The Khrushchev tours of Southeast Asia: lessons for understanding Cold War Soviet foreign policy

Abstract

In the winter of 1955-6, as the Cold War was gaining momentum and East and Southeast Asia were becoming the battleground of that war, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev visited Southeast Asia. He toured cultural and industrial sites in Afghanistan, India and Burma. In 1960 as the nations of Asia were freeing themselves from the shackles of European colonialism, Khrushchev again visited East Asia, making speeches against imperialism in Burma, Indonesia and India. From analysis of Khrushchev's tours of the region, one can gain an understanding of the Soviet premier's foreign policy. While the tours were included in Asian good will trips that emphasized Soviet relations with India. These visits are significant for determining the motives and insights of Khrushchev both for the countries they did and did not include and for the substance and results of the visits. Burma, the only country in Southeast Asia to be on the itinerary for both of Khrushchev's tours, was definitely neutral and unaligned, while Indonesia in 1960 was leaning left and worrying the USA. It is also interesting that he avoided the only two nations in Southeast Asia that were Soviet allies during his tenure: i.e. Vietnam and Laos and that he did not visit Southeast Asian nations with the most active Communist insurgencies: Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and the Philippines. At the times of the Asian tours, Khrushchev was perceived negatively by much of the world. His foes in the West portrayed him as a clumsy prince of darkness intent on world domination. His sometime allies in China and in Asian insurgencies caste him as a traitor to Communism and the neutral nations believed him to be weak and indecisive. Relying on sources from the Soviet archives, U.S. State Department documents, reports from news sources of the times as well as Khrushchev's memoirs, I will argue that Khrushchev, far from being either the bungling rustic that the U.S. and the West tried to paint him or the revisionist conciliator that was the image the Chinese Communist Party gave him, Khrushchev was both a sincere reformer and an astute political analyst. Perceiving that the Soviet Union was not and would never be popular among Southeast Asian Communist movements outside Vietnam and Laos, Khrushchev chose to let those insurgencies look to China for aid and inspiration. Believing that his role in history was to improve the image of Communism in the West, Khrushchev used his "good- will" tours in Southeast Asia merely to demonstrate that he was neither a demon dictator nor a clumsy peasant. Further he intended to use his Asia tour to strengthen the position of the USSR in Europe. By allowing the West to believe he was putting heat on such unstable countries as Thailand and Malaysia, he turned their attention away from Germany and the Balkins.