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Red Spring: The Sixties

KHRUSHCHEV

In the early 1960s, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev believed that socialism had to be liberated from the debris of bureaucracy and the terrors of Stalinism. He wanted to liberalize the system step by step -- making the U.S.S.R. happy as well as powerful.

Nikita Khrushchev

Khrushchev was impatient to see his people living as well as Americans -- or even better. To solve the national housing shortage, prefabricated apartment blocks shot up around every Soviet city. Living conditions improved, but there was still a shortage of goods in the shops. Khrushchev tried to shift the planned economy toward light industry and consumer needs. But the Soviet establishment, set in its ways, resisted change.

CATCHING UP

To solve the Soviet food shortage, Khrushchev rushed through agricultural reforms. He launched the Virgin Lands campaign, which plowed up the natural grasslands of central Asia and planted them with wheat. Khrushchev boasted the U.S.S.R. would overtake America in production of meat, milk and grain. Volunteers poured out to the Virgin Lands, filled with patriotic and communist zeal. But the Virgin Lands program was a failure. There were not enough fertilizers, railroad cars or grain silos. Much of the harvest was wasted.

More and more Russians, meanwhile, were getting a taste of such amenities as the company picnic -- and paid vacations at resorts run by the Communist Party and trade unions. Aspects of Western lifestyle also began to filter into the Warsaw Pact. Soviet teen-agers, imitating their Western counterparts, narrowed their trousers. But those caught wearing such garb were severely punished by militia and other officials. And, despite state disapproval, new music, ideas about art and dances from the West were also entering the Soviet lifestyle.

OUSTER/UNREST

The Soviet people, officials and citizens alike, were losing patience with Khrushchev. His great plans all seemed to end up badly. They found him a clownish, irresponsible leader who had nearly blundered into a nuclear war with the United States over Cuba. The Soviet Politburo selected Leonid Brezhnev to lead an attack on Khrushchev. In October 1964, Khrushchev was deposed.

Leonid I. Brezhnev

Stability was restored in the Soviet Union, but unrest stirred elsewhere in the Warsaw Pact. By February 1968, reformers within the Czechoslovak government were taking over. Brezhnev, now Soviet leader, flew to Prague to meet with the new Czechoslovak leader, Alexander Dubcek. Brezhnev accepted that some change was inevitable. But what was taking place in Czechoslovakia was already shocking the rest of the communist world.

RED SPRING

The reformers in Czechoslovakia were confident they could modernize communism. The party would still lead -- but by consent, not force. There would be freedom to speak and write, to travel and organize. There would even be a form of market economy. Dubcek's vision was called "socialism with a human face."

Alexander Dubcek in Bratislava, 1968

One of the first changes in Czechoslovakia that year was an end to censorship. Suddenly, newspapers were filled with truth, revealing the crimes of earlier Stalinist times. Crowds gathered in the streets to debate issues. Meanwhile, Soviet dislike of Dubcek's reforms had turned to fear that the Czechoslovak Communist Party might lose power. There was also concern that Dubcek might change sides in the Cold War.

BEAR CLAW

Threats from Moscow and elsewhere in the Warsaw Pact failed to make Dubcek change from his path of reform. In July 1968, the entire Soviet Politburo arrived from Moscow with renewed demands. The Czechoslovak leaders agreed to some concessions. But it was too late. The Soviets had already decided to solve their problem in Czechoslovakia by force.

On the night of August 21, Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia. Dubcek and other Czech leaders were arrested. By morning, when Soviet forces had reached the center of Prague, crowds of people took to the streets -- trying to reason with the tank crews. Clashes broke out, bringing death and destruction to the Czech capital. The Czechoslovak experiment, the most daring attempt to marry communism with democracy, had failed.

China: 1949-1972
A NEW CHINA

In 1949, the People's Liberation Army arrived in Beijing -- celebrating a communist victory and the end of their decades-long civil war against the Nationalists. Led by Mao Tse-tung, the communists establish the People's Republic of China. The U.S. government, which had considered China among its allies in Asia, is devastated by the "loss" of China to the communists.

Mao Tse-tung

Exhausted by the long war, Mao needed external help for China's reconstruction. One of his first acts is to visit Moscow, seeking military protection and economic aid. Mao wanted to conclude a Chinese-Soviet friendship treaty with Stalin -- but the two leaders remained wary of each other. After several months of negotiation, the Chinese and the Soviets signed a mutual defense treaty -- which also guaranteed aid for China.

REFORM/WAR

China's new rulers embarked on radical land reforms. Land was taken from private owners and handed to the peasants. Former landowners were denounced and humiliated. One million people lost their lives.

In 1950 North Korea -- with Soviet and Chinese backing -- attacked South Korea. Forces under a U.S.-led United Nations command pushed the North Korean invaders back to the Chinese border. China feared an attack on its own territory -- and sent more than 1 million troops across the border into Korea. More than 500,000 Chinese were killed in the Korean conflict.

TENSIONS

Stalin's death in 1953 had a deep impact in China. Despite Mao's misgivings, he had long respected Stalin's iron authority. Nikita Khrushchev soon emerged from the Kremlin power struggle as the new Soviet leader. Khrushchev and his Politburo visited China to maintain the Beijing-Moscow alliance -- a move that made the new Eisenhower administration in Washington increasingly anxious. As part of its policy to contain communism, the United States financed a military buildup on Taiwan -- home for the Chinese Nationalists.

But Mao did not give way to the American show of strength. His forces shelled the Nationalist-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu. The rising U.S.-Chinese tensions concerned Khrushchev -- who told Beijing that war with imperialism was no longer inevitable.

SPLIT

Khrushchev's attempts to steer the U.S.S.R. away from its Stalinist past -- and his denunciation of Stalin as a criminal -- alarmed Mao, who took such actions as a threat to his own style of leadership. China, meanwhile, was chafing over Soviet attempts to control the Beijing government. In the late 1950s, Khrushchev visited China at least twice to renew Soviet support.

Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung

But China's relations were already strained with its declared "big brother," and the Soviet leader could find no common ground with Chinese officials. Khrushchev, who had recently visited the United States, was accused by the Chinese of being an American stooge. Soon afterward, Soviet advisers were withdrawn from China. The struggle for pre-eminence in the communist world was now out in the open.

FAMINE/REVOLUTION

In 1958, Mao had thought up a new policy -- the Great Leap Forward -- a grandiose plan to transform China into a rich world power. Mao's method was a more extreme version of Stalin's brutal collectivization of the 1930s. People were told to produce steel in backyard furnaces. Crops were left to rot. Scientific knowledge and common sense were ignored. No one dared to tell the truth for fear of arrest -- or worse. Peasants' food was taken from them to make up bogus quotas. The result was one of the worst man-made disasters in history. More than 30 million people starved to death.

By 1966, haunted by the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao was fighting to maintain his domination in China. He launched the Great Cultural Revolution. Millions of young people were recruited into Mao's Red Guards. Their idealism was exploited to create mayhem and destroy every vestige of the past. The upheaval of the Cultural Revolution coincided with escalating tensions between China and the U.S.S.R. -- including a series of military clashes along the Chinese-Soviet border.

PINGPONG DIPLOMACY

Mao, fearful of Moscow's belligerence, decided he wanted better relations with the United States. The new U.S. President, Richard Nixon, was a lifelong anti-communist. But Nixon, wanting to limit Soviet power and end the Vietnam War, drew closer to China. The first sign of a thaw in U.S.-Chinese relations came in 1971 -- when a U.S. table tennis team, playing in Japan, was suddenly invited to China.

In April 1971, the US Table Tennis Delegation that had participated in the 31st World Table Tennis Championships in Japan was invited to visit China. On April 14, Zhou Enlai met with the US delegation and took this group picture with them.

The so-called "pingpong diplomacy" led to more breakthroughs -- culminating with Nixon's historic trip to China in February 1972. The visit was mostly symbolic -- formal diplomatic relations were not restored until 1979 -- but it helped reduce tensions between the two nations and brought new pressure on a shared rival: the Soviet Union.

Additional Sources:

www.cnn.com
www.npr.org
www.archives.gov
americanhistory.si.edu
www.phillyburbs.com
www.2idiotsinaboat.com
www.amherst.edu
www.ukrainebiz.com
www.gfsnet.org
www.radio.cz
www.temple.edu
www.union.edu
www.rt66.com
homepage.tinet.ie
www.china.org.cn

Today's classic warship, USS Calamus (AOG-25)

Mettawee class gasoline tanker

Displacement. 845 t.
Lenght. 220'6"
Beam. 37'
Draft. 13'11"
Speed. 10 k.
Complement. 62
Armament. 1 3'; 2 40mm; 3 20mm

USS Calamus (AOG-25) was launched 4 May 1944 by East Coast Shipyard, Inc., Bayonne, N.J., under a Maritime Commission contract; sponsored by Mrs. A. H. Moore; transferred to the Navy 7 July 1944; and commissioned the same day, Lieutenant W. Hord, USCGR, in command.

Calamus sailed from Norfolk 13 September 1944, bound for Pearl Harbor and Ulithi, where she arrived in mid-December and began her work as station tanker, fueling ships of the fleet as they brought the war ever closer to the Japanese homeland. Calamus cleared for Eniwetok 20 January 1945, and until February, pumped her vital gasoline into the ships readying there for the assault on Iwo Jima. Following the fleet she served westward, Calamus did station duty at Saipan from 11 February until 26 April, when she anchored off Okinawa to support the 3-week old assault. The tanker provided essential fueling service through the entire period of the island's assault and occupation, enduring the violent Japanese air attacks which marked the campaign as steadfastly as did the combatant ships.

Following occupation service, Calamus returned to San Francisco 20 March 1946. She was decommissioned 15 May 1946, and transferred to the Maritime Commission 4 September 1946. Calamus was laid up in that agency's reserve fleet at Suisun Bay, California. She was sold for scrapping in March 1964.

Calamus received one battle star for service in World War II.