By Patricia H. Kushlis
Six months ago, the US celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate that took place in the model kitchen of America’s first National Exhibit in the Soviet Union. On November 9, 1989 - thirty years and a few months later - a different but even more momentous event happened in US-Soviet relations: the fall of the Berlin Wall that signaled the unraveling of the Soviet empire in Europe to be followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself.
That unraveling spread like wildfire in the night from the Baltic Sea to the Balkans. By December 1989, revolution had spread south to Romania where the northern peaceful protests had turned violent as they approached the Black Sea. The increasingly bizarre, repressive and out of touch Communist regime of Nicholae Ceaucescu used Romanian security forces to fire upon demonstrators.
Nevertheless, the peaceful protests grew. And the Romanians learned of the events happening in their own country through Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and BBC.
On Christmas Day, the Ceaucescus – Nicholae and his wife Elena - were forced to flee their cozy comfortable Bucharest palace. Joining the popular uprising, the military turned against the couple too and they were unable to flee the country. The Ceaucescus were tried, sentenced to death by a military tribunal and executed by military firing squad that same day.
Back to 1959
In an article entitled “The 1959 Kitchen Debate (or how cultural exchanges changed the Soviet Union)” by Yale Richmond in the 2009 July/August issue of Russian Life, Richmond not only describes Nixon’s tense and testy reception in Moscow that July 1959 day a half century ago and his ten-day whirlwind tour of the Soviet Union thereafter.
But he also described a much more pleasant as well as strategically important experience that has all but been lost in time. Namely, Nixon’s three days stop-over in Warsaw en route back to the US where he focused on “US relations with Poland and other Eastern European communist countries” all the while feted by the Poles.
Nixon in Warsaw: the lesser known story
This stop-over was unplanned but when the Soviets refused to let Nixon return to the US via Siberia, Nixon seized “the opportunity to visit a country which had in 1956 replaced a Stalinist regime with one of ‘national communism’ and was seeking improved relations with the West, and with the US, in particular.” His arrival was met with huge crowds bearing bouquets of flowers. The Poles had learned of his visit through Radio Free Europe.
The men and women in the streets turned out in droves to welcome him.
From a political standpoint the decision for Nixon to visit Warsaw was “also a signal that the US . . .would treat each East European communist country individually, depending on its willingness to reform and to expand contacts with the West.” And it highlighted cultural exchange as central to US foreign policy.
The Polish-Russian relationship, of course, was never one of solidarity despite a public international face of unified Communist brethren throughout much of the Cold War.
Just as Mao’s China was simultaneously asserting its independence from Moscow in what later became known as the Sino-Soviet split, the Poles also had no love for the same overbearing neighbor which had quashed popular uprisings in both Poland and Hungary in 1956. Although circumscribed by hard power realities on the ground, the Poles looked for other ways to become closer to the West.
The Eisenhower administration, then, had its own strategic reasons for sending Nixon to Poland – particularly after the Soviets had refused to let him return to the US via the Russian Far East.
Kennan was right
Had anyone dreamed then that thirty years later the Berlin Wall would have fallen in tandem with the East German regime, that the Ceaucescus would have been removed by firing squad or that Poland or Romania would have joined NATO ten years on, the individual in question would have been considered a candidate for the loony bin.
But little by little, George Kennan’s prescription of "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies” even if that meant acceptance of Soviet control in Eastern Europe, in the words of David Engerman in the Boston Globe.
Containment, as Kennan predicted, over time increased the "strains" inherent in Soviet society and ultimately promoted tendencies that “must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power" -- a scenario Kennan had anticipated, in a more speculative vein, as early as 1932.”
So despite Khrushchev’s bluster and bravado in that model kitchen back in 1959, the Soviet Union and its Empire indeed did crumble but its decline and fall still came as a surprise to most in the West.
1989
In July 1989, we visited friends in West Berlin. We crossed the border at Checkpoint Charlie, showed the East German border guards our diplomatic passports through our rolled up car window as instructed by US Embassy personnel. We had previously changed currency – the minimum required for a day visit– at a bank on the corner at a black market rate. We then proceeded through no-man’s land and into the distinctly less prosperous East. We had no inkling at the time that we would never see Checkpoint Charlie again or that the next time we would see a section of the Wall it would be in the Newseum in Washington, DC.
The Polish Canary in a Mine Shaft
Yet less than three weeks later, the Hungarians opened the border with Austria and the dam began to burst: East German youth poured westward. The Czechs followed suit. In reality, of course, the fissures and the pressures had been there for years.
Once again, Poland had played a pivotal role that had begun there with major anti-government labor protests in 1980 over the freeing of prices for meat and the subsequent founding of Solidarnosc, the Polish independent trade union organization, which gave organization and direction to the protestors ultimately spurring the collapse of the Communist regime.