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Timothy J. Naftali

A. A. Fursenko

Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary Paperback – Illustrated, October 17, 2007

by Aleksandr Fursenko (Author), Timothy Naftali (Author)

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“Contains unsettling insights into some of the most dangerous geopolitical crises of the time.”―The Economist

This acclaimed study from the authors of “One Hell of a Gamble” brings to life head-to-head confrontations between the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Drawing on their unrivaled access to Politburo and KGB materials, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali combine new insights into the Cuban missile crisis as well as startling narratives of the contests for Suez, Iraq, Berlin, and Southeast Asia, with vivid portraits of leaders who challenged Moscow and Washington. Khrushchev’s Cold War provides a gripping history of the crisis years of the Cold War.

Print length

640 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

October 17, 2007
Dimensions

6.1 x 1.5 x 9.2 inches
ISBN-10

0393330729
ISBN-13

978-0393330724
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Aleksandr Fursenko, one of Russia’s leading historians, is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Timothy Naftali, a frequent contributor to Slate and NPR, is director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (October 17, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 640 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393330729
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393330724
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.09 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 1.5 x 9.2 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,067,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,842 in Russian History (Books)
- #10,352 in Political Science (Books)
- #41,472 in World History (Books)

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R. Crawford

My First “Enemy”

Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2021

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I believe the first President an American child remembers will occupy a special and non-political image in that child’s mind, even as he/she moves to adulthood. For me, that President was Dwight Eisenhower. So if you buy that analogy, then the first “enemy” you can remember will also convey the emotional memory as an adversary into adulthood. And for me that was Nikita Khrushchev.
But as adults, we also have the opportunity to examine those immature images in the light of history and intellectual honesty.
Doing so a bit, thanks to this book, I find the former Soviet leader - still boorish at times - but a more psychologically and intellectually complex, less evil tyrant and more insecure and troubled.
If you’re interested in those troubled times, this is a challenging but fascinating read.

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Henry Price (Hard Fried History)

Highly Readable and Well-Explained

Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2020

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Best history book on the Cold War, perhaps the best history book generally, I have read in awhile. Easy on the eyes, not oppressively scholastic yet still insightful and detailed. Accessible to the casual reader without having dumbed anything down. The presentation of the historical record and the analysis the authors provide are intertwined very well and the authors do a great job explaining Khrushchev and more broadly the Kremlin's thought process when responding to seminal Cold War events as they did.

As a brief note, this book does pick up roughly in 1953 and gives an extremely brief overview of who Khrushchev was before he was top dog. If you want to know about Khrushchev's upbringing or how he got to where he was, read Taubman, but if you want to know specifically about the Soviet (and even the broader US) perspective on the Cold War, specifically in Europe, the Middle East, the Congo and Cuba, I don't think you could find a better book. Read for an episode of my podcast, Hard Fried History.

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Essential Reading

Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2013

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Edward Crankshaw, Khrushchev's British biographer, acknowledged the Soviet leader's various faults, but noted that, although "rough, domineering, violent, sometimes vindictive, boastful, filled with peasant cunning, quite uneducated in the conventional sense, and with a mind that was never fully trained, [Khrushchev] nevertheless embodied certain qualities of character, imagination, perhaps even humility, which set him apart from his colleagues and above all of them." Despite traits acquired from the Soviet system of which he was a product, in his later years, Khrushchev occasionally showed signs of being "a courageous statesman with flashes of deep wisdom, who in other circumstances might have become an outstanding world figure held in wide respect."

Khrushchev's Cold War provides a somewhat less favorable portrait of the Soviet leader. Its emphasis is not on the contrast between Khrushchev's good and bad instincts, but rather on his ironic policy of confrontation with the West in order to make the USSR more like the West--in terms of military power, standard of living, and perhaps even provision for peaceful transfer of political power within the Soviet Union. Authors Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali have produced a massive, but very readable, 670-page volume (including 74 pages of annotation and a 45-page index). Fursenko was chairman of the history department of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Naftali, the former director of the Presidential Recordings Project at the University of Virginia, subsequently served as director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, and as a consultant to the 9/11 Commission. Their research for this volume drew on published diplomatic records, memoirs, monographs, recorded Presidential conversations, interviews, and records in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Presidential Libraries and the National Archives. They also relied on Russian archival records. Thus, this is a thoroughly researched and well documented book, but it should perhaps not be regarded as definitive until some of these Soviet records have been interpreted by other historians.

It is impossible to do justice to all the insights in this volume in a brief review. Its overall theme is Khrushchev's ongoing effort to increase the Soviet Union's military power, improve its standard of living, cultivate new allies, and end the Cold War, while avoiding war with the United States. Toward these ends, he pursued a dysfunctional policy that alternated between accommodation and confrontation. Naturally, his belligerent moves tended to undermine his conciliatory ones. But, to a surprising degree, Khrushchev's policies emulated those of the United States. Like Eisenhower, he opposed excessive military spending. Although he seemed to be adopting a threatening military posture, he reduced the size of the Russian army, declined to build a fleet of aircraft carriers, and chose not to maximize the development of nuclear missiles. But, like John Foster Dulles, he sought to use nuclear weapons for diplomatic leverage. By providing military and economic aid to Third World countries, he placed avoidable burdens on the Soviet economy without developing reliable diplomatic allies.

Soviet leaders were attempting a delicate balancing act. They blamed the uprisings in Poland and Hungary on the failure of their respective governments to raise the people's standard of living. They feared a similar failure in the USSR might lead to uprisings in the Soviet Union itself. Khrushchev may have understood Russian living conditions better than most other Kremlin officials, and may have sensed this problem more keenly. In 1958, faced with a choice between increasing consumer goods and matching US missile output during the 1960s, Khrushchev rejected increased missile production. He believed that the USSR could achieve its objectives without matching the US missile for missile. But, by the early 1960s, the Soviets had very few missiles and no bombers capable of reaching the US with nuclear bombs.

Although the U2 flights that had revealed the limitations of the Soviet bomber fleet were suspended in 1958, from other intelligence, US officials questioned the strength of the Soviet missile force. And subsequent U2 flights reinforced their doubts. The Russians, aware of these flights, must have suspected that the US was able to call their nuclear bluff. For its part, the US had missiles and bombers in Europe, fully capable of directing nuclear weapons at Soviet targets. It was in this context that the plan to place Russian missiles in Cuba took shape. If the US could station its missiles in nations close to, or contiguous with, the USSR, what prevented the Soviets from placing their missiles in Cuba, equally close the US? The USSR had not taken military action to prevent the installation of US missiles in Europe. So most Soviet leaders did not expect the US to take military action against the placement of Russian missiles in Cuba. In any case, with striking myopia, they apparently did not believe the presence of these missiles would be detected. Once the missiles were in place, Khrushchev planned to use their existence to gain more respect from the US, to protect Cuba from an American invasion, and to negotiate the removal of western troops from Berlin, a test ban treaty, and perhaps a grand agreement that would end the Cold War.

Soviet leaders were surprisingly uninformed about the US. (Khrushchev became apprehensive after learning that he would be taken to Camp David, fearing that it was some sort of internment facility!) Not only did they expect the missiles in Cuba to go undetected, they also failed to anticipate the American reaction to their presence. As a result, they had not planned possible responses to the US quarantine of the island. American leaders were equally unprepared for the crisis. They had no plans to attack Cuba or to cope with potential Soviet countermeasures in Germany. Hard liners on both sides were ready to go to war. Some US advisors suggested an invasion; Soviet defense minister Malinovsky drafted instructions that contemplated the use of strategic nuclear weapons if America invaded Cuba. But both Khrushchev and Kennedy were seeking a way to defuse the situation.

American historians generally interpret the outcome of the crisis as a victory for the US. But, although he was forced to remove his missiles from Cuba, Khrushchev could feel that the US was now taking Russia more seriously. Kennedy had agreed not to invade Cuba and would remove American missiles from Turkey. The super powers were on the way to a partial test ban treaty; and western countries increasingly tended to confer de facto recognition on East Germany. Perhaps most important, leaders on both sides learned to regard nuclear war as a real possibility. Just how real became apparent 30 years later when the release of Soviet records revealed that tactical and intermediate range missiles in Cuba, which likely would have been used against an invasion, had already been tipped with nuclear warheads. With the recognition of nuclear stalemate, the great powers transferred their attention to conventional conflicts, especially "wars of national liberation." This led to US involvement in Viet Nam. Fursenko and Naftali have little to say about Viet Nam. Ironically, in view of later developments, Khrushchev cared little about Southeast Asia. In Laos, the apparent flash point at the time, Khrushchev advised the Communists to compromise with non-Communists. In 1963, he told Averell Harriman that Laos was insignificant, and suggested that the US and the USSR should ignore it. Understandably, Chinese and North Vietnamese leaders felt Khrushchev was willing to sell them out to achieve his objectives in Europe.

The American heroes in this account are Eisenhower and Kennedy, who stepped back from escalation and confrontation at key moments. Khrushchev also occasionally backed away from the abyss--but sometimes it was his actions that had taken the world to the abyss. If there was a hero on the Soviet side, it was undoubtedly Anastas Mikoyan. For years, he had been the Kremlin's expert on foreign trade. (Following a 1936 visit to the United States, he became enamored of American ice cream and arranged for its manufacture in the USSR.) On the basis of his experience, he understood, perhaps better than any other Soviet leader, the diplomatic implications of Khrushchev's policies. Time and again, he attempted to prevent confrontational actions and sought to moderate those he could not prevent. That a nuclear war did not break out during these years may be due largely to the efforts of this one man.

Anyone interested in the history of the Cold War, or, indeed, in the future of humanity, should read this book. It tells the story of statesmen who worked to prevent catastrophe. But it also shows that, whether from positions of strength or weakness, nuclear powers may be willing to resort to brinkmanship to achieve their goals. This willingness, coupled with each side's misunderstandings of its adversary's intentions and capabilities, does not bode well for the future. And, once nuclear war becomes a real possibility, leaders tend to disregard their previous plans for "limited" nuclear war.

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Christine Norris

Understanding Khrushchev

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2021

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I lived through the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis. I was a small child then and processed this man as a one dimensional demon. Only when I processed and understood JFKs brilliant reasoning and diplomacy did Khrushchev become two dimensional. This book furnishes the third dimension. He was an interesting man. I am glad I read this book. Things were not always as they appeared. Lesson learned.

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