ROBERT M. SLUSSER

The Presidium Meeting of
February, 1961: A Reconstruction

The Soviet political system has been deliberately devised to make penetration of its arcana imperii as difficult as possible for an outsider. Among the most closely guarded secrets of the Kremlin are the real nature of decision making in foreign policy and the existence of factional differences within the leadership over patronage and policy.

Non-Soviet scholars are coming to realize, however, that despite the obstacles put in their path by Soviet censorship, it is possible for them to achieve an understanding of Soviet policy making, provided they are willing to recognize the special character of the evidence and to devise suitable means for its interpretation. The present article is designed to illustrate and exemplify some of these means.

Close observation of organizational changes in the Soviet political machine-primarily the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the All-Union and Union Republic governments—has by now established itself as an indispensable analytical tool. Correlation of organizational changes with policy statements by Soviet leaders, a technique employed with notable success by the late Boris Nicolaevsky, has enabled analysts to demonstrate the existence of well-marked factions in the Soviet leadership and to define their position on a number of important questions of policy.

The establishment of an accurate and detailed chronology as a means for the reconstruction of the specific historical context in which events and decisions have taken place has only recently been utilized as an analytical technique for “penetrating” the Kremlin’s secrets. While the chronological approach has necessarily been employed to some extent by nearly every analyst of recent Soviet history, this has usually been done on a limited scale and with regard to specific circumscribed areas. Only when an attempt is made to reconstruct chronologically the total historical context of a given event in recent Soviet history, however, can progress be made towards identifying the hidden links between internal politics and foreign policy decisions. The method is somewhat arduous and necessarily slow, but the insights which it yields fully justify the effort.

An instructive example of the application of this method is provided by the study of a self-contained episode in Soviet political history, the agricultural tour undertaken by N. S. Khrushchev in the early months of 1961. In studying this problem, the principal areas from which evidence must be taken into account are the following: (a) the political struggle within the Soviet leadership between Khrushchev and his supporters on the one hand and his opponents on the other; (b) the differing views of Khrushchev and the opposition on policy towards the United States; (c) the scientific-military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union; (d) Soviet disarmament policy; (e) Soviet policy towards Germany, including Berlin; and (f) Soviet policy towards Communist China and its European satellite, Albania.

The conclusions obtainable from this approach, as will be seen, vary in their degree of probability from strongly supported to frankly hypothetical. At the same time it should be noted that even the hypothetical conclusions acquire a greater degree of solidity when considered as part of a longer chain of events and hypotheses. The episode selected for consideration takes its place as part of a historical sequence which derives its inferential strength precisely from the fact that it is an interconnected and continuous chain with its own compelling inner logic, rather than a disjointed succession of meaningless and incomprehensible happenings.

I

At the close of his final speech to the CPSU Central Committee plenum which met from January 10 to 18, 1961, Khrushchev revealed that he was planning to make a tour of some of the Soviet Union’s principal agricultural regions, and that the trip had the approval of the Presidium:

In the Central Committee Presidium we have agreed that I shall soon go to the Ukraine and visit the Northern Caucasus and Georgia; I plan also to go to Voronezh and the virgin lands of Siberia and Kazakhstan.¹

Following the plenum, Khrushchev remained in Moscow for about a week. On January 21 he met with U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn K. Thompson to arrange the release of the surviving members of the crew of the U.S. RB-47 which had been shot down by Soviet interceptors on July 1 of the preceding year. He then turned his attention to the agricultural tour which he had announced at the plenum. On January 24 he arrived in Kiev for a plenum of the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee, held on January 26-28. From January 30 to February 1 he was in Rostov-on-the-Don for a conference of agricultural workers of the North Caucasus. From there he moved on to Tbilisi (February 4-7), for a similar gathering in the Transcaucasus. His next stop was Voronezh (February 9-11), in the Central Black Earth Zone of the RSFSR. On February 21-23 he was back in Moscow for a conference of the Central RSFSR. From February 28 to March 2 he was in Sverdlovsk, the Urals. From there he went to Kurgan for a ceremony awarding the Order of Lenin to Kurgan Province. On March 5 he arrived in Novosibirsk for a conference of Siberian farm workers which ended on March 8. His next stop was at Akmolinsk, capital of the Virgin Lands Territory, where a conference was held March 12-14. His final conference took place in Alma Ata, capital of the Kazakh SSR, on March 20-21. On March 24 he returned to Moscow. On the last day of each of the conferences Khrushchev delivered a speech, which was duly published in the Soviet press, though not immediately; his speeches were published only after delays which ranged from four to eight days. The delays cannot be explained as the result of any difficulty in transmission from remote locations, since one of the longest occurred with regard to the speech delivered on February 23 in Moscow.

According to Khrushchev, as we have seen, the Presidium had authorized him to make the tour. The delay in publishing his speeches suggests that they were being submitted to review before publication, presumably by the same Presidium which had agreed to the tour.

Analysis of Khrushchev’s itinerary indicates that there was a ten-day interruption from February 11 to February 21, coinciding with the longest delay in publication of one of his speeches. We know that during part of this period, Khrushchev was in Moscow, since Pravda reported him as receiving the ambassadors from Tunisia and the United Arab Republic (February 14) and Turkey (February 15). During this period his closest ally in the Presidium, L. I. Brezhnev, was away on a good-will tour to Africa; Pravda announced the journey on February 3, and it lasted from February 9 to February 19. Following the interruption Khrushchev attended a conference in Moscow, which he had omitted from his advance description of the tour. His speech on this occasion was listened to by the full Presidium.

As a tentative hypothesis to account for these facts, let us assume a meeting of the Presidium during the period between February 11 and February 19, called on the initiative of Khrushchev’s opponents. A consideration of the content of Khrushchev’s speeches on the tour and of certain other events taking place during the same period will not only strengthen this hypothesis but also enable us to specify the principal subjects which the meeting was called to consider and the decisions it reached.

II

In each of his speeches on the tour, Khrushchev included a section devoted to one of his favorite themes, the prediction of victory for the Soviet Union in its economic rivalry with the United States. In his speech to the Ukrainian Central Committee plenum on January 28, for example, he assured his listeners that “The Ukraine, if it works as it should, can overtake America in per capita output of meat in two to three years—four at the most.”² At Rostov-on-the-Don on February 1 he suggested that the names of workers who “made their contribution to accomplishment of the task of overtaking the U.S.A., the most highly developed capitalist country, in per capita output of meat and milk,” should be inscribed in a Golden Book.³ At Tbilisi on February 7 he predicted that the Soviet Union would overtake the U.S.A. in per capita industrial output by 1970.⁴ At Voronezh on February 11 he issued a call for leadership to help in “building a communist society whose level of production must of course be higher than in the U.S.A.”⁵

In each of his speeches up to this point, Khrushchev’s rivalry-with-America theme had been couched in exclusively economic terms. Furthermore, he had taken special pains to emphasize the peaceful nature of the competition. For example, in his February 7 speech at Tbilisi, he said,

. . . Our land of the Soviets will not only overtake but surpass you [the U.S.] ! (Prolonged applause.)

In saying this we do not threaten anyone. After all, we do not intend to take away your goods and wealth. Let this wealth remain with you. The social system in the U.S.A. rests on the American people, and our social and political system was established by the peoples of the Soviet Union.

. . . Our successes and our growth do not harm other peoples.⁶

The Voronezh speech, as we have seen, was followed by the longest delay in publication and by an unexplained 10-day hiatus in the tour. When Khrushchev returned to the podium at the conclusion of the Moscow meeting of February 21-23, the rivalry-with-America theme had acquired an entirely new aspect:

Recall, comrades, the comparatively recent time when the first atomic bomb was built in the U.S.A. The American imperialists began conducting an atomic policy of frightening the socialist countries, and above all the Soviet Union. This was a difficult time for us.

The Soviet people had risen to the challenge, Khrushchev continued, by developing atomic and thermonuclear weapons, and when the “American imperialists” surrounded the Soviet Union with military bases, Soviet engineers and scientists pioneered in the creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles. “All the advantages that the Americans had obtained by establishing their bases around our country,” Khrushchev boasted, “they lost at the moment when our rocket soared and, flying thousands of kilometers, landed exactly in the area planned by our scientists, engineers, and workers.”⁷

The military overtones to the rivalry theme became even more strident in Khrushchev’s speech in Sverdlovsk on March 2. “What is the significance,” he asked,

. . . of surpassing the U.S. in per capita production of meat and milk? It means showing the whole world that a people that has taken power into its own hands can in a short time convert its country from a backward into an advanced one, develop its economy, industry, and agriculture, its science and culture-that it will be able to attain the level of the most highly developed capitalist country and thereby bring glory to its system, the socialist system.

Capitalism’s most farsighted ideologists already foresee this and are fearful that the socialist system will in the immediate future accomplish this task. But this is the inexorable law of our forward movement. Capitalism cannot halt this movement, cannot stem the development of the Soviet land, of its economy. The imperialists may try to halt the development of the Soviet economy by war. But to choose the path of war is to doom the capitalist system to perdition. The Soviet Union has the most powerful rocket weapons in the world and has produced as many atom and hydrogen bombs as are needed to wipe aggressors from the face of the earth should they try to settle the ideological, political dispute between the two world systems by war. (Stormy applause.)⁸

Thereafter, however, the rattle of rockets in Khrushchev’s speeches faded away, and the former economic aspects of the rivalry theme reasserted their predominance. At Novosibirsk on March 11 he exulted in the performance of Soviet athletes in peaceful sport competition with Americans, but emphasized the greater importance of “competing [with the U.S.] in the name of a still greater rise in the people’s well being.”⁹ And at Alma Ata on March 21, in the last speech of his tour, he sketched his favorite vision of the future:

. . . To overtake the U.S.—the most highly developed capitalist country—in per capita meat production will be once again to demonstrate the great power of the socialist system. It will be a historic victory, a victory for the immortal doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. (Applause.)¹⁰

In concluding his speech, and with it his entire tour, Khrushchev sounded the themes of peace and disarmament:

The Communists are not intimidating anyone, they are not threatening war. It is not through war that we are advancing to our great goal. On the contrary, we desire that there shall be no wars among states and among peoples, and we are fighting for this; we propose general and complete disarmament and will accept any terms of control over disarmament if the Western powers accept our proposals on disarmament. (Applause.)¹¹

Surveyed as a whole, Khrushchev’s tour thus falls into two halves not only chronologically, with the Moscow break separating the early phase from the later, but also thematically. Before the Moscow break, the theme of rivalry with the U.S. was presented in Khrushchevian economic terms—victory in the drive for supremacy in per capita output in agriculture. In the Moscow and Sverdlovsk speeches, the first ones delivered after the break, bellicose boasts about Soviet military power nearly drowned out the peaceful notes of the rivalry theme. These notes regained their strength, however, in the final stages of the tour.

Before drawing any conclusions from these observations it will be useful to take note of some concurrent developments.

III

While Khrushchev was on tour, the new administration of President John F. Kennedy was engaged in a review of the military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. On January 30, in his first State of the Union message, the President informed the Congress that he had instructed the Secretary of Defense “to reappraise our entire defense strategy,” and, pending the presentation of preliminary conclusions at the end of February, to take three immediate steps: an increase in U.S. military airlift capacity, in order to achieve greater mobility in preparation for unexpected developments, a step-up in the production of Polaris submarines, and an acceleration of the missile program.

Long-term policies initiated by the previous administration were meanwhile bearing fruit and significantly altering the U.S.-Soviet balance in favor of the United States. In November, 1960, the U.S.S. “George Washington,” a nuclear-powered submarine carrying sixteen 1200-mm. Polaris missiles, became operational. In his farewell State of the Union message on January 11, 1961, President Eisenhower maintained that “the ‘missile gap’ shows every sign of being a fiction,” and cited intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM’s) and Polaris-armed nuclear submarines as evidence of America’s growing power. On February 1 the first test launching was held of the Minuteman ICBM, a three-stage solid-fuel rocket with a range of over 6300 miles. It was estimated that quantity production of the Minuteman would follow in the near future and that large-scale deployment would be achieved by mid-1962.

In an off-the-record press briefing on February 6, Defense Secretary McNamara mentioned that studies carried out by the new administration had led to the tentative conclusion that there had been, in fact, no “missile gap.” A report of McNamara’s statement in the New York Times on the following day brought a prompt White House disavowal: at a press conference on February 8, the President said that it would be “premature” to try to tell whether there was in fact a “missile gap” favoring the Soviet Union, and expressed the opinion that only after completion of the review of U.S. strategic and tactical weapons which the Defense Department was currently conducting could an accurate assessment be reached. ¹²

For the Soviet leadership, however, the changes in the strategic balance caused by U.S. rearmament, and—equally important—the changes in Washington’s perception of the strategic balance and its growing realization that the U.S. had a clear preponderance in strategic power over the Soviet Union, constituted a sharp warning that it would be increasingly difficult for them henceforth to use the alleged Soviet lead in strategic striking power and military-scientific technology as an effective instrument of Soviet foreign policy.¹³

Soviet concern about growing U.S. strategic power was reflected on February 3, when Soviet Ambassador to Turkey N. S. Ryzhov handed Turkish Foreign Minister S. Sarper an official statement asking for clarification of recent press reports of U.S. plans to provide the Turkish army with Jupiter rockets, build rocket bases in Turkey, and give Turkey access to atomic weapons.¹⁴

On the following day the Soviets inaugurated their program of interplanetary exploration with the orbiting of Sputnik VII, a 6483-kg. satellite test vehicle from which a space probe towards Venus was to be launched. The probe failed to leave the parking orbit, however, and on February 26 the satellite was destroyed on re-entry.¹⁵ Greater success attended the launching of Sputnik VIII, on February 12. This time the space probe, a 643.5-kg. rocket, was successfully launched from the parking orbit towards a planned rendezvous with Venus on approximately May 19.¹⁶ The new technique employed in these shots was of great significance for future space exploration, according to M. V. Keldysh, President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, because “(1) it eliminates the necessity of choosing specific dates for flights to the moon; (2) it makes possible the launching of heavier space vehicles towards Venus and the other planets; and (3) it removes the restrictions connected with the fact that not all points on the earth are equally advantageous for launching.”¹⁷

On February 17 the Soviet government sent a long note to the Bonn government, restating the Soviet arguments in favor of concluding a peace treaty with Germany, and asserting the Soviet government’s “unshakable determination . . . to bring the matter of peace negotiations with Germany to a conclusion.” The note called on the government of the German Federal Republic, and on Chancellor Adenauer personally, to contribute to “a peaceful settlement with Germany and also to the strengthening of peace and security in Europe.”¹⁸

On February 23, 1961, Soviet Armed Forces Day, the Soviet press carried significant statements by a number of Soviet military leaders. In a Pravda article entitled “Mighty Army of a Mighty People,” Chief of the General Staff Marshal M. V. Zakharov maintained that “the main force of aggression is the imperialism of the U.S.A.,” and warned that “the influence of the West German army in the aggressive NATO bloc is growing.” He raised the specter of a new German war against the Soviet Union, “this time with nuclear weapons,” but claimed that “the armament, composition, strength, and high combat readiness” of the Soviet Armed Forces “enable them to strike an immediate and crushing retaliatory blow at any aggressor who tries to disrupt the peaceful creative labor of the Soviet people.” ¹⁹

In Armed Forces Day speeches by two of Marshal Zakharov’s colleagues, a new and meaningful shift appeared in Soviet military claims. Both Marshals K. S. Moskalenko, Commander-in-Chief of Rocket Troops, and I. Kh. Bagramian, Chief of Rear Services, characterized the number of available Soviet ICBM’s as “sufficient” or “necessary”-apparently the first appearance of this formulation in place of earlier Soviet claims for superiority.²⁰ We have already noted Khrushchev’s employment of a variant of this formula in his Sverdlovsk speech on March 2. The Soviet leaders’ restraint is all the more striking in view of the new Soviet achievements in space exploration.

IV

We have postulated a meeting of the Presidium in mid-February 1961, called on the initiative of Khrushchev’s opponents. On the basis of the data which have been cited, we can now attempt a preliminary reconstruction of the meeting.

The planning for the meeting can be dated to early February. The note to Turkey about U.S. rocket bases and the announcement of Brezhnev’s African tour, both on February 3, provide a firm date for the beginning of the build-up towards the meeting. By this time texts were available for the first two of Khrushchev’s tour speeches, those in Kiev and Rostov-on-the-Don, and it was clear that he was taking a moderate line in foreign policy, emphasizing peaceful economic competition with the U.S. and saying nothing about military rivalry. Also available was the text of President Kennedy’s January 30 State of the Union message.

For the opposition a new urgency was injected into the situation by McNamara’s premature but accurate statement on February 6 that the “missile gap” might turn out to be a myth. The publicity given this statement in the United States led to no change in Khrushchev’s handling of the Soviet-U.S. rivalry theme in his next two speeches, however (those at Tbilisi on February 7 and at Voronezh on the 11th).

The long delay in publishing the text of the Voronezh speech was a clear indication of high-level concern over its content. Khrushchev, as we have seen, was back in Moscow by February 14 at the latest. It is probable that one of the decisions taken by the Presidium at the meeting for which he was unceremoniously recalled to Moscow by his colleagues was that he would have to beef up the rivalry-with-America theme in subsequent speeches on his tour by giving it a military setting and emphasizing Soviet strategic power. The Venus shots of February 4 and 12, which must have been long in preparation, came at a favorable moment to provide new evidence and reason to strengthen this theme, and at an earlier time might well have given rise to new claims for Soviet strategic superiority. Instead, in the light of the strategic reassessment being conducted by U.S. leaders, it was decided that henceforth a new and less provocatively misleading formulation—”adequate” or “necessary”—would be substituted for the earlier claims of Soviet rocket superiority.

The moderate, verbose, and typically Khrushchevian note to West Germany on February 18 may be taken to indicate the terminal point for the meeting. It took another three days to complete preparations for the Moscow agricultural conference, which opened on the 21st with a sizable turnout of the top party leaders, including both of Khrushchev’s most openly identified opponents and critics, F. R. Kozlov and M. A. Suslov. The Moscow conference can be viewed as an adroit improvisation which preserved the appearance of continuity on Khrushchev’s agricultural tour and thus masked the high-level deliberations on foreign policy which were the real reason—in this reconstruction—for his premature return to Moscow.

V

The most important decisions reached at the February meeting of the Presidium concerned four closely interrelated issues of cardinal importance in Soviet foreign policy: Berlin, disarmament, relations with the United States, and the resumption of nuclear testing.

In early January, 1961, as the time neared for the inauguration of the newly elected President in Washington, a number of Soviet diplomats were busy dropping broad hints to their American opposites that it would be desirable for the new administration to reach agreement on disarmament with the Soviets without delay; otherwise, they warned, Khrushchev’s position would be undermined by his internal opponents, who would prove less willing to compromise with the West if they should come to power.²¹ In Washington these hints were ignored as transparent efforts to pressure the new administration into premature and unwise concessions. Instead, the Kennedy administration asked its diplomatic partners in the disarmament talks, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, for a delay in resumption of the talks, in order to give it time to review and revise the U.S. position.

When the test-ban talks resumed in Geneva on March 21, the Soviet mood had undergone a sharp change. In his opening statement the chief Soviet delegate, Semyon K. Tsarapkin, without even waiting to hear the revised U.S. position, presented a demand for acceptance by the Western powers of a three-man team (troika) to head the control board to be entrusted with monitoring a test-ban treaty, in place of the one-man neutral administrator on whom the three powers had earlier agreed.²² The effect of Tsarapkin’s demand was to freeze the disarmament negotiations at the very outset of the Kennedy administration and to block further progress towards agreement on a test-ban treaty.

During the summer of 1961 the Soviets mounted a major propaganda campaign designed to force the West to accept Soviet proposals for a change in the status of Berlin. Instead of making concessions, the U.S. responded by taking a series of measures designed to strengthen its military capacity. At the height of the ensuing tension the East German regime (August 12-13), began the construction of a wall bisecting the occupied city and physically sealing off the East Zone regime from West Berlin.

The sequel to these events was the Soviet announcement on August 30 that the Soviet Union would shortly resume the testing of nuclear weapons, thereby unilaterally breaking the de facto three-power moratorium which had been in effect since early November, 1958.²³ The new Soviet test series, which ran from September 1 to October 30, constituted the largest cumulative total of nuclear explosions in history.

At the time, it was clear to technically trained observers that the Soviet test series of autumn, 1961, must have been in preparation for a considerable period of time. According to Dr. Hans A. Bethe, a prominent U.S. physicist, “It is very likely that they [the Soviets] had started specific preparations by March of 1961 when the test-ban conference reconvened in Geneva.”²⁴

Ambassador Arthur H. Dean, chief U.S. delegate to the test-ban talks, had come to a similar conclusion independently, based on his observation of Soviet behavior at Geneva. In particular, he regarded Tsarapkin’s troika proposal as a clear indication that the Soviets in March, 1961, were no longer interested in substantive negotiations on disarmament and were simply using the Geneva conference to mark time while preparations for the test series were under way.²⁵

While it is impossible within the brief scope of this essay to present all the relevant data bearing on the significance of these events, the conclusion to which they point can be stated concisely: At the February meeting of the Presidium whose existence we have postulated, a majority in the Presidium, led by the opponents of Khrushchev’s policy of rapprochement with the U.S., presented him with a clear-cut alternative: either obtain within six months a major concession from the West over Berlin, or accede to the resumption of nuclear testing by the Soviet Union. The Soviet note to West Germany on February 18 marked the launching of this propaganda offensive.

Khrushchev’s failure in August, 1961, to obtain the diplomatic victory which he sought in Berlin was therefore followed, first, by the building of the Berlin Wall, satisfying the immediate need of the East German regime for the physical security of its territory, and second, by the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing.

VI

While Khrushchev and his colleagues were conferring in Moscow, the Albanian Party of Labor was holding its twice-postponed Fourth Congress in Tirana.²⁶ The congress keynote was struck on the opening day, February 13, in speeches by party boss Enver Hoxha and Chief of State Mehmet Shehu. Their militant opposition to Khrushchev’s foreign policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the United States was veiled, as was characteristic at this stage of the Soviet-Albanian rift, under cover of denunciations of the Yugoslav Communists as “revisionist.”

The Soviet delegation to the congress was headed by P. N. Pospelov, a veteran party functionary and ideologist whose career pattern and public statements indicate an affinity with Khrushchev. The second member of the delegation was Iurii V. Andropov, later to achieve eminence as Chairman of the Committee of State Security (KGB), but at this period a rising young functionary who had served in the Komsomol, the central party apparatus, the diplomatic corps, and the government. His career had been built without visible assistance from Khrushchev, but he could not be identified with the Kozlov-Suslov opposition either. If he had a patron in the party hierarchy it appears to have been the senior party figure O. V. Kuusinen, in whose home territory the early stages of Andropov’s career were passed, and whose influence may have helped him get his appointment to the party Central Committee apparatus in 1957.

A year after the Albanian congress, on February 16, 1962, the Albanian party newspaper Zëri i Popullit denounced Andropov as a “professional Soviet provocateur and Khrushchev’s faithful spokesman,” and accused him of having helped to organize a walkout by the Greek Communist Party delegation at the February, 1961, congress, an incident which precipitated a sharp clash among the delegates. As Andropov’s collaborator in staging this incident, the Albanians named Rudolf Barák, head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party delegation to the congress, member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Politburo, and Czech Minister of the Interior.²⁷

Barák’s speech at the Albanian congress did in fact provide strong evidence of an ideological link with Khrushchev. He warned the Albanians of the danger of isolation from the Soviet bloc, while paying tribute to Khrushchev as the principal architect of the Warsaw Pact of May, 1955, which, he said, “guarantees . . . the security and defense of the Albanian People’s Republic.” Barák also praised Khrushchev for his attack on the “cult of personality” at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956 and for his behavior at the Fifteenth Session of the United Nations General Assembly in the autumn of 1960.²⁸

At the close of the congress Hoxha received the Soviet delegation, together with the Soviet ambassador, I. V. Shikin. The communiqué issued to mark the occasion asserted that the discussion had been “very cordial and friendly,”²⁹ but according to a speech by Pospelov at the Twenty-Second CPSU Congress in October, 1961, the reality had been very different: stung by “a number of glaring instances of direct anti-Soviet attacks by prominent Albanian officials, instances of a humiliating, hostile attitude toward our specialists, geologists, and Soviet seamen,” Pospelov had delivered a formal protest from the Central Committee of the CPSU, warning the Albanians that such actions “not only impede the development and strengthening of Albanian-Soviet friendship but also run counter to the interests of the entire socialist camp.” “If these abnormal phenomena are not stopped in good time,” the note concluded, “they may entail serious consequences.”³⁰

Pospelov’s revelation that the Central Committee had sent a note of protest to the Albanians clinches the evidence for a meeting of the Presidium in mid-February, 1961, and enables us to add an additional point to the agenda which we have postulated, namely, the increasingly unsatisfactory state of relations between the Soviet Union and Albania. The note of protest delivered by Pospelov on February 20 represented the agreed policy of the Presidium, speaking in the name of the Central Committee.

The subsequent Albanian charges against Andropov and Barák, however, and their identification of Khrushchev personally as an influence making for Soviet-Albanian conflict, provide a basis for the speculation that Khrushchev, smarting under the attack on his policy towards the United States, may have instigated an intrigue designed to disrupt the Albanian congress and exacerbate the tension between Albania and the Soviet Union.

Forced by the internal opposition to adopt a more hostile tone toward the United States, did Khrushchev retaliate by sharpening the ideological conflict with the external opposition? The available evidence is too fragmentary to permit a definite answer to this question, but at least it can be noted as significant that three major developments in Soviet policy occurred at virtually the same moment: a decision on preparations for the resumption of nuclear testing, a sudden rise in bellicosity toward the United States, and a sharp deterioration in Soviet-Albanian relations.