostwar capitalism, they lost any illusions that its self-destruction was imminent. Instead, they began wondering how their own system was going to sustain itself and spread its influence if it could not demonstrably improve the lives of the people who lived under it.
The problem became clear as early as June 1953 when workers in East Germany - the very class, according to Marx, that should have most welcomed Communist Party rule - instead rebelled against it. The Red Army quickly crushed the uprising and the hardline East German leader Walter Ulbricht survived, but the experience convinced Nikita Khrushchev, soon to emerge as the Soviet Union’s new leader, that "socialism" had to be given "a human face." That meant disavowing Stalin and promising something better - even if still within the fTamework of a command economy and one-party rule.
Conceding the necessity of reform, though, made it hard to control the pace. Khrushchev’s attacks on Stalin’s legacy - most dramatically his February 1956 "secret" speech - had the unintended effect of encouraging attacks on Soviet authority, for how could the two be separated? By the end of that year, Khrushchev had narrowly avoided a revolution in Poland, only to face one in Hungary that he suppressed by harsher means than Stalin had ever employed in that region. Meanwhile, an open border with West Berlin was allowing millions of East Germans to emigrate. When Khrushchev and Ulbricht built a wall to prevent this in 1961, they gave up any pretense that the people they governed preferred "socialism" over democratic capitalism. The Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern and Central Europe would remain, but only against the wishes of those included within it.
Khrushchev’s reforms provoked an equally unanticipated response from the Chinese, a people he could not shoot down or wall in. It had been one thing for Tito to challenge Stalin and stay in power: Yugoslavia was a small country, and the Soviet dictator’s influence within the international Communist movement remained dominant. It was quite another thing for the volatile and inexperienced Khrushchev to condemn Stalin without consulting Mao, the leader of the most significant revolution since Lenin’s who now ruled the world’s most populous country - and who had patterned his leadership on the example Stalin had set. With the Sino-Soviet split, the fragmentation of international Communism became irreversible just as the revival of market capitalism and democratic politics was also becoming so.
Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, Khrushchev’s successors, did no better. Having encouraged reforms in Czechoslovakia, they concluded in 1968 that these had gone too far and ended them with yet another military intervention. It was the Soviet Union’s right, they claimed, to intervene whenever "socialism" seemed to be in danger. But the Brezhnev Doctrine frightened whatever Marxist sympathizers were left in Europe, while Mao saw it as aimed at China and began preparing for war with the USSR. By the end of the decade, the Communist world had two centers whose hostility toward one another was at least as great as that of each toward the capitalists they had sworn to overthrow.
However well-intentioned it may have been, then, Khrushchev’s strategy of reforming Marxism-Leninism instead diminished its legitimacy and shattered its unity. It showed that any withering away of state authority - or any wavering of resolve among leaders - could cause that ideology itself to implode. This was disconcerting indeed for ruling Communist parties because it suggested that change carried within itself the seeds of their own destruction.
World History
