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    Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961
    Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961
    Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961
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    Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961

    By Hope M. Harrison

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    The Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War. For the first time, this path-breaking book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the communists' decision to build the Wall in 1961. Hope Harrison's use of archival sources from the former East German and Soviet regimes is unrivalled, and from these sources she builds a highly original and provocative argument: the East Germans pushed the reluctant Soviets into building the Berlin Wall.


    This fascinating work portrays the different approaches favored by the East Germans and the Soviets to stop the exodus of refugees to West Germany. In the wake of Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviets refused the East German request to close their border to West Berlin. The Kremlin rulers told the hard-line East German leaders to solve their refugee problem not by closing the border, but by alleviating their domestic and foreign problems. The book describes how, over the next seven years, the East German regime managed to resist Soviet pressures for liberalization and instead pressured the Soviets into allowing them to build the Berlin Wall. Driving the Soviets Up the Wall forces us to view this critical juncture in the Cold War in a different light. Harrison's work makes us rethink the nature of relations between countries of the Soviet bloc even at the height of the Cold War, while also contributing to ongoing debates over the capacity of weaker states to influence their stronger allies.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJun 27, 2011
    ISBN9781400840724
    Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961
    Author

    Hope M. Harrison

    Hope M. Harrison is Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies in the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. She is also Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at the Elliott School. She served as Director for European and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council from 2000 to 2001.

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      Driving the Soviets up the Wall - Hope M. Harrison

      Driving the Soviets up the Wall

      PRINCETON STUDIES IN

      INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS

      Series Editors

      Jack L. Snyder,

      Marc Trachtenberg,

      and Fareed Zakaria

      Recent Titles

      Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet–East German

      Relations, 1953–1961, by Hope M. Harrison

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      Authority and Control, by Jeffrey Herbst

      The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social

      Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International

      Relations, by Christian Reus-Smit

      Driving the Soviets up the Wall

      SOVIET–EAST GERMAN RELATIONS,

      1953–1961

      Hope M. Harrison

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

      Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,

      Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

      All Rights Reserved

      Third printing, and first paperback printing, 2005

      Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12428-5

      Paperback ISBN-10: 0-691-12428-0

      THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE CLOTH EDITION OF

      THIS BOOK AS FOLLOWS

      Harrison, Hope Millard.

      Driving the Soviets up the wall : Soviet–East German relations, 1953–1961 / Hope M.

      Harrison.

      p. cm.—(Princeton studies in international history and politics)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 0-691-09678-3 (alk. paper)

      1. Germany (East)—Relations—Soviet Union. 2. Soviet Union—Relations—Germany (East) I. Title. II. Series.

      DD284.5.S65 H368      2003

      327.43’1047′09045—dc21                     2002192693

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Sabon

      Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

      pup.princeton.edu

      Printed in the United States of America

      10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3

      To My Parents,

      and in Memory of Adam B. Ulam

      Contents

      List of Maps

      Preface

      Acknowledgments

      Abbreviations

      INTRODUCTION

      The Dynamics of Soviet–East German Relations

      in the Early Cold War

      CHAPTER ONE

      1953: Soviet–East German Relations and Power Struggles

      in Moscow and Berlin

      CHAPTER TWO

      1956–1958: Soviet and East German Policy Debates

      in the Wake of the Twentieth Party Congress

      CHAPTER THREE

      1958–1960: Khrushchev Takes on the West in the Berlin Crisis

      CHAPTER FOUR

      1960–1961: Ulbricht, Khrushchev, and the Berlin Wall

      Conclusion

      Notes

      Note on Sources

      Bibliography

      Index

      List of Maps

      Map 1. Europe during the Cold War

      Map 2. Divided Germany and Berlin with Western Access Routes

      Map 3. Five Places to Stop the Refugees

      Preface

      ON THE AFTERNOON of 9 November 1989, I boarded a plane on a long-planned journey to West Berlin. I was going with a group of graduate students from Harvard and Stanford for ten days on a program sponsored by the city of West Berlin. In an effort to maintain the U.S. commitment to West Berlin, the city paid for the program every year to bring up and coming Americans to West Berlin. At the time, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I was working on my dissertation on the building of the Berlin Wall. I wanted to know as much about divided Berlin as possible and was eager for the trip.

      Throughout the fall of 1989, East German refugees had been escaping via West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw and across the Hungarian border into Austria. They were all headed to West Germany. Bonn accepted all these refugees as West German citizens entitled to generous social welfare support. In addition, they gave each East German welcome money of 100 deutschmarks (worth roughly $55 at the time). Over 50,000 East Germans had fled to West Germany between May and October 1989, and by early November, this had become a crisis for the West German economic and social welfare system. The refugee numbers increased dramatically in early November. In fact, just before I left for West Berlin, 15,000 East Germans fled to West Germany via Czechoslovakia on 4–5 November,¹ and on 7 November, two hundred East Germans left East Germany each hour.² The question at the top of my list for all of the West Berlin and West German officials we were going to meet was, How can you keep this up? What are you going to do about the refugees pouring into your country?

      During the night of Thursday, 9 November, our group flew to Frankfurt. When we boarded the connecting flight to West Berlin on Friday morning, everyone on the plane was reading newspapers with banner headlines declaring, The Wall Is Open! I looked around and thought, Is 10 November the equivalent of April Fool’s Day in Germany? What is going on? I didn’t have to wonder for long. The pilot got on the intercom system and announced, The Wall fell in Berlin last night. We are flying into history.

      I could not believe my luck at being in Berlin for this historic occasion, all the more so because of my dissertation topic. My parents, with whom I had spoken many times about the dissertation, were beside themselves with excitement at my timing. Ich war dabei! (I was there! as all the quickly manufactured T-shirts and mugs said.)

      Euphoria is the only word to describe the mood on the streets of Berlin. People were selling champagne on street corners. On the afternoon of 10 November, in a jet-lagged, yet ebullient state, several of us went to Kennedy Platz (the site of Kennedy’s 1963 Ich bin ein Berliner speech), in front of the West Berlin City Hall, Rathaus Schöneberg, to hear the West German leaders speak about the momentous opening of the Wall. Chancellor Helmut Kohl had flown back hurriedly from Warsaw that morning along with Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. The West Berlin mayor, Walter Momper, was also on the podium. The most popular speaker of the day, though, was Willy Brandt, who had been the mayor of West Berlin when the Wall went up in 1961 and had gone on to become the West German chancellor.³ As a historian and as a human being, it was extraordinary to be part of the celebration at Rathaus Schöneberg—to actually be there and feel the emotion of the day, not just read about it in history books.

      Back at the hotel for dinner, I befriended one of the West Berlin English teachers hosting us, Claudia Wilhelm. Claudia volunteered to drive me around in her VW Bug the next day. Claudia was and is a Berliner. She was born in the East and fled with her family to the West in 1958. When the Wall came down, she was reunited with family in the East, including some she had not even known about.

      Saturday morning, 11 November, Claudia picked me up and drove me to see the celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate and the opening of the Glienecker Brücke, the famous spy bridge connecting West Berlin and Potsdam, East Germany. In 1962 the American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers had been traded for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in the middle of the bridge. Claudia and I stood amid crowds of cheering West Berliners as East Germans walked across the bridge and into the beautiful Grunewald section of West Berlin with its forests and lakes. People cheered. People cried. We took pictures. It was incredible.

      The next morning, we drove to Potsdamer Platz, the historic center of Berlin and site of Europe’s first traffic light in 1924. With the building of the Berlin Wall through the center of Potsdamer Platz, it became a barren, terrifying no-man’s land of layers of wall, minefields, guard towers, anti-tank barricades, guard dogs, and guards with a shoot-to-kill order. But on this spectacular Sunday morning, we watched a bulldozer lift up and remove a section of the Wall at Potsdamer Platz. Then we stood with the thousands of people who parted to form a corridor through which East Berliners could walk or drive into West Berlin. It was the most moving experience of my ten days in Berlin. I remember watching one young couple drive through in their green Trabant, or Trabi (the tiny, cardboard-like, exhaust-emitting, popular East German car). They were alternately laughing and crying, and people were reaching through their open car windows to hand the couple money and champagne. The hood of their car was covered with red and white carnations. We were all filled with emotion.

      All weekend long, it was impossible to drive a car on the main street of West Berlin, the Kürfurstendamm, due to the tens of thousands of East Berliners and East Germans strolling up and down it to get a look at West Berlin’s Fifth Avenue. We wanted to take the subway to East Berlin, but it was out of the question to even enter a subway station due to the thousands of people coming in from East Berlin. Monday morning’s West Berlin tabloid, Bild, had huge headlines in black, red, and gold, the colors of the German flag saying, "Guten Morgen, Deutschland. Es war ein schönes Wochenende. Good Morning, Germany. It was a beautiful weekend." It certainly was.

      People were hammering away at the wall to take home pieces as souvenirs. In the early days, there were pieces everywhere on the ground. As Claudia and I picked up a few, I thought to myself, Now, who is going to want to read a book about the sad story of building the Wall, when they can read an uplifting book about the fall of the Wall?

      But I also more optimistically thought, Maybe it will be possible to tell a more complete story of how the Wall went up now that it has come down. Sure enough, once Germany united a year later and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the archival doors swung open in Berlin and Moscow. This allowed me, and others, to piece together a much more complete picture of the East German and Soviet decision-making process leading to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Less than a year after German unification, in the fall of 1991, I began my work in the archives.

      Developments since unification have added to the importance of understanding the decision to build the Wall and the impact it had. People lost their lives trying to escape over or under the Wall. They were shot by East German border guards. The whole border system surrounding the Wall was not just something that sat passively while people stared at it in defiance. It encompassed an entire lethal response system that was activated when someone tried to cross the border without permission. Human beings were responsible for killing other human beings, Germans for killing Germans.

      The Wall trials since unification have attempted to assign culpability for this deadly border system to the high-level East German policy makers and the border guards who implemented their superiors’ directives. Some of the accused and convicted, such as former East German leader Egon Krenz, have tried to deflect the blame for the Wall and all it entailed onto the Soviets and the cold war. The evidence presented in this book, however, demonstrates the critical responsibility of the East German leaders themselves for the building of the Berlin Wall and all that went with it.

      Peter Schneider presciently forecast in his 1982 book, Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper), It will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.⁴ Even more than most people realized until the Wall came down, it really mattered on which side of the Wall you lived your life—the communist east or the capitalist, democratic west. Since German unification, the Mauer im Kopf (the wall in the mind) has continued to divide east and west Germans.⁵ The euphoria I witnessed in November 1989 faded away within months as resentments built up on both sides. The west Germans resented all the money it took to rebuild the shattered east; and the east Germans resented being taken over, colonized by the west with all of the East German traditions they had developed over forty years summarily dumped on the ash heap of history along with the ubiquitous statues of Lenin. Divided by the Wall, the distance between the East and West Germans expanded. It turned out to be not so easy to bridge just by tearing down the Wall and letting East Germans drive through in their Trabis. But the next generation of Germans will surely bridge this distance.

      On my final morning in Berlin in November 1989, Claudia drove me to the airport as the snow fell on pre-dawn Berlin. People were in their homes asleep after another night of celebrating the Wall’s opening. As we drove through the deserted streets, past Schloss Charlottenburg, I knew that I would return many times to uncover the history of the Berlin Wall. I, too, had become a Berliner.

      Acknowledgments

      I AM GRATEFUL to the institutions and colleagues who have helped me over the years of work on this book. I want to thank the institutions who have generously supported my research and writing: the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, the Nuclear History Program, Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the Social Science Research Council’s Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University of Berlin, Harvard’s Davis Center, Lafayette College, the Kennan Institute, the Cold War International History Project, and the Norwegian Nobel Institute. I also benefited greatly from interacting with my colleagues at these institutions.

      Since most of the key sources I used for this book were archival documents in Moscow and Berlin, I am happy to take this opportunity to thank the archivists and administrative staff who helped me: in Berlin, Herr Lange, Frau Gräfe, Frau Pardon, and Frau Rauber at SAPMO-Bundesarchiv; Herr Geyer at the (East German) Foreign Ministry archive; and Herr Förster and Frau Tschuck at the Stasi archive; in Moscow, Dr. Lebedev, Dr. Stegny, and the many archivists at the Foreign Ministry Archive; and Zoia Vodopianova, Vladimir Chernous, Yuri Malov, Rem Ussikov, Anatolii Prokopenko, and Natalia Tomilina at the post-1953 Central Committee Archive, now called the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History. Sven Holtsmark was very helpful in deciphering the filing methods of the Russian Foreign Ministry archive for me. I am grateful for the research help of Anne Kjelling and Bjørn Feen at the library of the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Olga Khomenko, Paul du Quenoy, and Justin Gibbons have been valuable research assistants at different stages of the work on this book, and Jeremy Kahn gave me helpful computer assistance with the manuscript. I was lucky to be able to supplement my archival work with interviews with former Soviet and East German officials. I want to particularly thank Karl Schirdewan (who has since passed away) and his wife Giesela, as well as Horst Brie in Berlin and Yuli Kvitsinky in Moscow for their openness.

      My dear friends in Moscow and Berlin have been tremendously generous with their time and apartment space. And they made my research trips very special. Warm thanks to Lena Sorokoletovskikh and Yura Bloshkin in Moscow; Alla Zbinovsky and Andy Braddel, formerly in Moscow, now in London; and Claudia Wilhelm, Beate Ihme-Tuchel, Johannes Tuchel, Lothar Wilker, Angelika Straub, and Hans-Hermann Hertle in Berlin. Claudia especially has been limitless in her hospitality and friendship. Thanks also to Ambassador Nikolai Gribkov in Moscow.

      Several colleagues have read all or part of this work and offered valuable advice. The final product is my responsibility alone, but it has been much improved by their help. In particular, Christian Ostermann and Melvyn Leffler each read the entire manuscript at crucial points. Christian and I spent the summer of 2000 pouring over the manuscript and having very stimulating discussions about every part of it. Christian helped me think through many crucial points. I cannot thank him enough for his careful attention to my manuscript, his lively conversation, and his friendship. Mel read the manuscript in the winter of 2001–2002. He gave an extremely generous amount of his time to editing the manuscript and pressing me on key questions. His comments, advice, and encouragement were invaluable in the final stage of my work.

      I appreciate the enthusiasm Jim Hershberg has shown for this project from the start and his suggestions. I also want to thank Jeff Kopstein and an anonymous reviewer for Princeton University Press for their very helpful comments. Jack Snyder, Robert Legvold, Robert Jervis, Mark von Hagen, Marc Trachtenberg, Tom Christensen, Kim Zisk, Bill Burr, John Lewis Gaddis, Tim Naftali, Geir Lundestad, and Jim Goldgeier all read parts of the manuscript in earlier stages and provided constructive comments. I also had useful discussions with many other colleagues and have benefited from their work: Hannes Adomeit, Günter Bishof, Tom Blanton, Tim Colton, Frank Costigliola, Greg Domber, Alexei Filitov, John Gearson, Beate Ihme-Tuchel, Mark Kramer, Haejong Lee, Michael Lemke, Gerry Livingston, Vojtech Mastny, Ernest May, Jim McAdams, David Murphy, Olav Njølstad, Leopoldo Nuti, Arnie Offner, Sue Peterson, Blair Ruble, Kori Schake, Doug Selvage, Dick Smyser, William Taubman, Oldrich Tuma, Matthias Uhl, Adam Ulam, Ruud van Dijk, Armin Wagner, Kathryn Weathersby, Odd Arne Westad, Gerhard Wettig, and Vlad Zubok. I am particularly grateful to Armin Wagner and Matthias Uhl, who responded from Berlin so quickly, helpfully, and thoroughly to my detailed e-mail questions in the final stage of my work on this book. A timely conversation on an airplane with Ken Reger persuaded me to add the preface.

      I want to thank Lew Bateman and John Lewis Gaddis for their early support for the publication of this work. It was Marc Trachtenberg’s introduction to History and Strategy in 1991 that sold me on the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics series. Marc made it clear that his work was at the intersection of history and political science and that scholars in the two fields had much to gain by sharing insights. I wholeheartedly agree with Marc and hope that historians and political scientists will find value in this book.

      I am glad that my colleagues at the history department and the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University decided to take the risk of hiring a former political scientist and have given me a wonderful academic home. In particular, I want to thank Ron Spector, Ed Berkowitz, and Harry Harding. Ed came up with the idea for the title of this book at my job talk at George Washington. I also want to thank my dear friend Lil Fenn, formerly of George Washington’s history department and now at Duke University, who made the maps for this book. The unique geography of divided Berlin and divided Germany is essential to the story here, and Lil graciously offered to portray this with maps. I am very grateful to all the people who helped me at Princeton University Press—Chuck Myers, Kevin Mclnturff, Gail Schmitt, Leslie Flis, Marsha Kunin, and Maria denBoer.

      Loving support of friends and family is essential in my life and has sustained me over the years of writing this book. Thanks to Devin Reese, Hal Cardwell and Camilla Cardwell, Mei Zhu, Lily Marshall, Anna Kyznetsova, Rob Litwak, George Liston Seay, and to my grandmother and my aunt Mary. I am also grateful to Ray Marvin and David Longo for their special help and to my neighbor Rosemary Normand. Kevin Carroll is an angel in my life. No words can adequately express his profound influence on my life. But he knows.

      I am so lucky to have my oldest and dearest friend, Beth Onufrak, in my life. She is a great source of support and happiness. Beth has cheerfully endured countless phone calls talking about Khrushchev and Ulbricht. And she is a pediatric psychologist, not a historian! We have shared many things.

      I am blessed to have four wonderful parents: my mother, my father, my stepmother, and my stepfather. My stepmother, Linda Harrison, was my high school history teacher and has been a great friend and inspiration. My stepfather, Joseph Blaney, shares an interest and expertise in history with me. He has been a great support to me for over twenty years, and he and my mother (and their cat, Butterfly) graciously hosted me for a month in their home at the final stage of my work on this book. Butterfly was a great help, except when she sat on the manuscript.

      I feel infinite gratitude for all my mother, Dorothy G. Blaney, and my father, Robert L. Harrison, have given me. I have inherited my father’s patience and attention to detail, without which I could have never written this book. I cherish our special trips to Berlin together. My mother’s love and support for me in everything, including completing this book, have been boundless. She is the rock in my life and the very definition of a mother. We have discussed most of this book, and she has read and commented on portions of it.

      This book is dedicated to my parents and to the memory of Adam B. Ulam. It was Adam’s examination of the Berlin Crisis—in an undergraduate class I took with him at Harvard, and in his seminal work, Expansion and Coexistence—that piqued my curiosity to know more. A professor can give no greater gift to a student.

      Abbreviations

      Driving the Soviets up the Wall

      INTRODUCTION

      The Dynamics of Soviet–East German Relations in the Early Cold War

      THE TWO STATES that emerged from the defeated Germany were central to the development of the cold war. Rapidly evolving from defeated objects of Four Power policy, the two Germanys became important actors in their own right on the front line of the cold war. Both superpowers initially treated their part of Germany as war booty to be plundered and kept weak, but as the cold war developed, they would each come to see their part of Germany as an essential ally whose needs were intertwined with their own. For political, military, economic, and ideological reasons, the superpowers engaged in a competition for allies to show that their side of the cold war was the stronger, more popular, more vibrant one. They also wanted to ensure that their German ally would not unite with the other against them. Beginning in the 1950s, the superpowers invested themselves, and their reputations, increasingly in their German allies, who were adept at taking advantage of this situation.

      While there have been a variety of in-depth studies of the U.S.–West German alliance,¹ there has been much less investigation of the Soviet–East German alliance.² This book will take advantage of the opening of former communist archives to examine the Soviet–East German side of the cold war from Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 through the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. After the profound Soviet losses of World War II, the Kremlin leaders’ prime motive initially was to make sure Germany could not rise up and threaten them again. It took longer for the Soviets than for the Western Powers to shift their policy from destruction and retribution in Germany to construction and support of an ally. It was a big leap from Stalin’s sanction of the raping and pillaging of the Soviet Zone of Germany³ in the mid- to late 1940s to Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev’s declaration to the East Germans that your needs are our needs in the 1950s.⁴ This book tells the story of Khrushchev’s increasing commitment to a strong, socialist state in East Germany and the ways the persistent East German leader Walter Ulbricht was able to use this commitment to his advantage. It is the story of East Germany transforming its weakness into strength in its relations with the Soviet Union and the story of the East Germans’ capacity to resist Soviet directives. This book will demonstrate that Soviet–East German relations from 1953–1961, particularly concerning the divided city of Berlin, cannot be understood without studying the actions and aims of both the Kremlin and East Berlin.

      An appreciation of the importance of nonsuperpower actors in the cold war is one of the primary lessons scholars have gleaned from the former Soviet bloc’s new archival evidence. In response, the political scientist Tony Smith has called for a pericentric study of the cold war,⁵ and the historian James G. Hershberg has urged a retroactive debipolarization of cold war history.⁶ Both scholars point to the opportunity and need to supplement previous studies focusing on the role of the superpowers with studies that examine the contributions of other states to the dynamics and key events of the cold war. Allies mattered in the cold war both because of the importance vested in them by the superpowers and because of actions they took at times independent of their superpower patrons, especially actions that exacerbated superpower relations or dragged more powerful superpower patrons into situations and commitments they otherwise would not have chosen.⁷ Only by including the actions and perceptions of key allies, such as England, France, the two Germanys, the two Koreas, the two Chinas, and the two Vietnams, in the history of the cold war can we arrive at a more nuanced and comprehensive analysis of some of the pivotal events and dynamics of that period. The roles of the two superpowers must be combined with those of important allies.

      The present book is an effort to do this. This book will illustrate that the Soviet–East German relationship was more two-sided than previously understood, that in some important ways a mutual dependency existed that mattered for the evolution of the cold war. As Abraham Ben-Zvi postulates in studying U.S.-Israeli relations, the core of numerous patron-client [relationships] is seldom characterized by pure dependence, but rather by what [Klaus] Knorr calls ‘asymmetrical interdependence.’ ⁸ The concept of interdependence in superpower-ally relations has been well developed on the Western side of the cold war, revealing the influence of America’s allies on the cold war–as persuasive allies and independent actors whose views and actions mattered to the United States for a variety of reasons. This body of literature demonstrates that it was not just U.S. preferences that were expressed in relations with its allies; the perceptions and aims of the allies were also important factors influencing U.S. policy. For example, the British played a crucial role in prodding the Americans to respond to the Soviet threat by establishing the Marshall Plan, a West German state, and NATO;⁹ and the West European invitation for a postwar American presence was an essential part of U.S. decision making.¹⁰ Outside of Europe, Pakistan, Taiwan, and Israel all pulled the Americans in as much as possible to assist them against their regional rivals.¹¹ The United States often found that its actions in these regions were guided more by the concerns of its local ally than by U.S. global strategy.¹²

      American allies did not exert their influence just by being persuasive in interactions with the United States; they also at times went outside of those interactions to act independently. Thus, President Truman found that he could not control the actions of South Korean President Syngman Rhee in the armistice talks ending the Korean War;¹³ and the British and French launched the Suez Crisis of 1956 without consulting with the United States.¹⁴ Similarly, try though he did to persuade West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to be more flexible in handling the Berlin Crisis in the late 1950s, President Eisenhower frequently complained that Adenauer’s differing views seriously constrained American options in the crisis.¹⁵

      Scholars of the Western side of the cold war have assumed that their findings of complicated, two-sided alliance relations only applied to the West.¹⁶ This is partly because they believed that the openness of the American democratic system to lobbying was a significant part of the reason allies were able to gain influence over American policy.¹⁷ Thomas Risse-Kappen has argued that democratic norms and institutions enabled and even promoted the European influence on U.S. foreign policy.¹⁸ Given the lack of democracy in the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc, combined with the Western cold war image of the Kremlin as an autocratic master of the Warsaw Pact, most scholars have concluded that, with the exception of China, Moscow did not have to deal with troublesome allies who complicated its foreign policy making.

      The treasure trove of documents made accessible since 1991, however, makes it clear that Moscow also had alliance concerns and that Soviet alliances were not as one-sided as previously surmised. This book will show that there was an important degree of mutual dependency between the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The same basic phenomenon accounts for both U.S. and Soviet vulnerabilities to alliance pressures during the cold war: the competition for allies.

      As the cold war burgeoned in the 1950s, Moscow and Washington felt they needed allies not only for practical military and economic reasons, but also for reasons more connected with their reputation as leader of one of two opposing blocs. Both sides believed in the domino theory: that gaining or losing an ally would have a multiplier effect. On the Soviet side, this concern was exacerbated starting in the late 1950s when they had to worry not only about the challenge to their allies from the United States, but also from Mao’s China. In Germany, Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere, the superpowers believed that if they did not defend their interests strongly, they would have no credibility as a reliable ally. As John Lewis Gaddis observes, however, Credibility is . . . a state of mind, not an objective, independently measurable reality. [C]redibility can hardly be on the line until one has chosen to put it there. For whatever reason, the Cold War encouraged a curious fecklessness on the part of the superpowers when it came to how and where they risked their reputations. Berlin was the most dramatic example, but hardly the only one.¹⁹

      Just as John F. Kennedy told the West Berliners in 1963, "Ich bin ein Berliner," so Khrushchev equated Soviet needs with those of his German ally. This book sets out to investigate both sides of the Soviet–East German relationship: how and why the Soviets saw the GDR as a crucial domino and how the East Germans responded to this. We will examine both the constraints on Soviet policy in affecting events in the GDR and the ways in which the East Germans resisted or influenced Soviet policies.²⁰

      Regarding relations between the Soviets and their allies, Kathryn Weathersby has argued that it is only by examining the intersection of Moscow’s and Pyongyang’s aims that one can understand what produced the [Korean] war in June 1950;²¹ and Norman Naimark has asserted that [t]he GDR . . . was created primarily out of the interaction of Russians and Germans in the Soviet occupied zone.²² Similarly, I will demonstrate that it is only by taking into account both the actions, urgings, and proddings of Ulbricht, and the calculations of Khrushchev, as well as the broader East-West interactions, that one can understand the climactic event of this book, the building of the Berlin Wall and the crisis surrounding it.

      There are a variety of factors that can explain the influence of a smaller ally on a great power, the influence of the Kremlin’s German ally on Soviet policy and on conditions in the GDR. As in any relationship between an empire’s core and its periphery, the geographic distance yields significant control over local conditions to the local power. This can create a gap between the superpower’s policy preferences and the actual local implementation of policy. The capacity of the local power to affect local conditions, and the implementation or nonimplementation of the superpower’s declared policies, gives it the capacity to constrain these policies.²³ In spite of all the Soviet troops and advisors in the GDR, Moscow was still not able always to enforce its policies and prevent the East Germans from acting independently. The roughly 500,000 Soviet troops in the GDR may have deterred the population from repeating the uprising of 1953, but they were not able to control the actions of the East German leaders.²⁴ The Soviet forces could determine or protect the ultimate fate of the socialist regime in the GDR but could not regulate its daily behavior.²⁵ Thus, through its impact on day-to-day local conditions, the smaller ally may limit the superpower’s real long-term policy options.

      Strategic location is central to the influence of an ally. If the country is located, for example, at the border between two military alliances, as was the case with the GDR, this gives the superpower a great stake in protecting and strengthening the ally, because the ally is a crucial part of the superpower’s buffer zone. The ally is of course perfectly well aware of this situation and may be able to use it to its own advantage. It can do this by persuading the superpower that the local ally needs certain things like increased economic and military aid (or a border closure) if it is going to be able to maintain its position as a bulwark against the other bloc. Thus, while the ally is clearly dependent on the superpower for its protection in its vulnerable location on the edge of the bloc, the superpower also feels some dependence on the ally to preserve this position as bulwark or buffer.²⁶

      The ally may play more than just a military-strategic role for the superpower; it may have a more symbolic function, such as serving as a model for the system of its superpower patron. As Khrushchev recounted in his memoirs, he sought to use their front-line location to make the GDR and East Berlin into a showcase of the moral, political and material achievement of socialism for capitalists to see and so be persuaded of the superiority of socialism.²⁷ Khrushchev’s energetic faith in the preeminence of the communist system and his determination to demonstrate this in Germany gave the GDR a means to pressure him for increased support.²⁸ Khrushchev testified to the importance of a strong, socialist East Germany for the Soviet Union by telling Ulbricht, your needs are our needs. Ulbricht treated this as an invitation to elicit a Soviet response to East German needs even if they sometimes conflicted with broader Soviet needs. As John Lewis Gaddis points out, the two superpowers attached their own reputations to their respective clients . . . [and] fell into the habit of letting their German allies determine their German interests, and hence their German policies.²⁹

      This situation provided the GDR with opportunities to convert its weaknesses into strength in bargaining with or manipulating the Soviet Union. The lack of popular support for the East German socialist government was manifested in the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) each year. The leaders of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED) could, with justification, use the threat of the regime’s collapse to obtain more aid from Moscow.³⁰ In addition, as the weaker power, East Germany had more to lose, more at stake if it collapsed than the Soviet Union did and thus was more motivated and persistent in the pursuit of its narrow goals. This translated into increased bargaining strength.³¹

      Glenn Snyder’s concept of the alliance security dilemma offers a useful lens through which to view the Soviet–East German relationship, although he does not apply the concept to the Soviet side of the cold war and focuses primarily on periods of multipolarity instead of bipolarity. Snyder postulates that in an alliance, each side must find the right balance between two tendencies toward more or less active support of the other ally. On the one hand, if one ally strongly supports the other, it can risk being manipulated, or entrapped in Snyder’s words, by that ally into adopting policies the first ally does not really support. On the other hand, if the first ally is stinting in backing the other ally, it can risk abandonment by the latter for a stronger supporter.³² This entrapment-abandonment dilemma also exists in the complicated dynamics of alliance politics between a superpower and a key ally.

      Map 1. Europe during the Cold War

      In the Soviet–East German case, the SED’s abandonment and entrapment concerns were very similar. On the one hand, they feared the Soviets would abandon the GDR to German unification on Western terms. On the other hand, they feared being forced or entrapped by the Soviets into more liberal policies than they favored domestically and in foreign policy, which in turn might facilitate German unification on Western terms or at least the SED hard-liners’ own overthrow by domestic opponents. The East German side, their fears, and their dependence on the alliance, however, have long been taken for granted and identified. It is the Soviet side that makes the story more interesting and that in fact opened up the opportunity for the East Germans to wag their tail as an ally.

      The Soviets had two worries concerning East German abandonment, fears that the East Germans manipulated to serve their own interests. On the one hand, the Soviets worried that the East German regime would involuntarily abandon the alliance by collapsing and being absorbed into West Germany. This concern was made realistic by the East German popular uprising of 1953 and by the refugee exodus throughout the 1950s, which was stopped only by the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The other more subtle, yet mounting worry after the beginning of the Sino-Soviet rift in the mid-1950s was that the GDR regime would move closer to the Chinese. Given that the Soviets had strong security and reputational reasons for their tight connection with the East Germans, they needed to find ways to guard against the chances of these two kinds of East German abandonment. Just as Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy perceived West Berlin and West Germany as a superdomino, so I would like to suggest that Khrushchev treated East Germany as a super-ally, an ally of the greatest importance to Soviet security and prestige, the loss of which was to be avoided at all costs.³³

      The extent of a small ally’s bargaining power is revealed when there are policy disagreements with the superpower. There was growing discord between Ulbricht and Khrushchev from 1953 through 1961 and particularly during the Berlin Crisis. While they shared many goals, they had important differences over the relative importance of different goals and what they were willing to risk to achieve them. As this book will illustrate, Ulbricht and Khrushchev disagreed over their favored domestic and foreign policies for the GDR, how to handle the refugee exodus, the future of West Berlin, whether or not to sign a separate peace treaty, the importance of Western recognition of the GDR, the level of economic aid the Soviet Union and other socialist countries should give to the GDR, the degree of sovereignty the GDR should have, including over the access routes between the FRG and West Berlin, and the level of risk regarding confrontation with the West each was willing to adopt to achieve their ends. Differences over goals, and methods to achieve these goals, were accentuated during the Berlin Crisis, which developed into a crisis in East German–Soviet relations as much as an East-West crisis.

      A superpower necessarily has broader interests and concerns than its smaller ally, especially during a crisis surrounding the status of the ally. As the crisis of the GDR regime’s legitimacy mushroomed from 1953 through 1961, the East German leaders operated from an increasingly narrow and urgent frame of reference and accordingly were willing to risk more to resolve the crisis than the Soviets were.

      The Soviets were under mounting pressure of their own in this period as their rift with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) deepened in the late 1950s.³⁴ The new archival evidence indicates that the role of China and the Sino-Soviet split influenced the cold war much more than previously thought. It was a significant factor in Soviet policy in the Korean War,³⁵ the Berlin Crisis,³⁶ the Cuban Missile Crisis,³⁷ and the Vietnam War.³⁸ The Cubans, the East Germans, and the North Vietnamese, among others, sought to use the Sino-Soviet rift to their advantage, and in each case, doing so intensified the cold war.

      This book examines three crucial periods in Soviet–East German relations: the six months after Stalin’s death in 1953, the two years following Khrushchev’s pathbreaking address to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and the three years of the Berlin Crisis. In each period, the Soviets consciously sought to pull Ulbricht back from his hard-line domestic and foreign policies to stem the refugee exodus, stabilize the country, and improve relations with the West. To their frustration and sometimes great concern, the Soviets were not able to impose their will on the East Germans. Khrushchev wanted the GDR regime to achieve stability by virtue of its viability and legitimacy as opposed solely to the control exercised by the Soviet military presence there or by Ulbricht’s administrative measures. Yet Ulbricht’s method of rule was by control, unassailable control, which he maintained was the only way given the existence of the aggressive, revanchist, imperialistic FRG next door. Ulbricht feared that any loosening of his tight grip on power would lead to the GDR’s collapse as well as to the collapse of his own personal power, perhaps his primary concern.

      To a large degree, the policies carried out in the GDR and East Berlin were formulated by the East Germans, not the Soviets, and were often implemented against Soviet wishes. The effect of these GDR hard-line policies was to deepen the division of Germany and thus intensify the cold war in Europe. Ulbricht finally put the Kremlin leaders in a position where their only realistic option to preserve a stable socialist regime in the GDR was to agree to his request to close off access to West Berlin. This outcome can only be understood by studying developments in Soviet–East German relations and in GDR policies, together with Western policies, in the years leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall.

      We shall see in the portrayal of Ulbricht’s background, personality, and policies, presented in chapter 1, that his tenacious, arrogant, and opportunistic personality contributed significantly to the GDR’s capacity to sway the Soviets. He had the skill and audacity to convert the environmental factors conducive to the GDR’s status as a key Soviet ally into influence over Soviet policy. The first two chapters of this book highlight Ulbricht’s capacity to resist Soviet calls for moderation of his domestic and foreign policies and Soviet incapacity or unwillingess to insist. By the fourth chapter, the focus shifts to Ulbricht’s more active efforts to change Soviet policies regarding Berlin.

      After Stalin’s death, his successors sought to lessen cold war tensions and alleviate the effects of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and at home. In early June 1953, the new Soviet leaders instructed the East Germans to introduce the New Course of liberalization of domestic and foreign policies. The combination of Ulbricht’s resistance to the New Course, the 17 June uprising in the GDR, and the aftermath of secret police chief Lavrenty Beria’s ouster led Stalin’s successors to backtrack on the New Course in the GDR and to reverse their support for Ulbricht’s more open-minded opponents. This is the subject of chapter 1.

      Again in 1956, Khrushchev made efforts to diminish cold war tensions and dismantle Stalinism. Following his de-Stalinization speech at the Twentieth Congress and his support for peaceful coexistence and separate paths to socialism, Khrushchev also sided with the opposition to Ulbricht that favored Khrushchev’s more liberal approach in both domestic and foreign policy. Yet Ulbricht again prevailed in preventing more liberal policies from being carried out consistently and thoroughly in the GDR against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and was ultimately able to get Soviet support for ousting his more liberal opponents. Chapter 2 examines these developments.

      In the 1958–61 Berlin Crisis, Khrushchev attempted to persuade (or coerce) the West to sign a German peace treaty and transform West Berlin into a demilitarized free city in order to relieve pressure on the GDR. Although he threatened unilateral action, his goal was to achieve the stabilization of the GDR by international agreement and not by unilateral action. Ulbricht, however, favored unilateral, as opposed to multilateral means of resolving the GDR’s problems, especially the refugee exodus. He doubted the West would make sufficient concessions and did not trust Khrushchev in negotiations with the West. Ulbricht’s actions, combined with Western unwillingness to give in to Khrushchev’s demands and Chinese pressure on Khrushchev to adopt a harder stance with the West, led to Khrushchev’s reluctant agreement to build the Berlin Wall, something the Soviets had been trying to avoid since 1952. This is the subject of chapters 3 and 4.

      I will not argue that East German influence was the only important influence on Soviet Deutschlandpolitik (policy concerning Germany) between 1953 and 1961. Based on my earlier writings, some readers have come to the erroneous conclusion that this is my belief. Of course, Soviet domestic politics, Western policy, and Chinese policy were also important in influencing Soviet foreign policy in this period. What I will argue is that the East German factor was much more important than previously recognized and indeed is an essential part of the story. The East Germans, through their own policies, narrowed Soviet options and also took advantage of tensions in U.S.-Soviet and Sino-Soviet relations, as

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