“One for the history books” — Metal Gear Solid 3’s Internal Diplomatic Historical Context
(Spoilers below for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.)
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater starts on August 24, 1964. It ends with Naked Snake killing his mentor, The Boss, after her defection to the Soviet Union on September 2.
On October 12, 1964, Leonid Brezhnev called Nikita Khrushchev (currently at his country retreat in the Abkhaz Soviet Socialist Republic) to attend a Presidium meeting in Moscow on October 13. Khrushchev flew into Moscow, was informed of his ouster, and then walked into a meeting in which he ‘voluntarily’ resigned his post. On October 14, Khrushchev ceased to be either the Soviet premier or the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The former post went to Alexei Kosygin, while Brezhnev took the latter. Oh, this part is real history — might be worth mentioning that.
I think a lot of players of Snake Eater gloss over this timing, but it is no coincidence. In the phone call between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Khrushchev that leads the game, Khrushchev specifically refers to Colonel Volgin (the game’s antagonistic Soviet military official and part-time lightning rod) as a member of ‘the Brezhnev faction’.
This is meant to be a light-hearted and educational article. I’m not even sure all of this is intentional; there’s undoubtedly mistakes I don’t know enough to spot (and I haven’t played Snake Eater for ages). On the other hand, I think Snake Eater makes for a fun platform to talk about history (and The Boss was definitely the first person in space).
I wanted to write about a few things now and return to this topic if anything else came to mind — and there’s always Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain to discuss.
Today, I’ll be focusing on the conversation between Johnson and Khrushchev, Volgin as a member of the ‘Brezhnev faction’, Major Zero as Snake’s commander, and EVA as a Chinese spy
The first place to start is with this lead-in cutscene to Operation Snake Eater. There’s a lot to cover here! The Moscow-Washington hotline is a very well-known about idea, but it is worth remembering that it was only established in 1963 — and it was designed for exactly the kind of high-profile disagreement Snake Eater features. It was never a telephone, but I think the cutscene is better for not being a Teletype (think proto-fax) chat.
The hotline emerged out of a post-Cuban Missile Crisis thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations. The thaw was a natural ‘step back from the brink’ moment for both the United States and the Soviet Union. The Kennedy/Johnson-Khrushchev moment is sometimes called the ‘Little Détente’, with its key achievements being the hotline and the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty. It is overshadowed by the détente between Richard Nixon and Brezhnev.
The Cuban Missile Crisis emerged partially out of a notion by Khrushchev that John Kennedy was being manipulated by bellicose advisers or was, flatly, a chicken-hawk who could be intimidated by aggressive actions. I’d say (in line with Zubok (2007)) that fears for revolutionary Cuba’s safety played a fairly big role too. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion showed that Kennedy was willing to make moves to undermine Fidel Castro’s new government — stationing nuclear weapons would prevent that from happening again.
Snake Eater suggests that Khrushchev pulled the missiles out of Cuba in order to retrieve the nuclear scientist who plays the damsel-in-distress role, Nikolai Sokolov. Uh-huh.
I mentioned earlier that Khrushchev talks about Volgin being in the ‘Brezhnev faction’. This is fairly misleading — that Brezhnev would rise above the rest was not at all clear in 1964. Plotting against Khrushchev was rife throughout 1964, being led by different Presidium members for different reasons. There are a number of significant co-conspirators who are now relative unknowns, like Nikolai Podgorny and Alexander Shelepin.
Despite what Khrushchev says in Snake Eater, the coup probably wasn’t a case of Cuba-induced military doubts about Khrushchev. That reading tends to come from Western thinkers, especially those who were working close to the time with limited information. Historians differ about the whys, but the reason that has always struck me as the most compelling were the ones that argue that Khrushchev’s downfall were his plans for reforming the Communist Party cadres.
Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Mikhail Suslov (the Party’s chief ideologist) advocated (and would later institute) a policy of ‘stability of cadres’, in contrast to Khrushchev’s plans for tenured cadre positions (also known as ‘rotation of cadres’). Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation reforms, from 1956, weakened the repressive apparatus of the Soviet state, which, in practice, gave the apparatchiks lifetime positions (under the Stalinist system, purges and denunciations were a significant health hazard).
That said, it isn’t totally wrong either. Cuba did weaken Khrushchev’s influence at home. Bellicosity and temperamental behaviour could be tolerated if successful, but instability, at home and abroad, was not what the Soviet leadership desired. Stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba had become a cure-all for the Soviet Union’s international problems — the embarrassing retreat left those problems only stronger.
These two threads can be drawn together into one narrative — the notion that Khrushchev’s mercurial reform drives were chafing other members of the Presidium, who would prefer either success or stability. The Brezhnev era would become famous for its lethargy for this reason.
Major Zero is a British CIA agent who manages Naked Snake while they’re in the jungles of the Soviet Union. While I’m sure there were examples of this happening in practice, the idea of a British operative at this level of command is hard to imagine.
The reason for this is that, in 1964, the U.S. security services had a low estimation of the capabilities of MI6 — it was notoriously leaky. The Cambridge Spy Ring (a group of Soviet moles in MI5 and MI6 who had squeaked through security basically because they were bourgeois aristocrats who went to Cambridge University) was publicly revealed in 1956, revealing that high-level operatives had been slipping information to the Soviet Union since the early 1950s, if not earlier.
It was publicly revealed after two of the Cambridge Ring (Donald McLean and Guy Burgess) appeared at a press conference in Moscow. Other agents (particularly Kim Philby) were also under immense suspicion. Worse, Burgess and Philby had actively been stationed in the United States.
Relationships naturally became frostier. While the spy services continued to enjoy fairly close ties, Zero being British, already an odd choice, doesn’t make much sense.
EVA turning out to be a Chinese spy always stuck in my craw as a kid. Why would the People’s Republic of China (PRC) spy on the Soviet Union? Well, this is actually pretty well-founded — the Khruschev era marked the beginning of what historians call the Sino-Soviet split. This is, in my view (influenced mostly by Sergey Radchenko (2010)), a division about different visions of socialism. What follows is a definite oversimplification (sorry, historians!).
As aforementioned, from 1956 onwards, Khrushchev pursued a ‘de-Stalinisation’ policy, which conceded that Josef Stalin had made mistakes (gasp!) and that a different path could be chosen. While this was a policy that Mao Zedong may have agreed with in private (Stalin’s lack of support for the Chinese Communist Party prior to its victory did not escape his notice), attacking one of the foundations of international socialism proved controversial.
Additionally, the People’s Republic sought to advance a different model of socialism to the Soviet Union. We can summarise this broadly as ‘Maoism’ or ‘Third Worldism’; this was a model that encouraged action and armed insurrection by the peasantry. This clashed with a more conservative Soviet position on revolution, which tended not to rock the boat too much.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a humiliation for the Soviet Union and one that strengthened the hand of the PRC in the international socialist political landscape. While the Soviet Union had backed down in the face of danger, the PRC could point to its record in the Korean War and show that fighting capitalists was doable. The climate only grew colder as the USSR signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty with the United States and the United Kingdom — more signs of Khrushchev’s revisionism.
Basically, the idea that the PRC might have a spy in the USSR in 1964? Plausible… ish. I’m not sure what the actual state of inter-socialist-bloc espionage was in 1964, so the jury is still, to an extent, out on this.
I hope you all enjoyed that little history lesson. If you ever want to chat history with me, feel free to contact me on Twitter (@robowitched) — I’m always down to talk.
If you have historical questions about the Metal Gear games, let me know and I can do some research to find the answers for you.
I just want to underline again that this article likely contains some rather vulgarised summaries and paraphrases — if folks have push back or corrections, I’m happy to hear them! As I said above, I’m only an amateur and I still have a lot to learn about applying my thoughts to a project like this.
Works Cited
Bowker, Mike. ‘Brezhnev and Superpower Relations’, in Bacon, Edwin. Sandle, Mark. Brezhnev reconsidered, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
McIntyre, Ben. A Spy Among Friends: Philby and the Great Betrayal, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)
Radchenko, Sergey. ‘The Sino-Soviet split’ in Leffler, Melyvn P. Westad, Odd Arne. The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume II, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Savranskaya, Svetlana. Taubman, William. ‘Soviet foreign policy, 1962–1975’, in Leffler, Melyvn P. Westad, Odd Arne. The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Volume II, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 134–157
Taubman, William. ‘The Khrushchev period, 1953–1964’, in Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Cambridge history of Russia: Vol. 3: The twentieth century, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2006), pp. 268–291
Tompson, William J. ‘The Fall of Nikita Khrushchev’, Soviet Studies, 1991, 43:6, pp. 1101–1121
Zubok, Vladimir M. A failed empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War, from Stalin to Gorbachev, (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2007)
