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Порталус

Stalin and the Cold War

Дата публикации: 13 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Soviet Russia (1917-53) →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1189693158


Did Joseph Stalin want the Cold War?

Viewpoint: Yes. Joseph Stalin needed the Cold War in order to justify repression in the U.S.S.R. and Soviet control of Eastern Europe.

Viewpoint: No. Joseph Stalin did not want the Cold War, but his paranoia and desire for territorial expansion made it possible.


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In principle, Joseph Stalin was probably as much in favor of keeping the wartime Grand Alliance of Britain, Russia, and the United States in place as were his postwar counterparts Clement Attlee and Harry S Truman. Four years as a battleground had left the Soviet Union devastated economically, disrupted administratively, and unsettled ideologically. Stalin had mobilized domestic support for the war in part by turning to nationalism and religion. Some of the more successful Red Army generals had begun the war in the gulag archipelago, victims of the purges of the 1930s.
Would the Soviet dictator continue the process of opening his society and loosening its restraints? That question was answered almost immediately in domestic contexts, as returned prisoners of war (POWs) were shipped en masse to labor camps and "enemies of the people" once again faced sham trials or administrative punishment. Thoughts of an economy reconfigured to meet civilian needs vanished as the arms factories ran overtime and rationing of all sorts continued. This tightening of domestic belts did not inevitably prefigure increased international tension. Stalin, however, made no secret even during World War II of his conviction that once common enemies were removed, the hostility between communism and capitalism would equally shape policies and behaviors.
East-West relations deteriorated slowly and uncertainly after 1945. Public opinion in the West was strongly in favor of maintaining good relations with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). Winston Churchill's 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech was widely interpreted as atavistic and provocative in both Britain and the United States. Stalin's success in excluding the West from any authority in the sphere of influence Russia had acquired in Eastern Europe was, however, not matched by gestures of conciliation elsewhere. Instead, the Soviet Union began asserting an increased interest in the Near and Middle East, from Greece and Turkey to the Persian Gulf. A Britain unable to sustain its immediate postwar role as counterweight turned to a United States increasingly ready to believe that Soviet aggrandizement in those regions represented an unacceptable alteration in the balance of power--particularly when considered in the context of Russia's postwar gains in the Far East. The March 1947 enunciation of the Truman Doctrine, with its guarantee of support for "free institutions and national integrity" against external aggression, marked the end of the postwar era and the beginning of a Cold War that Stalin may not have sought, but certainly expected.



Viewpoint: Yes. Joseph Stalin needed the Cold War in order to justify repression in the U.S.S.R. and Soviet control of Eastern Europe.

In the summer of 1945 Soviet military power was dominant from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. An army, which only five years earlier had been humiliated by Finland, had come back to crush Nazi Germany and within ninety days of that great victory pulled off a logistical miracle, transferring significant assets to the Pacific across a single rail line of seven thousand miles for a war against Japan. As a result, there was justifiable pride in the accomplishments of the Red Army, which had saved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) from a brutal Nazi occupation. Without its heroic efforts Allied casualties at Normandy, France (6 June 1944), would have been heavier. Indeed, in its final three-week offensive to take Berlin, the Red Army sustained more casualties than the combined British and American forces in their yearlong drive from Normandy to the Elbe River in Germany.

The forces that met along the Elbe River in the spring of 1945 were part of the greatest alliance in history, joined together to crush the greatest threat to civilization in the twentieth century. The reasons for fighting, how they fought, and the postwar goals of the United States and the U.S.S.R., however, were at complete opposites. The Americans had fought primarily for idealistic reasons, to stop a threat to the freedom of democracies and to liberate those neighbors crushed under Nazi tyranny. The Soviets had actually been allied with the Nazis at the start of the war and Joseph Stalin had engaged in the dividing up of Eastern Europe with Adolf Hitler until his supposed ally turned against him.

The people of the Soviet Union made a heroic defense in a battle for survival, but the goals of the valiant Red Army and their leader were not necessarily the same. Stalin saw the situation in 1945 as a platform for the expansion of his power, even while many of his countrymen assumed that they had fought to free Russia from occupation and that the conflict was now over. Stalin apologists argue that he was driven to a Cold War confrontation because the United States clearly intended to contain communism and eventually destroy it. These historians are the same ones who argue that the purges of the 1930s were justified and that there was never a deliberately created famine in the Ukraine. If American intent had been to push back communism, or to destroy it, then the nearly complete demobilization of U.S. ground forces by the end of 1945 was a poor way to start the campaign. In May 1945 the United States had over fifty combat-ready divisions in Europe; by the end of the year barely one division could fit the definition of being prepared for war. At the same time the Soviets had well over three hundred divisions in the field and would continue to maintain their forces at nearly that level for years to come.

In the communist view, war is simply acceptable politics through the use of violence. Under the thin veil of having to maintain social order in a devastated Eastern Europe, Stalin systematically suppressed any attempt at a democratic process inside his area of control. The betrayal of the Polish Resistance fighters in Warsaw during the Soviet summer offensive of 1944 was but a foreshadowing of what was to come. In the final days of World War II many Eastern European refugees returning to their countries who posed a threat to communist control were either killed or deported to Siberia. The purges, mass executions, and deportations that occurred in the Ukraine and the Baltic states in 1944 expanded into Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Soviet-occupied Germany. Tens of millions who had expected liberation quickly found that the heel of one boot had been lifted off their backs simply to be replaced with another.

At the same time Stalin moved to aggressively export his personal brand of communism to areas outside immediate Soviet control, and he was soon engaged in the covert support of communist efforts in Greece, Turkey, and Italy. The only counterforce to full military hegemony was the American monopoly on atomic weapons. This factor alone is perhaps the sole reason that there was a Cold War rather than a World War III in the late 1940s. The United States adroitly bluffed Stalin, leading him to believe that it might be in possession of several hundred atomic weapons when in fact it had less than one hundred until 1948.

Deeply paranoid, Stalin was convinced that given an opportunity the Americans would launch a strike on the Kremlin with the sole intent of killing him, and for years highly trained troops manned antiaircraft positions around Moscow twenty-four hours a day.

The nuclear monopoly, maintained until 1949, gave the United States some semblance of a counterforce that blocked any major aggressive effort on the part of the Soviet Union. The only alternative then for maintenance of control in the occupied territories, the continuance of an Orwellian warlike mentality in the homeland, and the expansion of power was a war of nerves: the Cold War. It served all three purposes well. By 1948 any semblance of freedom in occupied Europe was dead. Communist governments were installed, which immediately received the backing of Soviet troops in the name of communist solidarity.

An aspect of the Cold War that is often overlooked in the West is its use as a means of maintaining an iron grip inside the Soviet Union. After four bitter years of war and sacrifice, many people within the U.S.S.R. believed that they had earned a taste of freedom and this sentiment existed even within the Red Army, which had fought such a heroic battle. The paranoia and war scares created by the Cold War enabled Stalin to continue the repression of the prewar years, covered over with the excuse that at any minute all of them might fall victim to the bombs of the capitalistic imperialists.

Thus, in an instant, the old Western allies were now the new Hitlers, who were far more dangerous, for they could strike and annihilate the entire Soviet Union without warning. Under this guise any potential threat from within was neutralized. It could not have been any other way, for without a new enemy to fear, the nightmare of postwar repression and the deportation of millions to Siberia would have been seen for what it was: the outright insanity of the Soviet leader.

Finally, there is a third driving factor, the desire to continue expansion. With direct military confrontation ruled out, the only alternative was secret support of communist movements, such as the effort in Greece and Turkey, and the support of proxy armies in such areas as North Korea.

Stalin clearly favored an evolutionary war by other means in order to avoid a conflict that was so direct that the United States would be provoked into the use of nuclear weapons. Yet, at the same time, he had to maintain a constant level of pressure that would eventually wear down the will to resist and trigger a cave-in of resolve similar to what happened to the Allies after World War I. Fortunately the generation that fought and won World War II was made of sterner stuff. When confronted by the Berlin Crisis of 1948, rather than surrender, the Western powers demonstrated moral strength and finally forced Stalin to back down. The Truman Doctrine (1947) was a clear statement of American resolve, which was finally demonstrated by direct intervention in Korea and the U.S. decision to make more thermonuclear weapons. Stalin wanted the Cold War, if for no other reason than the fact that he needed it in order to survive.

-- William R. Forstchen, Montreat College


Viewpoint: No. Joseph Stalin did not want the Cold War, but his paranoia and desire for territorial expansion made it possible.

In 1945 the Soviet Union stood at the height of its power. Nazi Germany had been crushed and Soviet troops occupied Berlin. The dominant feature in international politics for the half century that followed World War II, however, was a fierce geopolitical competition between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) and its erstwhile Western allies. Was this competition something Soviet premier Joseph Stalin wanted? There is a compelling case that the Cold War resulted directly from aggressive Soviet actions. Yet, there are many convincing reasons to believe that Stalin believed his actions after the war were subtle enough, and his credibility sufficiently strong, to maintain the cordiality of his wartime relationship with the West. Hoping to have his cake and eat it, too, he worked simultaneously for Soviet aggrandizement around the world and a peaceful international environment in which the Soviet Union could recover and develop a position of competitive strength.

Stalin's activities in the months immediately after the surrender of Germany in May 1945 did not seem especially provocative. Despite attempts to distribute political resources in favor of the national communist parties in Eastern Europe and create a political culture that diminished the appeal and effectiveness of their noncommunist opponents, the ultimate effect of these activities was not clearly seen for a while to come. Promised free elections were held and none of the communist parties in Eastern Europe won a clear majority. Stalin tolerated "bourgeois" politicians in positions of authority, including many, such as Stanislaw Mikolajczyk in Poland and Jan Garrigue Masaryk in Czechoslovakia, who advocated a pro-Western orientation for their countries. In a surprising move for a Bolshevik, Stalin did nothing at all, even about monarchism, in the region. Tsar Simeon II of Bulgaria was deposed in a democratically held referendum in September 1946, one year after the conquest by the Red Army, while King Michael of Romania continued to sit on his throne as late as December 1947, more than three years after Soviet troops overran his country.

Strategically, Stalin held to his promises made during the war. Although Western forces that had marched into the demarcated Soviet occupation zones of Germany were obliged to withdraw, the Soviets allowed British, French, and American troops into their respective sectors of Berlin and Vienna, with full transit rights across other Soviet zones. Stalin also refrained from the overt mobilization of foreign communists, in Western or Eastern Europe, under the banner of international communism. The Third, or Communist, International (Comintern), the main agency for the coordination of foreign communists by Moscow, before its abolition as a goodwill gesture for the West in May 1943, was not revived in any form for more than two years after the end of the war. The only guidance from Moscow to communists across the continent was for them to participate in their provisional governments and, after parliamentary and constitutional forms of government had been reestablished, to compete in free elections and the democratic process. Although Greece was plagued by a communist-guerrilla movement and bloody civil war, it is now known conclusively that support came from Josip Broz Tito in blatant contravention of Stalin's wishes. Put simply, nothing overt in Stalin's immediate postwar foreign policy in Europe indicated a desire for confrontation with the West.

Although many scholars have called Stalin's entry into the war against Japan shameless because he only did so two days after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (6 August 1945), he was actually keeping the letter of his agreement with the West to enter the Pacific theater precisely three months after the defeat of Germany. In other words, he was to enter the war in the Pacific, and break the Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact of 1941, on 8 August 1945--and he did exactly that. The fact that he did not move against Japan earlier was no sinister plot to allow American resolve and technology to win a role in Asia for him while he sat back and did nothing. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, furthermore, had encouraged Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek to make small territorial, mineral, and military-base concessions to the U.S.S.R. and had promised Stalin a role in postwar China. Stalin had no reason not to expect those promises to be honored. Nothing overt in Stalin's immediate postwar foreign policy in Asia indicated a desire for confrontation either.

Indeed, considering the domestic situation of the Soviet Union, Stalin had no reason to look forward to conflict with any optimism. Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens had died, at least as many (and possibly more) than all of the other combatant powers put together, including Germany and Japan. The main industrial and agricultural areas of the Soviet Union had been conquered by Germany and fully mobilized for Adolf Hitler's war effort. Somewhere between five and seven million Soviet citizens were abducted and used as forced laborers in German industrial enterprises. So thorough was the dislocation of the Soviet economy that the success of its armies depended on massive support from the United States in almost every conceivable military and industrial category. Moscow received more than $6 billion in assistance during the war, a figure almost one-half the entire U.S. defense budget of 1950.

It is fallacious, however, to assume that since a man as ruthless as Stalin tried to preserve his strategic partnership with the West after World War II, he was either only partially responsible for the Cold War or completely innocent. Even though Stalin did not want to enter into a confrontational relationship, he nevertheless did nothing to neglect the global position of the U.S.S.R. Indeed, many of his activities represented acute threats to Western security and exceeded what the West had promised him during the war.

The "adjustment" of the political cultures of Eastern Europe to favor parliamentary communism was supported by the Soviets. Gradually communists began to take full advantage of their artificially strong positions and, with indirect Soviet support and approval, to use tactics of intimidation against noncommunist political parties. Although the full consolidation of communist regimes in the region was achieved only after Stalin's definitive break with the West, the stage was set much earlier.

On the comparative strategic level, Stalin lost no time in trying to reach parity with the West, especially in jet-engine technology and atomic energy. Even as early as 1943, Soviet intelligence had developed an espionage network in the United States and Great Britain aimed at acquiring atomic-weapons technology. It is now known that immediately after the United States dropped its atomic bombs on Japan, Stalin ordered his security chief, Lavrenty Beria, to begin a crash program to develop the Soviet bomb. The espionage network in the West was expanded.

Along the Soviet periphery, Stalin attempted to insinuate his power into a variety of places. In the summer of 1946 Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov demanded that the Allies accommodate Moscow's demands for a share in the occupation of the industrial Ruhr region, located deep inside of the western zones of Germany. He made this request even though the U.S.S.R. had absolutely no pretension to such rights in the wartime agreements and even though the Soviets did not extract massive amounts of forced labor or natural resources from their occupation zone. The Allies not only rejected the demand, but even viewed it as undermining joint control of Germany. Immediately after Molotov's demands were rejected, the Western allies began to think about the economic and political integration of their zones of occupation to the exclusion of the Soviets.

Further afield, Moscow attempted to establish a Soviet presence in entire countries in which it had been promised no postwar role. This situation occurred in 1946 in Turkey, where the Soviets demanded from Ankara the rights to maintain a naval base in the Bosporus Straits. As a result, the West grew suspicious of Soviet intentions. A similar situation occurred in Iran, where the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company held a monopoly on the petroleum fields and where the United States wanted to expand its own interests. The Soviets attempted to use a legally fictitious approach to the national self-determination rights of the Azerbaijani population to absorb strategic Iranian territory. Both of these incidents prompted immediate demands from the West for Moscow to desist. In the case of Turkey and Greece (the communist insurrection in the latter was incorrectly thought to have been Soviet-inspired), the United States and Britain gave generous financial support to noncommunist governments.

Whenever he overstepped his bounds and was called on it by the West, Stalin did indeed back down. Soviet demands on Turkey ceased and the Soviet troops who had entered Iran for temporary occupation during the war left the country without annexing any territory. Although Stalin demurred from provocations that would have elicited a Western military response, his actions on a variety of fronts showed bad faith.

The decisive break came in June 1947 when Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced that the United States would sponsor a broad program of financial assistance to promote the recovery and stability of all Europe, the Soviet Union included. Initially, it has been revealed, Stalin was keenly interested in the prospect of receiving postwar financial assistance from the United States in addition to the Lend-Lease aid he had obtained during the war. The perception that aid under the Marshall Plan would be attached to political conditions, however, gave Stalin some pause. Rather than allow Eastern Europe and his own country the chance to recover with the benefit of American finance, Stalin chose to consolidate what he already had under monolithic communist domination. The weak constitutional governments of Eastern Europe were compelled to reject Marshall Plan aid and other close ties to the West (Czechoslovakia, for instance, had come close to forming a defensive military alliance with France in 1947). By the following February every state in the region had a monolithically communist government. In later years communists who favored a more nationalist orientation for their governments were removed from power, expelled from their communist parties, and often arrested and executed. All independent political parties and social institutions were either eliminated or placed on communist "guidance."

By June 1948 the continuing economic integration of the Western sectors of Germany, caused initially by Molotov's demand that the U.S.S.R. be included in the occupation of Ruhr, gave Stalin the pretext to blockade West Berlin. By cutting off the access of the Western Allies to their legitimate presence in the western parts of the city, an arrangement sanctified by wartime agreements, Stalin had maneuvered his country and the world into a prolonged conflict of dangerous dimensions. Although he had not wanted it, the Soviet leader's obsession with security and the aggrandizement of his country made the Cold War possible.

-- Paul Du Quenoy, Georgetown University

FURTHER READINGS


References


John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);

Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);

Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (Boston: Beacon, 1989);

Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 13 сентября 2007 года

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