Son's View of Khrushchev: Missiles and Crisis

Author: (Russian) Shekhruchef, written by Shekhruchef, translated by Guo Jiashen and Yu Tao
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2006-08-01
Features: On the evening of Sunday, October 28, 1962, it was an ordinary autumn day. The scorching heat of summer had reluctantly passed, and winter was just around the corner. The sidewalks of Moscow were crowded with people, all in a hurry. Cars were scarce on the streets, and the noise was not loud. Not long ago, the city had banned car horns. Therefore, the Seagull car, which impatiently screeched at the red light, stood out even more. This was no ordinary intersection. The Seagull car had been speeding through the streets of Moscow for half an hour, seemingly aimlessly weaving through narrow alleyways. The alley it was trying to reach was impossible to find, and the driver was becoming increasingly frantic. The low growl of the government emergency siren sounded almost like a desperate cry. There was a reason for the urgency. In the Seagull car sat a responsible comrade, short and sturdy, with a large head. A few sparse brown hairs barely covered his shiny bald head. His thick, short fingers clenched a red official document bag with five seals. The bag prominently featured large black letters: Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The rest of the bag was blank, with no address. The responsible comrade in the Seagull car was none other than the one whom newspapers, magazines, radio, and television across the country and the world followed. Inside the bag was the typed draft of a reply from Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy of the United States. The world was on the brink of disaster, and irreversible things could happen at any moment. Therefore, this time, the letter was not sent through the normal communication channels between world leaders but was broadcast immediately on the Moscow radio. This measure was extraordinary in international life but highly effective, and within minutes, our reply could be placed on the recipient's desk. It was well known that the American radio interception department was not without reason. The matter was the deployment of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba. Soviet leaders believed that only by taking this gamble could they prevent the United States from repeating the risky amphibious landing in the Bay of Pigs last April. However, neither Khrushchev nor his colleagues in the Presidium of the Central Committee could predict how the United States would react to this move. The deployment of missiles was an agreement between Cuba and the Soviet Union, two allied countries, and seemed to pose no threat to anyone. It was hard to imagine that a small country like Cuba, even if it had dozens of missiles parked among the palm trees, would make its powerful neighbor tremble with fear. But the Americans based their thinking on different principles. The agreement between the Soviet Union and the Republic of Cuba was seen as an unacceptable invasion of the Western Hemisphere. The United States could not tolerate this, and a storm broke out. Quarantine at sea, threats of air raids, reconnaissance planes circling constantly over the island, and finally, the declaration of military readiness at the highest level. The world was on the brink of war, just one spark away. Both sides across the ocean were fully aware of the fatal consequences of a nuclear conflict. The Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and the President of the United States both believed that it was absolutely unthinkable to go to war. However, simply not wanting to fight was not enough; they had to find the only correct measure to prevent war from breaking out. Both leaders realized that if the situation got out of control, conflict was inevitable. Correspondence between the two leaders had just begun.