139. Research Memorandum From the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (Hughes) to Acting Secretary of State Ball1
SUBJECT
- The Soviet Union A Year After Khrushchev
In this report, prepared originally for the fall session of the NATO Working Group of National Experts in Paris, we review Soviet developments during the year since Khrushchev’s ouster. The report, which incorporates information available as of November 5, 1965, might be [Page 348] read with a companion piece, RSB-128, “The Situation in Eastern Europe,” November 3, 1965 (Secret).2
Abstract
In the year since the ouster of Khrushchev the Soviet leadership has endeavored to project an image of collectivity and has claimed to be approaching the considerable Soviet domestic and foreign problems inherited from Khrushchev in a more reasonable and careful manner. The style of Brezhnev and Kosygin has been more deliberate and less flamboyant than Khrushchev’s. Their collective approach has necessarily reduced the popular appeal of their moves as compared to his. Moreover, the removal of Khrushchev has removed none of the dilemmas, divisive issues, and chronic domestic problems which confronted the regime under his leadership. The present leaders are thus under constraint to adjust their differences within the framework of collegiality as long as possible, but it does not seem that the post-Khrushchev collective leadership is more likely to remain a permanent feature of Soviet politics than was the first post-Stalin junta.
In domestic affairs, the new leaders have defined perhaps more carefully than any of their predecessors some of the more serious problems, and have taken some policy initiatives that have at least set the broad framework for dealing with several of these problems. The agricultural measures adopted at the Central Committee plenum last March should prove beneficial over the long run; those in the sphere of industrial management and planning adopted at the September plenum may well produce at least short-run deleterious effects, as they have already led to confusion and indecision. The economic reforms, if fully implemented, would represent a significant policy departure, but in their present form they lag behind the proposals of the more “liberal” Soviet economists and the reforms introduced recently in a number of East European countries. A major drawback of the projected reforms is that they connote postponing until 1967–68 the introduction of the revised, presumably more rational system of wholesale prices. One crucial question for the success of the reforms is whether the industrial managers, long accustomed to a “command system,” will avail themselves of the opportunities to exercise initiative constructively.
There were signs of top-level disagreement over the extent and timing of the economic reforms and governmental restructuring right up to the eve of the September plenum. Behind these differences loomed the perennial debate over allocation of resources and over priorities for the next Five-Year Plan. Differences have also been evident [Page 349] in other key areas: in defining the Party’s role towards the government and the economy; in setting stricter limitations on Party membership and revising rules on rotation of personnel in leading Party organs; and in determining how, and at what pace, to carry out re-evaluation of the Stalin period.
In foreign affairs, the programmatic underpinnings of Soviet policy shifted soon after Brezhnev and Kosygin took over in 1964, and for the ensuing year Moscow emphasized bloc unity as a stated policy goal. By so doing, the Soviets evidently hoped to regroup their forces in the international communist movement and to put the onus for any further polemics on the Chinese. In this context they tried to build up a call for joint action in Vietnam both as a rallying slogan for communists and their sympathizers throughout the world and as a device for embarrassing the Chinese. Moscow seemed willing to pursue this policy even at the risk of serious deterioration in its relations with the US, but the Soviets remained circumspect in avoiding direct US–USSR military confrontation over Vietnam, and in the end there appeared to be no intention to change the basic relationship with the US that might be labeled limited hostility. By the end of their first year in office, Khrushchev’s successors had made no remarkable breakthroughs. To the extent that they have proven their point that the Chinese were to blame for continued disunity in the communist world, they have but demonstrated their lack of defined purpose to choose an alternative follow-up policy. In the third world, the Soviets have encountered some knotty dilemmas in the face of international and internecine conflicts, but on the whole their flexible policy has brought them some slight gain in favor, illustrated by their experience with the abortive Bandung II episode.
[Here follow a Table of Contents and sections on leadership and internal developments comprising 20 pages.]
III. SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY
A. General Guidelines
Although the post-Khrushchev regime attempted some initiatives during the year and responded to various crisis situations, its policy now seems to be hung up on the interplay of a number of conflicting pressures. This impression was confirmed by Brezhnev’s comments on the state of Soviet foreign policy included in his speech to the September plenum. Despite Brezhnev’s efforts to characterize Soviet diplomacy as “active” and “advancing,” the net impression is that Moscow has at least as many problems and fewer solutions than it had a year ago. When he failed to point to any new directions on the major issues of China and particularly the US, Brezhnev perhaps inadvertently drew [Page 350] a starkly pessimistic picture that would be depressing to a large part of the Soviet public, which tends to look on good Soviet-US relations as a harbinger of a happier state of affairs for themselves.
The likelihood also exists that Brezhnev’s remarks reflect an increased preoccupation of the regime with domestic matters. Beginning with Presidium member Kirilenko’s statement in the Far East in July, a series of authoritative comments on Soviet foreign policy, including articles in Kommunist and Pravda, and most recently Suslov’s speech to the Seventh Comintern Congress commemoration, have, in roughly similar language, stressed that the first or “supreme revolutionary principle” of Soviet foreign policy is the “building of communism” at home. While this statement also has connotations for the running polemic with the Chinese Communists on the proper revolutionary tactic in the international field, the way it has been emphasized in recent months, and particularly accompanied by reference to the CC CPSU plenums of the past year, all of which were primarily concerned with domestic matters, suggests that the regime at least for the moment is focusing inward.
The programmatic underpinnings of Soviet foreign policy shifted soon after the accession of the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime in 1964 and continued to point during the year in the direction of greater concern with problems of bloc unity and leadership even at the risk of a serious deterioration of US-Soviet ties. The formula used was first enunciated by Brezhnev in November 1964. It included six aims or tasks, involving the fostering of (1) peaceful conditions for socialist construction, (2) socialist unity, (3) national liberation, (4) cooperation with independent Afro-Asian and Latin American states, (5) peaceful coexistence with capitalist states, and (6) deliverance from world war. Although these six points basically follow the tenets of the CPSU Program issued in 1961, peaceful coexistence was no longer the umbrella under which all other tasks are to be carried out but became one of the six distinct, though interrelated, priorities of Soviet foreign policy and placed near the end of the list. Slight deviations from the six-point formula have appeared during the year, and although the formula is not necessarily included in every authoritative foreign policy statement, it has been reiterated recently and remains a useful template against which future policy statements can be measured.
Despite Brezhnev’s somewhat negative picture of Soviet policy, recent developments suggest some movement in certain areas. There have been hints that the Soviet regime may be shifting its tactics vis-á-vis Communist China in the direction of more forthright hostility and possibly a more overt move to isolate the Chinese. This likelihood has been accelerated by the Indo-Pakistan crisis as well as the Indonesian internal crisis but was already apparent in late summer. At the same [Page 351] time, the Soviet regime in the last half year has increasingly resorted to a “soft-sell” approach in an effort to improve relations with countries on its southern borders-i.e., Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The “soft-sell” also has emerged in relations with the Scandinavian and other Western powers and seems a coefficient of recent Soviet moves to reemphasize popular-front movements, both in Western Europe and Latin America, and to cooperate with “revolutionary” democrats in Africa and Asia.
[Here follow sections on Sino-Soviet relations, Eastern Europe, and Vietnam.]
E. No Fundamental Shift in Relations with the US
The hardening of the Soviet demeanor toward the US continues to be limited and apparently intended more as a tactic than a fundamental reorientation of policy. Brezhnev in his plenum speech chose to make US-Soviet relations depend upon the course of events in Vietnam, although he seemed to be at a loss to foresee how the Vietnam crisis might be resolved. He stated that these relations have been “considerably complicated” by the Vietnam crisis and have a “clear tendency toward freezing,” although he gave no indication whether or in what way they would worsen.
Brezhnev did not, however, repeat his August 27 criticism of the President, nor have other authoritative Soviet statements since then criticized the President. Developments since the end of August, when it seemed possible that the Brezhnev criticism would open a harsher phase in US-Soviet relations, reveal both positive and negative moves vis-á-vis the US. These moves to some extent cancel out each other and leave the USSR roughly on its previous course of carefully limited hostility toward the US in bilateral state relations. While the cultural aspects of the US-Soviet exchange program have bogged down further, the scientific and educational exchanges continue to limp along. This behavior contrasts to the outpourings of Soviet propaganda media which have steadily increased the anti-imperialist emphasis concentrating on the US as the main culprit responsible for exacerbating international tension.
[Here follow sections on new tactics in Western Europe, flexibility in the third world, disarmament, and the United Nations.]