In diagnosing what was wrong with Soviet leaders in the aftermath of Hungary, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai got it right. While their "arrogance and self-importance have not been completely eliminated," he wrote to Mao, "an atmosphere lacking discipline and order is spreading _ They appear to lack confidence and suffer from inner fears and thus tend to employ the tactics of bluffing or threats in handling foreign affairs."436 Nonetheless, Kremlin leaders kept behaving as if nothing had happened.
Even while Soviet tanks were rolling into Hungary, Moscow once again called for disarmament talks, tentatively accepting President Eisenhower’s "Open Skies" proposal it had previously rejected. It proceeded with an array of further disarmament and nonaggression proposals, though none was sufficiently attractive to be acted upon. By April 1957, high-ranking party officials in Moscow were telling visiting comrades that "things are now settling down,"
And that the time for resuming detente had come.437 While publicizing his view that Washington and Moscow could come to terms, Khrushchev simultaneously escalated his bellicose rhetoric.
Khrushchev later berated the "capitalist countries" for having instigated the "putsch" in Hungary, accusing them of wanting to do the same in East Germany and warning them that "we will rap your knuckles." He tried to intimidate Denmark and Norway - the countries he had previously tried to charm - by threatening them with nuclear annihilation if they allowed US forces on their territories. He boasted of having "a bomb so big _ that we cannot even test it inside the vast area of the Soviet Union. If we set it off on the North Pole it would melt the ice-cap and send the oceans spilling over the world."438
In June, at the secret party plenum at which Khrushchev routed an intraparty plot to unseat him, the record of his foreign policy was scrutinized in a characteristically Soviet way. The defeated Molotov chided him for not doing enough to exploit divisions in the capitalist camp and for undermining Soviet prestige by undignified behavior, such as spending hours naked in a sauna with the president ofFinland. In backing the winner, the otherwise perceptive Anastas A. Mikoian claimed that, in exploiting "the contradictions of imperialism in the interests of communist policy, there has never been such a broad practice, such rich results," as under Khrushchev’s skillful leadership.439 In fact, initiatives to integrate Western Europe, culminating in the March 1957 Treaty of Rome that established the Common Market, signified the opposite.
Nor was Khrushchev’s management of the growing contradictions within Communism’s own camp very skillful. He tried to ostracize the Polish Communists, whose foremost ambition was to be recognized by Moscow as its most valuable clients. In courting Tito’s Yugoslavia, Khrushchev withdrew Soviet troops from neighboring Romania, thus making it easier for its devious rulers subsequently to shake off Soviet tutelage with impunity. The rapprochement with Yugoslavia did not last, but was enough to further antagonize the Chinese, despite the rash promise of Soviet assistance in the development of their nuclear program. More than ever before, Khrushchev needed a success.
World History
