I've been working on the Berlin crisis (1958-61), reading hundreds and hundreds of documents, secondary literature etc, so here's a thread that summarises my findings. Although it's deep history, I think it's relevant for our understanding of crises in general, including today.
So, to recap, in Nov. 1958 Khrushchev announced his first "ultimatum" re Berlin. He wanted to end four power occupation rights and conclude a peace treaty. But, seeing that a peace treaty with united Germany wasn't in the cards, he said he'd sign a peace treaty with just the GDR.
The reason it became a crisis was that he set a 6-month deadline for the four powers to agree on a general peace treaty and implied that, once the deadline lapsed, he'd transfer control over access to West Berlin to the GDR (and they presumably would bar Western access).
Historians have written extensively about Khrushchev's decision-making, none more competently and convincingly than @HopeMHarrison and @VladislavZubok1. We still don't have smoking-gun evidence of what prompted Khrushchev's reckless ultimatum.
He was of course concerned by the GDR's economic plight (refugees were voting with their feet in increasing numbers). I suspect (though I have no means of proving this) that he was implicitly competing with Mao who had pursued a very militant policy (Second Taiwan Strait crisis).
Khrushchev did not want to look weak by comparison. Meanwhile, Eisenhower was taken aback by the ultimatum, and invited Khrushchev to visit the United States in the hope that such recognition of Soviet importance would translate into a more docile foreign policy.
It did, to some extent, as Khrushchev postponed his decision on Berlin, but he later renewed the ultimatum. He hoped JFK would help him cut the Gordian knot.
GDR's Ulbricht kept pressing him to do something about Berlin (the situation was dire). In Nov. 1960, Khrushchev promised him to resolve the problem in 1961 (without giving a date), because failing to do so would undermine Soviet "prestige".
In general, Khrushchev seemed increasingly concerned about his "prestige": he would talk about it repeatedly in the months that followed. He knew that backing out of his promise to sign a peace treaty would be a huge loss of face (who would take him seriously again)?
In multiple conversations he had in the spring of 1961, he reasoned thus: the West would not fight a war over Berlin. They'd accept a face-saving solution allowing them to retreat. No "idiot" had been born yet, Khrushchev, claimed, who would risk a thermonuclear war over Berlin.
The most interesting conversation was the one at the Presidium (Politburo) on May 26, 1961, when Khrushchev tried to estimate chances of war. 5%, he figured. Mikoyan thought the allies *could* start a war over Berlin, but only conventional.
Foreign Minister Gromyko was "almost" sure there would be no war. Khrushchev thought that the West Europeans (the French & the British in particular) were not going to fight for sure. But one thing kept him worried: he wasn't so sure about the US.
He was worried by the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. He thought that, given what Kennedy did with the Bay of Pigs, he really could do something stupid, like start a nuclear war over a place that ultimately did not matter to America in strategic terms (Berlin).
His conversations with Kennedy in Vienna that June did not reassure Khrushchev at all. He just did not know that Kennedy could be trusted. So his 5% was really an off-the-wall number. It was too high a risk to run. Gromyko's "almost sure" had one too many "almosts" in it.
Anyway, as Ulbricht continued to press Khrushchev, the Soviet leader kept procrastinating, postponing the decision to November, and later to December. As everyone knows, in August, the Berlin Wall went up, making it possible to postpone the problem indefinitely.
Khrushchev came up with a funny psychological device to explain his retreat. He argued that former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (then already dead) was a much more predictable opponent. He would cite examples where Dulles backed off, understanding consequences of war.
Khrushchev would praise Dulles and trash Kennedy, because he thought Kennedy did not understand red lines. But to me, this fixation on Dulles merely suggests that Khrushchev was trying to sell his retreat to himself. He was trying to find a reason why he could not run the risk.
In the end, to cover up his retreat on the Berlin question, Khrushchev ordered the test of a Soviet thermonuclear bomb (the Tsar Bomb), a 57 megaton weapon, the largest ever tested. For all his boasting, he proved unwilling to test the American resolve over Berlin.
What are the lessons of this? I don't think there are straightforward lessons. One could interpret this episode to mean that, faced with resolve, Moscow will back down despite menacing rhetoric because they understand what war is like. They'll come up with some excuse.
On the other hand, although Khrushchev backed down in the end, it was a 49/51 decision. It could have easily gone the other way. Perhaps his experience of WWII was one of the reasons he was so reluctant to see an even worse, more terrible war, breaking out.
Putin does not have this kind of experience. Maybe Putin, reviewing the lessons of the Berlin crisis, would say: you know what, I would not have backed down. I would have run the risk, and the US would have backed off. It's impossible to know what *his* decision would have been.
We can say with relative certainty today that JFK's resolve in rebuffing Khrushchev's Berlin entreaties contributed to Khrushchev's uncertainty, and so led to the preferred outcome (Khrushchev backing down). But we are only wise in retrospect.
Anyway, these are limits of history. Its lessons are pretty contradictory. But what it does show is that the eventual outcome was certainly not the only possible one. We just got lucky.
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