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What could anyone ever have had to fear, they wonder, from a state that turned out to be as weak, as bumbling, and as temporary as the Soviet Union? But they also ask themselves and me: how did we ever make it out of the Cold War alive? I’ve written this book to try to answer these questions, but also to respond—at a much less cosmic level—to another my students regularly pose.
“Can’t you cover more years with fewer words?” some of them have politely asked.
need for a short, comprehensive, and accessible book on the Cold War—a
It’s forced me to apply, to all this new information, the simple test of significance made famous by my late Yale colleague Robin Winks: “So what?”
The world, I am quite sure, is a better place for that conflict having been fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it. No one today worries about a new global war, or a total triumph of dictators, or the prospect that civilization itself might end.
the Cold War—like the American Civil War—was a necessary contest that settled fundamental issues once and for all.
I’ve chosen instead to focus each chapter on a significant theme: as a result, they overlap in time and move across space.
The dedication commemorates one of the greatest figures in Cold War history—and a long-time friend—whose biography it will now be my responsibility to write.
the war had been won by a coalition whose principal members were already at war—ideologically and geopolitically if not militarily—with one another.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born in revolution. Both embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed, would also do so for the rest of the world.
Both, as continental states, had advanced across vast frontiers: they were at the time the first and third largest countries in the world. And both had entered the war as the result of surprise attack:
The American Revolution, which had happened over a century and a half earlier, reflected a deep distrust of concentrated authority.
Despite the legacy of slavery, the near extermination of native Americans, and persistent racial, sexual, and social discrimination, the citizens of the United States could plausibly claim, in 1945, to live in the freest society on the face of the earth.
Bolshevik Revolution, which had happened only a quarter century earlier, had in contrast involved the embrace of concentrated authority as a means of overthrowing class enemies and consolidating a base from which a proletarian revolution would spread throughout the world.
he forced a largely agrarian nation with few traditions of liberty to become a heavily industrialized nation with no liberty at all.
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, at the end of World War II, the most authoritarian society anywhere on the face of the earth.
years. If there could ever be such a thing as a “good” war, then this one, for the United States, came close.
advantages. It waged only one war, but it was arguably the most terrible one in all of history.
but it is likely that some 27 million Soviet citizens died as a direct result of the war—roughly 90 times the number of Americans who died.
Roosevelt had even assured Stalin, at Teheran, that American troops would return home within two years after the end of the war.
The stark fact that the Americans and the British could not have defeated Hitler without Stalin’s help meant that World War II was a victory over fascism only—not over authoritarianism and its prospects for the future.
settlement. It was at least as easy to believe, in 1945, that authoritarian communism was the wave of the future as that democratic capitalism was.
Stalin’s postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.
The interests of communists elsewhere in the world, admirable though those might be, would never outweigh the priorities of the Soviet state as he had determined them. Narcissism, paranoia, and absolute power came together in Stalin:
From Stalin’s perspective, then, the long-term forces of history would compensate for the catastrophe World War II had inflicted upon the Soviet Union. It would not be necessary to confront the Americans and British directly in order to achieve his objectives. He could simply wait for the capitalists to begin quarreling with one another,
Stalin’s goal, therefore, was not to restore a balance of power in Europe, but rather to dominate that continent as thoroughly as Hitler had sought to
Europe. It was also a flawed vision, for it failed to take into account the evolving postwar objectives of the United States.
“She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all,” Secretary of State John Quincy Adams proclaimed in 1821, but “[s]he is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”13
The British would attempt to influence the Americans as much as possible—they aspired to the role of Greeks, tutoring the new Romans—but under no circumstances would they get at odds with the Americans.
As a disillusioned Roosevelt put it two weeks before his death: “[Stalin] has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.”
“All of Germany must be ours, that is, Soviet, communist,” Stalin commented in 1946.23 There were, however, two big problems with this strategy. The first had to do with the brutality with which the Red Army occupied eastern Germany. Not only did Soviet troops expropriate property and extract reparations on an indiscriminate scale, but they also indulged in mass rape—some
The idea was to preserve as much of Germany as possible under western rule rather than to risk the danger that all of it might come under Soviet control.
Here, then, the Americans embraced Stalin’s own equation of blood with influence. They had done most of the fighting in the Pacific War. They alone, therefore, would occupy the nation that had started it.
The Cold War’s roots in the world war, therefore, help to explain why this new conflict emerged so quickly after the old one had come to an end.
Roosevelt and Churchill envisaged a postwar settlement which would balance power while embracing principles. The idea was to prevent any new war by avoiding the mistakes that had led to World War II: they would ensure cooperation among the great powers, revive Wilson’s League in the form of a new United Nations collective security organization, and encourage the maximum possible political self-determination and economic integration, so that the causes of war as they understood them would in time disappear.
Stalin’s was a very different vision: a settlement that would secure his own and his country’s security while simultaneously encouraging the rivalries among capitalists that he believed would bring about a new war.
Each crisis that arose fed the next one, with the result that a divided Europe became a reality.
Stalin delayed the withdrawal of Soviet troops from northern Iran,
He demanded territorial concessions from Turkey as well as bases that would have given the U.S.S.R. effective control of the Turkish Straits.
requested a role in the administration of former Italian colonies in North Africa with a view to securing one or more additional naval bases in the eastern Mediterranean.
Kennan’s “long telegram” became the basis for United States strategy toward the Soviet Union throughout the rest of the Cold War.
Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because this provided the only excuse “for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule,
“long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow’s wishes; that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits
the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold
Tito did not depend upon Stalin’s support to remain in power. Efforts to subject him to Cominform orthodoxy caused Tito to bristle, and by the end of June, 1948, he had openly broken with Moscow. Stalin professed not to be worried.
The western allies improvised an airlift for the beleaguered city, thereby winning the emphatic gratitude of the Berliners, the respect of most Germans, and a global public relations triumph that made Stalin look both brutal and incompetent.
former State Department official Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury for having denied under oath that he had been a Soviet agent during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Klaus Fuchs, had confessed to having spied for the Russians while working on the wartime Manhattan Project.
Joseph McCarthy, a hitherto-obscure Wisconsin Republican, who in February, 1950, began raising the question of how the Soviet Union could have gotten the atomic bomb so quickly at a time when the communists were equally quickly taking over China.
