Searing memories of the German attack and occupation merged with other, longer memories—of the German invasion during the First World War, of Allied intervention during the Russian civil war, of Napoleon’s attempted conquest of Russia at the beginning of the previous century—to induce in the Soviet leadership a veritable obsession with ensuring the protection of their homeland from future territorial violations. The geographical expanse of the Soviet Union, a nation that covered one-sixth of the earth’s land mass and was three times as large as the United States, made the challenge of an adequate national defence especially acute. Its two most economically vital regions, European Russia and Siberia, lay at the country’s extremes; and each had in the recent past shown itself highly vulnerable to attack. The former fronted on the infamous Polish corridor, the invasion route through which the troops of Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler had so easily poured in the past. The latter had twice within the last twenty-five years fallen prey to Japanese aggression; Siberia, moreover, shared a vast land border with China, an unstable neighbour still in the throes of revolutionary upheaval. No friendly neighbours, such as Mexico and Canada, and no two-ocean barriers existed to ease the task of Soviet defence planners.
The overwhelming need to defend the Soviet homeland lay at the heart of all Kremlin designs for the post-war world. Blocking the Polish invasion route, or ‘gateway’, ranked foremost in that regard. Poland, stressed Stalin, was ‘a matter of life or death’ to his country. ‘In the course of twenty-five years the Germans had twice invaded Russia via Poland,’ Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin lectured US envoy Harry Hopkins in May 1945. ‘Neither the British nor the American people had experienced such German invasions which were a horrible thing to endure. … It is therefore in Russia’s vital interest that Poland should be strong and friendly.’ Convinced that the Germans would recover quickly and once again pose a threat to the Soviet Union, Stalin considered it mandatory that steps be taken while the world was still malleable to ensure future Soviet security needs. Those required, at a minimum, that acquiescent, pro-Soviet governments be installed in Poland and other key Eastern European states; that Soviet borders be expanded to their fullest pre-revolutionary extent—meaning the permanent annexation of the Baltic states and the eastern part of pre-war Poland—and that Germany be hobbled through a harsh occupation regime, systematic de-industrialization, and extensive reparations obligations. German reparations could also contribute to the massive rebuilding effort facing the Soviet Union as it sought to recover from the ravages of the war.
Yet those plans, based as they were on the age-old formula of security-through-expansion, needed to be balanced against a countervailing desire to maintain the framework of cooperation with the United States and Great Britain that had evolved, however imperfectly, during the war years. The Kremlin’s interest in sustaining the Grand Alliance partnership forged in the heat of total war rested not on sentiment, which had no place in Soviet diplomacy, but on a set of quite practical considerations. First, Soviet rulers recognized that an open break with the West needed to be avoided, at least for the foreseeable future. Given the crippling losses to manpower, resources, and industrial plant inflicted on their nation by the war, a premature conflict with the United States and Great Britain would place the Soviets at a severe disadvantage, a disadvantage made even more palpable after the US demonstration of its atomic capabilities in August 1945. Second, Stalin and his chief lieutenants were hopeful that the United States could be induced to make good on its promise of generous financial support to their reconstruction efforts. A policy of unbridled territorial expansion would most likely prove counterproductive, since it could precipitate the very dissolution of the wartime alliance and consequent withholding of economic assistance that they sought to prevent.
Finally, the Soviets were looking to be treated as a respected, responsible great power after being shunned as a pariah state for so long. They craved respect, somewhat paradoxically, from the same capitalist states their ideological convictions taught them to loathe. The Russians wanted not just respect, of course; they insisted upon an equal voice in international councils and acceptance of the legitimacy of their interests. Even more to the point, they sought formal Western recognition of their expanded borders and acceptance of, or at least acquiescence in, their emerging sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. All those considerations served as brakes on any imprudent inclinations to gobble up as much territory as the Red Army’s naked power might allow.
The fact that one of history’s most brutal, ruthless, and suspicious rulers presided over the Soviet Union’s delicate balancing act at this critical juncture adds an unavoidable personal element to the story of Moscow’s post-war ambitions. The imperious Stalin completely dominated Soviet policy-making before, during, and after the war, brooking no dissent. In the recollection of Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s eventual successor, ‘he spoke and we listened’. The former Bolshevik revolutionary ‘transformed the government he ran and even the country he ruled, during the 1930s, into a gargantuan extension of his own pathologically suspicious personality’, suggests historian John Lewis Gaddis. It was a ‘supreme act of egoism’ that ‘spawned innumerable tragedies’. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Stalin viewed his Western allies, as he viewed all potential competitors at home and abroad, with the deepest suspicion and mistrust (Box 1).
Box 1 Joseph Stalin
Slight of stature and possessing little by way of charisma or oratorical talent, the Georgian-born Stalin ruled his country with an iron fist from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. The Soviet dictator tightened his grip on the reins of power during the 1930s—at a frightful price to his own people. As many as 20 million Soviet citizens died as a direct or indirect result of Stalin’s forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture and systematic repression.
Yet Russian foreign policy cannot be understood as the product, pure and simple, of Stalin’s brutishness and unquenchable thirst for dominance, as important as those surely were. For all his ruthlessness and paranoia, and for all his cruelty towards his own people, Stalin pursued a generally cautious, circumspect foreign policy, seeking always to balance opportunity with risk. The Russian dictator invariably calculated with great care the prevailing ‘correlation of forces’. He evinced a realist’s respect for the superior military and industrial power possessed by the United States and oft-times sought the proverbial half a loaf when pursuit of a full loaf seemed likely to generate resistance. The needs of the Soviet state, which always took precedence for Stalin over the desire to spread communism, dictated a policy that mixed opportunism with caution and an inclination to compromise, not a strategy of aggressive expansion.
The ideology of Marxism-Leninism that undergirded the Soviet state also influenced the outlook and policies of Stalin and his top associates, though in complex, hard-to-pin-down ways. A deep-seated belief in the teachings of Marx and Lenin imparted to them a messianic faith in the future, a reassuring sense of confidence that, whatever travails Moscow might face in the short run, history lay on their side. Stalin and the Kremlin elite assumed conflict between the socialist and capitalist worlds to be inevitable, and they were certain that the forces of proletarian revolution would eventually prevail. They were thus unwilling to press too hard when the correlation of forces seemed so favourable to the West. ‘Our ideology stands for offensive operations when possible’, as Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov put it, ‘and if not we wait.’ If ideological certitude at times bred a cautious patience, at other times it distorted reality. Russian leaders failed to comprehend, for example, why so many East Germans and Eastern Europeans saw Red Army forces more as oppressors than liberators; they continued as well to calculate that a war between rival capitalist states was bound to occur and that the capitalist system would before long face another global depression.
Ideology imparted to Soviets and Americans alike a messianic faith in the world-historical roles of their respective nations. On each side of what would soon be
come the Cold War divide, leaders and ordinary citizens saw their countries acting for much broader purposes than the mere advancement of national interests. Soviets and Americans each, in fact, saw themselves acting out of noble motives—acting to usher humanity into a grand new age of peace, justice, and order. ‘Leaders on each side believed that history itself was on their side,’ stresses historian David C. Engerman; ‘both countries equated the growth of their own power with historical progress.’ Married to the overwhelming power each nation possessed at a time when much of the world lay prostrate, those mirror-opposite ideological values provided a sure-fire recipe for conflict.
Chapter 2
The origins of the Cold War in Europe, 1945–50
A fragile alliance
A classic marriage of convenience, the wartime alliance between the globe’s leading capitalist power and its chief proponent of international proletarian revolution was riddled from the first with tension, mistrust, and suspicion. Beyond the common objective of defeating Nazi Germany, there was little to cement a partnership born of awkward necessity and weighed down by a conflict-ridden past. The United States had, after all, displayed unremitting hostility to the Soviet state ever since the Bolshevik revolution that brought it forth. The Kremlin’s rulers, for their part, saw the United States as the ringleader of the capitalist powers that had sought to strangle their regime at infancy. Economic pressure and diplomatic isolation had followed, along with persistent denunciations by American spokesmen of the Soviet government and all it stood for. Washington’s belated recognition of the Soviet Union, which came seventeen years after the state’s establishment, was insufficient to drain the reservoir of bad blood, especially since Stalin’s efforts to knit together a common front against Hitler’s resurgent Germany in the mid- and late 1930s were met with indifference from the United States and other Western powers. Abandoned yet again by the West, at least from his perspective, and left to face the German wolves alone, Stalin agreed to the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939 largely as a means of self-protection.
For its part, the United States entered the post-First World War period with nothing but disdain for an unruly, unpredictable regime that had confiscated property, repudiated pre-war debts, pledged support for working-class revolutions across the globe, and spewed contempt on religion while persecuting Christians and denying the existence of God. American strategists did not fear the conventional military power of the Soviet Union, which was decidedly limited. They worried, rather, about the appeal of the Marxist-Leninist message to downtrodden masses in other lands—as well as in the United States itself—and about the revolutionary insurgencies, and resulting instability, it might spark. Washington, accordingly, laboured to quarantine the communist virus and to isolate its Moscow quartermasters throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. It was like ‘having a wicked and disgraceful neighbor’, recalled President Herbert Hoover in his memoirs: ‘We did not attack him, but we did not give him a certificate of character by inviting him into our homes.’ Roosevelt’s diplomatic recognition of 1933, prompted by commercial and geopolitical calculations, actually changed very little. The Soviet–American relationship remained frigid right up to Hitler’s betrayal of his Soviet ally in June 1941. Before then, the Faustian pact between Germany and Russia had just served to intensify American distaste for Stalin’s regime. When the Soviet dictator opportunistically used the German cover to launch aggression against Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland, in 1939–40, anti-Soviet sentiment burgeoned throughout American society.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, ideological antipathy yielded to the dictates of realpolitik. Roosevelt and his chief strategists quickly recognized the great geostrategic advantages for the United States of a Soviet Union able to resist the German onslaught; they worried, conversely, about the enhanced power that Germany would gain were it to subdue a country so rich in resources. Consequently, beginning in the summer of 1941, the United States commenced shipping military supplies to the Soviet Union in order to bolster the Red Army’s chances. The central dynamic of Roosevelt’s policies from June 1941 onward was, as historian Waldo Heinrichs has so aptly put it, ‘the conviction that the survival of the Soviet Union was essential for the defeat of Germany and that the defeat of Germany was essential for American security’. Even the inveterately anti-communist Churchill immediately grasped the critical importance of the Soviet Union’s survival to the struggle against German aggression. ‘If Hitler invaded Hell’, he quipped, ‘I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.’ The Americans, the Soviets, and the British thus suddenly found themselves battling a common enemy, a fact formalized with Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States two days after Pearl Harbor. More than $11 billion in military aid flowed from the United States to the Soviet Union during the war, serving as the most concrete manifestation of the newfound sense of mutual interest that bound Washington and Moscow together. Meanwhile, the US government’s wartime propaganda machine strained to soften the image of ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin and the unsavoury, long-loathed regime he headed.
Precisely how, where, and when to fight their common German adversary, however, were questions that almost immediately generated friction within the Grand Alliance. Stalin pressed his Anglo-American partners to open a major second front against the Germans as quickly as possible so as to relieve the intense military pressure on his own homeland. Yet, despite Roosevelt’s promises to do so, the United States and Great Britain chose not to open a major second front until two and a half years after Pearl Harbor, opting instead for less risky, peripheral operations in North Africa and Italy in 1942 and 1943. When Stalin learned in June 1943 that there would be no second front in north-western Europe for another year, he angrily wrote to Roosevelt that the Soviet government’s ‘confidence in its allies … is being subjected to severe stress’. He caustically called attention to ‘the enormous sacrifices of the Soviet armies, compared with which the sacrifices of the Anglo-American armies are insignificant’. Not surprisingly, Stalin proved wholly unsympathetic to his allies’ supply and preparedness problems. They had the luxury of waiting before engaging the full brunt of German armed might; the Russians quite obviously did not. Stalin suspected that his putative allies simply did not assign a particularly high priority to relieving the Soviets; and he was certainly right in the sense that the Americans and British much preferred to have Soviets die in the fight against Hitler if that allowed more of their own soldiers to live. Right up until the launching of the long-postponed Allied invasion of the German-occupied Normandy coast in June 1944, Soviet forces were holding down more than 80 per cent of the Wehrmacht’s divisions.
Political disputes also plagued the wartime alliance. None proved more nettlesome than those surrounding the peace terms to be imposed on Germany and the post-war status of Eastern Europe, respectively. At the wartime conference at Tehran, in November 1943, and throughout the following year, Stalin impressed upon Roosevelt and Churchill his conviction that Germany would regain its industrial-military power soon after the war’s end and once again pose a mortal danger to the Soviet Union. The Russian ruler, accordingly, pushed vigorously for a harsh peace that would strip Germany of both territory and industrial infrastructure. Such an approach would satisfy the Soviet Union’s dual need to keep Germany down while extracting from it a sizeable contribution to the Soviet rebuilding effort. Roosevelt proved unwilling to commit himself fully to Stalin’s punitive proposals, though he did tell Stalin that he, too, saw merit in the permanent dismemberment of Germany. In fact, US experts had not yet decided, at that point, among competing impulses: whether to crush the nation that had precipitated so much carnage; or to treat it magnanimously, using the anticipated occupation period to help fashion a new Germany that could play a constructive role in post-war Europe, with its resources and industry fully utilized in the mammoth task of rehabilitating war-torn Europe. Despite Roosevelt’s preliminary nod toward a punitive approach, the
issue remained far from settled, as subsequent developments would make painfully clear.
Eastern European questions, which also touched directly on vital Soviet security interests, similarly eluded easy resolution. In theory and in practice, the Americans and British were reconciled to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe—an Eastern Europe, in other words, in which the Soviets exercised a predominant influence. In the crudest version of wartime spheres of influence diplomacy, in November 1944 Churchill and Stalin tentatively approved the notorious ‘percentages agreements’, which purported to divide much of the Balkans into zones of preponderant British or Russian influence. Roosevelt never signed on to that modus vivendi, however, since it represented too blatant a violation of the principles of free and democratic self-determination that formed a cornerstone of American plans for post-war political order. Yet this particular square could not be circled. Poland, the country whose joint invasion by Germany and the Soviet Union had triggered the European war, well encapsulated the intractable nature of the problem. Two competing Polish governments vied for international recognition during the war years: one, headquartered in London, was led by strongly anti-Soviet Polish nationalists; the other, set up in the Polish city of Lublin, essentially served as a Soviet puppet regime. In so polarized a polity, there was no middle ground; hence little room existed for splitting differences as Roosevelt was wont to do in domestic political clashes.
At the Yalta Conference of February 1945 (see Figure 1), Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin tried to resolve some of these basic disputes while also planning the war’s end game. The conference represents the high point of wartime cooperation, its compromises well reflecting both the existing balance of power on the ground and the determination of the ‘Big Three’ leaders to sustain the spirit of cooperation and compromise that their unusual alliance’s survival required. On the crucial question of Poland, the Americans and British agreed to recognize the Soviet-backed Lublin government, provided that Stalin broaden its representativeness and permit free elections. Largely as a sop to Roosevelt, who sought a fig leaf to cover this retreat from one of America’s proclaimed war goals—and to assuage the millions of Americans of Eastern European descent (most of whom, not insignificantly, were Democratic voters)—Stalin accepted a Declaration on Liberated Europe. The three leaders pledged, in that public document, to support democratic processes in the establishment of new, representative governments for each of Europe’s liberated nations. The Soviet ruler also received the assurance he sought that Germany would be forced to pay reparations, with the tentative figure of $20 billion put on the table, $10 billion of which would be earmarked for the Soviet Union. But final agreement on that issue was deferred to the future. The Soviet commitment to enter the war against Japan within three months after the end of the European war, also negotiated at Yalta, marked a major diplomatic achievement for the United States, as did the formal Soviet agreement to join the United Nations.
The Cold War Page 4
