ABSTRACT
Soviet-Egyptian relations began virtually only after Stalin’s death. There is some controversy over changes which Stalin sought or planned to make in foreign (and domestic) policy in the last year or so of his life. Nonetheless, pending a thorough reassessment and change in foreign policy, Stalin had little room for a relationship of any duration with a country like Egypt. His was a strictly bi-polar, two-camp view of the world (expounded by Zhadnov in 1947) which advocated revolutionary militancy and loyal alignment. Given this attitude, Stalin failed to see the shades and nuances developing in the Third World, and thus was fated to dismiss the revolution-making Free Officers in Egypt as lackeys of imperialism. Similarly, neither before nor after the Egyptian revolution did Stalin initiate a shift towards the Arabs or a ‘pro-Arab’ stand in the context of the Arab-Israel dispute, despite the fact that his policy towards Israel had been increasingly unfriendly since the end of 1948. Only after Stalin’s demise, the rethinking surrounding the succession and the rise first of Malenkov and then Khrushchev, did Soviet policy undergo significant change. This change, which basically opened the way for relations with a ‘Third’ non-aligned world, was generated by concern over the risks inherent in the nuclear era. Finding Stalin’s militancy too risky and believing in the inevitability of escalation of war, including local war, to nuclear confrontation, the new leaders sought reduction of international tensions and peaceful coexistence through deterrence. Khrushchev took this competition overseas, well beyond the outer edges of the Soviet bloc, and he defined deterrence as nuclear power even to the point of nuclear ‘sabre-rattling’. Yet he saw this, apparently, as brinkmanship, i.e., the employment of the threat of nuclear strike as a deterrent, without in fact getting involved in a war, which Khrushchev believed could not remain limited or conventional.
