Cold War After The Truman-Stalin Era

In early 1953, there was a change in the leadership of both the superpowers- the US and USSR. In the US, President Truman’s tenure ended in January 1953. He was succeeded by Dwight Eisenhower. an ex-army general who had commanded the Allied forces in Europe during the Second World War. Meanwhile. Soviet leader Stalin died in March 1953. He was succeeded as party chief by Nikita Khrushchev and by Georgy Malenkov as prime minister. The two Soviet leaders were not very comfortable with each other. Malenkov was replaced by Nikolai Bulganin in 1955. He was more acceptable to the party chief.

But in 1958 even Bulganin was dropped and Khrushchev assumed the prime ministership as well. President Eisenhower led US for eight years till he was succeeded by John F Kennedy in January 1961. Khrushchev remained at the helm of affairs till he was overthrown in 1964 by the troika of Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny and Alexei Kosygin. After the Truman-Stalin era, the US-Soviet relations eased considerably, but the Cold war showed no signs of ending. During 1953-64 several steps were taken by both the sides to improve relations, but at the same time tension got accelerated on different occasions.

CRISIS IN POLAND

Poland was the first to ignite. In June 1956, riots in the industrial city of Poznam were brutally suppressed, leaving dozens of people dead and hundreds wounded. A conflict occurred in the Polish Communist Party between two factions – one owing allegiance to Boleslaw Bierut, who had died earlier the same year, and the other led by Gomulka, who was a Nationalist Titoist communist, and had remained in jail since 1949, and was recently released. Gomulka faction succeeded.

In October, Polish Communist Party issued a proclamation that Poland would henceforth pursue a ‘national road to socialism’, and Gomulka was elected Secretary of the Polish Communist Party. The Soviet leaders decided not to use force against Gomulka. This was second set-back to USSR after Yugoslav decision in 1948 to follow Nationalist Communism.

REVOLT IN HUNGARY

Since the end of Second World War, Hungary was governed by an orthodox Communist leader, Matyas Rakosi, a nominee of Stalin. (He had been freed from jail before the War on Stalin’s initiative after the Soviet Union returned old Hungarian flags captured by the Czar in 1849.) The Rakosi regime was severe ‘even by Stalinist standards.’ In 1953, he was summoned to Moscow, reprimanded and replaced by a reformist communist Imre Nagy.

A more intangible effect of 1956 arises with the spread of its talented diaspora. Many thousands of gifted Hungarians left their country and settled as far afield as Australia, the United States, and across Western Europe. The contributions they made to their adopted countries were incalculably beneficial. Nowhere have I heard the kind of objections to Hungarian refugees that one regularly encounters in relation to other refugee and asylum-seeking groups. To some degree this is because everyone knew what the Hungarians had fled from; they received instinctive sympathy. But it also reflects the performance of the Hungarians in their adopted countries. They assimilated well and quickly, and were soon more than repaying their hosts.

Even though assimilated, however, they were eloquent voices critical of communism and the Soviet empire. The eminence many soon achieved in their fields of scholarship and enterprise added weight to their criticisms. And in the United States especially, they formed the influential “captive nations” lobby with other émigré groups, to press for a realistic foreign policy and, in time, to provide Reagan with intellectual heft.

REFERENCES : International Relations By V.N. Khanna