Comparing Berlin and Ukraine

I found this interview of Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko by Adam O’Neal in the Wall Street Journal very throught-provoking. What first caught my attention was the surname Radchenko. Although the surname occurs in Russia it is more common in Ukraine. As it turns out Dr. Radchenko was born on the island of Sakhalin. Sakhalin, as you presumably are aware, is in the Pacific ocean, sandwiched between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. It must be a lonely, even boring existence there. However, I’ll accept him as a Russian.

This is the part of the interview that caught my attention:

Consider the Berlin crisis (1958-61). Khrushchev perceived the balance of power shifting as the Soviet nuclear arsenal grew, and he believed he could bluff away some of his country’s foreign-policy dilemmas. “He would say, ‘OK, we’ll squeeze the Americans out of Berlin.’ Obviously Berlin was a big sore point for Khrushchev, much as Ukraine is for Putin today,” Mr. Radchenko says. “He presented an ultimatum to the Americans—that you have to sign a peace treaty with Germany, paving the way to a withdrawal from Berlin. And if you don’t, he implied, then the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, and they’ll kick the U.S. out of Berlin.”

The archives show that Khrushchev “thought that the Americans were unlikely to go to war over Berlin, and he made the calculation that it was a 95% chance that they would not go to war,” Mr. Radchenko continues. Still, that was a 5% chance of “an absolutely destructive, suicidal war. And that was too much for him. So he decided to back down and quietly wind down the whole Berlin thing by building a Berlin Wall.”

Today Mr. Putin seeks an agreement that would limit the size and activities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, effectively restoring Russian dominion over much of Central and Eastern Europe—a nonstarter for Washington and the alliance’s leadership. “I’m not trying to suggest that Putin is Khrushchev or Khrushchev is Putin,” Mr. Radchenko says. “What I’m saying is that Putin cannot be blind to this general perception—that’s not just in Russia but around the world—that there’s a changing correlation of forces.”

Let’s consider the two situations. Was Berlin as important to Khrushchev as Ukraine is to Putin? Is Ukraine as important to Biden as Berlin was to Eisenhower? I think the answer to both of those questions is “No”. Khrushchev backed down at least in a sense. He built a wall. Based on that understanding what do you think is likely to happen with respect to Ukraine?

There is also an issue of relative strength. Don’t make the mistake that the U. S. made for 40 years and overestimate the Soviet Union’s postwar strength. Putin’s tactical position with respect to Ukraine is enormously stronger than Khrushchev’s with respect to Berlin and his strategic interest are far stronger. The situation is the reverse for the U. S.

Interestingly, Dr. Radchenko ends on an optimistic note which is worth considering:

If Mr. Putin is hell-bent on incorporating Eastern Ukraine into the Russian Federation, he has the military capability to do so. But Mr. Radchenko sees some space for optimism. “I feel that Putin is an opportunist,” he says. “If he is an opportunist, then it’s likely that he can be convinced, with the proper inducement and proper application of sticks and carrots, to pursue a different policy. But you also have to then consider what to give him, and how to give it, in order not to potentially encourage further encroachment and further aggression.”

He thinks “freezing the situation on Donbas probably would be everyone’s preferred solution at this stage, because the alternative is unfreezing it and we don’t want to unfreeze it at this moment, because this would mean war. That is why advice would be, both to Kyiv and in fact to Moscow, to try to find some sort of compromise solution. And that, of course, means avoiding by all means a renewal of military hostilities on the actual line separating the two sides in Donbas.”

There are two key points there. First, Putin is very much a realist as well as an opportunist but Khrushchev was very much the idealist. He had played a role in the 1917 revolution and the subsequent civil war. That runs parallel to the difference between today’s Russia and the Soviet Union.

The other point is that such a settlement, while in the interests of both Russia and the U. S., will absolutely be opposed by both the unreconstructed Cold Warriors and the Poles and Ukrainians who have such great influence on U. S. policy. It’s a dangerous time and I hope that we maintain a firm eye on U. S. interests.