Word: khrushchevism
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...satellite leaders began trooping into Moscow. First came Czechoslovakia's President Antonin Novotny, who had heavily invested in Cuba. Next came Bulgaria's Todor Zhevkov, and East Germany's Walter Ulbricht, who has been waiting since 1958 for Khrushchev to live up to his promise to throw the U.S., Britain and France out of Berlin. At week's end Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka joined the procession. Each in his own way, the satellite leaders were bound to ask the same question that preoccupied the rest of the world: Why had Khrushchev got himself involved...
Moscow often had tried rocket diplomacy of sorts in the past. Khrushchev once told Greece that he would rain nuclear destruction on the Acropolis, and he as good as promised Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that West Germany would become a "funeral pyre." But these were only what diplomats have come to call "missile letters." Never before had the Kremlin risked using missiles themselves to push its policies. It had not permitted Warsaw Pact allies to have offensive missiles, and had never, in fact, dared allow them off the soil of the Soviet Union. Why had Khrushchev done...
Explanation for Export. Since many in the West cling fondly to the view of Khrushchev as a moderate, one theory is that he was pushed into taking the Caribbean gamble, either by the military or by the so-called "hard line" or "Stalinist" group, which some experts suspect of strong and continuing influence. This, presumably, is just what Nikita would like the world to think. Some Western observers even go so far as to argue that if Khrushchev was forced into the Cuban move by "extremists," he is now in a better position than before, having proved the extremists wrong...
Most longtime students of Soviet politics doubt this. They believe that there is still something like collective leadership in Russia, hence that Khrushchev may have been egged on by militarists-or for that matter, urged to be careful by the cautious. Certainly the man who has exploded a 50-megaton bomb in a test over the Arctic, might, by ordinary standards, be considered a hard-liner himself. On balance, there is reason to assume that Khrushchev was behind the Cuban project from start to finish...
...version being fed to the satellites and neutrals is that Khrushchev really believed on the basis of Soviet intelligence reports that a U.S. invasion of Cuba was imminent. He felt that the Russian people could not bear to witness the overthrow of what they now considered as a reincarnation of their own great 1917 socialist revolution. So, according to the ingenious but preposterous Moscow tale, a careful Russian plan was drawn up to ship the missiles to Cuba without secrecy, install them without camouflage. When Kennedy got word, he would make a fuss, presumably demand negotiations, in which the Russians...