There aren’t enough palm trees, the Soviet general thought to himself. It was July 1962, and Igor Statsenko, the 43-year-old Ukrainian-born commander of the Red Army’s missile division, found himself inside a helicopter, flying over central and western Cuba. Below him lay a rugged landscape, with few roads and little forest. Seven weeks earlier, his superior—Sergei Biryuzov, the commander of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces—had traveled to Cuba disguised as an agricultural expert. Biryuzov had met with the country’s prime minister, Fidel Castro, and shared with him an extraordinary proposal from the Soviet Union’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to station ballistic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Biryuzov, an artilleryman by training who knew little about missiles, returned to the Soviet Union to tell Khrushchev that the missiles could be safely hidden under the foliage of the island’s plentiful palm trees.
But when Statsenko, a no-nonsense professional, surveyed the Cuban sites from the air, he realized the idea was hogwash. He and the other Soviet military officers on the reconnaissance team immediately raised the problem with their superiors. In the areas where the missile bases were supposed to go, they pointed out, the palm trees stood 40 to 50 feet apart and covered only one-sixteenth of the ground. There would be no way to hide the weapons from the superpower 90 miles to the north.
But the news apparently never reached Khrushchev, who moved forward with his scheme in the belief that the operation would remain secret until the missiles were in place. It was a fateful delusion. In October, an American high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane spotted the launch sites, and what became known as “the Cuban missile crisis” began. For a week, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his advisers debated in secret about how to respond. Ultimately, Kennedy chose not to launch a preemptive attack to destroy the Soviet sites and instead declared a naval blockade of Cuba to give Moscow a chance to back off. Over the course of 13 frightening days, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war, with Kennedy and Khrushchev facing off “eyeball to eyeball,” in the memorable words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The crisis ended when Khrushchev capitulated and withdrew missiles from Cuba in return for Kennedy’s public promise to not invade the island and a secret agreement to withdraw American nuclear-tipped missiles from Turkey.
The details of the palm tree fiasco are just some of the revelations in the hundreds of pages of newly released top-secret documents about Soviet decision-making and military planning. Some come from the archives of the Soviet Communist Party and were declassified before the war in Ukraine; others were quietly declassified by the Russian Ministry of Defense in May 2022, in the run-up to the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. The decision to release these documents, without redaction, is just one of many paradoxes of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where state archives continue to release vast troves of evidence about the Soviet past even as the regime cracks down on free inquiry and spreads ahistorical propaganda. We were fortunate to obtain these documents when we did; the ongoing tightening of screws in Russia will likely reverse recent strides in declassification.