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The Soviet Union wanted a tactical ally in the West who shared its suspicion of the ‘Anglo-Americans’; the British wanted a revived France to take its place in the counsels of Europe and relieve Great Britain of continental obligations;
French influence in eastern Europe, an arena where French diplomacy had been most active between the wars, was finished:
France’s attention was now fixed, indeed fixated, upon Germany.
What French policy makers sought was the complete disarmament and economic dismantling of Germany:
French diplomats in the aftermath of German defeat could thus hope that a natural concordance of interests—shared fear of Germany and suspicion of the ‘Anglo-Americans’—might translate into sustained Soviet support for French diplomatic goals.
Stalin, however, did not share French illusions. He had no interest in serving as a counterweight to assist the French in offsetting the foreign policy heft of London and Washington,
like the rest of Europe, France (as we have seen) urgently needed not just American aid but German recovery.
The solution, as it emerged in French thinking in the course of the ensuing months, lay in ‘Europeanising’ the German Problem:
In short, if you could not destroy Germany, then join her up to a European framework in which she could do no harm militarily but much good economically.
As Western generals well knew, there was absolutely nothing to stop the Red Army advancing to the Atlantic if Stalin ordered it.
Stalin wanted back the land the Bolsheviks had lost, at the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and in the course of the war with Poland two years later.
From the Soviet viewpoint a glacis to its west, a broad swathe of land across which Germans especially would have to pass if they wished to attack Russia, was a vital security concern.
introduced the strategy by which Russia would dominate through ‘protection’ of its neighbours.
Alexander’s purposes had been quite explicit. The concerns of small nations were to be subordinated to those of the Great Powers. Since British interests lay overseas and no other continental power matched that of Russia, the Czar would serve as arbiter of a post-war continental arrangement.
Alexander and his ministers would have seen nothing with which to cavil in a policy memorandum written by Ivan Maisky, the Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, in November 1944: ‘The most advantageous situation for us would be the existence in Europe after the war of only one mighty continental power—the USSR, and one mighty maritime power—Britain.’
Britain.’
But the continuities of policy far outweigh the differences. They are linked, as it were, by the calculations of Sazunov (Russia’s foreign minister on the outbreak of war in 1914), who was already envisaging the future of eastern Europe as a cluster of small, vulnerable, states; nominally independent but effectively clients of Great Russia. To these enduring themes of Czarist foreign policy in Europe, Stalin added distinctive calculations of his own. He truly expected the coming economic collapse of the West—extrapolating from inter-war precedent as well as Marxist dogma—and he exaggerated the
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time, Stalin believed, was on his side. But this did not make him any more secure. On the contrary, defensiveness and a wary suspicion characterized all aspects of Soviet foreign policy—‘the
The Bolshevik regime had always been insecure—it was born, after all, of a minority coup in unpropitious circumstances and a highly unsympathetic environment—and Stalin, like all tyrants, needed to invoke threats and enemies, whether domestic or foreign.
What, then, did Stalin want? That he anticipated a coming cooling of relations with the West and was out to make the best of his assets and take advantage of Western weakness is doubtless true. But it is far from obvious that Stalin had any clear strategy beyond that.
Stalin himself was famously risk-averse,
whereas Stalin could readily be dissuaded from trying to destabilize Paris or Rome (since he had no armies there), the
Soviet presence further east was a non-negotiable affair, as everyone recognized.
From his standpoint, Stalin operated in what passed in Moscow for good faith. He and his colleagues assumed that the Western Allies understood that the Soviets planned to occupy and control ‘their’ half of Europe;
such agreements could be reached because in the end none of the Great Powers were willing to risk confrontation over them.
Just as the war had been about Germany, so was the peace, and the spectre of German revanchism haunted Soviet calculations every bit as much as it did those of the French.
The Anglo-American strategy was driven in part by calculations of political prudence. If the Germans in the Western zone of occupation remained beaten down and impoverished, and were offered no prospect of improvement, then they would sooner or later turn back to Nazism—or else to Communism. In the regions of Germany occupied
American and British military governments, therefore, the emphasis switched quite early to reconstructing civic and political institutions and giving Germans responsibility for their domestic affairs.
Fortunately for the Western allies, Communist occupation policies in Berlin and the Soviet-occupied territory of eastern Germany were not such as to attract disaffected German sentiments and votes.
From the outset, the Soviets established in their zone of occupation a de facto Communist-led government without Allied consent and set about rendering superfluous the Potsdam accords by ruthlessly extracting and dismantling whatever fell within their grasp. Not that Stalin had much choice. There was never any prospect of the Communists gaining control of the country or even the Soviet zone except by force.
The British were extracting at most $29 million in reparations from Germany; but the occupation was costing London $80 million a year, leaving the British taxpayer to foot the bill for the difference
the US Army in particular was not well pleased, since the cost of feeding millions of hungry Germans fell on its own budget.
But it was becoming obvious that the four Occupying Powers were not about to reach an agreement.
the wartime Allies were bound by little more than their co-responsibility for Germany, the contradictions of which thus came increasingly to the fore.
The British and Americans were determined to build up the Western German economy, in order that the Germans might support themselves but also to contribute to the revival of the European economy in general. The Soviet representatives wanted a restoration of reparations from the Western zones of Germany and, to this end, a united German administration and economy as initially envisaged (albeit vaguely) at Potsdam.
the new American goals: economic unification of the western zone of Germany and the encouragement of German self-government. For the Americans especially, Germans were rapidly ceasing to be the enemy.
The Western Allies were moving forward with independent plans for West European recovery, while two months earlier Stalin had established the Cominform, instructed the Communist parties of France and Italy to take an intransigent line in their countries’ affairs and clamped down sharply on the Communist-controlled countries in what was now a Soviet bloc.
To the extent that the Cold War was about Germany, the final outcome—a divided country—was probably preferred by all parties to a Germany united against them.
The Americans, like Stalin, were improvising in these years.
Whatever led Stalin to adjust his calculations in Eastern Europe, it was decidedly not the rhetoric of American domestic politics.12 The immediate cause of the division of Germany and
Europe lies rather in Stalin’s own errors in these years. In central Europe, where he would have preferred a united Germany, weak and neutral, he squandered his advantage in 1945 and subsequent years by uncompromising rigidity and confrontational tactics. If Stalin’s hope had been to let Germany rot until the fruit of German resentment and hopelessness fell into his lap, then he miscalculated seriously—though there were moments when the Allied authorities in western Germany wondered whether he might yet succeed. In that sense the Cold War in Europe was an unavoidable outcome of the Soviet
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All the Soviet Union needed to do was accept the Marshall Plan and convince a majority of the Germans of Moscow’s good faith in seeking a neutral, independent Germany. In 1947 this would radically have shifted the European balance of advantage.
That such tactical calculations were beyond Stalin cannot be credited to the West.
From the Soviet side the war had been fought to defeat Germany and restore Russian power and security on its western frontiers. Whatever was to become of Germany itself, the region separating Germany and Russia could not be left in uncertainty.
The only acceptable outcome for Stalin was the establishment—in those parts of the region not preemptively absorbed into the USSR itself—of governments that could be relied upon never to pose a threat to Soviet security. But the only way to guarantee such an outcome was to align the political system of the states of eastern Europe with that of the Soviet Union and this, from the start, was what Stalin wanted and intended.
favouring the formation of ‘Front’ governments, coalitions of Communists, Socialists and other ‘anti-Fascist’ parties, which would exclude and punish the old regime and its supporters but would be cautious and ‘democratic’, reformist rather than revolutionary.
Control, in fact, mattered much more than policies.
Communist parties adopted instead a strategy of covert pressure, followed by open terror and
repression.
Communists’ tactics became more confrontational and less embarrassed by judicial or political constraints, even at the cost of alienating foreign sympathy, once it was clear that electoral success would elude them.
