Did the Soviet Union start the cold war?

Viewpoint: Yes, the cold war was the result of the belligerence of Joseph Stalin and the insecurity it caused in the United States and the West.

Viewpoint: No, the primary responsibility for the cold war derives from the hard-line policies of the United States.

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The question of who "started" the cold war has been an issue of rancorous debate among historians and policymakers for more than four decades. Most of what was written in the 1950s and 1960s about the origins of the cold war came to be defined as "orthodox" or "traditional." In the 1960s and 1970s a new interpretation of the sources of the cold war emerged and was dubbed "revisionist" because of its challenge to the orthodox interpretation. Shortly after the first revisionist studies appeared, and at an accelerated pace during the late 1980s and early 1990s, as archives in the Soviet Union (later Russia) and Soviet-bloc countries opened to Western scholars, a "postrevisionist" reading of the origins of the cold war appeared.
Traditionalists put the blame for the cold war on the Soviet Union. They argue that the Soviets' denial of free elections in Poland and Czechoslovakia, their meddling in Greece, Turkey, and Iran, their assistance to communist forces in China, and their opposition to U.S.-sponsored postwar plans for controlling weapons and promoting economic development--such as the Baruch Plan and the Marshall Plan--caused the Truman administration to reassess its initially more conciliatory approach to the Soviet Union and adopt a harder line toward it. There are differences among traditionalists regarding the driving motivation behind Soviet conduct. Some emphasize the messianic nature of communist ideology, while others offer a combination of traditional Russian imperial impulses, and also point out that Soviet conduct was in line with historical patterns of traditional power politics.
Revisionists argue that Soviet behavior was largely defensive in nature. After the devastation of the Second World War, the Soviet leadership was interested in rebuilding its country and addressing legitimate security concerns--especially making sure that the countries of east and central Europe would no longer be used as a corridor of invasion into Russia. According to this argument, it was the United States, driven by a capitalist need for markets and raw materials, that adopted a confrontational, bullying tone toward the Soviet Union, leading to the outbreak of the cold war.
Postrevisionists reject what they regard as the dogmatic Marxism that characterized much of the revisionist reading, but they also challenge what they consider an excessive emphasis by traditionalists on the role of communist ideology in guiding Soviet foreign policy. Postrevisionist analyses emphasize geopolitical considerations and strategic realities to suggest a more balanced view of responsibility for the cold war. In their writings, however, there is a return to traditionalist themes, as they point to provocative Soviet actions and to an exceedingly bellicose Soviet rhetoric as major contributing factors in the breakdown of cooperation between the two countries and the onset of the cold war.



Viewpoint: Yes, the cold war was the result of the belligerence of Joseph Stalin and the insecurity it caused in the United States and the West.

The cold war--the discrete, globalized confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that began immediately after the Second World War and came to an end with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991--occurred as a result of the belligerence of Joseph Stalin and the insecurity it caused in the United States. The "revisionist" interpretation of the cold war, which stipulates that it originated in the expansionist tendencies of American capitalism, accurately explains some kinds of U.S. expansion after 1945, but it fails to account for the particular hostility of U.S.-Soviet relations during this period.

There can be no doubt that after the Second World War the United States engaged in the most lucrative and widespread economic expansion in the history of modern empires. A powerful, confident, industrial powerhouse, the United States saw every one of its major economic competitors go down to defeat or demoralization during the war. Japan and Germany were reduced to rubble; Great Britain, and, to a greater extent, France, were shorn of their colonial holdings and exposed as declining economic powers. Unscathed by the war and brimming with wartime industrial capability, the United States sought to fill the vacuum left by the reduction and retrenchment of its economic rivals. New York City replaced London as the center of world capitalism. American goods and American popular culture flooded every corner of the world. American corporations wielded immense power and leverage over dozens of foreign societies, squeezing profits from them and in so doing enriching the American population.

This imperial project had nothing essentially to do with the Soviet Union of 1946. The United States had been engaged in global economic expansion since the 1890s; its postwar policies were merely an accelerated continuation of its earlier agenda. If the Soviet Union had been taken over by the Walt Disney Company in 1946, the basic elements and direction of American economic expansion would have continued unchanged. Nations that emerge triumphant after world wars, such as the Netherlands after the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) or Great Britain after the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815), tend to exploit their hard-won success materially; the United States was no exception to this rule.

What pushed postwar international politics beyond simple imperial rivalry and into the volatile and militarized cold war was the growing insecurity of the United States, particularly key officials in President Harry S Truman's administration, about the belligerence and aggressiveness of the Soviet Union under its tyrannical leader Joseph Stalin. This insecurity manifested itself in late 1945 and reached a critical level in February 1946. By that point Truman administration officials had become convinced that, left unchecked, the Soviet Union would eventually threaten the security of the United States.

During the wartime Tehran Conference of late 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declined to support a British proposal to revive French and German power after the war. By announcing this decision he was making it clear to Great Britain and the Soviet Union that the United States would not oppose Soviet domination of the European continent. As Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Stalin all understood, with Germany and France weakened, the Soviet Union would be the only remaining great power on the Eurasian continent. Nonetheless, Roosevelt believed in 1943 that the United States could tolerate Soviet hegemony. Certainly, Germany was not then regarded as a nation to be rejuvenated, and the dismal performance of France during the war had discouraged Roosevelt from viewing it as a legitimate European postwar power.

At the Yalta Conference in 1945 Roosevelt's acquiescence to the obvious signs of Soviet domination over eastern Europe merely affirmed his earlier decision. By once again declining to bolster France and Germany and by tolerating Stalin's flagrant imposition of Soviet-style regimes in Poland and elsewhere, Roosevelt, a dying man at Yalta, gave no signal that the U.S. position on the postwar balance of power in Europe had changed. This crucial question faced Truman when he became president on the death of Roosevelt in April 1945: would he continue to regard the expansion of Soviet power in Europe as acceptable to the United States?

From the vantage point of basic American national security, this question did not have an obvious answer. Certainly the Soviet Union was in many ways a hostile regime. As Truman's more hard-line advisers and his Republican critics in Congress were quick to point out, the Soviets had violated wartime agreements in eastern Europe, having ruthlessly and often brutally imposed client regimes on the long-suffering populations in that part of the continent. Moreover, the Soviet Union adhered to an ideology of global communist revolution and the destruction of capitalist regimes such as the United States, an ideology that Stalin had already used to justify the liquidation of millions of "class enemies" and political opponents in the 1920s and 1930s. On the other hand, many American officials regarded the Soviet domination of eastern Europe as an understandable, defensive act, considering that Germany had crossed the central European plain to invade Russia twice in the space of thirty years. Revelations about Stalinist atrocities and terror were widely discounted as American and British propaganda or at least regarded as internal matters. Finally, the physical devastation of the Soviet population and the Red Army, together with the American monopoly over the atomic bomb, led many to minimize the possibility of a Soviet threat to American security.

The answer to the question boiled down to a reading of Stalin's true objectives and an interpretation of those objectives in light of U.S. national security. If the Soviet government were interested in moving beyond eastern Europe and dominating the entire continent, and if the Soviet domination of Europe could be seen as a threat to American survival, then it would make sense to abandon Roosevelt's Tehran policy and adopt a more confrontational position toward the Soviet Union. During late 1945 and early 1946 Truman and his advisers debated this problem, and in February 1946 they decided that the Soviet Union indeed sought to expand its power and therefore posed a serious long-term threat to the security of the United States.

Three events pushed Truman and his aides to adopt this position. On 9 February 1946, Stalin delivered a public address in which he revived a form of volatile communist rhetoric that had been suppressed during the war. In his speech Stalin blamed American criticism of his actions in eastern Europe on the forces of international capitalism, asserting that the Second World War was the result of capitalist rivalries and predicting that the Soviet Union would prevail over its capitalist enemies. This ill-timed speech discredited those individuals who saw Stalin as a defensive-minded Russian nationalist, and it emboldened Americans who viewed him as a messianic communist revolutionary. On 16 February the U.S. government announced the discovery of a spy ring in the United States: agents of the Soviet Union, acting as Canadian emissaries and scientists, had been caught infiltrating U.S. atomic facilities. This revelation fueled American animosities toward its erstwhile ally, as well as sparking concern of an imminent Soviet atomic arsenal. A week later George F. Kennan, an American diplomat working in Moscow, sent a telegram to Washington explaining Stalin's recent actions. The Soviets, he argued, adhered to a different view of international politics than did the United States and other western nations. He contended that the Russians were much more cynical about international agreements, considering them as pieces of paper to be discarded when convenient, rather than as binding documents. They regarded the West as an eternal adversary of Russia, always arrogant in its dealings with "backward" Russia and never to be trusted. They thought of adversaries in international relations not as rival nations but as sworn enemies to be destroyed. These Russian traditions, Kennan argued, were strengthened by Soviet ideology, which lent a sense of historical inevitability to the looming conflict with the West. Kennan's "long telegram" captivated its many readers in the Truman administration, who were receptive to a clear, historically based assessment of the Soviet threat.

Could Soviet belligerence threaten the United States? In 1946 Americans faced a world far more dangerous than any they had seen before. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941 had shown that nations could launch surprise attacks on America from across oceans, something that had never before been technologically possible. The rapid Nazi conquest of Europe had demonstrated that the balance of power in Europe can change in an instant--that nations will often fold in the face of seemingly inexorable power. Its geographical isolation, together with the historically stable balance of European power, had long provided the United States with free national security. Recent history had proven beyond a doubt that it had become possible for a regime to dominate the Eurasian continent quickly and attack the United States directly and devastatingly.

In 1946 the only nation even remotely capable of threatening the United States was the Soviet Union. The Soviets still had an immense army, which was certainly capable of marching through war-torn Europe and attaining inestimable geopolitical momentum and military resources. The Soviets formally adhered to an ideology that endorsed the violent overthrow of capitalist regimes such as the United States. The only question was whether the Soviet Union actually intended to embark on such a campaign. Stalin's brutal treatment of his own citizens, his cynical treaty with Nazi Germany, and his imposition of tyrannical regimes in eastern Europe confirmed the suspicions of Truman and his advisers. The events of early 1946 convinced them it would be too great a risk to assume that the Soviet Union did not intend to dominate Europe or to believe that the United States would be safe in a world where the Soviets controlled that entire region. No one could be sure that the Soviet Union would embark on such a campaign; more important, it had become impossible for Truman and his aides to believe with certainty that the Soviets would not. Erring on the side of national security, Truman therefore decided to adopt a harder line toward the Soviet Union in the many postwar negotiations of 1946 and 1947. Despite the American atomic monopoly, the Soviet Union did not back down. The cold war ensued.

-- Campbell Craig, University of Canterbury, New Zealand


Viewpoint: No, the primary responsibility for the cold war derives from the hard-line policies of the United States.

Three main perspectives have dominated the debate on the origins of the cold war. For traditionalists the cold war was caused by hostile Soviet intentions rooted in communist ideology and the need to justify internal repression. Once Soviet expansionist goals became clear in 1946 and 1947, the United States was forced into a firm containment posture that it would otherwise have avoided. The revisionists turn this argument on its head, arguing that the origins of the cold war lie in hostile U.S. actions from 1945 to 1947, at a point when Soviet leaders sought peace so that they could rebuild their idevastated country. The reasons revisionists give for U.S. aggression vary, but they include American efforts to promote global capitalism and American paranoia in regard to U.S. security needs. The third perspective, postrevisionism, offers a middle-ground position. Postrevisionists hold that the cold war was, above all, the tragic result of the anarchic international system. Both superpowers were driven primarily by the quest for security; yet, each saw the other as aggressive, and thus each acted to protect its respective sphere. These actions fueled an unnecessary spiral of mistrust and hostility, one that persisted into the 1980s.

This essay, building on the seminal work of Melvyn Leffler in 1992, agrees with the postrevisionist argument but pushes it a bit further. By 1946-1947 both superpowers were indeed caught up in a tragic spiral of distrust. Primary responsibility for the cold war, however, lies with the United States because it was the first state to shift to hard-line policies after the Second World War. As early as mid 1945 President Harry S Truman began to move toward a policy that later became known as "containment," despite his awareness that this policy would likely lead to a destabilizing arms race. He took this provocative action, Leffler argues, to ensure that the United States maintained its "preponderance of power" against the rising Soviet colossus. Containment strategies in 1945 thus reflected rational geopolitics rather than greed or irrational paranoia.

Truman's adoption of hard-line policies was not based on a belief that Soviet premier Joseph Stalin had aggressive intentions. In fact, Truman liked and even respected Stalin at that time. Rather, Truman recognized that if America did not act, the Soviet Union would grow significantly, and the Soviet leaders who later replaced Stalin might not be so moderate. In short, the cold war began for systemic, realistic reasons: the fear of decline; uncertainty about the future intentions of the other nation; and the prudent realization that unless preventive action were taken at that time, it might be too late in the future.

Standard accounts of the cold war usually designate 1947 as the year in which the American containment strategy was set in place. Yet, the core foundations of this containment were actually laid by August 1945. The full extent of this policy may be seen in the following eight interlocking actions taken in 1945 to restrict Soviet economic and military growth:

1. The surrounding of the Soviet Union with U.S. air and naval bases in order to project military power into the Soviet heartland;

2. the termination of U.S. aid to the Soviets, even as aid was extended to the Chinese--an action that included resisting Soviet claims to badly needed reparations from Germany;

3. the use of the atomic bomb, which--in addition to ending the Pacific war quickly--was designed to make Moscow more accommodating in postwar relations;

4. the American effort to rebuild western Europe, which required the revitalization of the western half of Germany, a nation that had just killed more than twenty million Russians;

5. the rapid deployment of U.S. and allied troops in Korea, China, and Manchuria to prevent communist penetration of the region;

6. the U.S. refusal to give atomic secrets and materials to the Soviet Union;

7. the restricting of Soviet naval access to the Mediterranean and North Sea despite recognition of Soviet legal rights;

8. the exclusion of any Soviet role in the occupation and revitalization of Japan, a nation that had fought several wars with Russia in the first half of the twentieth century.

In implementing this policy Truman did not believe he was abandoning all chances of cooperation with the Soviet Union; a great-power modus vivendi might still be worked out. Any such arrangement, however, would be on U.S. terms. In short, the United States would do everything necessary to maintain a preponderant position. If the Soviets cooperated, so much the better. If they did not, Truman preferred a cold war--with all its attendant risks of inadvertent escalation--to a situation in which the United States cooperated at the expense of long-term power. Allowing the Soviet Union to achieve a dominant position would threaten U.S. security, should Soviet intentions prove aggressive down the road.

On 2 April 1945 a top-secret report from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was forwarded to President Roosevelt; it was subsequently given to Truman. The report outlined the dilemma: Russia would emerge from the war as the strongest nation in Eurasia. Indeed, "Russia's natural resources and manpower are so great that within a relatively few years she can be much more powerful than either Germany or Japan has ever been. In the easily foreseeable future Russia may well outrank even the United States in military potential." These fears were reinforced by similar OSS intelligence reports in May. Later that month James F. Byrnes, who was soon to be secretary of state, summed up the feelings of Truman's inner circle. He argued that the best U.S. strategy would be to push ahead as quickly as possible in the development of atomic weaponry to ensure that America stayed ahead of the Soviet Union, even as the United States tried to maintain good relations.

The tragic side of U.S. policy in 1945 is that it sprang from a fear of future Soviet intentions, not present ones. During the Potsdam Conference in July-August 1945, as he crystallized his containment strategy, Truman found Stalin not entirely disagreeable. In late July he wrote in his diaries and to his wife that he liked Stalin and found him honest and straightforward. Near the end of the conference Stalin canceled a meeting because of a cold, and Truman wrote in a diary entry that he was worried about what would happen were Stalin suddenly to die. Some "demagogue on horseback" would take over the Soviet state and destroy the fragile European peace. Byrnes expressed similar concerns throughout the fall of 1945.

Maintaining the U.S. preponderance of power was thus considered necessary as protection against an uncertain future. Yet, U.S. leaders also understood that the policies required to secure this preponderance could antagonize Moscow. In discussions over the spring and summer with his old friend Joseph E. Davies, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Truman was warned repeatedly that, given their history, the Russians were extremely anxious about foreign attacks. In particular Davies cautioned that the demonstration of atomic weaponry over Japan and the withholding of atomic secrets would only undermine Soviet trust, causing a massive arms race that might lead to nuclear annihilation. Yet, by the fall of 1945 Truman's sense of prudence had led him to reject all atomic sharing. In October an old friend, Fyke Farmer, asked him if this policy meant that the armaments race was on. The president replied in the affirmative, but added that the United States would stay ahead.

It is now generally accepted that at least part of the reason for dropping atomic bombs on Japan was to send a signal of U.S. superiority to Moscow. In particular Byrnes and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson believed in the summer of 1945 that demonstrating the effectiveness of the bomb would impress Russia with American military might. Byrnes thought the atomic bomb might help to keep the Soviets from overwhelming Manchuria and northern China in August. After the mid-July atomic tests revealed the true destructive power of the bomb, Truman was much more confident that it could be employed as a diplomatic tool to restrict Soviet expansion. As he told an assistant at Potsdam, the bomb "would keep the Russians straight." This conviction made him more willing to press U.S. demands at the conference, which could only have heightened growing Soviet suspicions.

Nothing in the foregoing argument implies that the Soviet Union was a "good" state; it was, as Truman realized, a brutal dictatorship that killed and oppressed its own citizens. Yet, out of simple geopolitical self-interest, Stalin wanted to maintain good relations with the West in 1945: he needed breathing space to rebuild his war-ravaged country. Loans from the United States, reparations from Germany, and relative peace in the near term were critical to this rebuilding process. It is thus not surprising that Truman found Stalin straightforward and businesslike at Potsdam. Yet, it is evident that after August, once the elements of Truman's containment policy were in place, Moscow became much less accommodating. Stalin pressed for early development of a Soviet atomic bomb, sought to prevent Soviet exclusion from the occupation of Japan, and resisted any Soviet retreat from northern Iran. By 1946 Soviet rhetoric was predicting that a clash between the two superpowers was all but inevitable.

In the end, of course, it is difficult to say whether, even without the provocative U.S. actions in 1945, the Soviets would have shifted to a policy of confrontation. Stalin and his advisers were a highly suspicious, if not paranoid, lot. It is clear, however, that in terms of relative hostility of policy, the United States moved first in the escalation spiral. Although the Soviets did seek to consolidate their hold in eastern Europe, both Roosevelt and Truman in 1945 had resigned themselves to the division of Europe. Yet, the series of actions Truman undertook during the summer of 1945 could only have been seen by Moscow as an effort to project superior American power against the Soviet periphery and to maintain U.S. strategic preponderance.

American policy was not immoral, only tragic. It reflected the twin problems of the fear of decline and the fear of future intentions of the rising Soviet state. In such circumstances it was only prudent for the stronger state to move reluctantly to shore up its dominance across the board. Truman's understanding that his policies would likely bring on a cold-war spiral only heightens the sense of tragedy. He was forced to choose a policy that represented the lesser of two evils: preponderance and an increased risk of war in the short term over decline and a possible war later under less auspicious power conditions.

-- Dale C. Copeland, University of Virginia


Stalin's Worldview

On 9 February 1946 Soviet premier Joseph Stalin delivered a radio address to his nation, reviving the anticapitalist rhetoric that he had tempered during the Second World War. The following excerpts explain his view of the struggle between capitalism and communism and his faith in the strength of the Soviet state:

During the past four years the events of the struggle against the German and Japanese aggressors developed--the events of the Second World War. Doubtless the war was the main event of that period.

It would be incorrect to think that the war arose accidentally or as the result of the fault of some of the statesmen. Although these faults did exist, the war arose in reality as the inevitable result of the development of the world economic and political forces on the basis of monopoly capitalism.

Our Marxists declare that the capitalist system of the world economy conceals elements of crisis and war, that the development of world capitalism does not follow a steady and even course forward, but proceeds through crises and catastrophes. The uneven development of the capitalist countries leads in time to sharp disturbances in their relations and the group of countries which consider themselves inadequately provided with raw materials and export markets try usually to change this situation and to change the position in their favor by means of armed force.

As a result of these factors, the capitalist world is sent into two hostile camps and war follows.

Perhaps the catastrophe of war could have been avoided if the possibility of periodic redistribution of raw materials and markets between the countries existed in accordance with their economic needs, in the way of coordinated and peaceful decisions. But this is impossible under the present capitalist development of world economy. . . .

The point is that the Soviet social system has proved to be more capable of life and more stable than a non-Soviet social system, that the Soviet social system is a better form of organization of society than any non-Soviet social system. . . .

Source: "New Five-Year Plan for Russia," Vital Speeches of the Day, 12 (15 October 1945 - 1 October 1946): 300.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Gar Alperovitz, with assistance of Sanho Tree and others, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995);

Dale C. Copeland, Anticipating Power: Dynamic Realism and the Origins of Major War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forth- coming 2000);

Herbert Feis, From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York: Norton, 1970);

Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper & Row, 1980);

Denna Frank Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 2 volumes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961);

John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972);

Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997);

Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);

Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York: Knopf, 1980);

Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);

Hogan, ed., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995);

Howard Jones and Randall Woods, "Origins of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East," Diplomatic History, 17 (Spring 1993): 251-310;

Michael Kort, ed., The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);

Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1992);

Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After, second edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995);

David G. McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992);

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland: World, 1959).