The Cold War

Bradley Lightbody

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134646623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The Cold War examines the complex arguments which divided East and West following the end of the Second World War, and analyzes its eight major phases, including:

* the emergence of the Cold War
* Coexistence and Detente
* Glasnost in the late 1980s.

Combining factual overview and background discussion of the key issues such as the nuclear threat and who, if anyone, won the Cold War, with analysis of source material, students will find this a must-have in the study of this major historical event.

1
EMERGENCE OF THE COLD WAR

BACKGROUND NARRATIVE

At 10.50 p.m. on 30th April 1945, the Red Army signalled the defeat of Nazi Germany by unfurling the Red Banner from the roof of the shattered Reichstag, Berlin. It was victory, but a victory overshadowed by the lack of agreement between the wartime Allies over the future of Europe.

The Red Army had advanced some 1500 miles from the gates of Moscow into the heart of Europe and this was of immediate concern to Great Britain and the United States. The Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States were not natural allies but had been united by war against the common enemy: Nazi Germany. The prewar relationship had been one of estrangement, given Western hostility to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and a general fear of a revolutionary Marxist ideology that threatened world revolution.

The first wartime conference at Teheran in November 1943 was cordial and held out the prospect for future agreement but at the second conference, Yalta in February 1945, significant differences arose over the future of Poland and Germany. At this critical juncture in East—West relations President Roosevelt died, on 12th April 1945, and was succeeded by Vice-President Harry S Truman. Truman insisted that the Atlantic Charter signed by all of the nations at war with Germany must remain the basis of any post-war settlement. The Charter principles promised all nations a choice in their system of government as expressed in free and fair elections, but this conflicted with the Soviet Union’s desire for ‘friendly’ governments in Eastern Europe.

The final conference of the war at Potsdam in July 1945, attempted to satisfy US and Soviet concerns but with mixed success. There was considerable mistrust on both sides and later each accused the other of breaking faith.

The non-co-operation between East and West was described as an ‘Iron Curtain’ by Churchill in a private telegram to Truman on 12th May 1945. These words later became the centrepiece of Churchill’s famous speech of 5th March 1946, at Fulton, Missouri, when the failure to reach agreement was publicly acknowledged.

This speech was viewed in advance by President Truman, who thought it was admirable, whereas Stalin regarded it as harsh and confirmation of a threat to the Soviet Union. There were further attempts to break the deadlock in 1946– 47 but in reality the Cold War had begun.

ANALYIS (1): TO WHAT EXTENT WAS THE COLD WAR INEVITABLE?

The orthodox and revisionist studies that dominated the early years of the Cold War blamed the Soviet Union and the United States respectively for attempting to impose their own political and economic ideologies upon Europe and the world. In both cases the Cold War was regarded as an inevitable clash between opposing ideologies as both the Soviet Union and the United States in 1945–47 attempted to impose a new world order based upon Marxism or capitalism.

The orthodox interpretation of the Soviet Union as a hostile, expansionist power dominated Western policy and thinking into the 1960s. American diplomats W.Averell Harriman and George F. Kennan in particular identified the Soviet Union as a threat to world peace to the extent that in April 1950 the National Security Agency asserted that the aim of the Soviet Union was nothing less than, ‘absolute authority over the rest of the world’.¹

This stark assessment of Soviet intentions dated back to 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin alarmed the West by endorsing the Marxist theory of inevitable conflict with capitalism until, ‘ultimately one or the other must conquer’.² This threat of revolution cast a permanent shadow over pre-war relations, and the establishment of the Comintern to promote communism world-wide only served to heighten tension and opposition. The failure of the Western intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918–20 and the subsequent survival of Bolshevism was greeted with dismay in the West and not least by Churchill who as British minister of war was one of the most trenchant opponents of communism. The Soviet Union was treated as a pariah nation not only because of the West’s opposition to communist ideology but from moral opposition to ‘red fascism’, given the repressive nature of Lenin’s and later Stalin’s dictatorship.

After 1928, the transformation of the Soviet Union into an industrial and military power under Stalin’s leadership only increased the sense of threat, and, if anything, the rise of Nazi Germany was welcomed as a‘bulwark against Bolshevism’.³ The threat assessment was very much one of communism rather than fascism, despite Hitler’s ‘legal’ revolution that supplanted Weimar democracy with a Nazi dictatorship and a foreign policy that openly addressed German expansion. The differences were that the Soviet Union’s Marxist ideology challenged at an ideological level the concepts of liberalism and capitalism that formed the basis of Western society and government, and, at a more practical level, the fact that Lebensraum faced east. The evidence of Soviet hostility was more latent than actual but the Soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War from 1936, the dismemberment of Poland in 1939 and the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1940 acted to confirm Stalin’s hostile intent. The Kremlin watchers in the US Embassy in Riga, capital of Latvia, concluded that Stalin was biding his time looking for opportunities to exploit and was ultimately seeking world-wide communist revolution. By 1945, Stalin had annexed the Baltic States, pushed Poland’s borders westwards and refused to withdraw from Eastern Europe until pro-Soviet governments were appointed rather than elected. Daniel Yergin identified the Soviet Union as a hostile, expansionist power in the ‘Riga Axiom’⁴ and it was here that the orthodox interpretation of the Cold War took firm root. Roosevelt was criticised for being too trusting in the face of this massive Soviet expansion. Feis argued that, rather than accept Soviet demands, it ‘was better to risk a break with Stalin at Yalta’.⁵

At Potsdam it became an article of faith for Truman and Churchill that Stalin was using the dislocation of war to advance communism across Europe. Kennan, who was a diplomat in the US Embassy in Riga, expressed all of these fears in an uncompromising analysis, the ‘Long Telegram’ of February 1946, which identified the Bolsheviks as ‘the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced their country on to ever new heights of military power’.⁶ The subsequent Soviet rejection of the Baruch Plan to control nuclear weapons development also heightened Western concern about Soviet intentions.

In this context the Cold War was inevitable as the West had to oppose the Soviet Union for its own survival, but not everyone accepted the orthodox analysis of inevitable conflict. Looking through Soviet eyes, it was possible to regard Soviet actions as primarily defensive rather than expansionist. The US ambassador in Moscow in 1937–38, Joseph Davies, questioned the wisdom of the Riga Axiom, as did General Lucius Clay and the journalist Isaac Deutscher.

The world revolutionary goals, espoused by Lenin and Trotsky, which so intimidated the West, had been abandoned by Stalin in 1928 in favour of ‘socialism in one country’. The Comintern largely confined itself to propaganda and was eventually disbanded by Stalin in 1943 with no notable successes after twenty-five years of supposedly promoting revolution world-wide. Stalin regularly identified the West as a threat and in defending the high production targets of the first Five Year Plan in 1931 stated, ‘either we do it or they crush us’.⁷ Far from threatening the West, Stalin was intimidated by a hostile Nazi Germany and under the banner of collective security sought a defensive alliance with Britain and France. The rebuff of collective security and the Munich Agreement between Chamberlain and Hitler of 1938 convinced Stalin that Britain and France were ‘encouraging the Germans to march East’.⁸

It was this fear that prompted Stalin to reach his own agreement with Hitler in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 23rd August 1939 after years of what Stalin referred to as, ‘pouring buckets of filth over each other’s heads’.⁹ The fact that Marxism and its antithesis fascism could come to an understanding for reasons of mutual gain indicated that ideology was no barrier to agreement.

After 1965 this evidence of a defensive Soviet Union coupled with shock at the scale and nature of the Vietnam War prompted a reassessment of American foreign policy in 1945–47. Paterson concluded that American policy ‘assumed a communist monolith that did not exist’.¹⁰

The resulting revisionist interpretation of the Cold War identified the Atlantic Charter of 1941 as an attempt at a Pax Americana that made the Cold War inevitable. Instead of Stalin being expansionist and hostile, he was merely defending the Soviet Union against US policies that were designed to undermine communism. The Atlantic Charter principles carried forward the 1918 Wilsonian aims of a democratic world and ‘open-door’ economics, but such liberal principles were alien to the Soviet system of government and made disagreement inevitable. Both Great Britain and the Soviet Union ended the war virtually bankrupt, but the United States’ GNP had more than doubled and placed that country in a commanding position, giving rise to the suspicion that the commitment to open-door economics was an attempt to open up the British Empire and the whole of Europe to American economic penetration. The Conservative MP Robert Boothby complained in the House of Commons that the United States’ aim was to ‘open the markets of the world for the benefit of the United States of America’.¹¹ This suspicion was supported by the liberal conditions attached to Lend-Lease payments and the establishment of the World Bank and the IMF at Bretton Woods in 1944, all of which favoured US trade.

The later US suspension of Lend-Lease payments to the Soviet Union and the reluctance to endorse reparations to compensate the Soviet Union for the cost of the war were equally interpreted as attempts at economic blackmail. Finally, at Potsdam the US nuclear monopoly was used by Truman as a trump card to try to force Soviet compliance with the Atlantic Charter but the result was only to increase division and make the Cold War inevitable. The later rearming of West Germany and admittance to NATO in May 1949 were equally offensive to the Soviet Union after the losses of the Second World War, and deepened the Cold War hostility.

The revisionist argument of inevitable conflict is contradicted by Roosevelt’s pragmatic and openly flexible approach at Teheran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945. Roosevelt was willing to concede Soviet spheres of influence if it meant winning Soviet co-operation within the United Nations and a partnership to police the world. He was an idealist committed to liberalism, but he recognised the reality of Soviet power and hoped that over a period of ten to twenty years sufficient trust would be established to permit the relaxation of the Soviet dictatorship. Later, in 1946, US Secretaries James Byrnes and Henry Wallace attempted to maintain Roosevelt’s pragmatism but failed against an administration convinced of the Riga Axiom.

The inconsistencies in the orthodox and revisionist interpretations of the Cold War were exposed, after 1972, by John Lewis Gaddis, in particular, in a succession of books that collectively ushered in the post-revisionist interpretation. The Cold War was judged to be a product of the misjudgements of both the United States and the Soviet Union during the wartime negotiations rather than an inevitable conflict. Stalin had misjudged the nature of Western democracy and the restrictions it placed upon Churchill and Roosevelt to strike deals, whereas Truman and Churchill had misjudged Stalin’s sense of insecurity and need for financial assistance to restore the Soviet Union. The death of Roosevelt on 12th April 1945 removed the person most able to bridge the divide and broker agreement.

In addition, public opinion in 1945 recognised the sacrifice of the Soviet Union and found any idea of future conflict difficult to accept. The day after Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech the Chicago Sun commented: ‘Let Mr Truman’s rejection of the poisonous doctrines declared by Mr Churchill be prompt and emphatic...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: EMERGENCE OF THE COLD WAR
• 2: CONFRONTATION
• 3: PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE
• 4: THE MISSILE RACE
• 5: DÉTENTE
• 6: DISARMAMENT
• 7: EVIL EMPIRE
• 8: GLASNOST
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY