Driving the Soviets up the wall: A Super-Ally, a superpower, and the building of the Berlin Wall, 1958-61

Cold War History

Volumn 1, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 53-74

  Harrison, Hope M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248096532     PISSN: 14682745     EISSN: 17437962     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/713999909     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. Tony Smith, 'New Wine for New Bottles: A "Pericentric Paradigm" for the Study of the Cold War', 10 June 1997 updated version of a talk presented at the 1997 Baker Conference on 'The New Cold War History', Ohio University, Athens, OH, 9-11 May 1997.
2. See also Odd Arne Westad, 'Russian Archives and Cold War History', Diplomatic History, 21/2 (Spring 1997), especially pp.268-71.
3. This approach is very much at odds with the standard approach of international relations theory, neorealism, propounded by Kenneth Waltz, which asserts that allies do not play significant roles in bipolarity. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (NY: Random House, 1979), pp.163, 168-72.
4. For the text of Khrushchev's ultimatum, see 'Note From the Soviet Union to the United States Regarding the Status of Berlin and the Potsdam Agreements, November 27, 1958', in United States, Department of State, Documents on Germany, 1944-1985 (Washington, DC: Office of the Historian, Department of State Publication 9446), pp.552-9.
5. Previous authors writing on this subject have emphasized factors other than East German influence on Soviet policy in the Berlin Crisis of 1958-61: James Richter, Khrushchev's Double Bind: Domestic and foreign Constraints on Soviet foreign Policy, 1953-1964 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995);
6. Hannes Adomeit, Soviet Risk-Taking and Crisis Behavior (Boston: George Allen und Unwin, 1982);
7. Marc Trachtenberg, 'The Berlin Crisis', in History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp.169-234;
8. and idem, A Constructed Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For works which emphasize the importance of the East German role in the crisis
9. see Hope M. Harrison, 'The Bargaining Power of Weaker Allies in Bipolarity and Crisis: The Dynamics of Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961' (Ph.D. diss., Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1994);
10. idem, 'Ulbricht and the Concrete "Rose": New Archival Evidence on the Dynamics of Soviet-East German Relations and the Berlin Crisis, 1958-1961', Cold War International History Project (hereafter, CWIHP), Working Paper No. 5 (May 1993);
11. and Michael Lemke, Die Berlinkrise 1958 bis 1963 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995).
12. Glenn H. Snyder, 'The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics', World Politics 36/4 (July 1984), pp.461-95;
13. Stanley Hoffmann, Gulliver's Troubles (NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968);
14. and Robert Osgood, NATO: The Entangling Alliance (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1962).
15. William Burr, 'Avoiding the Slippery Slope: The Eisenhower Administration and the Berlin Crisis, November 1958-January 1959', Diplomatic History 18/2 (Spring 1994), esp. pp.180-81.
16. What Glenn Snyder calls the security dilemma in alliance politics - the dilemma of strongly supporting an ally and thus risking entrapment by that ally or not so strongly supporting an ally and thus risking abandonment by that ally - operated on the Soviet side of the Cold War as well as the Western side. Snyder, 'The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics';
17. and idem, Alliance Politics (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997).
18. Kathryn Weathersby, 'Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945-1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives', CWIHP Working Paper No.8 (Nov. 1993), especially pp.23-5, quote from p.23.
19. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, 'One Hell of a Gamble': Khrushchev, Castro & Kennedy, 1958-1964 (NY: WW Norton & Company, 1997), pp.167, 169-70.
20. Ilya V Gaiduk, 'The Vietnam War and Soviet-American Relations, 1964-1973: New Russian Evidence', CWIHP Bulletin, 6-7 (Winter 1995/96), pp.232, 250-58.
21. see 'USSR Council of Ministers Order "On Measures to Improve the Health of the Political Situation of the GDR", 2 June 1953', CWIHP Bulletin 10 (March 1998), pp.79-81.
22. On the Soviet decision-making process leading up to the New Course, see Mark Kramer, 'The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy Making (Part 1)', Journal of Cold War Studies 1/1 (Winter 1999), pp.3-55.
23. Soviet support for the New Course was not limited to the GDR; they intended it to be implemented throughout East-Central Europe in Hungary, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria, as well as the Soviet Union itself, Kramer, 'The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle', pp.30-31.
24. See, for example, the comments of Ulbricht and Grotewohl at the 9 June 1959 Moscow summit, 'Kratkaia zapis' peregovorov s partiino-pravitel'stvennoi delegatsiei GDR 9 iunia 1959 g', pp.14-16
25. (for the complete translation of this summit meeting and the one on 18 June 1959, see Hope M. Harrison, introduction, translation, and annotation, 'The Berlin Crisis and the Khrushchev-Ulbricht Summits in Moscow, 9 and 18 June 1959', CWIHP Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998), pp.204-17) ;
26. and Ulbricht's 4 August 1961 report to Khrushchev, 'Informationen über die Ursachen der wirtschaftlichen Schwierigkeiten der DDR', SAPMO-BArch, ZPA, J IV 2/202/30.
27. On the vastly increasing amounts of Soviet economic aid to the GDR from 1953 through 1961, see 'Reshenie Sovetskogo pravitel'stva ob okazanii ekonomicheskoi pomoshchi Germanskoi Demokraticheskoi Respublike', 18 April 1953, AVPRF, F. 06, Op. 12a, Pap. 52, Del. 314;
28. and 'Spravka o zakliuchenii torgovikh soglashenii GDR so stranami sotsialistichekogo lageria na 1958 g', by A. Krut'ko, Trade Representative of the USSR in the GDR, 17 June 1958, AVPRF, F. 0742, Op. 3, Pap. 21, Por. 35.
29. For the complete English translation of this and of other high-level documents on Soviet-East German relations, see the appendices in Harrison, 'Ulbricht and the Concrete "Rose"'. 21.
30. See Khrushchev's speech on 4 August 1961 to the Warsaw Pact conference in Moscow, 'Iz stenogrammui soveshchaniia pervuikh sekretarei TsK kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii stran-ychastnits varshavskogo dogovora po voprosam, sviazannuim s podgotovkoi k zakluocheniuo germanskogo mirnogo dogovora', TsKhSD, F. 10, Op. 3, D. 12, published in Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 2 (March-April 1999), p.72. Referred to hereafter as 'Iz stenogrammui soveshchaniia pervuikh sekretarei'.
31. 'Kratkaia zapis' peregovorov c partiino-pravitel'stvennoi delegatsiei GDR 9 iunia 1959g', AVPRF, F. 0742, Op. 4, Por. 33, Pap. 31, p.4.
32. On this final point, see Waltz's oberservation that 'When great powers are in a stalemate, lesser states acquire an increased freedom of movement'. Theory of International Politics, p.184.
33. On the positive effects on bargaining power of 'weaker' states see Samuel B. Bacharach and Edward J. Lawler, Bargaining: Power, Tactics, and Outcomes (Washington: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1981), pp.186, 190;
34. and Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations: Bargaining, Decision Making, and System Structure in International Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp.29-30, 443.
35. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp.17, 22;
36. and idem, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp.37-9.
37. This kind of behaviour has been termed the second 'face' of power, indirect power, the power to prevent someone from doing something you do not want, or to manipulate the options available to them. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, 'Two Faces of Power', American Political Science Review 56/4 (December 1962), pp.947-52;
38. and idem, 'Decisions and Nondecisions: An Analytical Framework', American Political Science Review 57/3 (Sept. 1963), pp.632-42.
39. Ash uses the term to refer to the GDR use of FRG aid in the 1960s-80s. Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (NY: Random House, 1993), p.188; also pp.157-62, 168, 177, and 187.
40. Khrushchev Remembers, Vol. 1, with an introduction, commentary and notes by Edward Crankshaw, transl. and ed. by Strobe Talbott (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1970), p.456.
41. Sydney Gruson, 'Red German Curb Perplexes West. New Berlin Squeeze Feared as Entry of Envoys Posted to Bonn is Restricted', New York Times, 22 Sept. 1960.
42. Statement by Major General Nikolai F. Zakharov, the Soviet commandant in East Berlin, cited in 'Gain for Reds in Berlin. East Germans Seem to Have Free Rein From Russians Short of a Showdown', New York Times, 25 Sept. 1960.
43. see Hemen Ray, 'Die Ideologische Achse Peking-Pankow', Aussenpolitik 11 (1960);
44. and M.J. Esslin, 'East Germany: Peking-Pankow Axis?' The China Quarterly 3 (July-Sept. 1960).
45. In the words, presumably, of a State Department official, unsigned document, 27 March 1961, 'The Sino-Soviet Dispute and the Berlin Situation', The Declassified Documents Quarterly Catalog and Microfiche (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1978), 67C, p.1. The author thanks Beth Lester for a copy of this document.
46. In contrast to the other Soviet leaders who argued that the Construction of Socialism programme in the GDR should be slowed down in favour of the New Course, Beria and Malenkov were later accused of wanting to stop the Construction of Socialism programme altogether, 'abandon' the GDR, and allow it to be united 'on bourgeois terms' with the FRG. '"Delo Beriia". Plenum TsK KPSS Iiuli 1953 goda. Stenograficheskii Otchet', Izvestiia TsK KPSS 1,2 (Jan. and Feb. 1991), pp.140-214,147-208.
47. Theories of bargaining power show how a strong commitment by an ally to an alliance can increase the bargaining power of the other ally, and even risk the entrapment of the first by the second ally into supporting policies the first does not really favour. Snyder, 'The Alliance Security Dilemma', p.467.
48. 'Iz stenogrammui soveshchaniia pervikh sekretarei', p.72.
49. Hannes Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1998), pp.100-109;
50. and Doug Selvage, 'The End of the Berlin Crisis', CWIHP Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998), p.218.
51. Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany. A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995);
52. and Wilfried Loth, Stalin's ungeliebtes Kind, Warum Moskau die DDR nicht wollte (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1994).