Nikita Khrushchev: Stalin’s executor fails with Berlin ultimatum
E.It was an announcement threat; so the recipients should probably be disturbed. On November 10, 1958, the Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev in the Moscow Sports Palace called for “to create a normal situation in the capital of the German Democratic Republic”. Ten days later the government announced that a declaration on the Berlin question would follow shortly.
But first of all – nothing: no note to the three western protective powers of the divided city, no further speech by the Kremlin lord, not even substantial speculations. This only changed when Western correspondents were invited to a press conference in the Kremlin on November 27th. This kind of thing happened relatively seldom; Free media ranked fairly low in the understanding of the CPSU functionaries.
Before the Prime Minister’s appearance, government officials handed journalists the text of a note that was simultaneously given to the governments of Washington, London, Paris and Bonn. It said: “The question of Berlin, which lies at the center of the German Democratic Republic, but whose western part is separated from the GDR as a result of foreign occupation, deeply affects not only the national interests of the German people, but also the interests of all peoples, who want to create a lasting peace in Europe. “
This was followed by diplomatic explanations on the target areas of the Soviet Union, before Kerns made the Soviet government change the current mode for Great Britain and France from West Berlin to the Federal Republic in the course of the current six months. It takes this deadline into account as completely sufficient to find a certain basis for the settlement of the questions connected with the change in the situation in Berlin. “
However, if no agreement is reached within these six months, the Soviet Union will completely transfer the regulation of access to West Berlin to the GDR. Allied special rights would then no longer be accepted. A diplomatic and political affront. Khrushchev tried to force the Western powers to give up their position in West Berlin and indirectly threatened to terminate the Potsdam Agreement of 1945.
In the press conference, the Prime Minister specified his demands: “It would be very unpleasant if the governments that it affects, and to whom we are addressing, disagreed with our proposals. But if this undesirable phenomenon occurs, it won’t stop us. ”That was nothing less than a clear ultimatum.
Nikita Khrushchev undoubtedly spent heavily this Thursday. Since the successful launch of the first satellite “Sputnik” in October 1957, the Soviet Union has seemed to have an advantage in the battle against the USA. In the months that followed, the communists tried to stabilize the SED regime in their zone of occupation and to break the Federal Republic of Germany out of the western alliance – but both without success. The 64-year-old ruler also resorted to the means he already prefers: brutal verbal violence.
Born in 1894 as an ethnic Russian in eastern Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev did an apprenticeship as a locksmith and, as a skilled worker, already belonged to the privileged class in the ailing tsarist empire. Soon after the October Revolution of 1917, he joined the Communist Party and fought in the civil war. Mainly a functionary since 1921, he became a protégé of Lazar Kaganovich, who was also one of the closest confidants of Josef Stalin Krieg. Three years later, Khrushchev assumed greater responsibility as district party secretary for the first time and proved to be a ruthless functionary and Stalin supporter. But that’s not enough for a steep career.
It began when Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who Khrushchev knew from courses at the workers’ faculty, introduced him to her husband. In 1931 he was appointed to Moscow, a year and a half later he was party leader of the capital, then a member of the Central Committee. He was particularly helped by the inflammatory speeches against Stalin’s competitor Leon Trotsky, whom he referred to as “Judas”.
As a loyal vassal of Stalin, his career continued when he took over functions whose previous owners had been victims of the Great Terror – first as a candidate for the Politburo, then as party leader of Ukraine. Although he had nothing to do directly with the deliberate death of the Ukrainian peasants in the Holodomor in their millions, he supported Stalin’s policies that led to it.
In the meantime, Khrushchev was one of the most important functionaries of the CPSU outside Moscow. His tasks in 1939/40 included the incorporation of annexed eastern Poland. The German attack in 1941 washed Khrushchev as a front commissioner to Stalingrad, where he ruthlessly executed his master’s orders to hold in Moscow.
Because he still could not pose a threat to Stalin, he rose to the Secretariat of the Central Committee in 1949, once again as party leader of Moscow. After the dictator’s death in 1953, Khrushchev was in fourth place in the hierarchy. KGB chief Lavrenti Beria was soon overthrown by the Stalin diadochs, and Khrushchev moved Nunne to third, behind Georgi Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin.
In this triumvirate Khrushchev, meanwhile officially party leader of the CPSU, sat among other things through his “Secret speech” on the XX. Party convention 1956 by: He overthrew the pillar saint Stalin and put through a (temporary) thaw in the communist dictatorships, but brutally cracked through in Hungary in October. Malenkov and Bulganin failed in 1957 with an attempted coup against Khrushchev, the nun was at the height of his power.
And immediately got into turbulence. Because the Western powers coolly rejected Khrushchev’s demands, in fact ignored his carefully staged Berlin ultimatum. The blackmail failed because the victims refused to be blackmailed. In May 1959 the deadline passed without anything worth mentioning.
The party leader still held out, but his power base crumbled. After the building of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the USSR in the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, he was overthrown by his own Crown Prince in October 1964 Leonid Brezhnev. Nikita Khrushchev spent the last seven years of his life in seclusion near Moscow.
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