THE BEGINNINGS OF A DÉTENTE IN EAST-WEST RELATIONS

A "thaw" in the East and the declaration of "peaceful coexistence"

At the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, Khrushchev launched the process of de-Stalinization. As secretary-general of the Party, he denounced his predecessor’s crimes and the cult of personality surrounding him, accusing him of despotism and of conducting a particularly brutal and repressive regime with mass deportations and the execution of thousands of communists on the basis of spurious court verdicts. This party congress had lasting repercussions, not just in the USSR, but throughout the Socialist bloc. The Soviet Communist Party acknowledged pluralism, giving each People's Democracy the opportunity to create a brand of socialism suited to its own individual needs: this led to the questioning of Soviet supremacy in a number of Eastern European states. The Soviet Communist Party itself decided to intensify relations with the "disloyal" state of Yugoslavia and, in April 1956, to dissolve "Cominform".

In June 1956, there were workers' uprisings in Poland which resulted in the Stalinists being ousted from power, with no resistance from the Kremlin. Apart from East Germany, which remained loyal to Moscow, and the special case of Rumania under Ceaucescu, which pursued an extreme form of “national Socialism”, all the other eastern bloc countries tried to re-establish some degree of national sovereignty, in spite of ongoing declarations of allegiance to Moscow.

Khrushchev's political attitude to the West raised hopes: his reconciliation with Yugoslavia and the solution of the Austrian question in 1955 (with the signing of a treaty that followed a Soviet proposal by freeing Austria from Allied occupation as a neutral country) were interpreted as a positive sign. At this stage, the fact that such talks took place at all could be considered as progress. Khrushchev's new guideline for Soviet foreign policy was “peaceful coexistence”: in future, the supremacy of each side's respective form of social order was to be proved not in direct military confrontation, but via economic competition. The basic Soviet assumption was that Socialist and Western/capitalist societies would exist side by side. Mutual respect for territorial integrity, non-aggression, and non-interference in the domestic affairs of other countries were stated as the guiding principles of foreign policy. In spite of this, the ideological struggle continued, and the USSR never expressly relinquished the aim of a world-wide revolution.

This apparent lessening in tensions was accompanied by Khrushchev's unchanging confrontational attitude towards the West. He repeatedly questioned the status of Berlin under the four Allied powers and finally gave his consent for the construction of the Berlin Wall. The peak of tensions in the Cold War, as well the turning point, came with the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 which took the world to the brink of nuclear war. After this crisis, there was increased awareness of the need for arms control. The Cuban crisis and the politics of confrontation were due in part to major Soviet progress in the domain of nuclear armament. In October 1957, the USSR shocked the Western world by launching Sputnik, the first ever space satellite. This robbed the United States of their aura of technological superiority. Of greater significance in military terms, however, was the fact that the Soviet Union now possessed intercontinental missiles, rendering it capable of attacking the United States. In Europe, this sparked doubts over whether the USA would risk its own survival to come to the aid of its European allies in the case of a Soviet attack.

In Czechoslovakia, economic crisis prompted the development of a concept of “socialist market economy” that was implemented step-by-step from 1966. In January 1968, the former state and party leadership was dismissed and a newly formed government under Alexander Dubcek announced extensive measures for the democratization of state and party with the aim of establishing “Socialism with a human face”. In the eyes of Moscow and of Czechoslovakia’s communist neighbours, however, this went much too far. After several warnings, a bloody end was put to the “Prague Spring” when troops from five Warsaw Pact countries marched in on the morning of August 21, 1968. In response to these events, Leonid Brezhnev, as secretary-general of the Soviet Communist Party, proclaimed the doctrine of “limited sovereignty of Socialist states” wherever the Socialist system was in danger. In other words, defending the interests of Socialism as a whole took priority over the defence of each country's individual interests. But the USSR reserved the sole right to define these general interests, which were in fact identical with the interests of the USSR. Although the Soviets now accepted stronger diversity among Communist countries than they had in the early 1950s, this freedom was subject to strict limits.

The Era of Negotiations

With Richard Nixon's arrival in the White House in 1969, a period known as the "era of negotiations" began. But during this time, the division of the world into spheres of influence remained firmly in place. East/West relations came to be based on political realism, with each side accepting the other's existence and system on the condition that the jointly defined rules of conduct were adhered to. The chief priority was to prevent a nuclear conflict and to limit so-called “substitute wars” (i.e. armed conflicts outside Europe linked with the East/West confrontation) as these could have a negative effect on US/Soviet relations. In practical terms, this took the form of arms control policy, reaching its high point at the 1975 Helsinki Summit with the signing of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).

The agreements reached at this pan-European conference, attended by 34 countries from East and West, focussed on three areas: firstly, security issues and the recognition of borders altered since 1945; secondly, technical cooperation; and thirdly, human rights. The latter category included agreements on “human contacts” (mostly within families) through to reuniting families, but also concerning freedom of movement between CSCE states and free exchange of information as a first step towards freedom of information. Due to the widely diverging positions of the negotiating partners in East and West, the CSCE Final Act finally represented no more than a declaration of intent. The western states succeeded in their demand for the full text of the CSCE Final Act to be published in all signatory states. Discrepancies between the wording of this document and conditions in these countries subsequently formed the basis for demands made by eastern European civil rights activists and for complaints by Western governments against eastern bloc countries.