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The Soviets and European Integration from Stalin to Gorbatchev 89
fever of propagandistic improvisation, the Kremlin applied for Soviet membership
of NATO, knowing they would be rejected and thus proving the anti-Soviet character
of the alliance.
The new foreign policy created room for the evolution of Soviet Weltanschauung
into a less polarized and confrontational direction. The diminishing fear of a
big European war helped the new Soviet leadership to adopt, at the 20th CPSU congress
in February 1956, an innovative concept of “peaceful coexistence” with capitalism
as a permanent Soviet international strategy. According to Andrei Alexandrov-Agentov,
a Soviet expert on Europe and later assistant to Foreign minister
Andrei Gromyko, the essence of the new strategy, developed by Khrushchev and
his colleagues, consisted of “three main elements: to prop up to the maximum and
tie to the Soviet Union the countries of the People’s Democracy of Eastern and
Central Europe; to create, wherever possible, a neutral “buffer” between the two
opposing military-political blocs; and to gradually establish economic and other
more or less normal forms of peaceful cooperation with the countries of NATO.” 13
These elements were direct precursors of Gorbachev’s “new thinking” of the mid-
1980’s.
The Soviet leaders continued to see the USSR as a leader and “bulwark” of the
world revolutionary process that, they believed, was bound to lead to the victory of
communism. Nevertheless, the new emphasis on “peaceful coexistence” made
them look for models of “socialist integration” that could anchor the countries of
Eastern Europe to the Soviet economy and eventually replace Stalin’s imperial
domination over the satellites by a commonwealth on a more or less voluntary
basis. The reorientation of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance
(COMECON) towards mutually more beneficial trade arrangements between the
Soviets and the satellites reflected the impossibility of continuing Stalin’s crude
exploitation of East European countries and the total subservience of their economies
to Soviet military-industrial needs. With the willingness to tolerate a greater
level of economic and even political autonomy in the countries of the Soviet bloc
came the need for new modes of relationship – with an appearance of mutual profitability
and a proper legal facade. In reality, what emerged was a model of economic
interdependence imposed on reluctant East European allies by Moscow and
generously financed from vast Soviet economic and natural resources.
The uprisings in Poland and Hungary in 1956 made the need to “pamper” Eastern
Europe even more urgent. During 1957 the Presidium (Politburo) even split on
the issue of hidden Soviet subsidies and loans to Eastern European economies.
Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan argued that the Soviets had to do it anyway, to
gain time, since otherwise the workers in those countries would rebel, and the
USSR would lose its strategic positions in their center of Europe. This was perhaps
the first time the Soviets had to face squarely the emerging burden of their European
empire. The only way they could maintain their autarky and control along
12. “Zapis besedi Bulganina, Khrushcheva, Mikoiana, Molotva s priemier-ministrom inostrannikh del
Danii Khansenom, TsKhSD, fond 5, opis. 30, delo 163, p.33.
13. A.M. ALEXANDROV-AGENTOV, Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva, Moscow 1994, pp.93-94.