(originally published by H-German on 7 February 1996)
At the Berlin Four Power Foreign Ministers' Conference in January and February 1954, the Soviet delegation for the first time emphasized European collective security rather than German reunification. Over the next year and a half it became obvious that the Kremlin's Germany policy now rested on the assumption that there would be two independent German states for the foreseeable future (the so-called "Two-State Theory"). Gerhard Wettig, using materials from the Archives of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (AVPRF), argues that Viacheslav Molotov and the Soviet Foreign Ministry began to think along these lines soon after Josef Stalin's death on March 5, 1953. Wettig's findings are especially interesting because they shed new light on the long-controversial role of secret police chief Lavrentii Beria in Soviet German policy during this period. It now seems most unlikely that the "New Course" implemented by the GDR in June, 1953, was linked to a Beria-plan to abandon East Germany for a rapprochement with the West.
In April and early May 1953, Soviet diplomats in Moscow and East Berlin (the latter group included Vladimir Semyonov, who is frequently described as Beria's man in the GDR) reevaluated Stalin's German policy. Recent research based on Soviet and East German sources has stressed that the reunification campaign culminating with the "Stalin notes" of 1952 aimed primarily at preventing West German rearmament by mobilizing nationalist sentiment in the Federal Republic against the Adenauer government. Perhaps in order to keep his options open in appealing to German nationalism, Stalin also was reluctant to establish an independent GDR before 1949 or, thereafter, to put the GDR on an equal footing with other Eastern European communist states. The Soviet Foreign Ministry position which slowly emerged in early 1953 professed basic agreement with the methods and goals of Stalin's policy. Implicitly and explicitly, it nonetheless acknowledged that the reunification campaign had not had the desired effect; it was necessary to envision the possibility both that West Germany would join the European Defense Community and that reunification on acceptable, i.e. pro-Soviet, terms was impossible. The GDR remained economically and politically weak and needed to be strengthened, which could be done in part by upgrading its international status and removing overt Soviet occupation controls. Inside Germany as a whole, these measures would aid both the USSR's image and the communist struggle against the West.
Around the same time, disturbing signs reached the Soviet leadership that the "forced construction of socialism" implemented by the SED in mid-1952 was producing a crisis situation in East Germany. We still depend on personal testimony and memoir accounts by Molotov, Andrei Gromyko and others for reconstructing the events that led the Soviet Communist Party leadership to instruct its East German comrades from June 2-4 to implement the "New Course." Molotov, assisted by Gromyko, apparently prepared a document for the CPSU-Presidium on how to rein in the SED's program before it was too late. The Presidium's resolution, which stressed that strengthening the GDR would improve the communist position in the German question, correspond to the Foreign Ministry's new thinking on Germany, although in more radical form. Moreover, Wettig argues that Semyonov's appointment as the first civilian High Commissioner in East Berlin in late May -- which meant among other things that the Kremlin's instructions to the GDR's leadership would now run through the Foreign Ministry's man -- was a definite sign that Molotov's policy had won out.
During the Presidium's discussions on East Germany in late May, Beria supposedly had shocked his colleagues by arguing that it didn't matter if there was socialism in Germany at all so long as Germany was peaceful. Nonetheless, in the end he fully supported the Presidium's reform program and perhaps was its main author. Wettig believes that the program's anti-Western accent is incompatible with Beria's supposed intention to reach an accommodation with the West by surrendering the GDR (a charge most recently repeated by former Soviet spy-chief Pavel Sudoplatov) [1]. The fact that the Soviet leadership clung to the "New Course" in the GDR even after the anti-communist uprisings that started there on June 17 is further evidence that the policy enjoyed wide support; otherwise, it could have been dropped along with Beria. Wettig already had concluded elsewhere that there is no firm evidence Beria had an actual plan to "decommunize" the GDR. Such accusations, as well as Walter Ulbricht's related charges against the East German communists Zaisser and Herrnstadt, first arose after Beria's arrest on June 26 [2].
By August, the Soviet leadership clearly had reoriented its German policy around strengthening the GDR and creating a good image for the USSR. For the first time it also displayed a new interest in the domestic political balance in the FRG. Since the reunification platform was fading into the background, the old maxim of "who is not with us (or, more exactly, the West German KPD) is against us" lost validity. No longer was the SPD merely a disguised instrument of the "Adenauer-clique" but instead the Soviet's preferred victor in the September 1953 West German elections.
Wettig aptly traces the origins of the Foreign Ministry's new thinking on Germany. Moreover, he argues convincingly that elements of the Soviet leadership besides Beria (i.e. Molotov and his coworkers) favored a policy along the lines of the "New Course," but as part of a larger effort to strengthen the GDR and keep it in the socialist camp. Since it depends on Foreign Ministry documents, the article necessarily leaves several important questions unanswered. Who else in the Soviet leadership supported the slow reorientation towards a "Two-State" policy and when? Did they do so as an active response to the shortcomings of Stalin's policy, like Molotov, or only because of the situation in the GDR? Finally, we still don't know for sure whether Beria really favored abandoning socialism the GDR after all and what would have happened in these regards had he won the power struggle that followed Stalin's death.
[1] Pavel and Anatoly Sudoplatov with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schechter, Special Tasks (Boston, 1994), 363ff. (Jump back to text)
[2] Gerhard Wettig, "Sowjetische Wiedervereinigungsbemühungen im ausgehenden Frühjahr 1953? Neue Aufschlüsse über ein altes Problem," Deutschland Archiv 25/9 (September 1992): 943-958. (Jump back to text)
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