The Cuban Missile Crisis: Assessment of New,and Old,Russian Sources

A revolutionary hedgehog

The first port of call for the Soviet side of the story concerns Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba: what was he thinking? It was one of the first questions John F. Kennedy (JFK) put to the participants of the inaugural ExComm meeting on 16 October 1962. When, 6 days later, JFK went on air to announce the US naval ‘quarantine’ against Cuba, Moscow offered several explanations, including that the missiles were there to defend Cuba against a US invasion – something many a Kremlinologist refused to accept as a valid reason rather than a mere ploy of Soviet propaganda. Alternative answers included the ‘quick fix’ proposition – that is, that Moscow made up for its inferiority in InterContinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) by putting shorter range missiles right off the US coast – as well as the idea of a calculated gambit, designed to trade Cuban missiles for US Jupiter missiles in Turkey, or at least for concessions in Berlin. All these possible explanations were broached at that first ExComm (Executive Committee) meeting and were soon accepted as the must-mentions of informed public discussion of the subject.

Nearly 10 years passed before any serious new evidence emerged on the Soviet role in the crisis. It came in the form of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs, smuggled to the West and published in multiple volumes beginning in 1971. Khrushchev’s confused ramblings, while on the whole supportive of the ‘defense of Cuba’ line of argument, contained claims that could substantiate a wide variety of interpretations of Soviet decision making, including notions of Soviet ‘prestige’ (read: Khrushchev’s own prestige), even credibility (‘if Cuba fell, other Latin American countries would reject us …’), while addressing the balance of power (‘we’d be doing nothing more than giving them [the Americans] a little of their own medicine’). ¹ Khrushchev Remembers and its successor Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (1974) became about all there was on the Soviet side of the story for over 15 years, even though it was impossible to surmise, as indeed with any memoir, the accuracy of what Khrushchev remembered, and where he misremembered, and to what extent he engaged, consciously or unconsciously, in after-the-fact rationalizations. ²

With the end of the Cold War, the paucity of sources yielded to fabulous wealth. Soviet veterans of the crisis hastened to tell their stories for the first time, reshaping and informing this nascent historiography. ³ Much of the new testimony confirmed the weathered Soviet claim about defending Cuba as a socialist bridgehead, with strategic concerns (in the sense of the nuclear balance) trailing far behind. ⁴ The notable exception to the change of emphasis was General Dmitrii Volkogonov’s path-breaking book, Sem’ Vozhdei, which leaned to the side of the strategic imperative. Volkogonov’s most memorable contribution was the unreferenced anecdote about Khrushchev allegedly telling the Soviet Defense Minister, Rodion Malinovskii, that it would not be a bad idea to ‘throw our hedgehog in the Americans’ pants’. ⁵ This anecdote later made its way to the English-language literature and, occasionally furnished with imagined historical detail, now appears in a dozen books on the subject as evidence in support of the strategic character of Khrushchev’s decision. ⁶ Even so, the calculating, strategic-minded Khrushchev of old has practically vanished from scholarly accounts. He has been replaced by a new Khrushchev, the passionate believer in Communism, the defender of the Cuban revolution.

Among Russian historians who did the most to advertise the ‘new’ Khrushchev was late Sergo Mikoyan, the son of Khrushchev’s close confidant and Cuban trouble-shooter Anastas Mikoyan. Mikoyan Jr. became one of the favorite commentators on the crisis for Western audiences. In 1990, Bernd Greiner, writing for the Diplomatic History, claimed he had a ‘detailed knowledge of the discussions and decisions in the [Soviet] Presidium’, and an interview with Mikoyan was advertised under the ambitious title ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis Reconsidered: the Soviet view’. ⁷ In that interview, as in many subsequent interviews, Mikoyan argued that Khrushchev sent missiles to Cuba to defend the island against a US invasion. His views to this effect have been cited by a large number of Western scholars, notably those who sympathize with the revisionist Cold War historiography. ⁸ For, if Mikoyan was right about Khrushchev’s motives (and – in the words of Thomas Patterson – he was ‘well-positioned to know’), then one could conceivably blame the United States for causing the Cuban missile crisis by resorting to covert and overt actions to destabilize Castro’s regime. Patterson (in his commentary on Mikoyan’s interview) continues: ‘Khrushchev would never have had the opportunity to install dangerous missiles in the Caribbean if the United States had not been attempting to overthrow the Cuban government’. ⁹

Just how ‘well-positioned’ was Mikoyan to know what was happening behind the scenes in 1962? In the early 1990s, when the history of the Cuban missile crisis was being rewritten, thanks to new revelations on the Soviet side, no one could answer this question with any degree of certainty. Now we can, however, thanks to the publication (in 2006) of Sergo Mikoyan’s own seminal work on the Cuban missile crisis, Anatomi’ia Karibskogo Krizisa. In this thousand plus page volume, Mikoyan devotes a full chapter to the discussion of Khrushchev’s motives, arguing in somewhat unequivocal terms that the ‘main reason’ for sending missiles was to save Cuba from invasion. ¹⁰ Fortunately, Mikoyan provides detailed references for his claims so that rather than assuming his insider knowledge (as was the case with earlier studies of the crisis in the West) we can try to understand how Mikoyan became so convinced of the correctness of his position, and whether his sources truly justify such conviction.

Most of the evidence comes from Sergo Mikoyan’s notes of conversations with his father, all of which postdate the crisis – we are not told by how much. Thus, Anastas Mikoyan recalled:

Even before the trip to Bulgaria [May 1962] he [Khrushchev] conveyed to me his worry about a possible attack by the USA, which I fully shared. But this was not expressed for now in the development of a concrete plan of action. And after he returned from there in May, [he] told me that he kept thinking how to save Cuba from an invasion … ¹¹

This is no smoking gun; reservations that apply to Khrushchev’s memoirs may equally apply here including selective memory and ex post facto rationalization. The full context of Anastas Mikoyan’s remarks is also missing.

The second piece of evidence is Mikoyan Sr.’s statement before Soviet officers on 21 November 1962:

If they [the Americans] did it [invaded], the revolutionary Cuba would be no more. This would be a great blow for the world communist movement, for all socialist countries, for all that is progressive. This would throw back, just as it was getting under way, the struggle of the peoples of Latin America, and not only of Latin America but also of Africa. ¹²

This was said in the context of explaining to the Soviet officers why the Soviet government decided to ‘prevent the Americans from strangling Cuba’. However, one would expect Mikoyan to confirm to the Soviet officers the truthfulness of the Soviet propaganda about defending Cuba and scoring a great victory as a result of Kennedy’s noninvasion pledge. Presumably, he would not be telling Soviet officers that Moscow sent missiles to Cuba to redress the Soviet strategic inferiority vis-à-vis the United States. In this context, how could one depict the decision to withdraw as a victory for the USSR?

The same reservations may apply to Sergo Mikoyan’s third piece of evidence – his father’s assurances in discussions which took place with Cuban leaders in early November. According to the now available transcripts, Mikoyan said:

we [the Soviets] were, and are, doing everything possible in order to protect Cuba from invasion and to arm Cuba. We took a great risk, because at the moment of utmost tension there really was the danger of the unleashing of a thermonuclear war … All of this was necessary for Cuba, first and foremost, and not for us. ¹³

However, we would not really expect Mikoyan to tell Castro – who was already furious over becoming a trading chip in Soviet–American relations – that the rationale for placing missiles in Cuba was to close the missile gap with the United States.

The last important piece of evidence cited by Sergo Mikoyan is something he would have not known in the early 1990s, as it came to light only recently. Yet it happens to offer the best support for his line of argument about defending Cuba. The evidence is the fragmentary record of the Presidium meetings, the so-called Malin notes (published in full in 2003 in Russia, and now also accessible, in translation, on the Miller Center’s Kremlin Decision-Making Project web site). The first fragment is that of the meeting on 21 May 1962, where Khrushchev initially broached the question of sending missiles to Cuba. The fragment reads, ‘On aid to Cuba. How to help Cuba, so that it holds on (Khrushchev)’. ¹⁴ We also now have Khrushchev’s unclear comments at the 22 October 1961 meeting: ‘The thing is that we do not want to unleash a war; we wanted to scare, to deter the USA in relation to Cuba’. ¹⁵ It is difficult to draw sweeping conclusions from just a couple of lines of text. This evidence, when tallied with the other information assembled in Mikoyan’s book, would warrant the conclusion that defending Cuba was one of the concerns on Khrushchev’s mind, but it would not support the unequivocal interpretation that it was the only or even necessarily the primary concern. More likely, this concern and strategic arguments were so tightly connected and interrelated in Khrushchev’s mind that he would not be able to distinguish one from the other – as he did not in his memoirs.

In this connection, it is helpful to cite from the recollections of the Deputy Commander of the Soviet forces in Cuba, Leonid Garbuz, who reports on Khrushchev’s remarks at a meeting on 7 June 1962: ‘Khrushchev began his talk with a phrase: “we in the C[entral] C[ommittee] have decided to throw a “hedgehog” to the Americans: to place our rockets in Cuba so that America is not able to swallow the Island of Freedom …”’ ¹⁶ Thus, the hedgehog hypothesis became conveniently married to the idea of defending Cuba from US invasion. Was the ‘hedgehog’ meant to protect Cuba or was Cuba meant to offer convenient quarters for the ‘hedgehog’? This is not something we can answer with confidence. It is instructive that Mikoyan, after his many statements in defense of Khrushchev the romantic, yields to the brute logic of the evidence by stating toward the end of his analysis that he finds the ‘compromise’ interpretation (which emphasizes both the defense-of-Cuba theme and Khrushchev’s strategic imperatives) ‘more or less acceptable’. ¹⁷ As James Hershberg argues, Khrushchev’s decision ‘defies mono-causal explanation; like Harry S. Truman’s dropping of the atom bomb on Japan … it had overlapping objectives’. ¹⁸

One thing that one can say with confidence is that with the proliferation of Soviet oral history on the Cuban missile crisis, it is no longer safe to claim that Khrushchev was motivated strictly by strategic considerations – indeed, no one does so. What one sees in recent years, however, is the increasing prevalence of the opposite point of view – the line of argument that emphasizes Khrushchev’s irrationality, his romanticism, and idealism. This has happened despite the fact that, as demonstrated above, there is no real evidence for making unequivocal statements to this effect.

An example of this tendency is the highly influential, and in many respects path-breaking, work by Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War. The authors argue,

It was not the temptation to use the Cuban Revolution as a chance to improve the Soviet position in the strategic balance of the superpowers that brought the Soviet missiles to San Cristobal, Cuba; rather, it was a new strategic capability that emboldened Khrushchev to launch an overseas operation to save the Cuban Revolution. ¹⁹

What about the evidence? If we check the reference to this particular statement, we see that it is merely a 1993 interview with the former Soviet diplomat Oleg Troianovskii. Ironically, Troianovskii later published memoirs, in which he gave equal weight to Khrushchev’s preoccupation with strategic balance. ²⁰ Zubok, however, appears to have softened the ‘revolutionary’ side of his revolutionary–imperial paradigm with the recent book, The Soviet Union and the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. This more nuanced (and convincing) view also draws on Oleg Troianovskii for evidence – a good example of how the same kind of evidence may be used to support opposite interpretations. ²¹

Where Zubok has moved away from ‘revolutionary’ explanations of the Soviet missile deployment, then John Lewis Gaddis, by contrast, has come to emphasize Khrushchev’s ‘ideological romanticism’. In his 1997 account of the Cold War, We Now Know, Gaddis judged the Soviet leader to have acted out of ‘desperation’ – a view that inspired unforgiving criticism on the part of Sergo Mikoyan who said in no uncertain terms: ‘J. Gaddis is far from understanding the psychology and the method of thinking of the Soviet leaders …’ ²² If Mikoyan had read his later book, The Cold War, he would come away with a more sympathetic impression, for Gaddis now claims that Khrushchev, far from being desperate,

intended his missile deployment chiefly as an effort, improbably as this might seem, to spread revolution throughout Latin America. He and his advisers had been surprised, but then excited, and finally exhilarated when a Marxist-Leninist insurgency seized power in Cuba on its own …

Khrushchev, Gaddis adds, ‘was like a petulant child playing with a loaded gun’. ²³

Gaddis substantiates this imagery with one remark about Fidel Castro, which Mikoyan is said to have made after meeting the Cuban leader: ‘Completely like us. I felt as though I had returned to my childhood’. ²⁴ This remark – cited from One Hell of a Gamble – may have been mistranslated (by Fursenko and Naftali, not Gaddis). It seems that Mikoyan actually said, ‘I had a feeling that my youth (as opposed to “childhood” – SR) has returned’. ²⁵ Minor points aside, the important issue here is that one somewhat mistranslated remark by Mikoyan (not Khrushchev), made in a context that is far from clear, has appeared time and again in the literature as evidence for the Soviet leader’s ‘ideological romanticism’, becoming almost a must-mention and a counterpart to Volkogonov’s hedgehog anecdote.

There is an epistemological problem here. The shift in the existing historiography of the Cuban missile crisis toward greater emphasis on Soviet ‘romanticism’ – something that we have clearly witnessed since the mid-1990s, and, indeed, something this author has enthusiastically embraced ²⁶ – is not grounded in indisputable, unequivocal evidence but, often, in selective citations from studies that (in turn) drew on materials which are often still not freely available to researchers interested in the examination of the evidence. For example, the aforementioned remark by Mikoyan has been cited time and again in the emerging literature to provide a very interesting effect. David Priestland, for instance, mentions Mikoyan’s ‘childhood’ moment to argue that the Soviet leaders sought to ‘infuse some youthful spirit into the ageing body of Soviet Communism’. ²⁷ The same remark appears in Odd Arne Westad’s highly acclaimed Global Cold War, ²⁸ citing from Piero Gleijeses, who cites in turn from Fursenko and Naftali, ²⁹ who cite from a cable sent by the Soviet intelligence agent in Havana, Aleksei Alekseev, on 10 February 1960. The cable itself is at the archive of the Russian Service of External Intelligence (SVR), inaccessible to scholars, so that we simply cannot know why Alekseev would report, via intelligence channels, on the comments Mikoyan – then arguably the No. 2 man in the leadership – made to other members of his own delegation. Whatever the reasons, Mikoyan’s chance remark has come to signify for many the strength of Soviet ideological commitment to Cuba.

Another piece of evidence that is extensively used to support the above argument is a further remark by Mikoyan, this time to Dean Rusk:

You Americans must realize what Cuba means to us Old Bolsheviks. We have been waiting all our lives for a country to go Communist without the Red Army, and it happened in Cuba. It makes us feel like boys again!

First cited in Schoenbaum’s Waging Peace and War in 1988, this statement had since appeared in dozens of books and articles on the Cuban missile crisis. For instance, Hal Brands cites it to support his argument that the Soviets were ‘thrilled’ by the Cuban revolution ‘in an ideological sense’. ³⁰ Lebow and Stein use the same snippet to emphasize Mikoyan’s ‘sentimental attachment’ to Cuba. ³¹ Mervyn Bain resorts to Mikoyan’s remark to argue that Khrushchev had a ‘close personal affinity’ with Castro. ³² The point here is not at all to argue that Mikoyan was lying to Rusk or to his close associates (if anything, the coincidence suggests that he was saying about the same thing to both the friend and the foe), but to point out that we have come to depend heavily on such snippets of information to paint a picture of the Soviet involvement in the Cuban missile crisis as heavily colored by ideological imperatives.

Indeed, a renewed interest in ideology has increasingly characterized scholarship on the Cold War as a whole. Many historians of the Cold War now emphasize ideology as the primary motivation for Cold War decision makers. The Cuban missile crisis serves as merely one of the case studies for illustrating the role of ideology in Soviet policy making. But it is an important one. If we say that there is no compelling evidence that Khrushchev was motivated by ‘revolutionary romanticism’ – even if there is also no real evidence to the contrary – where does it leave us with regard to the centrality of ideology in New Cold War scholarship? There are, no doubt, other case studies to draw upon, but one should certainly be aware of the potential pitfalls in overreliance on uncertain scraps of evidence. Alas, the bottom line is: we do not know precisely why Khrushchev sent missiles to Cuba. Fifty years on, we are still struggling with this essential and perhaps impossible question. This of course makes it difficult to draw sweeping conclusions from the existing literature.

Khrushchev withdraws

The second important question that has multiple answers in the existing literature of the Soviet side of the Crisis is how – and why – Khrushchev, after taking the gamble to secretly deploy Medium-Range Ballistic Missiles (MRBMs) and Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) to Cuba, decided to withdraw those same missiles from the island. Historians and political scientists have had difficulty making sense of the decision-making process behind three letters Khrushchev sent to Kennedy as the crisis climaxed: One, a private one, on 26 October, and two letters on 27 and 28 October, respectively, which were broadcast by Radio Moscow. In the first letter, Khrushchev proposed – although arguably only implicitly and in somewhat vague terms – that the Soviet Union would withdraw missiles from Cuba in return for Kennedy’s noninvasion pledge. In the second (public) letter, Khrushchev upped the ante by asking for a quid pro quo: removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in return for the US withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Finally, on 28 October, the Soviet leader agreed, unequivocally, to take the ‘weapons which you regard as offensive’ (i.e. the missiles, though not tactical nuclear weapons, of which Kennedy was not aware) out of Cuba. These twists and turns of policy within the space of 2 days can now be understood much better, because of the release of key documentation on the Russian side.

The most important development was the declassification of the Malin notes for October 1962. These were first introduced in Fursenko and Naftali’s One Hell of a Gamble, though it was not until the publication of Khrushchev’s Cold War, by the same authors, that this evidence was utilized in full. ³³ The Malin notes are quite fragmentary, missing (among other things) the records of the Presidium discussion on 23 October. Sergo Mikoyan fills the gap here with the notes of his father’s (naturally) self-centered recollections (also borrowed by Fursenko and Naftali). ³⁴ We do have the records for the 25 October meeting, and these show that Khrushchev agreed to the idea of dismantling missile sites if Kennedy undertook ‘not to touch Cuba’. ³⁵ This perfectly explains his first letter to Kennedy, although Fursenko and Naftali also highlight secondary factors, for instance, that Khrushchev became scared after he had learned about Kennedy’s alleged determination to get rid of Castro through Warren Rogers, an American journalist, who had been overheard to this effect by a bartender/KGB informant at the National Press Club and then confirmed the troubling news to a Soviet diplomat Georgii Kornienko. This story is de-emphasized in Fursenko and Naftali’s later account, and for a good reason: it probably had very little, if any, impact on Khrushchev’s decision to send that 26 October letter. The decision had by then been made.

In general, the subplots of the various secret meetings and backchannels have animated accounts of the Cuban missile crisis since the 1960s. Perhaps the most famous story concerns contacts between the KGB rezident in Washington, Aleksandr Feklisov, and the ABC journalist John Scali at the height of the crisis – known for many years and long understood to have played a crucial role in brokering a peaceful settlement of the crisis. Feklisov (then using the cover name Fomin) and Scali met on 26 October, and either the former or the latter proposed the withdrawal/noninvasion pledge compromise. Kennedy had assumed that the proposal came directly from Khrushchev, and it seemed to square with, and complement, in more concrete terms, his 26 October letter. However, some documentation emerged in the 1990s, which suggests that Feklisov may have been acting on his own initiative. Until now, this question has not been settled, although it could presumably be cleared up when the cable traffic between the KGB and Feklisov is declassified in full, which one hopes will not require another 50 years. For now, one issue that we can at least say with certainty is that the Feklisov/Scali exchange was basically irrelevant to Khrushchev’s decision making between 25 and 28 October. It certainly does not explain why Khrushchev changed his mind and added Jupiters into the settlement formula on 27 October.

Fursenko and Naftali explain this change of mind by invoking Walter Lippmann who had just proposed the Turkey/Cuba exchange in a newspaper column on Thursday 25 October – an article Khrushchev is said to have read. ³⁶ Khrushchev’s comments at the Presidium on 27 October show that he thought that it was possible that the United States would agree to the ‘liquidation’ of their bases in Turkey, as well as Pakistan – which would make the Soviet Union ‘the winner’ – but also that he was already resigned to scaling back these demands in case the White House refused to give way. ‘I think that we should not be stubborn’ was how Khrushchev explained his position before the Presidium voted on the text of the letter to Kennedy, which was broadcast on the radio later that day. ³⁷

In addition, it has now become clear from the Russian record that the one concession, which scholars believed had swayed Khrushchev into agreeing to withdraw missiles – Kennedy’s private promise, made through Robert Kennedy via Ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin – that Jupiters would be withdrawn eventually, played no role in Khrushchev’s capitulation on 28 October. ³⁸ Khrushchev simply panicked in reaction to what appeared to be indications of an imminent US attack on Cuba. He was also greatly exercised by a letter from Fidel Castro that appeared to call for a first strike on the United States. ‘Only a person who has no idea what nuclear war means, or who has been so blinded, for instance, like Castro, by revolutionary passion, can talk like that’, Khrushchev complained several days later. ³⁹ Indeed, when faced with the prospect of escalation, the Soviet leader preferred to back down and cut his losses. For him, this included the loss of Cuban trust. Mikoyan was promptly dispatched to Havana to salvage the wreck of the Soviet–Cuban alliance. Transcripts of his talks, now fully declassified, show the depth of the Cubans’ resentment of having become a plaything of Khrushchev’s nuclear brinksmanship. ⁴⁰ The Chinese exploited the rift to the full, unleashing a propaganda campaign to discredit the embattled Soviet leader in the eyes of the Cuban and the Third World audience. ⁴¹ Release of new documentation on the Russian side shows that Khrushchev could not stomach a confrontation with the United States and the politico-military risks this entailed.

How close?

The third tantalizing question about the Soviet side of the story in the Cuban missile crisis – the subject also broached in Campbell Craig’s contribution to this issue – relates to estimates of a nuclear confrontation: just how close did the world come to the brink? (The emergence of new Soviet evidence on this question in the late 1980s and early 1990s gave the Western audience a powerful jolt). In the words of a New York Times columnist, Flora Lewis, the crisis was ‘worse than we knew’. ⁴² Lewis was talking about the revelation, at the January 1989 Moscow oral history conference, that Soviet nuclear warheads had reached Cuba (something the Kennedy Administration could not detect but safely assumed) and ‘orders could have been given at any moment’ to fire them. ⁴³ At a subsequent ‘critical oral history’ conference of United States, Soviet (now Russian), and Cuban veterans of the affair (above all Fidel Castro himself), in Havana in January 1993, new troubling details seeped into the public domain. It turned out that the Soviet force on the island had been equipped with tactical nuclear weapons, and – it was even said – the General in Charge, Issa Pliev, had predelegated authority on their use in case of a US invasion and loss of communications with Moscow. ⁴⁴ This claim gave added weight to the argument that the chief danger of the Cuban missile crisis was not in what Kennedy or Khrushchev did or did not do but in how far they actually controlled the action on the ground. The prospect of a nuclear Armageddon as an unexpected, indeed, accidental, consequence of a US invasion of Cuba appeared more possible in retrospect.

In 1992–1993, the question of whether General Pliev had the authority to use nuclear weapons in Cuba prompted a lively discussion among historians, most memorably in a rather intense and at times testy exchange between Mark Kramer, on the one hand, and James Blight, Bruce Allyn, and David Welch, on the other. ⁴⁵ The evidence was patchy then, and Mark Kramer argued that it was wrong to claim that the crisis was ‘more dangerous than it actually was’, and he insisted that Khrushchev in fact expressly forbade the use of nuclear weapons in case of a confrontation with the Americans. ⁴⁶ In the 20 or so years that had passed since those early debates, we know both more and less but there is a certain degree of clarity concerning key documents.

Thus, we know that Khrushchev never approved the instruction prepared by the Ministry of Defense in early September 1962 which would have given Pliev the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons in case of a US invasion and if he could not contact Moscow. Khrushchev withheld his authorization even as he approved the shipment of additional tactical nukes to Cuba on 7 September. ⁴⁷ Indeed, Gribkov retreated from his previous sensationalist claims in his book Operation Anadyr, co-authored with US General William Smith. ⁴⁸ On the other hand, the same Gribkov claimed a few years later, in a different publication, that when Khrushchev saw Pliev before the latter’s departure for Cuba, the Soviet leader,

after thinking about it for some time … gave the right to the commander of the Group [of forces] to use the Luna rockets as he deems fit when defending the island … This right is given to him in case of the lack of communications with Moscow. ⁴⁹

Sergo Mikoyan cited Gribkov as telling him privately in Havana (in 1992) that the Soviet forces in Cuba would no doubt use tactical nukes against an invading force. ‘I am personally confident that this would happen if the warheads were at an accessible distance’, argues Mikoyan, without, however, supplying any concrete evidence, except for references to the logic of military action. ⁵⁰

We know, however, that at the outset of the acute phase of the crisis, on 22 October, Khrushchev (through the Minister of Defense Rodion Malinovskii) ordered Pliev not to resort to the ‘weapons of Statsenko’s and of all Beloborodov’s cargo’, which is understood to refer to all – including tactical – nuclear weapons. ⁵¹ Further conflicting evidence appears in the Presidium notes for 22 October (prior to the dispatch of Malinovsky’s cable). Khrushchev supposedly said: ‘Give the instruction to Pliev – to bring all forces to full battle readiness. Try his best at first not to use the atomic [weapons]’. The fragment continues: ‘If there is a landing – [use?] tactical atomic weapons, and the strategic – [wait?] until the instruction (excluding the use of the means in Statsenko’s care)’. ⁵² If this fragment is compared with Malinovsky’s cable, one possible conclusion is that while Khrushchev was at first inclined to delegate the authority to use the tactical weapons to Pliev in case of a landing, he evidently had second thoughts at the last moment and withheld authorization. The order to refrain from any use of nuclear weapons was restated ‘categorically’ in another cable from Malinovsky to Pliev on 27 October. ⁵³ But if Pliev was clear about his orders after 22 October, it is still impossible to tell whether he had the authority, implied or explicit, to use tactical nuclear weapons before that date.

Even if Pliev had no authority to use tactical, or strategic, nuclear missiles, the question remains whether he, or officers under his command, could have used them nonetheless, for instance, in the heat of battle. Michael Dobbs, in a recent book on the Cuban missile crisis, emphasized that the main danger actually lies in inadvertent escalation of hostilities as a result of a ‘sonofabitch moment’ – that is, someone, somewhere along the command line, not following orders or making a mistake of some sort. ⁵⁴ This version of events has been particularly popular since the revelation that it was a Soviet officer who ordered to shoot down a U-2 over Cuba on 27 October 1962 – without any authorization from Khrushchev, the General Staff in Moscow, or even Pliev in Cuba. Sensationalist media has of course hijacked the story for their purposes. For instance, one John C. Wohlstetter, in a review of Dobb’s book, recently argued that the U-2 was shot down on Castro’s orders (this has long been proven otherwise) – and how this should warn today’s policymakers in the West about the dangers of an ‘Islamic Castro’. Speaking of incorrect analogies, it is truly astounding what nonsense one continues to read about the Cuban missile crisis these days! ⁵⁵ This seems to multiply with every passing anniversary.

There were other similar moments throughout the crisis, most notably, the accidental overflight of Soviet territory in the Far East by another American U-2 plane, also on 27 October, due to a navigational error. ⁵⁶ This incident, Dobbs and others now speculate, could have been misinterpreted by the Soviets as an intelligence mission before a first strike, or even the first strike itself. But – and here is where we run into a wall on the Russian side – very little evidence has surfaced that would shed light on the Soviet reaction to the misdirected U-2, so it is difficult to make any conclusions as to how the military – or Khrushchev – interpreted these developments, and whether the moment was as dangerous as Dobbs would make us believe, or as Khrushchev claimed in his letter to Kennedy. ⁵⁷ Yet again, the paucity of evidence has hardly proved to be a barrier for journalists. The Globe and Mail, for instance, in reviewing Dobbs’ book, confidently stated that the U-2 was not shot down by Soviet MiGs, because they could not reach the required altitude. ⁵⁸ And so, just as we learn more about the Cuban missile crisis with every new revelation, new myths are being born and the old myths are resuscitated.

It is actually difficult to argue, just on the basis of the shooting down of U-2 over Cuba, that the Soviet chain of command over tactical, much less strategic, nukes was in danger of a breakdown. By the same token, while it is certainly interesting to have learned, from Dobbs’ carefully assembled evidence, that the Soviets deployed nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to the vicinity of the Guantanamo base, and were poised to strike the base in case hostilities broke out, Dobbs himself notes that the order to strike would have had to come ‘from the general staff in Moscow’ – something we have long known. ⁵⁹ It should be said that most of his evidence on the Soviet side – certainly useful in many ways – is basically hearsay. Documents that would shed more light on the misadventures of the Soviet tactical nuclear weapons remain classified in the Russian archives, including the precise date and manner of their removal from Cuba.

There is more evidence that has come to light in the last decade or so that has strengthened the hand of those who argue that the world came closer to the brink than most people realized. The key development here was the elaboration of the story of the four Soviet submarines on a mission to protect these Soviet shipments to Cuba. The revelation first came to light in Russia in a 1995 article by Aleksandr Mozgovoi who later authored a study, based mainly on extensive interviews with crew members of the four submarines dispatched to the vicinity of Cuba in the run-up to the crisis. ⁶⁰ The most exciting passage of the book was a recollection by Vadim Orlov, head of the radio intercept team aboard one of the submarines, the B-59. Orlov claimed that the captain of the submarine Vitalii Savitskii – who was ‘totally exhausted’ from days of US antisubmarine warfare harassment – decided to use a nuclear torpedo against his American pursuers and was only dissuaded from doing so at the last moment, having been persuaded by the Second Captain, Vasilii Arkhipov. ⁶¹ The Americans had no idea that this submarine or the other hunter-killers were equipped with nuclear-tipped torpedoes, and dropped depth charges to make them surface.

These revelations caused further controversy in the West, when they were picked up by scholars and journalists in 2002. Although it had earlier become known to scholars that the four submarines had been equipped with nuclear-tipped torpedoes, the new evidence suggested that these could well have been used without authorization. Subsequent investigation by Svetlana Savranskaya, based on oral history, disagreed as to whether such authorization had been given, with some of the submarine captains claiming to have been told that they could strike back if attacked by the Americans. ⁶² Recently, Dobbs drew on the same testimony in making the argument that the world neared the brink. Both Savranskaya and Dobbs make a reservation to the effect that many details in this story are unclear. It is especially difficult to corroborate Orlov’s story, seeing that Savitskii, Arkhipov, and other key witnesses are already dead. All the same, Vasilii Arkhipov has now entered the literature as the ‘guy who saved the world’. ⁶³ There is even a Wikipedia article devoted to this important, if, for all intents and purposes undocumented, feat.

Conclusions

Since the end of the Cold War, we have come to learn a great deal about the Soviet side of the story of the Cuban missile crisis. Important details have come to light through increasing declassification and oral history; in particular, through the efforts of individual scholars noted here and scholarly enterprises such as the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) and the National Security Archive, among others. But it is fair to say that we have still only seen the tip of the iceberg. Key documentation remains inaccessible to this day in the archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense, and of the Navy, in the Presidential Archive, in the archives of the intelligence services (in particular, the SVR), and the Foreign Ministry Archive. Though Fidel Castro has released a smattering of materials, mostly in connection with the international oral history conferences he hosted in Havana in 1993 and 2001–2002, Cuban documents remain mostly sealed off. CWIHP has continued its efforts to obtain, and translate, new documents on the crisis, most recently those of the Chinese. ⁶⁴ This effort is not attracting as much attention or funding as it once did in the 1990s. The gloss of novelty has worn off. It seems that we have learned so much about the crisis – what else do we need to know? Moreover, it is not even clear that new evidence could help us answer the three most vexing questions: why did Khrushchev send missiles to Cuba, why did he withdraw them, and how close did the world come to thermonuclear Armageddon?

On the other hand, there is much that we have learned about the Cuban missile crisis since the Soviet side of the story began to emerge. We know that it was Khrushchev personally – not a ‘collective leadership’ of any kind – who committed to sending missiles to Cuba and forced the idea through the Presidium practically without any resistance. It was also Khrushchev who made the decision, at the 11th hour, to withdraw missiles from Cuba. Earlier, Kremlinological analyses tended to ponder the role of various factions within the leadership and bureaucratic and institutional interests. We have learned, thanks to the disclosures on the Soviet side, that such pressures were evidently not a serious determinant of Khrushchev’s actions. On the other hand, it has become clear that one cannot understand how Soviet foreign policy was made without taking into account the role of personality. With a confused personality like Khrushchev – flamboyant and romantic here, calculating and rational there – it has proven difficult to understand the twists and turns of Moscow’s policy toward Cuba, and, for this matter, its foreign and defense policy in general. Hence, the new literature on the Cold War has come to emphasize irrationality and emotions, which colored perceptions and influenced policy making on the Soviet side. Indeed, we have seen that scholars embraced this new, ‘ideological’, aspect of the Soviet Cold War experience with remarkable zeal.

Yet no amount of zeal, occasionally born of suspect evidence, has served to undermine the longtime argument that Khrushchev stepped back ‘from the brink’ because he was afraid of a nuclear war. His revolutionary spirit, his love of Castro, and so on – none of that sufficed to bolster Khrushchev’s willingness to stand firm in the face of US pressure. Indeed, new evidence has shown that Khrushchev had blinked even earlier than it seemed at the time. Now, what exactly that means in terms of historical lessons is less clear. One could either argue that it proves that containment worked and, just as George Kennan would have predicted, the Soviet Union retreated when faced with superior force. Or, it may prove nothing, except that Khrushchev personally did not have the nerve for toughing out a standoff with the Americans. The strong personal and subjective element in Soviet/Russian decision making suggests that it just as likely that Stalin, Brezhnev, or Putin would have acted the same way as that they would have acted differently. Some of the same reservations also apply to US decision making during the crisis but, comparatively speaking, Soviet/Russian foreign policy has proved more likely to suffer from zigzags and unexpected reversals, often due to the absence of strong institutional constraints.

Furthermore, we have learned a lot about the details of the Soviet operation in Cuba – the logistical arrangements, the nature of military plans, and so on. – including the startling revelation of the tactical nuclear weapons, deployed both in Cuba and aboard the submarines, which caused, and continue to cause, controversy among scholars and the general public. Disclosure of these sensational details over the last 20 years has not produced great clarity as to whether these weapons could, and would, have been used. The ‘brink’ theory has won plenty of adherents, from Allyn, Blight, and Welch in the early 1990s to Michael Dobbs most recently. Voices of skeptics have not been heard quite as loudly, although the evidence has not been unequivocal, especially in the case with the submarines incident. It has become fashionable, on the basis of the new Russian literature on the Cuban missile crisis, to argue that the world had come very close to a nuclear war and that the main danger was not even in what Kennedy or Khrushchev thought or did, but in the inadvertent escalation of hostilities. Khrushchev was apprehensive about the prospects of an accidental nuclear war, and did his best to keep control of the ‘red button’, figuratively speaking. But, problematically, there was no ‘red button’ that Khrushchev could have resorted to. The command and control structure was not well integrated, and much dependent on the actions of individual commanders who decided for themselves how to interpret instructions from Moscow.

Books have appeared in the West that account for the Soviet side of the story. Some have been more successful than others. Clearly, One Hell of a Gamble and Khrushchev’s Cold War by Fursenko and Naftali and, more recently, Anatomi’ia Karibskogo Krizisa by Sergo Mikoyan have advanced our knowledge to a considerable degree. Scholarly debates have raged intermittently in conferences and in print. Few of the big debates of the early 1990s have been satisfactorily resolved. Michael Dobbs, in One Minute to Midnight, remarks that he was greatly surprised how much more new evidence he had been able to unearth. Even so, his book has served as another reminder of how many things he – or others – have not been able to unearth. A lot hinges on the declassification process in Russia, which has now slowed down to a crawl. New evidence continues to emerge year after year, but the crucial pieces of the puzzle are still missing. Fifty years anniversary of the Crisis serves to remind us that we have only just scratched the surface.