How We Got Here

Moments that shaped U.S. and Soviet views

In the six decades since the October Revolution, the relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union have provided a long drama of violent antipathy alternating with uneasy reconciliation. "Bolshevism," said one early observer, "means chaos, wholesale murder, the complete destruction of civilization." In 1918, Woodrow Wilson even sent some 15,000 American troops to support Allied forces fighting against the Bolsheviks in northern Russia and eastern Siberia. But within three years, the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover was pouring food and medical supplies into famine-ridden Russia.

It was not until 1933, under the new Roosevelt Administration, that the U.S. recognized the Soviet government, and a brief honeymoon began. Then came Stalin 's psychopathic purges and show trials and the Hitler-Stalin pact that prepared the way for World War II. But when Hitler attacked Russia, Americans began to regard the Soviet Union as a gallant ally.

The Soviet-American relationship has developed since then in a procession of crises and events. Among them:

STALINGRAD. By the summer of 1942, the German armies had driven deep into Russia, and in August, General Friedrich Paulus' Sixth Army closed in on Stalingrad on the Volga. The Soviets resisted fiercely. As fall and then the bitter winter set in. Paulus' men inched into Stalingrad, fighting house to house. But like Napoleon, Hitler had come too far into Russia and reckoned without the Russian cold. The suffering and bravery of Stalingrad in that terrible winter became a new myth of an enduring Soviet Union. The Red Army, under Georgi Zhukov, managed to encircle Paulus' 200,000-man army and batter it into submission. The German surrender on Feb. 2, 1943, was a turning point of the war.

It was an urgent time of shared suffering and purpose. America delivered $11 billion in arms, grain and other supplies to keep the Soviets going. Allied convoys bringing supplies into Murmansk and Archangel through the Barents Sea sometimes lost as many as three-quarters of their ships to German dive bombers. Toward the end of the war, with the Americans rolling into Germany from the West and the Soviets from the East, Winston Churchill remarked: "I deem it highly important that we should shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible." The Allies had to settle for the Elbe River, where Americans and Russians at last embraced on April 25,1945.

THE BERLIN BLOCKADE. The wartime Soviet-American friendship soon hardened into peacetime animosity--the cold war, in the writer Herbert Bayard Swope's coinage--when the Soviet Union organized its postwar system of Eastern European satellite states. The U.S. countered with its Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The most direct East-West confrontation occurred in isolated Berlin, when the Soviets suddenly shut down all roads, rails and waterways in an effort to starve the city into submission. The U.S. and Britain responded with an unprecedented airlift. Bright C-54s and battered C-47s touched down at West Berlin's Tempelhof Airport at a daytime rate of one every three minutes. At its peak, these allies ferried a record of 12,940 tons of fuel and food in one day during what they called "Operation Vittles." After ten months the Soviets opened the ground corridors to the West again, but Berlin remained an international, and emotionally American, outpost behind the Russian lines. "Ich bin ein Berliner, "said President Kennedy.

THE ROSENBERG TRIAL. The US monopoly on atomic power ended in 1949 when Americans learned to their dismay that the Soviets had cracked the secret. They suspected that spies were to blame. In April of 1951, Federal Judge Irving Kaufman looked down at the defendants. "Plain, deliberate, contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed," he told Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. "I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb... has already caused the Communist aggression in Korea ... and who knows but that millions more of innocent' people may pay the price of your treason."

The trial, falling in the midst of the Korean War and the red-baiting campaign of Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy, embodied the polarizations and anxieties of the era. The Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing two years later.

THE HUNGARIAN UPRISING. A crowd poured down Stalin Boulevard in Budapest and mounted the marble base of the statue, a 25-foot bronze of Joseph Stalin erected on the site of the razed Regnum Marianum Church. With ladders, cables and acetylene torches, a group of workers cut through the metal knees and brought the old dictator crashing to the street. Hungarians hammered at the huge metal corpse. Said one wrecker: "I want a souvenir of this old bastard."

For three weeks in 1956, the mutinous Hungarians had conducted a revolt to drive the Soviets out of their homeland. They had also waited in some agony for American intervention, but none came. On Nov. 4 reinforced Soviet Army forces swept through Budapest and crushed the rebellion there. By Nov. 14, when the last rebel stronghold fell, about 25,000 Hungarians had been killed.

The year 1956 was a complicated time in the Soviet-American relationship. Earlier that year, in a secret session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Soviet Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev had delivered a three-hour speech debunking Stalin. He had been, said Khrushchev, a treacherous, lying, murdering paranoid. But the Hungarian tragedy demonstrated that Khrushchev was not going to dismantle Stalin's empire.

SPUTNIK. It was the earth's only other satellite except the moon, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball, hurtling around the planet at 18,000 m.p.h. An NBC radio announcer that October in 1957 bade his audience: "Listen now, for the sound which forever separates the old from the new." And over thousands of radios, from somewhere in space, came an eerie beep ... beep ... beep.

The Soviet Union astonished the world with the sophistication of its Sputnik. The technological surprise plunged the U.S. into orgies of introspection. It prompted the National Defense Education Act to provide $1 billion for more science teaching and student loans. The satellite gave the impetus to John Kennedy's promise four years later to put a man on the moon by the end of the 60s.

THE U2. On May 1, 1960, Pilot Francis Gary Powers climbed aboard his low-slung, black Lockheed U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance plane in Peshawar, Pakistan. As he traversed the Soviet Union at about 65,000 feet, supposedly beyond the range of Soviet interception and missiles, his infrared cameras photographed potential targets below. But above Sverdlovsk, according to the Soviets, a ground-to-air rocket brought down the U2; Powers parachuted to earth unharmed. At first the U.S. claimed that the plane was on a weather reconnaissance flight and had strayed over the U.S.S.R. But Khrushchev had captured Powers, the wrecked plane and the film, which he mockingly brandished before the Supreme Soviet.

The Eisenhower Administration suffered the acute embarrassment of being caught lying. Two weeks later, at the previously arranged Big Four summit conference in Paris, Khrushchev demanded an apology. Eisenhower refused it, though he assured the Soviets that the overflights had been suspended. The summit collapsed in an atmosphere of anger and accusation. Later in the year, Khrushchev came to New York for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly and left a vivid image in the world's memory: as a Filipino delegate spoke, Khrushchev removed his own shoe and pounded it on the table, like a peasant overheated by vodka.

CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS. Khrushchev had sized up Kennedy as a weakling and the U.S. as "too liberal to fight." Proceeding on such assumptions, Khrushchev attempted an astonishing military ploy in October 1962. The Soviets set about installing 40 launch pads on Cuba, with missiles aimed at the U.S. 90 miles away. Khrushchev had misjudged Kennedy. During one hair-raising autumn week, Kennedy used the threat of American nuclear force to get the missiles dismantled, crated and shipped back to the Soviet Union. In what became a cliche of international machismo, Secretary of State Dean Rusk explained: "We're eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked."

THE INVASION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA. Just before midnight, telephones all over Prague began to jangle. Friends and relatives living in Czechoslovak border towns were frantically passing the word to the capital. Soon the roar of jet engines sounded over the city's medieval streets; Soviet planes were flying ominously low. Thus in August 1968 began the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia by 200,000 soldiers from the Warsaw Pact countries. It seemed an extraordinarily brutal overreaction to a rather gentle experiment. The Czechoslovak government under Alexander Dubcek had tried for eight months to humanize Communism, to promote freedom of speech and of the press, the right to free assembly, to criticize, both from within the party and from political clubs outside it. Moscow found Dubcek's "Prague Spring" intolerable. Under what became known as the "Brezhnev Doctrine," Moscow claimed the right to intervene in any Communist state threatened by "counterrevolution."

THE NIXON DETENTE. It was an encounter unlike anything the Soviets had ever seen. Vice President Richard Nixon, who had built a whole career on opposition to Communism, came to Moscow in 1959 to open the American National Exhibition, and there, amid the shiny appliances of a model kitchen, he got into an increasingly heated argument with Nikita Khrushchev. "You don't know everything," Nixon charged. "You don't know anything about Communism except fear of it," Khrushchev retorted.

The odd meeting helped persuade Nixon that he had a special knack for face-to-face bargaining with the Communists. As President, he decided, even in the midst of the Viet Nam War, to fly to Peking in February 1972 and open diplomatic discussions. Three months later he went to Moscow to reassure the Russians of their tremendous stakes in a Soviet-American partnership.

The point of Nixon's trip was mutual self-interest: the President and Brezhnev signed an arms limitation agreement, both sides now seeming ready to scale down their profligate arms competition. They agreed to save money and pool information by embarking on a joint space venture--the Apollo-Soyuz linkup that came to pass in 1975.

THE SOLZHENITSYN AFFAIR. A blue and white Aeroflot TU-154 brought him, handcuffed, on the first leg of his exile, from Moscow to Frankfurt. "I was in prison just this morning," Alexander Solzhenitsyn said. "First I must get used to things and try to comprehend my situation."

Thus in February 1974, Solzhenitsyn began his banishment from the country that could not silence him or endure him as its conscience. A Nobel prizewinner and one of the century's great writers, Solzhenitsyn for a time embodied Russia's human rights problem. President Ford, who was still pursuing the Nixon policy of detente, declined to receive him at the White House, and he eventually retreated to the isolation of a Vermont farm, but the issue of freedom and dissent banged around ever more noisily in corridors of Soviet-American interchange.

Jimmy Carter became publicly insistent on the issue. Carter wrote a personal letter to Andrei Sakharov, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, promising "our good offices to seek the release of prisoners of conscience." Such activity infuriated the Soviets, who were already angry enough about the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974, which tied Soviet-American trade deals to freedom of emigration for Russian Jews. The Soviet Union has persisted in trying dissidents, like Anatoli Shcharansky and Alexander Ginzburg, but seems to have grown somewhat more circumspect about the trials and less punitive in its sentences. In Stalin's day they would have been shot.

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