ONE
Dividing the World
There are now two great nations in the world, which starting from
different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and
the Anglo-Americans....Each seems called by some secret design of Providence
one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.
Alexis de Tocqueville, 18351
With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the
Asiatic, the African, and perhaps the South American nationalisms, there will
remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other—the
United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will
compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the
fields of economics and ideology. These same laws make it inevitable that both
Powers should become enemies of Europe. And it is equally certain that both
these Powers will sooner or later find it desirable to seek the support of the
sole surviving great nation in Europe, the German people.
Adolf Hitler, 19452
It has
become almost obligatory to begin histories of the Cold War with Tocqueville’s
famous prophecy, made more than a century before the events it foresaw had come
to pass. Hitler’s prediction, advanced
even as these events were happening, is deservedly less well known. Still, the
similarity in these two visions of the future, put forward 110 years apart by
the greatest student of democracy and the vilest practitioner of autocracy, is
striking: it is rare enough for anyone to anticipate what lies ahead, even in
the most general terms. Was the division of the world that began in 1945 really
the result of “some secret design of Providence,” or, if one prefers the
Führer’s more secular formulation, of a set of laws derived from history and
geography? Or was it an improbable accident? Or was it, as great events most
often are, something in between?
Tocqueville
made his forecast the way most people do: by projecting the past and the
present into the future. At the time he wrote the United States and Russia
occupied vast expanses of thinly populated but resource-rich continents. Each had a high birth rate, and therefore
the potential for rapid growth. Each had been expanding across successive
frontiers; neither faced rivals capable of impeding that process. But there the
similarities ended. The United States was already, in 1835, the world’s most
democratic republic, and the Russian empire its most prominent example of
monarchical authoritarianism. Tocqueville saw the contrast clearly: Americans
relied “on personal interest and [gave] free scope to the unguided strength and
common sense of individuals,” while Russians concentrated “the whole power of
society in one man.”3 Significantly, though, he said nothing about how this difference
in systems of government might affect relations between the two countries or
their dealings with the rest of the world. What a subsequent generation would
call “bipolarity” would not have surprised Tocqueville, but whether
conflict—hot or cold—would result from that condition remained shrouded, even
from this most clairvoyant of observers.
Today it is
for historians, not clairvoyants, to account for the rise, flourishing, and
decline of Russian—American global hegemony. We are well beyond the distant
horizon Tocqueville could only barely discern. We know that his prophecy did
come to pass, in such a way as to exceed even Hitler’s expectations: enormous
power did combine with intense hostility, to the point of encompassing not just
all of Europe and much of the rest of the world, but—some would say—the future
of civilization itself. We are in a position now to see how this happened, to
trace the process by which the Russian—American predominance Tocqueville and
Hitler anticipated became the Cold War the world so greatly feared. We are also
free to speculate on whether this had to happen: whether there might have been
alternative paths from 1835—or even from 1945—to where we are today.
I
At the time
Tocqueville wrote, the United States and Russia had about as many connections
as exist now, say, between Paraguay and Mongolia. The Americans had attempted,
after the Napoleonic wars and their own nearly disastrous War of 1812, to
exclude themselves from further involvement in European affairs: the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823 was as much a welcome withdrawal from an old continent as a
brash assertion of authority over a new one. Russia issued no such self-denying
ordinance, but it too turned inward after the death of Tsar Alexander I in
1825, playing only an occasional role in the maintenance of a European order
that seemed stable enough in any event. The simultaneous shift of American and
Russian concerns away from Europe and toward the development of continental
empires meant that for decades to come citizens of the two countries would have
little to do with one another. The world was still empty enough for empires to
expand without intersecting.
Some
contacts, to be sure, did take place. There had been a thin trickle of trade
and travel since the days of the American Revolution, and this in turn had
given rise, among educated minorities in both the United States and Russia, to
a modest interest in each other’s culture and institutions. Both states shared
the parallel but not equivalent problem of managing conquered peoples within
their territories. Both abolished involuntary servitude at almost the same
time—Russian serfs won emancipation in 1861 and American slaves in
1863—although under very different sets of circumstances. Both strongly distrusted
that era’s most visible hegemon, Great Britain, an attitude reflected in
American sympathy for the Russians during the Crimean War and in a Russian
“tilt” toward the North during the American Civil War. And both cooperated in
resolving a long series of disputes over territory and fisheries in the Pacific
Northwest, a process that culminated in Russia’s sale of Alaska to the
Americans in 1867.
Russia
became no less authoritarian and the United States no less democratic during
those years, but in the nineteenth century diplomacy rarely reflected the
compatibility, or lack thereof, of domestic institutions. Otherwise, the United
States would have had its most amicable relationship with Great Britain and its
most antagonistic with tsarist Russia; the reality, however, was just the
opposite. One reason was that Britain’s naval superiority and remaining North
American possessions threatened interests as seen from Washington. But there
was also, in the early relationship between the United States and Russia, a
mutually acknowledged tradition of non-interference in each other’s internal
affairs. It simply did not occur to Americans or Russians that either country
might gain by attempting to alter the other, distinctly dissimilar though they
were.
The first departures
from this pattern arose from the remarkable improvements in transportation and
communication that took place during the final decades of the nineteenth
century. The Russians built the Trans-Siberian railroad just as the Americans
were modernizing their navy, a technological coincidence that allowed both
states to project influence into northeast Asia at a time when China, the
ancient empire that had long dominated that part of the world, seemed on the
verge of collapse. Expansionist impulses directed toward opposite ends of the
earth suddenly converged at a time and in a place where the major European
powers, as well as an increasingly assertive Japan, also had important
interests. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904—5 eventually followed, and President Theodore
Roosevelt helped settle it in such a way as to preserved a diminished presence for the defeated
Russians in Manchuria. But the United States had, during that conflict, openly
aligned itself alongside its old adversary Great Britain in support of Japan
and in opposition to tsarist imperial aspirations.
A second
source of Russian—American antagonism also grew out of the transportation and
communication revolutions of that era. Cheap steamship fares greatly increased
the flow of emigrants from Russia to the United States—the figures went from
about 19,000 annually during the 1880s to around 200,000 a year during the
decade preceding World War—and with them came gruesome tales of privation and
officially sanctioned oppression. Meanwhile, Americans had begun travelling to
Russia, albeit in far smaller numbers, to satisfy their curiosity about that
still mysterious empire; some of them revealed what they found in lurid detail
on the lecture circuit and in the mass circulation newspapers and magazines
that had recently begun to flourish. The American public therefore became more
aware of the tsarist government’s repressive character just as that regime,
following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, seemed determined to
confirm it. No one did more to shift American attitudes about Russia than the
explorer and author George Kennan with his vivid exposé of the Siberian exile
system. He was by no means alone,
however, in questioning whether a democracy could ever have “normal” relations
with a government that treated its people as harshly as Russia did. The issue
would have seemed hypothetical to Americans in Tocqueville’s day, when the
number of constitutional democracies could have been counted on the fingers of
one hand. But that situation too was changing: by the beginning of the
twentieth century democratic institutions had spread sufficiently that Russia
and not the United States stood out as the anomaly.
The conquest
of distance, therefore, did not strengthen Russian—American friendship; instead
it worsened matters by injecting disputes over geopolitics and human rights
into a relationship in which remoteness had heretofore encouraged the
appearance of complementary interests. Technology allowed Russians and
Americans to get to know one another better; but in defiance of the
conventional wisdom that communications ease conflicts, their governments found
it more difficult to deal with one another as a result. By the time World War I
broke out, official contacts had fallen into a pattern of deep distrust,
despite the fact that American financiers indirectly—through the British and
the French—supported Russian military operations. And although the United
States would have entered the war on the side of Great Britain, France, and
Russia in 1917 even if the February Revolution in Petrograd had not deposed the
Tsar, American involvement alongside the Romanovs in a fight “to make the world
safe for democracy” would have been difficult to justify. As he himself knew,
Woodrow Wilson was fortunate in not having had to make the effort.
II
If, as is
often said, World War II created a vacuum of power in Europe, then surely World
War I left a vacuum of legitimacy. For not only did that cataclysm sweep away
entire empires—the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, the Russian—it
also discredited the old forms of diplomacy that allowed war to break out in
the first place and that proved so ineffective in ending it. Neither imperial
regimes nor imperial methods had many defenders left by time the Bolsheviks
staged their coup d’etat late in 1917. And much as the military strength of the
United States and the Soviet Union would fill the European vacuum in 1945, so
American and Russian ideologies did in 1918. These emerged, though, at least as
much from individuals as from institutions and traditions. For the first time,
personalities shaped the course of Russian—American relations, in such a way as
to magnify vastly the differences contrasting national experiences had already
produced.
The United
States and the new Provisional Government in Russia fought on the same side,
but only briefly. For the October Revolution soon replaced that indecisive
regime with one committed, not just to a separate peace, but to nothing less
than ending capitalism throughout the world. The new Soviet government drew its
legitimacy neither from God nor from free elections but from science: it
claimed to have identified the class struggle as the ultimate engine of history
and to have harnessed its policies to that mechanism, thereby ensuring their
success. It was, therefore, as confident as any government has ever been about
reaching its intended objective, which was in this instance—however improbable
the odds—world revolution. What Lenin promised was the ultimate form of
interference in other states’ internal affairs: overthrowing not just their
governments, but their societies.
He did so,
though, just as a gentler revolution was transforming the foreign policy of the
United States. Wilson had not been content to justify American entry into the
war for what it was—an effort to restore the European balance of power.
Instead, he too imposed an ideological framework by proclaiming as war aims
self-determination, open markets, and collective security. His purpose was not
to spread revolution, as was Lenin’s; but Wilson did seek to alter world
politics by removing what he thought to be the causes of injustice, and hence
of war. This was, in its own way then, as ambitious an agenda as that of the
Bolsheviks. Much of the subsequent history of the twentieth century grew out of
the clash between these ideologies—Wilson’s versus Lenin’s—both of them
injected into world politics within the two and a half months that separated
the Bolshevik coup of November 1917 from the President’s January 1918 Fourteen
Points address.
Despite
their apparent novelty, these ideas reflected deeply-rooted national
characteristics. Tocqueville would have found Wilson’s liberal-capitalism
familiar, and Lenin ran his party and his government with an authoritarianism
at least as firm as that of the Russian tsars. The universalism in Wilson’s and
Lenin’s proclamations might well have surprised Tocqueville or any other
nineteenth century observer, though: they were meant not just for internal application
or external emulation, but for the widest possible implementation. They
constituted, albeit in wholly different ways, fundamental challenges to the
international state system itself: in Wilson’s case through the appeal for a
supranational League of Nations, and in Lenin’s by way of his call for
proletarians in all countries to arise and overthrow their oppressors. Nothing
like this had happened since the most militant days of the French Revolution;
certainly there was no precedent for such sweeping and urgent pronouncements in
the prior record of either American or Russian foreign policy.
An important
feature of ideological thinking is its determinism. Ideologists convince
themselves, and seek to convince others, that history is on their side, that
progress toward the goal they have chosen is inevitable and therefore
irresistible. And yet the ideological confrontation between Wilson and Lenin
arose more from coincidence than from predestination: for this, bumbling German
diplomacy was largely responsible. Wilson took the United States into the war
only because the Kaiser’s government had unwisely resumed all-out submarine
warfare and then even more foolishly proposed an alliance with Mexico—an offer
the British intercepted and quickly leaked to the Americans—promising the
return of “lost provinces” extending from Texas to California. Meanwhile, and
with equal imprudence, the Germans had arranged for Lenin to travel from his
exile in Switzerland back to Petrograd, thus setting in motion the astonishing
sequence of events that would so quickly place a tiny band of quarreling
conspirators in charge of the largest nation on the face of the earth.
Wilson and
Lenin responded to the situations in which they found themselves with a
combination of improvisation, eloquence, purposefulness, and sheer audacity
that would have been striking enough in either of them but that seems
remarkable for having occurred, simultaneously, in both. We cannot know what
course events would have taken had the great reformer and the great
revolutionary not reached their respective preeminences—from which they
proclaimed their respective messages to the world—at just the same time.
History could hardly have happened as it did, though, without these two most
messianic of twentieth century leaders. The moment was one of what chaos
theorists call “sensitive dependence on initial conditions:” had things
occurred differently on a personal scale at this particular time, vast
differences on a collective scale would have followed from them. Contingency
created circumstances in which Wilson and Lenin defined mutually hostile
ideological visions, imposed them upon the countries they led, and then
departed from their positions of leadership, leaving it to less visionary
successors to determine what their legacies were to be.
III
The events
of 1917-18 created a symbolic basis for conflict between communism and
capitalism by setting the self-proclaimed objectives of the United States and
Soviet Russia against one another in the most fundamental way. But this clash
of ideas brought few actual conflicts over the next quarter-century.
International rivalries aligned themselves less than one might have anticipated
along the ideological polarities Wilson and Lenin had left behind.
Instead of
leading the movement to eliminate the causes of war, as Wilson had hoped,
Americans relinquished the global predominance their military exertions had
earned them; they thereby violated a basic premise of international relations
theory, which is that great powers, having attained that status, do not
willingly give it up. Instead of provoking world revolution, as Lenin had
desired, his government began its transformation into a stifling and
bureaucratized tyranny, thereby violating Marxist theories about the withering
away of the state and the liberation of the masses who lived within it. Europe
was again left, for the most part, to its own devices, with neither Washington
nor Moscow exerting influence commensurate with the globalist pretensions each
had earlier advanced.
Americans by
no means isolated themselves from Europe after World War I. The United States
participated, along with the British, the French, and the Japanese, in a
half-hearted occupation of Russian territory that lasted from 1918 to 1920; but
the motives behind that enterprise were a confused muddle, and its results were
correspondingly ineffective. Intervention may even have helped the Bolsheviks
by allowing them to pose as defenders of Russian nationalism. There is little
reason to think that they would have been any less hostile toward the
capitalist world if it had never taken place. The United States also retained
the expanded economic ties with Europe that grew out of its shift, during the
war, from international debtor to creditor. American private capital, it is now
clear, was almost as important to the Europeans’ recovery during the 1920s as
was the much more visible Marshall Plan after World War . But economic
influence alone can neither reshape an international system nor determine
everything that happens within it, and it was in the non-economic sphere that
American actions fell short of Wilsonian aspirations.
The most
significant geopolitical development of the early postwar years was surely the
fact that the United States, despite its abortive intervention in Russia and
its involvement in European economic stabilization, made no significant
attempts after 1920 to shape political-military developments on the Continent.
It chose this self-effacing path, historians have variously argued, because the
nation’s long-standing tradition of peacetime isolationism reasserted itself,
or because Wilson had asked too much of the American people during the war, or
because he had obtained too little of his visionary plan for peace in the
Versailles Treaty. But there was a deeper reason as well: the United States
withdrew from Europe’s politics because it saw no obvious challenge to the
balance of power there, and thus no threat to its own security. Germany had
been defeated; Soviet Russia was torn by civil war and factional disputes;
Great Britain and France had been “associates” during the war and could hardly,
in the future, be enemies. To the extent that there was any perceived danger in
the 1920s it came from Japan’s growing navy, and inasmuch as Washington had a
coherent national security policy during that decade, it focused on handling
that problem.
The
consequences of this disengagement from Europe are bound to have been
important, although scholars disagree as to what they were. Some have
maintained that the United States’s failure to assume Britain’s role as global
economic hegemon left an absence of managerial authority that intensified and
prolonged the Great Depression. Others have insisted that greater American assertiveness
would have bolstered the European democracies’ determination to resist Adolf
Hitler, and hence might have prevented World War 11. One pattern is definite,
though: Americans were reluctant to assume world responsibilities in the
absence of clear and present danger. Despite the alarms suspected subversive
activities set off inside the United States, most notoriously during the “Red
Scare” of 1919—20, the Soviet Union in the interwar years failed to meet that standard. Indeed, the most significant Soviet—American
contacts during this period involved the efforts of American corporations—all
of them reliable bastions of capitalism—to increase trade with and investment
in the world’s only communist state.
The Soviet
Union too, in a sense, withdrew from Europe after World War I, but for a
different set of reasons. Lenin was no isolationist: his internationalism
combined conventional diplomacy with what were, at the time, the highly
unconventional methods of the Comintern, the agency he created in 1919 to
spread revolution throughout the world. But these approaches undercut more than
they reinforced one another. Barely concealed attempts to overthrow capitalist
governments made it difficult for Soviet diplomats to negotiate with them.
Chilled relations, in turn, did little to discourage efforts to root out
Comintern agents. Nor did the Bolsheviks free their proletarian
internationalism from the parochial habits of Russian radicalism, a deficiency
that made their appeal to European workers less successful than it might
otherwise have been. Meanwhile, as with most revolutions, the passage of time
was shifting the goals of this one from the immediately attainable to the
ultimately desirable. As Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, consolidated his
power during the latter half of the 1920s, he by no means abandoned the goal of
world revolution, but
he did place increasing emphasis on first building up the strength and
security of the Soviet state.
The USSR
would probably have become a great power even if Stalin had followed his
mother’s advice and become a Georgian priest, but the fact that he did not—that
this deceptively unimpressive figure succeeded in outmaneuvering all other
aspirants to the succession as well as Lenin’s own attempts to deny it to
him—very much affected the way in which that happened. It is possible to
imagine a Trotsky or a Bukharin ordering the collectivization of agriculture
and the large-scale industrialization this was to have made possible. It is not
at all clear, though, that they or anyone else would have implemented these
measures with the brutality Stalin relied upon, or that they would have
followed them with massive purges against mostly imaginary enemies.
Paranoia—the tendency to “place sinister interpretations on events that may
have no sinister bearing, and attribute hostile motives to acts that may have
no hostile intent” need not be incapacitating: in Stalin’s case it coexisted
with, and no doubt also inspired, a most extraordinary administrative performance.
The number of deaths resulting from Stalin’s policies before World War II, it
is now agreed in
both Russia and the West, was between 17 and 22 million—substantially more than
twice the number of Hitler’s victims in the Holocaust.
The scale of
this disaster makes the words that characterize it seem bleached, like the
bones of the dead. But one way of putting it is that Stalin had conflated the
requirements of national with personal security in a completely unprecedented
way. It is revealing that the historical figure he most sought to emulate was
not Lenin—whose experiments with terror were bad enough—but Ivan the Terrible.
Years later Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, would recall his old boss’s
“utter irresponsibility and complete lack of respect for anyone other than
himself.” Stalin’s choices, as much as
Lenin’s legacy or the requirements of Marxist ideology, transformed the
government he ran and even the country he ruled, during the 1930s, into a
gargantuan extension of his own pathologically suspicious personality. This
supreme act of egoism spawned innumerable tragedies: one was that it
constrained the Soviet Union’s ability to counter the bid of another great
authoritarian egoist, Hitler, for dominance in Europe.
It did so,
first, by undercutting potential resistance within Germany itself. Stalin’s distrust of European socialism was
so great that he forbade the German Communist Party from collaborating with the
Social Democrats to oppose the Nazi assumption of power in 1933. Alarmed by the
results of this policy, he then allowed his foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov,
to advocate collective security through the League of Nations, but just as the
highly visible Moscow purge trials were getting underway. Stalin put his own terror
on public display, therefore, at a time when Hitler’s, for the most part, was
still hidden: no wonder the European democracies, themselves ambivalent over
whether to resist or appease fascism, responded tepidly to Litvinov’s efforts. Nor did they monopolize short-sightedness:
Stalin himself had long hoped for some kind of cooperation with Nazi Germany,
despite the ideological inconsistencies this would have involved. His decision to sign a non-aggression pact
with Hitler in August 1939, just days before Germany invaded Poland and less
than two years before it would attack the Soviet Union itself, was entirely in
keeping with the spirit, and the characteristic competence, of Stalinist
diplomacy.
The eve of
World War II, then, found the United States and the Soviet Union on the sidelines: they had chosen to exclude
themselves, or had found themselves excluded, from the role their size and
strength should have given them in European affairs. Despite a contrast in
forms of government that could hardly have been greater, Soviet and American
leaders shared a sense of impotence as war again approached. Neither country
could control what was happening, nor did there seem to be the slightest
prospect that they might in the future cooperate. An informed observer, as late
as the end of 1939, would have had every reason to regard Tocqueville’s 1835
prophecy about an eventual Russian and American domination of the world as,
still, a wild improbability.
IV
There were
important parallels, but equally important differences, in the careers of
Hitler and Stalin. Both had risen from being outsiders in their respective
societies to positions of unchallenged authority over them; both had been
under-estimated by potential rivals; both were prepared to use whatever methods
were available—including terror—to achieve their purposes. Both exploited the
fact that a harsh peace and the onset of a global economic crisis had stalled
the advance of democracy in Europe, but not the technological means of
controlling large populations; both made full use of the opportunities for
propaganda, surveillance, and swift action provided by such innovations as the
telephone, radio, motion pictures, automobiles, and airplanes. Both benefited,
as a consequence, from the conviction of many Europeans that authoritarianism
was the wave of the future. Both merged personal with national interests; both
dedicated themselves to implementing internationalist ideologies.
But where
Stalin looked toward an eventual world proletarian revolution, Hitler sought
immediate racial purification. Where Stalin was cautiously flexible, Hitler
stuck to his perverse principles through thick and thin: he never placed the
security of his state or even himself above the task of achieving literally,
and at whatever cost, his goals of Aryan supremacy and Jewish annihilation.
Where Stalin was patient, prepared to take as long as necessary to achieve his
ambitions, Hitler was frenetic, determined to meet deadlines he himself had
imposed. Where Stalin sought desperately to stay out of war, Hitler set out
quite deliberately to provoke it.
Both
authoritarians wanted to dominate Europe, a fact that placed them at odds with
the traditional American interest in maintaining a balance of power there. But
only Hitler was in a position to attempt domination: he therefore created, for
the United States, the European democracies, and even the Soviet Union itself,
a threat whose urgency, one might have thought, would have transcended whatever
differences divided his potential victims.
It certainly
did so in Washington and London. Franklin D. Roosevelt had long regarded Nazi
Germany as the primary danger to American security and had sought, ever since
extending diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1933, to leave the way
open for cooperation with Moscow.40 Winston Churchill loathed Marxism-Leninism
at least as much as his predecessor Neville Chamberlain, but he shared
Roosevelt’s view that geopolitics was more important than ideology. Both leaders foresaw the fragility of the
Nazi—Soviet alliance and were prepared to accept Soviet help in containing
Hitler whenever that became possible. They also repeatedly warned Stalin of the
impending German attack in the winter and spring of 1941. Only the Soviet dictator’s misplaced faith
in a fellow authoritarian—a kind of brutal romanticism, to which his own
temperament and style of governing would allow no challenge—prevented the
necessary defensive measures and made Hitler’s invasion in June of that year
such a devastating surprise. “My people and I, Iosif Vissarionovich, firmly
remember your wise prediction,” NKVD chief Lavrentii Beria wrote to Stalin on
the day before the invasion: “Hitler will not attack us in 1941!”
The German
Führer had no comparable illusions about his Soviet counterpart, but he too
subordinated geopolitical logic to authoritarian romanticism. He struck because
he had always believed German racial interests required Lebensraum in the east;
but he paid little attention to what Napoleon’s precedent suggested about the
imprudence of invading Russia while Great Britain remained undefeated. It is
even more difficult to account for Hitler’s declaration of war on the United
States the following December, four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Had he not acted, Roosevelt would have found himself under immense pressure to
divert American resources—including the Lend Lease aid already flowing to Great
Britain and even by then to the Soviet Union—to the Pacific. The best
explanation of Hitler’s behavior appears to be that excitement over Japan’s
entry into the war impaired his ability to think clearly, and in an autocratic
system no mechanisms existed to repair the damage.
Both Stalin
and Hitler made foolish mistakes in 1941, and for much the same reason: their
systems of government reflected and reinforced their own romanticism, providing
few safeguards against incompetence at the top. The effect turned out to be a
fortunate one, because it eliminated any possibility of an authoritarian coalition
directed against the United States and its democratic allies; instead, the
democracies now aligned themselves, however uneasily, with one authoritarian
state against the other. German statecraft had once again drawn Americans and
Russians into Europe, but this time in such a way as to throw them, despite
deep ideological differences, into positions of desperate dependence upon one
another. For without the Soviet Union’s immense expenditure of manpower against
the Germans, it is difficult to see how the Americans and British could ever
have launched a successful second front. But without the United States’
material assistance in the form of Lend Lease, together with its role in
holding the Japanese at bay in the Pacific, the Red Army might never have repelled
the Nazi invasion in the first place.
Tocqueville
had long ago foreseen that the United States and Russia, if ever moved to do
so, would command human and material resources on an enormous scale: their
potential power exceeded that of any European state he could envisage. What
neither Tocqueville nor anyone else could have anticipated were the
circumstances that might cause Americans and Russians to apply this strength,
simultaneously, beyond their borders, and in a common cause. Hitler’s twin
declarations of war accomplished that, giving the Soviet Union and the United
States compelling reasons to re-enter the European arena with, quite literally,
a shared sense of vengeance. Through these unexpectedly unwise acts, therefore,
this most improbable of historical agents at last brought Tocqueville’s old
prophecy within sight of fulfillment.
V
When a power
vacuum separates great powers, as one did the United States and the Soviet
Union at the end of World War II, they are unlikely to fill it without bumping
up against and bruising each other’s interests. This would have happened if the
two postwar hegemons had been constitutional democracies: historians of the
wartime Anglo-American relationship have long since exposed the bumping and bruising
that did take place, even among these closest of allies. Victory would require more difficult
adjustments for Russians and Americans because so many legacies of distrust now
divided them: the distinction between authoritarian and democratic traditions;
the challenge communism and capitalism posed to one another; Soviet memories of
allied intervention in Russia after World War I; more recent American memories
of Stalin’s purges and his opportunistic pact with Hitler. It was too much to
expect a few years of wartime cooperation to sweep all of this away.
At the same
time, though, these legacies need not have produced almost half a century of
Soviet—American confrontation. The leaders of great nations are never entirely
bound by the past: new situations continually arise, and they are free to
reject old methods in attempting to deal with them. Alliance in a common cause
was as new a situation as one can imagine in the Russian—American relationship.
Much would depend, therefore, upon the extent to which Roosevelt and Stalin
could—in effect—liberate their nations’ futures from a difficult past. The
American President and his key advisers were determined to secure the United
States against whatever dangers might confront it after victory, but they
lacked a clear sense of what those might be or where they might arise. Their
thinking about postwar security was, as a consequence, more general than
specific. They certainly saw a vital interest in preventing any hostile power
from again attempting to dominate the European continent. They were not
prepared to see military capabilities reduced to anything like the inadequate
levels of the interwar era, nor would they resist opportunities to reshape the
international economy in ways that would benefit American capitalism. They
resolved to resist any return to isolationism, and they optimistically embraced
the “second chance” the war had provided to build a global security
organization in which the United States would play the leading role.
But these
priorities reflected no unilateral conception of vital interests. A quarter
century earlier, Wilson had linked American war aims to reform of the
international system as a whole; and although his ideas had not then taken
hold, the coming of a second world war revived a widespread and even
guilt-ridden interest in them as a means of avoiding a third such
conflict. Roosevelt persuaded a skeptical
Churchill to endorse Wilson’s thinking in August, 1941, when they jointly
proclaimed, in the Atlantic Charter, three postwar objectives:
self-determination-—the idea here was that people who could choose their own
forms of government would not want to overthrow them, hence they would achieve,
to use a Rooseveltian term, freedom from fear; open markets—the assumption was that an unrestricted flow of commodities
and capital would ensure economic prosperity, hence freedom from want; and
collective security—the conviction that nations had to act together rather than
separately if they were ever to achieve safety. To put it in language Mikhail Gorbachev would employ decades
later, security would have to be a condition common to all, not one granted to
some and withheld from others.
Despite this
public commitment to Wilsonian principles, neither Roosevelt nor Churchill
ruled out more realistic practices. Had postwar planning been left to them
alone, as in democracies it could not be, they might well have come up with
something like what Roosevelt occasionally talked about: the idea of four great
powers—the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and Nationalist
China—operating as world policemen, using force or the prospect of it to keep
smaller states in line. But even this cold-blooded approach, like the Wilsonian
constraints that kept the politically sensitive Roosevelt from insisting on it,
implied a sense of collective security among the four: it would not have worked
if any one of them had sought to maximize security for itself, while attempting
to deny it to others. There was, thus,
little unilateralism in F.D.R.’s thinking, whether he was operating in his
idealistic or his realistic mode.
The United
States would seek power in the postwar world, not shy away from it as it had
done after World War I. It would do so in the belief that only it had the
strength to build a peace based on Wilsonian principles of self-determination,
open markets, and collective security. It would administer that peace neither
for its exclusive advantage nor in such a way as to provide equal benefits to
all: many as yet ill-defined possibilities lay in between these extremes. Nor
would Roosevelt assume, as Wilson had, public and Congressional approval;
rather, the administration would make careful efforts to ensure domestic
support for the postwar settlement at every step of the way. There would be
another attempt at a Wilsonian peace, but this time by the un-Wilsonian method
of offering each of the great powers as well as the American people a vested
interest in making it work. It was within this framework of pragmatism mixed
with principle that Roosevelt hoped to deal with Stalin.
The Soviet
leader, too, sought security after World War II: his country lost at least 27
million of its citizens in that conflict; he could hardly have done otherwise. But
no tradition of common or collective security shaped postwar priorities as
viewed from Moscow, for the very good reason that it was no longer permitted
there to distinguish between state interests, party interests, and those of Stalin himself.
National security had come to mean personal security, and the Kremlin boss saw
so many threats to it that he had already resorted to murder on a mass scale in
order to remove all conceivable challengers to his regime. It would be hard to
imagine a more unilateral approach to security than the internal practices
Stalin had set in motion during the 1930s. Cooperation with external allies was
obviously to his advantage when the Germans were within sight of his capital,
but whether that cooperation would extend beyond Hitler’s defeat was another
matter. It would depend upon the ability of an aging and authoritarian ruler to
shift his own thinking about security to a multilateral basis, and to
restructure the government he had made into a reflection of himself.
It is
sometimes said of Stalin that he had long since given up the Lenin—Trotsky goal
of world revolution in favor of “socialism in one country,” a doctrine that
seemed to imply peaceful coexistence with states of differing social systems.
But that is a misunderstanding of Stalin’s position. What he really did in the
late 1920s was to drop Lenin’s prediction that revolutions would arise
spontaneously in other advanced industrial countries; instead he came to see
the Soviet Union itself as the center from which socialism would spread and
eventually defeat capitalism. The
effect was to switch the principal instrument for advancing revolution from
Marx’s idea of a historically determined class struggle to a process of
territorial acquisition Stalin could control. “The idea of propagating world
Communist revolution was an ideological screen to hide our desire for world
domination,” one of his secret agents recalled decades later. “This war is not as in the past,” Stalin
himself explained to the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas in 1945: “whoever
occupies a territory also imposes his own social system.... It cannot be
otherwise.”
Stalin was
fully prepared to use unconventional means to promote Soviet interests beyond
the territories he ruled. He kept Lenin’s Comintern in place but turned it to
his own purposes: this became clear during the Spanish Civil War, when Stalin
used Comintern agents as much to wipe out Trotskyists as to fight
fascists. One of his most far-sighted
initiatives involved the recruitment of an elaborate network of youthful spies
in Great Britain and the United States during the 1930s—most of them
anti-fascist intellectuals—years before they could have risen to positions that
would have given them anything significant to spy upon. Nor did Stalin rule out war itself as a
means of advancing the revolutionary cause. He would not, like Hitler, risk
military conflict to meet some pre-determined timetable. But he did see wars
among capitalists as likely to weaken them and therefore speed “socialist
encirclement:” that may be one reason why he failed to foresee the German
attack in 1941. And he by no means excluded the possibility of an eventual war
with capitalism involving the Soviet Union itself. “Stalin looked at it this
way,” his foreign minister, Viacheslav Molotov recalled: “World War I has
wrested one country from capitalist slavery; World War II has created a
socialist system; and the third will finish off imperialism forever.”
It would be
easy to make too much of Stalin’s words, for reality always separates what
people say from what they are able to do. What is striking about Stalin,
though, is how small that separation was. To a degree we are only now coming to
realize, Stalin literally imposed his rhetoric upon the country he ran: this
was a dictator whose subordinates scrutinized his every comment, indeed his
every gesture, and attempted to implement policies—even the most implausible
scientific doctrines—on the basis of them.
Not even Hitler ran so autocratic a system. The result was a kind of self-similarity across scale, in which
the tyrant at the top spawned smaller tyrants at each level throughout the
party and state bureaucracy: their activities extended down to the level of
scrutinizing stamp collections for evidence that their owners might value the
images of foreign potentates more than those of Lenin and Stalin. It was typical of the Kremlin boss, the most
consummate of narcissists, that he thought very far ahead indeed about security.
But it was always and only his own security that he was thinking about.
Here, then,
was the difficulty. The Western democracies sought a form of security that
would reject violence or the threat of it: security was to be a collective
good, not a benefit denied to some in order to provide it to others. Stalin saw
things very differently: security came only by intimidating or eliminating
potential challengers. World politics was an extension of Soviet politics,
which was in turn an extension of Stalin’s preferred personal environment: a zero-sum
game, in which achieving security for one meant depriving everyone else of it.
The contrast, or so it would seem, made conflict unavoidable.
VI
But is this
not putting things too starkly? The United States and its democratic allies
found ways to cooperate with the Soviet Union, after all, in fighting Germany
and Japan. Could they not have managed their postwar relationship similarly, so
that the safety Stalin demanded could have been made to correspond with the
security the West required? Could there not have been a division of Europe into
spheres of influence which, while they would hardly have pleased everybody,
might have prevented an ensuing four and a half decades of superpower rivalry?
Stalin
appears to have relished his role, along with Roosevelt and Churchill, as one
of the wartime Big Three. Such evidence as has surfaced from Soviet archives
suggests that he received reassuring reports about Washington’s intentions:
“Roosevelt is more friendly to us than any other prominent American,”
Ambassador Litvinov commented in June 1943, “and it is quite obvious that he
wishes to cooperate with us.” Whoever was in the White House, Litvinov’s
successor Andrei Gromyko predicted a year later, the Soviet Union and the
United States would “manage to find common issues for the solution of
...problems emerging in the future and of interest to both countries.” Even if
Stalin’s long-range thinking about security did clash with that of his
Anglo-American allies, common military purposes provided the strongest possible
inducements to smooth over such differences. It is worth asking why this
practice of wartime cooperation did not become a habit that would extend into
the postwar era.
The
principal reason, it now appears, was Stalin’s insistence on equating security
with territory. Western diplomats had been surprised, upon arriving in Moscow
soon after the German attack in the summer of 1941, to find the Soviet leader
already demanding a postwar settlement that would retain what his pact with
Hitler had yielded: the Baltic states, together with portions of Finland,
Poland, and Romania. Stalin showed no sense of shame or even embarrassment
about this, no awareness that the methods by which he had obtained these
concessions could conceivably render them illegitimate in the eyes of anyone
else. When it came to territorial aspirations, he made no distinction between
adversaries and allies: what one had provided the other was expected to
endorse.
Stalin
coupled his claims with repeated requests for a second front, quite without
regard to the fact that his own policies had left the British to fight Germany
alone for a year, so that they were hardly in a position to comply. He
reiterated his military and territorial demands after the Americans entered the
war in December, despite the fact that they were desperately trying to hang on
in the Pacific against a Japanese adversary against whom the Soviet
Union—admittedly for good strategic reasons—had elected not to fight. This
linkage of postwar requirements with wartime assistance was, as the Russians
used to like to say, “no accident.” A second front in Europe in 1942 would have
been “a completely impossible operation for them,” Molotov later acknowledged.
“But our demand was politically necessary, and we had to press them for
everything.”
On the
surface, this strategy succeeded. After strong initial objections, Roosevelt
and Churchill did eventually acknowledge the Soviet Union’s right to the
expanded borders it claimed; they also made it clear that they would not oppose
the installation of “friendly” governments in adjoining states. This meant
accepting a Soviet sphere of influence from the Baltic to the Adriatic, a concession not easily
reconciled with the Atlantic Charter. But the authors of that document saw no
feasible way to avoid that outcome: military necessity required continued
Soviet cooperation against the Germans. Nor were they themselves prepared to
relinquish spheres of influence in Western Europe and the Mediterranean, the
Middle East, Latin America, and East Asia.
Self-determination was a sufficiently malleable concept that each of the
Big Three could have endorsed, without sleepless nights, what the Soviet
government had said about the Atlantic Charter: “practical application of these
principles will necessarily adapt itself to the circumstances, needs, and
historic peculiarities of particular countries.”
That,
though, was precisely the problem. For unlike Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill
would have to defend their decisions before domestic constituencies. The manner
in which Soviet influence expanded was therefore, for them, of no small
significance. Stalin showed little
understanding of this. Having no experience himself with democratic procedures,
he dismissed requests that he respect democratic proprieties. “[S]ome
propaganda work should be done,” he advised Roosevelt at the Tehran conference
after the president had hinted that the American public would welcome a
plebiscite in the Baltic States. “It is all nonsense!” Stalin complained to
Molotov. “[Roosevelt] is their military leader and commander in chief. Who
would dare object to him?” When at
Yalta F.D.R. stressed the need for the first Polish election to be as pure as
“Caesar’s wife,” Stalin responded with a joke: “They said that about her, but
in fact she had her sins.” Molotov
warned his boss, on that occasion, that the Americans’ insistence on free
elections elsewhere in Eastern Europe was “going too far.” “Don’t worry,” he recalls Stalin as
replying, “work it out. We can deal with it in our own way later. The point is
the correlation of forces.”
The Soviet
leader was, in one sense, right. Military strength would determine what
happened in that part of the world, not the enunciation of lofty principles.
But unilateral methods carried long-term costs Stalin did not foresee: the most
significant of these was to ruin whatever prospects existed for Soviet sphere
of influence the East Europeans themselves might have accepted. This
possibility was not as far-fetched as it would later seem. The Czechoslovak
president, Eduard Benes, spoke openly of a “Czech solution” that would exchange
internal autonomy for Soviet control over foreign and military policy. W. Averell Harriman, one of Roosevelt’s
closest advisers and his ambassador to the Soviet Union after 1943, was keenly
interested in such an arrangement and hoped to persuade the Poles of its
merits.83 F.D.R. and Churchill—concerned with finding a way to respect both
Soviet security interests and democratic procedures in Eastern Europe—would
almost certainly have gone along.
Nor was the
idea out of the question from Stalin’s point of view. He would, after all,
approve such a compromise as the basis for a permanent settlement with
Finland. He would initially allow free
elections in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet occupation zone in
Germany. He may even have anticipated an enthusiastic response as he took over
Eastern Europe. “He was, I think, surprised and hurt,” Harriman recalled, “when
the Red Army was not welcomed in all the neighboring countries as an army of
liberation.” “We still had our hopes,”
Khrushchev remembered, that “after the catastrophe of World War II, Europe too
might become Soviet. Everyone would take the path from capitalism to
socialism.” It could be that there was
another form of romanticism at work here, quite apart from Stalin’s affinity
for fellow authoritarians: that he was unrealistic enough to expect ideological
solidarity and gratitude for liberation to override old fears of Russian
expansionism as well as remaining manifestations of nationalism among the
Soviet Union’s neighbors, perhaps as easily as he himself had overridden the
latter—or so it then appeared—within the multinational empire that was the
Soviet Union itself.
If the Red
Army could have been welcomed in Poland and the rest of the countries it
liberated with the same enthusiasm American, British, and Free French forces
encountered when they landed in Italy and France in 1943 and 1944, then some
kind of Czech—Finnish compromise might have been feasible. Whatever Stalin’s
expectations, though, this did not happen. That non-event, in turn, removed any
possibility of a division of Europe all members of the Grand Alliance could
have endorsed. It ensured that an American sphere of influence would arise
there largely by consent, but that its Soviet counterpart could sustain itself
only by coercion. The resulting asymmetry would account, more than anything
else, for the origins, escalation, and ultimate outcome of the Cold War.
VII
The question
is worth asking, then: why did the Czech—Finnish solution work only in Finland
and nowhere else? Why did Hitler’s victims not welcome the Russians—who had
done more than anyone else to defeat him—as warmly as they did the Americans
and their British and French allies? The answer, at its simplest level, has to
do with how much one can expect from human nature.
Stalin as
well as Roosevelt and Churchill miscalculated when they assumed that there
could be friendly states along an expanded Soviet periphery. For how could the
USSR absorb the Baltic States entirely and carve off great portions of Germany,
Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, while still expecting the citizens of
those countries to maintain cordial attitudes toward the state that had done
the carving? It is of course true that
the Finns, who were also carved upon, did somehow manage it. But not everyone
else was like the Finns: if allowed free elections, it was by no means certain
that Poles and Romanians would show the same remarkable qualities of
self-control for which their northern neighbor would become famous. Nor was it
obvious, even where the Russians permitted other Eastern Europeans to make a
choice, that Moscow would follow its own Finnish example and stay out of their
internal affairs: these states did have Germany, not Sweden, on the other side
of them, and that surely made a difference.
But there
was more to the matter than just geography: compounding it was a growing
awareness of the particular system Stalin had imposed upon his own people and
might well export elsewhere. The war was ending with the defeat of fascism, but
not authoritarianism. The price of relying upon one authoritarian to conquer
another had been that both would not simultaneously disappear. However vast the
moral capital the Soviet Union—and the European communist parties—had
accumulated in fighting the Germans, it could not obscure the fact that
Stalin’s government was, and showed every sign of continuing to be, as
repressive as Hitler’s had ever been. A movement that had set out, a century
earlier, to free the workers of the world from their chains was now seeking to
convince its own workers and everyone else that the condition of being in
chains was one of perfect freedom. People were not blind, though, and victory
over German authoritarianism brought fears of Soviet authoritarianism out into
the open.
Worried that
this might happen, Roosevelt and Churchill had hoped to persuade the Europeans
that Stalin himself had changed: that he meant what he said when he denied any
desire to extend his own system beyond its borders; that they could therefore
safely accept the boundary changes he demanded and the sphere of influence
within which he proposed to include so many of them. But this strategy required
Stalin’s cooperation, for it could hardly succeed if the Soviet leader failed
to match his deeds with the Atlantic Charter’s words. Unless the Soviet Union
could show that it had shifted from a
unilateral to a multilateral approach to security, there could be little basis
for consent from Europeans certain to fall under its control. That situation,
in turn, would place the Americans and the British in the painful position of
being able to cooperate with Moscow only by publicly abandoning principles they
themselves had proclaimed, and that Stalin himself appeared to have endorsed.
Authoritarians
tend to see ends as justifying means, and are generally free to act
accordingly. Democracies rarely allow that luxury, even if their leaders might,
in their darker moments, wish for it. What people think does make a difference,
and yet nothing in Stalin’s experience had prepared him for this reality. Thus
it was that although the objective he sought appeared to correspond with what
his allies wanted—a secure postwar world—the methods by which he pursued that
goal proved profoundly corruptive of it. Poland best illustrates the pattern.
Presumably
Stalin had security in mind when he authorized the murder, at Katyn and
elsewhere in the spring of 1940, of at least 15,000 Polish officers captured
during the invasion that followed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He apparently hoped to
avoid disturbances that might endanger his relationship with Hitler, to clear
out overcrowded camps, and perhaps also to eliminate potential leaders of a future
Poland who might be unsympathetic to Soviet interests. He cannot have given the
matter much thought, for he was only meting out to the Poles the kind of
treatment he had already accorded several million Soviet citizens, and would
extend to many others in the future.
What Stalin
did not anticipate was that he would need to repair his relations with the
Poles after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, that he would find it
necessary to recognize the Polish government-in-exile in London and reconstitute
a Polish army on Soviet soil to fight the Germans, and that the Nazis, in 1943,
would reveal the Katyn atrocity to the world. Rather than admit responsibility,
Stalin chose to break off relations with the London Poles, who had called for
an international investigation. He then created a puppet regime of his own in
Lublin and begin treating it as the legitimate government of Poland, a maneuver
he backed with force as the Red Army moved into that country in 1944. Stalin
subsequently failed to support, or even to allow the Americans and British to
supply by air, an uprising of the Polish resistance in Warsaw, with result that
the Germans wound up completing, on a far more massive scale, the purge of
Polish anti-communists he himself had started at Katyn four years earlier. This
tragic sequence of events reflected Stalin’s tendency, when confronting the
prospect of insecurity, to try to redesign the future rather than admit that
his own past behavior might have contributed to the problem in the first place.
Stalin in
the end got the acquiescent Polish government he wanted, but only at enormous
cost. The brutality and cynicism with which he handled these matters did more
than anything else to exhaust the goodwill the Soviet war effort had
accumulated in the West, to raise doubts about future cooperation in London and
Washington, and to create deep and abiding fears throughout the rest of Europe.
He also earned the enduring hostility of the Poles, thereby making their
country a constant source of insecurity for him and for all of his
successors. The most effective
resistance to Soviet authority would eventually arise in Poland—effective in
the sense that the Kremlin never found a way to suppress it. And in an entirely appropriate aftermath,
the belated official acknowledgement of Stalin’s responsibility for Katyn,
which came only in 1990, turned out to be one of the ways in which the last
Soviet government acknowledged, not only the illegitimacy of the sphere of
influence Stalin had constructed half a century before, but its own
illegitimacy as well.
It used to
be thought that authoritarian leaders, unfettered by moral scruples, had
powerful advantages over their democratic counterparts: it was supposed to be a
source of strength to be able to use all means in the pursuit of selected ends.
Today this looks much less certain. For the great disadvantage of such systems
is the absence of checks and balances: who is to tell the authoritarian in
charge that he is about to do something stupid? The killings Stalin authorized,
the states he seized, the boundary concessions he insisted upon, and the sphere
of influence he imposed provided no lasting security for the Soviet Union: just
the opposite. His actions laid the foundations for a resistance in Europe that
would grow and not fade with time, so that when a Soviet leader appeared on the
scene who was not prepared to sustain with force the system Stalin had
constructed, the Soviet empire, and ultimately the Soviet Union itself, would
not survive the experience.
VIII
Social
psychologists make a useful distinction between what they call “dispositional”
and “situational” behavior in
interpreting the actions of individuals. Dispositional behavior reflects deeply
rooted personal characteristics which remain much the same regardless of the
circumstances in which people find themselves. One responds inflexibly—and
therefore predictably—to whatever happens. Situational behavior, conversely,
shifts with circumstances; personal traits are less important in determining what one does. Historians need to be
careful in applying this insight, though, because psychologists know how
tempting it can be to excuse one’s own actions by invoking situations, while
attributing what others do to their dispositions. It would be all too easy,
in dealing with so controversial a matter as responsibility for the Cold
War, to confuse considered judgment with that most satisfying of sensations:
the confirmation of one’s own prejudices.
By the end
of 1945 most American and British leaders had come around—some reluctantly,
others eagerly—to a dispositional explanation of Stalin’s behavior. Further
efforts to negotiate or compromise with him were likely to fail, or so It
seemed, because success would require that he cease to be what he was. One
could only resolve henceforth to hold the line, remain true to one’s own
principles, and wait for the passage of time to bring a better world. Such at
least was the view of a new George Kennan, whose top secret “long telegram”
from Moscow of 22 February 1946, would shape American policy over the next half
century more profoundly than his distant relative’s denunciations of tsarist
authoritarianism had influenced it during the preceding one. Nor was
“containment” just an American strategy: Frank Roberts, the British chargé
d’affaires in the Soviet capital, was dispatching similar arguments to London
even as former prime minister Winston Churchill, speaking at Fulton, Missouri,
was introducing the term “iron curtain” to the world. It was left to Kennan, though, to make the dispositional case
most explicitly in a lesser-known telegram sent from Moscow on 20 March:
“Nothing short of complete disarmament, delivery of our air and naval forces to
Russia and resigning of powers of government to American Communists” would come
close to alleviating Stalin’s distrust, and even then the old dictator would
probably “smell a trap and would continue to harbor the most baleful
misgivings.”’
If Kennan
was right, we need look no further in seeking the causes of the Cold War:
Stalin was primarily responsible. But how can we be sure that this perspective
and the policies that resulted from it did not reflect the all too human
tendency to attribute behavior one dislikes to the nature of those who indulge
in it, and to neglect the circumstances—including one’s own behavior—that might
have brought it about? Is there a test historians can apply to avoid this trap?
One might be
to check for evidence of consistency or inconsistency, within a particular
relationship, in each side’s view of the other. Attitudes that show little
change over the years, especially when circumstances have changed, suggest deep
roots and hence dispositional behavior. Trees may bend slightly before the
wind, but they stay in place, for better or for worse, until they die.
Viewpoints that evolve with circumstances, however, reflect situational
behavior. Vines, after all, can creep, climb, adhere, entwine, and if necessary
retreat, all in response to the environment that surrounds them. Roosevelt’s
vine-like personality is universally acknowledged, and needs no further
elaboration here: there could hardly have been a less dispositional leader than
the always adaptable, ever-elusive F.D.R. But what about Stalin? Was he capable
of abandoning, in world politics, the paranoia that defined his domestic
politics? Could he respond to conciliatory gestures, or was containment the
only realistic course?
Stalin’s
behavior toward fellow-authoritarians did twist and turn. He gave Hitler the
benefit of the doubt at several points, but viewed him as an archenemy at
others. His attitudes toward Josef Broz Tito in Yugoslavia and Mao Zedong in
China would evolve over the years, albeit in opposite directions. But Stalin’s
thinking about democratic capitalists remained rooted to the spot: he always
suspected their motives. “Remember, we are waging a struggle (negotiation with
enemies is also struggle) . . . with the whole capitalist world,” he admonished
Molotov as early as 1929. He dismissed
Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s warnings of an impending German attack in 1941 as
provocations designed to hasten that event.
He authorized penetration, by his spies, of the Anglo-American atomic
bomb project as early as June 1942, long before his allies made the formal but
by then futile decision to withhold such information from him. He placed repeated obstacles in the path of
direct military cooperation with the Americans and the British during the
war. He not only arranged to have
Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s living quarters at the Tehran Conference bugged; he
also had Rena’s son, a precocious linguist, translate the tapes daily and
report to him on what was said.
“Churchill is the kind who, if you don’t watch him, will slip a kopeck
out of your pocket,” Stalin famously warned on the eve of the landings in
Normandy in June 1944, surely the highpoint of allied cooperation against the
Axis. “Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hand only for bigger coins.”’
A
compliment? Perhaps, in Stalin’s grudging way, but hardly an expression of
trust. The Soviet leader is on record as having expressed compassion—once, at
Yalta—for the president’s physical infirmity: “Why did nature have to punish
him so? Is he any worse than other people?” But the very novelty of the remark impressed
Gromyko, who heard it: his boss “rarely bestowed his sympathy on anybody from
another social system.” Only a few
weeks later the same Stalin astounded and infuriated the dying Roosevelt by
charging that secret Anglo-American negotiations for the surrender of Hitler’s
forces in Italy were really a plot to keep the Red Army out of Germany. Many years later a Soviet interviewer would
suggest to Molotov that “to be paralyzed and yet to become president of the
United States, and for three terms, what a rascal you had to be!” “Well said,” the old Bolshevik heartily
agreed.” If anyone knew Stalin’s mind
it was Molotov, the ever-faithful apparatchik who came to be known, for the
best of reasons, as “his master’s voice.”
Even into his nineties, Molotov’s recollections of F.D.R. were clear,
unrepentant, and unvarnished. A Roosevelt request for the use of Siberian air
bases to bomb Japanese targets had been an excuse “to occupy certain parts of
the Soviet Union instead of fighting. Afterward it wouldn’t have been easy to
get them out of there.” The President’s larger intentions were transparent:
Roosevelt believed in dollars. Not that he believed in nothing
else, but he considered America to be so rich, and we so poor and worn out,
that we would surely come begging. “Then we’ll kick their ass, but for now we
have to keep them going.” That’s where they miscalculated. They weren’t
Marxists and we were. They woke up only when half of Europe had passed from
them.
“Roosevelt knew how to conceal his attitude
toward us,” Molotov recalled, “but Truman—he didn’t know how to do that at
all.” Charm, though, could not hide facts: “Roosevelt was an imperialist who
would grab anyone by the throat.”
If Stalin’s
wartime attitude toward Roosevelt was half as distrustful as Molotov’s in
retirement, then a significant pattern emerges: neither American nor British
sources reveal anything approaching such deep and abiding suspicion on the
Anglo-American side. Churchill subsequently credited himself, to be sure, with
having warned of Soviet postwar intentions; but the archives have long since
revealed a more complex pattern in which his hopes alternated with his fears
well into 1945. In the case of
Roosevelt, it is difficult to find any expressions of distrust toward Stalin,
public or private, until shortly before his death. If he had doubts—surely he
had some—he kept them so carefully hidden that historians have had to strain to
find traces of them. Kennan first put
forward his dispositional explanation of Stalin’s actions in the summer of
1944. But in contrast to Molotov, he
found no sympathy at the top, nor would he for some time to come.
From this
perspective, then, one has to wonder whether the Cold War really began in 1945.
For it was Stalin’s disposition to wage cold wars: he had done so in one form
or another throughout his life, against members of his own family, against his
closest advisers and their families, against old revolutionary comrades,
against foreign communists, even against returning Red Army war veterans who,
for whatever reason, had contacts of any kind with the West in the course of
defeating Nazi Germany. “A man who had subjected all activities in his own
country to his views and to his personality, Stalin could not behave
differently outside,” Djilas recalled. “He became himself the slave of the
despotism, the bureaucracy, the narrowness, and the servility that he imposed
on his country.” Khrushchev put it more bluntly: “No one inside the Soviet
Union or out had Stalin’s trust.”
Roosevelt’s
death in April 1945, then, is not likely to have altered the long-term course
of Soviet—American relations: if Stalin had never trusted him, why should he
have trusted that “noisy shopkeeper” Harry S. Truman, or the harder-line
advisers the new president came to rely upon?
The Labour Party’s subsequent victory in the British general election
produced no improvement in Anglo-Soviet relations either: Stalin was entirely
ecumenical in the range of his suspicions, and if anything detested European
socialists more than he did European conservatives. Khrushchev describes him
going out of his way at the December 1945 Moscow Foreign Ministers’ Conference
to insult both Truman—who fortunately was not present—and British Foreign
Secretary Ernest Bevin: “What caused Stalin to behave that way? This is
difficult to explain. I think he believed he could run the policy of the whole
world. That’s why he behaved in such an unrestrained way toward representatives
of countries that were our partners.”
If doubts
remained about Stalin’s disposition, he thoroughly dispelled them in his first
major postwar address, made on the eve of his own “election” to the Supreme
Soviet in February 1946. The speech was not, as some Americans regarded it, a
“declaration of World War III.” It was,
though, like Molotov’s reminiscences, a revealing window into Stalin’s mind.
World War II, the Kremlin leader explained, had resulted solely from the
internal contradictions of capitalism, and only the entry of the Soviet Union
had transformed that conflict into a war of liberation. Perhaps it might be
possible to avoid future wars if raw materials and markets could be
“periodically redistributed among the various countries in accordance with
their economic importance, by agreement and peaceful settlement.” But, he
added, “that is impossible to do under present capitalist conditions of the
development of world economy.” What all
of this meant, Stalin’s most perceptive biographer has argued, was nothing less
than that “the postwar period would have to be transformed, in idea if not in
actual fact, into a new prewar period.”
“There has
been a return in Russia to the outmoded concept of security in terms of
territory—the more you’ve got the safer you are.” The speaker was former Soviet
foreign minister and ambassador to the United States Maxim Litvinov, who had
personally negotiated the establishment of Soviet—American diplomatic relations
with Franklin D. Roosevelt. The occasion was an interview, given in Moscow to
CBS correspondent Richard C. Hottelet a few months after Stalin’s speech. The
cause, Litvinov explained, was “the ideological conception prevailing here that
conflict between Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable.” What would
happen, Hottelet wanted to know, if the West should suddenly grant all of the
Soviet Union’s territorial demands? “It would lead to the West’s being faced,
after a more or less short time, with the next series of demands.”
Litvinov
managed, remarkably enough, to die in bed.
His views on the breakdown of wartime cooperation, though, had hardly
been a secret: his colleagues regularly listened to recordings of his
conversations acquired, as Molotov put it, “in the usual way.” Why was the old
diplomat not arrested, charged with treason, and shot? Perhaps his public advocacy
of collective security and cooperation with the West, paradoxically, shielded
him: Stalin did, from time to time, worry about how his regime looked to the
outside world. Perhaps his boss kept Litvinov alive in case the Soviet Union
ever again needed the West’s assistance. Perhaps he was just lucky, an
explanation his successor as foreign minister favored. “Litvinov remained among
the living,” Molotov recalled with his usual grim clarity, “only by chance.”
IX
Only a few
months after Litvinov’s death Stalin too died in bed, probably as a result of
medical neglect stemming from the fact that he had come, by 1953, to see even
his own doctors as mortal enemies. That
terminal but characteristic event provides a useful vantage-point from which to
look back to see how the Cold War had come to pass, and to speculate on whether
it might have been avoided.
One hundred
and eighteen years earlier, Tocqueville had predicted bipolarity but not
necessarily hostility. He was a careful enough historian to understand that the
trends visible to him in 1835 would only frame future history. Individuals as
yet invisible would determine it by what they did with the conditions they
encountered. “Men make their own history,” another keen long-term observer,
Karl Marx, would later note, “but they do not make it just as they please; they
do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.”
The role of
the historian is, or ought to be, to focus exclusively neither on individuals
nor on the circumstances they inherit, but on how they intersect. One way to do that is to think of history as
an experiment we can rerun—if only in our minds— keeping Tocqueville-like
trends constant but allowing for Marx-like variations in the individuals who
have to deal with them. If the result replicates what actually happened, then
it seems safe to assume that, on balance, circumstances and not men determined
the outcome. But if it appears that different individuals might have altered
the course of events—if rerunning the experiment does not always produce the
same result—then we should question deterministic explanations, for what kind
of determinism empowers unique personalities at distinctive moments?
Certain
aspects of the Russian—American relationship would change very little in an
experiment rerun with 1835 as a starting point: geographical position,
demographic potential, contrasting traditions of social and political
organization. It is difficult to conceive how the Americans might have evolved
an autocratic form of government, or the Russians a democratic one. Neither
country was likely to remain inactive on the international scene; each would
surely have found cause, sooner or later, to intervene in European and East
Asian affairs. But could it have been foreseen that both would transform their
respective traditions of democracy and authoritarianism into globalist
ideologies at precisely the same moment, as Wilson and Lenin did? Could it have
been anticipated that Stalin would then shift the internationalism of the
Bolshevik revolution, not simply back to a form of Russian nationalism
resembling that of the tsars, but to a brutal variety of narcissism matched
only by the contemporaneous leader of an antipathetic ideology? Could it have
been expected that Hitler would then forge a coalition of communism and
capitalism directed against himself, culminating with the fraternal embraces of
victorious Soviet and American troops in the center of Germany? Could it have
been predicted that this alliance would then fall apart, within a matter of
months, leaving in its wake almost half a century of cold war?
Geography,
demography, and tradition contributed to this outcome but did not determine it.
It took men, responding unpredictably to circumstances, to forge the chain of
causation; and it took one man in particular, responding predictably to his own
authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predisposition, to lock it into
place. Would there have been a Cold War
without Stalin? Perhaps. Nobody in history is indispensable. But Stalin had
certain characteristics that set him off from all others in authority at the
time the Cold War began. He alone pursued personal security by depriving
everyone else of it: no Western leader relied on terror to the extent that he
did. He alone had transformed his country into an extension of himself: no
Western leader could have succeeded at such a feat, and none attempted it. He alone saw war and revolution as
acceptable means with which to pursue ultimate ends: no Western leader
associated violence with progress to the extent that he did.
Did Stalin
therefore seek a Cold War? The question is a little like asking: “does a fish
seek water?” Suspicion, distrust, and an abiding cynicism were not only his
preferred but his necessary environment; he could not function apart from it.
“Conciliation struck Stalin as trickery or naiveté,” William Taubman has
concluded, “and toughness only confirmed the Soviets’ image of America as an
unreconstructed enemy.” The Americans
would in time develop a similar view of Stalin and his successors; some of
their leaders would hold onto it long after the reasons for it had begun to
disappear. But that was not the prevailing attitude in Washington, or in other
Western capitals, in 1945. It was, consistently had been, and would remain
Stalin’s, until the day of his own medically under-attended demise.