‘The main reason for the tension between East and West in the 1960s was the actions of the Soviet Union.’ How far do you agree with this statement?

The 1960s were a time of high tension in the Cold War.  When the Russian Premier and the American Vice President could get into a blazing public row about kitchens, you get an idea of just how deep these tensions went.  They included a Space Race; an Arms Race; espionage and counter-espionage; buying allies with promises of economic help; and proxy wars in Vietnam, Laos, the Congo, Nigeria and Israel.  In particular, that were four key flashpoints: the U-2 Affair (1960), the Berlin Wall (1961), the Cuban Missiles Crisis (1962) and the Prague Spring (1968). 

In 1962, this tension took the world to the brink of a nuclear war of extinction. 

It could be argued that the actions of the Soviet Union were the MAIN reason for the tension between East and West in the 1960s:

Certainly the Americans blamed the Soviets.  In 1960 future president Lyndon Johnson accused the Soviet Union of ‘sabre-rattling’ and said: “Premier Khrushchev seems determined to inflame the Communist world”. 

For all its promises of a ‘thaw’, Khrushchev’s concept of ‘Peaceful coexistence’ meant in fact peaceful competition.  In the Space Race it was the USSR who launched the first satellite and put the first man in space, challenging US technological dominance; and in the Arms Race the USSR developed a massive superiority in conventional forces and Khrushchev boasted that he turning out nuclear missiles “like sausages”. 

In the U-2 crisis of 1960, Khrushchev intentionally delayed announcing the capture of Powers to entrap the Americans, and it was Khrushchev who shouted and swore, marched out of the Paris Summit, and went off to develop his own spy satellites and spy planes. 

In Berlin, it was Khrushchev who upped the ante with his 1958 ultimatum, a demand reiterated in the Vienna Summit in 1961 at which, Kennedy admitted: "He beat the hell out of me”.  And it was the Soviets who without warning built the Berlin Wall – a deadly symbol of communist repression, it was for Khrushchev a cause for rejoicing: “Ulbricht laughs at the Americans”. 

In Cuba, also, it was Khrushchev who secretly started constructing the missiles sites, provoking a crisis, and who thensent ships carrying missiles into the midst of that crisis in a terrifying game of nuclear ‘chicken’. 

And in Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was the Soviets who horrified the western world by marching into Prague, reinforcing Western fears of Soviet expansionism – historians regard the Brezhnev Doctrine as the end of thaw which followed the Cuban missile crisis. 

So we can see that it might be argued that the actions of the Soviet Union were the main reason for the Cold War tension of the 1960s. 

But were the actions of the Soviet Union the MAIN reason for the Cold War tension of 1960s? There were other factors raising tension.  How do the actions of the Soviet Union rate against them as a cause of tension?

Firstly, what about the United States? In the 1960s, revisionist historians such as Gar Alperovitz and Gabriel Kolko blamed the Americans for the Cold War tensions.  It was certainly the US which set the pace in the Arms Race (in 1967, where the USSR had 7,000 nuclear warheads, the USA had 31,000 – more than 20 times the number needed to kill every human being on earth).  And whilst the USSR initially led the Space Race, Kennedy’s 1962 vow to land a man on the moon, and the massive funding of NASA this unlocked, put an end to that. 

The problem with the USA during this period was that, although it continually played the victim, it was determined to win every confrontation whatever the cost, as its policy swung back and forth between proactive containment and downright rollback. 

The crisis in 1960 was a direct result of the U-2’s violation of Soviet airspace, about which the Americans first told lies and then played hard-ball, asserting the right to surveillance.  “It is difficult to see how any head of government could have been expected to sit down at a peace conference under the veiled public threat of further violations of his airspace” wrote Wise & Ross (1962).  And after the failure of the Paris Summit, the US expanded its Corona satellite system and increased its U-2 flights (only not over Soviet territory). 

In Berlin, Soviet demands had been preceded by blatant violations of the Potsdam Treaty, by the use of West Berlin as a “cancerous tumour” for espionage, and by the West openly encouraging/causing East Germany’s refugee crisis.  And it was in response to Kennedy’s speech of 25 July threatening “we must be ready to resist with force” that Khrushchev went to Ulbricht and proposed a Wall.  Even then, it was Kennedy who insisted on the last propaganda word, visiting West Berlin and making his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ in earshot of the East Berliners. 

And in Cuba in 1962, the opening of the Russian archives has proven that the missiles sites were indeed as Khrushchev stated: “‘solely to defend Cuba against the attack of an aggressor” after the CIA-enabled Bay of Pigs invasion and the numerous US-prompted attempts to assassinate Castro (including the outrageous Northwoods Conspiracy).  They have also shown that the siting of American ICBMs in Turkey (ie Russia’s next door neighbour) was a provocation/cause. 

As regards ‘reasons for tension’, the USA has plenty to answer for. 

Moreover, we have to realise that there were other players in the Cold War than just the USA and the USSR, and that they too played significant parts in the raising of tensions.  Perhaps the main factor was China: when Khrushchev visited America in 1959, the Chinese accused him of a "bourgeois pacifist concept", taunting Khrushchev to renew his demand that America withdraw from West Berlin.  A major factor in Khrushchev’s proposal for the Berlin Wall was that Albania and Romania had both gone over to China, which had started also to cosy up to Ulbricht.  And, of course, Vietnam and Laos were a theatre of Chinese interventions. 

Recent research (with its ideas of ‘depolarisation’) has shown also that Russia’s allies in the Warsaw Pact were more than simply nodding dogs.  Ulbricht had so much influence over Soviet policy that historian Hope Harrison developed her ‘tail wags the dog’ that it was Ulbricht, not Khrushchev, who set the pace in the Berlin crisis.  Cuban revisionist historians, although they accept that Khrushchev ‘blanked’ Castro during the Missiles Crisis itself, have demonstrated considerable Cuban agency in the wider situation, notably the Soviet decision to build the sites.  And in 1968, whilst Brezhnev wavered, it was his Warsaw Pact allies – particularly East Germany and Poland – who demanded that he act before the Prague Spring spread. 

Constructivist historians have emphasised that communism was a worldwide, popular phenomenon, and that communist revolutions were capable of flaring up anywhere at any time.  Historians tend to address the Cold War as a conflict of superpowers, but in reality the USA was trying to stamp out small bush fires all over the globe (as, for example, when it intervened in the Dominican Republic in 1965). 

Also, we might also ask whether the Soviets really were as aggressive as has been suggested.  Looking at events, they seem mostly to have been reactive to external pressures (at Paris to the U-2 incursion; in Berlin to western pressures, China and Ulbricht; in Cuba to the Bay of Pigs and Turkish ICBMs; in Czechoslovakia to Warsaw Pact members). 

Wise and Ross realised as early as 1962 that Khrushchev’s desire for ‘peaceful co-existence’ was genuine – in 1960 he twice offered Eisenhower a way out (by denying knowledge, or by apologising) and he described as “a bitter shameful disappointment” his realisation that Eisenhower did not feel the same way.  Even then, he tried détente again at Vienna, and it is generally accepted that the Berlin Wall eased tensions – something that Kennedy accepted with relief.  In 1962, it was Khrushchev’s telegrams that provided the opening for a stand-down, and – as revisionist historian James Paterson pointed out (1974) the massive Soviet arms build-up after 1962 was a reaction to what Soviet leaders regarded as a massive humiliation: “’Never will we caught like this again’, concluded the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister”.  And note that Czechoslovakia in 1968 caused no tension at all because, since Hungary in 1956, the West had ceded control behind the Iron Curtain to the USSR, and so did not react. 

So, how far might we agree that the actions of the Soviet Union were the MAIN reason for the Cold War tension of the 1960s?

The first ‘traditional’ western histories of the Cold War wholly blamed the Soviets; they would have had no problem answering this question: ‘Yes!!’ Equally, the revisionist historians of the Vietnam War era would just as easily have answered: ‘No – the USA was’. 

Recent historians, with access to records on both sides, have tended to avoid blaming either ‘side’, preferring to see the Cold War as a multi-layered ‘pericentric’ conflict of ideologies and cultures, fuelled by fear of ‘the other’, and descending at times into mere one-upmanship. 

We have seen that there are arguments that the USSR played its part in that conflict, but that it also genuinely tried to act in a way which might achieve peace, and that there were other players – particularly the USA, but others such as China, Cuba and the Soviet satellite states – who in their turn provoked and/or escalated the tension. 

Thus we can say with confidence that, although the USSR played a significant part in the 1960s Cold War tensions, Soviet actions were NOT the main cause of those tensions. 

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