How does Nikita Khrushchev think?
How does the Soviet leader in the Missile Crisis react to the situation that he’s in?
What does he draw on?
What does he go back to?
What does he dig deep inside himself to find out?
In order to understand Khrushchev
at the crunch when it seemed like war was about to break out,
you’ve got to go back to the Second World War,
the Eastern Front of the European Theater
where he was a Soviet soldier, middle rank- not high, not low.
The Soviet Union lost 20 million people. Dead.
20 million people dead as a function of the Second World War.
Some were shot, some were blown up,
some froze to death, some starved to death,
some were just never heard from again.
That is tragedy on an epic scale
never before or since seen- anything like it,
and Nikita Khrushchev was right in the middle of it.
And he was an earthy man.
He was a man of the people in the best sense.
He was highly voluble,
he was creative and clever,
but he was not educated.
His father and grandfather were miners- coal miners and tin miners.
The ugliest most terrible job you can imagine.
He worked in the mines as a young person.
He called the mines “my Cambridge, my Oxford, my Harvard.”
That’s where he learned to be a man, he said.
Khrushchev in the Missile Crisis did not expect to confront Kennedy.
He thought he would be coming to Cuba at the end of November 1962
to give a speech in which he announced to the whole world
that we’ve put these missiles into Cuba, no problem,
it’s just to counterbalance the US missiles and Turkey and other places
that have threatened us for quite a long time.
Now that we’re basically equal
in terms of deliverable nuclear power on our respective door steps,
well let’s stop arguing and get down to negotiating.
In his fantasy that’s what he thought would happen.
Boy was he shocked.
When Kennedy made his speech he was absolutely blown away.
This is not going to be tolerated.
The missiles have to come out.
Well, how can he take them out?
I mean, the whole idea was to put them in.
The Cubans wanted it.
His military is over there trying to build these things as fast as they can,
but now towards the end of the climactic week of the missile crisis
he gets intelligence reports
that the Americans are about to invade and attack
and he sends Kennedy this letter.
It’s poetry almost,
but it’s poetry of a very uneducated and earthy guy.
He says we’re going to be blind moles.
We’re going to clash beneath the surface of the earth, aren’t we?
In another context he talks about two goats on a bridge
neither one goat will let the other goat go by
so they keep butting their heads and they fall over the bridge.
Goats can’t swim so they die.
Are we going to be the goats?
Is that what we’re going to be?
Now when he uses these images, these are the earthy images of a Russian peasant.
And that’s what he is.
He’s a Russian peasant in charge of the second largest nuclear force in the world.
- as luck would have it.
He has seen, as he says in this letter,
war roll through villages and towns leaving nothing but destruction in its wake.
Pretty much a quote from that letter.
He could not have known how that would resonate with Kennedy.
Well it did because Kennedy had his own war experience half a world away.
But to Khrushchev,
the 20 million dead, the 20 million Russians who disappeared
as a function of the Second World War,
that would be a pittance, he said,
compared to the ultimate atomic destruction of the entire human race.
And Mr. President, Kennedy, we cannot let that happen.
By sending such a letter at that moment,
it greatly raised the odds that it wouldn’t happen.
Kennedy got that letter.
All the reports are that Kennedy saw this and he thought
“My God, he thinks just the way I do.
I think we’re going to find a way out of this.”