Origins of the Cold War: new evidence

Conservative Western historians have been bustling to the press with scoops drawing upon privileged, selective, and purchased access to the archives and spymasters of the former Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, the greatest notoriety has gone to "smoking guns" that purportedly corroborate the basic cold war dogma of the U.S. right, particularly the McCarthyite spymania. But there is other recently available material from the Eastern archives given little or no attention. These documents call into question a fundamental premise of the Official American History of the second half of the twentieth century: Soviet responsibility for the origins of the Cold War.

Two decades ago, the apportioning of responsibility for the outbreak of the Cold War was an objective pursued avidly by participants in a fierce academic debate set against the backdrop of the Vietnam war. On one side were "orthodox" scholars who painted a picture of an ideologically preprogrammed expansion of the Stalinist state bent on sovietizing the world at any price. In the other corner were the "revisionists" pointing an accusing finger at the imperialist designs of the United States. By the end of the 1970s, the debate had run itself into the ground in the absence of available documentation on the Soviet side. The controversy would finally be stilled by the suppression of debate during the Reagan era.

The opening of the Soviet and East European archives has provided us with some answers to this puzzle that are at least as definitive as the record indicating the involvement of some U.S. Communist party members in espionage. The lack of attention paid by establishment scholars amounts to a tacit admission that confidential Soviet and East European documents uphold the crux of the revisionist thesis. In fact, Stalin and the Soviet leadership did not want the Cold War and were prepared to go to considerable lengths to avoid it, including throttling any revolutionary impulse in the non-Soviet Communist parties. Almost all of the newly available data lies scattered and untranslated in specialized journals and books. But there are a few noteworthy disclosures that deserve a far broader audience than they have received so far.

The Maiskii Memorandum

In January 1944, Ivan Maiskii drew up and submitted to Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, broad guidelines for long term Soviet foreign policy objectives.(1) Only six months before, Maiskii had been promoted to deputy foreign minister and was a member of a working group set up within the Soviet government to map out geopolitical strategy in the postwar world. Maiskii was a smooth and skilled survivor able to tailor his work to the perceived mood and needs of his chief patrons. The recently declassified "Maiskii Memorandum" was no exception to a pattern of professional circumspection that enabled the longtime Soviet ambassador to London to escape the purges of the late 1930s.

In his Memorandum, Maiskii defined the paramount postwar foreign policy objective of the Soviet state to be the maintenance of a durable peace in Europe and Asia for at least the next thirty to fifty years or the "lifespan of two generations." The chief concern of the Soviet leadership was not world revolution, which Maiskii blithely wrote off as the "music of the future," but the far more practical aim of obtaining a Peredyshka or recuperative breathing space for a country bleeding from a thousand wounds. In maneuvering diplomatically to buy time, Maiskii reckoned that no less than a decade would be needed for the Soviet Union to recover from the devastation inflicted by the Nazis. Along with this period of reconstruction, another two to four decades were required to enable the Soviet Union to "become so powerful that it need no longer fear any aggressor in Europe or Asia," whether acting singly or in combination.

The Maiskii memorandum leaves no doubt that the Soviet state sought to barter its supreme contribution to the defeat of fascism for admission into a postwar global directorate as a conventional Great Power with generally recognized security concerns within its own sphere of influence. At one point, Maiskii noted that Great Britain was "especially interested in Greece" and urged the Soviet leadership to exercise "great caution" in its diplomatic dealings to avoid trespassing into the politics of a region ceded to British hegemony. Maiskii ruled out any unilateral treaties with Greece if London objected and suggested that Moscow rely entirely upon trilateral agreements negotiated between all three parties. For Maiskii, Greece was meant to serve as a model of diplomatic quid pro quo in which Soviet respect for British security concerns in the Mediterranean would be reciprocated by London in Eastern Europe.

The report also envisaged the postwar emergence of an "independent and viable Poland" as well as a "strong Czechoslovakia" that could serve as the most effective diplomatic ally of the Soviet Union in Europe. In a detailed breakdown by country, the Maiskii Memorandum confirms that there was no premeditated master plan for incorporating Eastern Europe into a Soviet bloc or establishing cadre dictatorships on its recently liberated strategic periphery. To ensure postwar stability, the preferred policy for both Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe was a "state-system based upon the principles of broad democracy in the spirit of the ideology of the Popular Front" of the mid-1930s.

Maiskii hoped that the end of the war would bring "the greatest possible spread of Soviet influence into China and the consolidation of the friendliest possible relations." But he argued that the course of events would ultimately hinge upon internal developments largely beyond Moscow's control, such as the emergence of "genuinely democratic progressive nationalist elements friendly to THE USSR." In keeping with his negative view of global revolutionary change, Maiskii never broached the possibility of the complete victory of the forces of Mao Zedong over the Kuomintang. Instead he urged a defensive posture aimed at avoiding worst-case outcomes. Maiskii's greatest fear was that a government dominated by hostile nationalists would eventually be drawn into an anti-Soviet alliance by the United States. But the Stalin is a diplomat discounted the immediacy of this danger by predicting that China would be left so shattered by the war that at least twenty years must pass before it could begin to pose a security threat to the Soviet Union.

Stalin badly wanted a durable peace to concentrate national energies on domestic reconstruction and development. In retrospect, the most surprising aspect of the document is the naivete demonstrated by such a hard bitten bunch on matters of foreign trade. Anticipating a serious postwar crisis of over-production in the United States, Moscow placed great stock in the possibility that Washington and London, desperate for markets, could be cajoled into paying off in kind its "allied debt obligation" to the Soviet Union, which had borne the brunt of the war. Maiskii went so far as to envisage the allies entering into peacetime lend-lease arrangements lasting five to ten years, during which time the Soviet Union would be provided gratis with the machinery and technology essential to postwar reconstruction.

However much these hopes for a foreign aid bonanza were misplaced, Maiskii concluded that the Soviet Union had compelling strategic and economic reasons for preserving "good relations with the USA and England" after the war. The key to ensuring Soviet security and preserving the peace in Europe was said to be keeping Germany harmless" for the next thirty to fifty years. This would require long term collective security arrangements and Maiskii advised that there were no unavoidable territorial or economic disputes between the wartime allies that stood in the way of this mutually beneficial cooperation.

The fatal analytical flaw of the Maiskii memorandum was its gross underestimation of the extent to which the war had enabled the United States to emerge as the preeminent global power. Maiskii was well aware of the expansionist ambitions of Washington as a "dynamic imperialism" committed to penetrating the protected colonial markets of its European rivals through a wide range of self-serving "open door" stratagems. But the Soviet diplomat believed that U.S. imperialism still lacked the cadre and far-flung administrative framework available to Britain, a lack he believed would handicap Washington in postwar rocketing for a position in the new world order. Maiskii was confident that the Soviet Union could capitalize upon the simmering rivalry between a surging U.S. imperialism and a declining British empire to strike a stable postwar balance of power with Moscow as the swing player in a resumption of traditional sphere of influence or balance of power politics.

Stalin Against Sovietization

The Maiskii Memorandum was written in the wake of the Teheran Conference of November 1943 where the spirit of wartime accord between the leaders of the Big Three reached its height and led to expectations on all sides that this cooperation could be carried over into peacetime. The attempt of the Soviet government to translate the spirit of Teheran into practical action was immediately evident in the secret communiques exchanged between Moscow and the underground network of the Polish Workers' (i.e., Communist) Party. In February 1944, Soviet messages were sent to Polish Communist resistance fighters complaining about a "sectarianism" in their political work that was needlessly alienating potential allies and narrowing the potential base of the anti-Nazi front.(2) The Soviet leadership was especially concerned that the radicalism of the Polish Communist underground was "conveying the false impression that the Polish Workers' Party is pursuing a course towards the sovietization of Poland which it is in fact not doing and should not do." The leadership of the Polish Workers' Party noted this criticism and instructed its members in March to abandon the polarized thinking that "Poland can only be soviet or reactionary" with no possibility of an intermediate stage between the two. Only a few months later in july, Moscow was once again compelled to send another directive condemning the party's excessively radical agrarian strategy that raised the danger that "Poland will become a bone of contention between the Teheran powers." It is, of course, well known that Poland had been a "bone of contention between the Teheran powers" this whole time, but what has not been appreciated is the degree to which the Soviet side was exercising restraint.

After Teheran, the Soviet leadership began to view Eastern Europe in the traditional great power terms exemplified by Molotov's boast in August 1945 that "our sphere of influence has been recognized" by the wartime allies.(3) Stalin's strategy towards Poland differed little from British policy towards Greece in its ruthless determination to ensure that a regime friendly to the regional hegemony came to power. But there is no evidence in the archival record to suggest that Stalin was intent upon exporting the Soviet model, and a great deal attesting that he opposed such an outcome.

In the recently published transcript of a March 1945 meeting with leaders of the Polish Workers' party, Stalin ruled out the collectivization of agriculture as a "complete fantasy" for the next few decades.(4) Instead he encouraged his audience to accept the need for an independent Peasant Party corresponding to the long term existence of individual economy in agriculture. Stalin insisted upon the Peasant Party being afforded genuine autonomy to ensure its credibility because "opposition on some matters does not preclude loyalty although the opposition cannot be allowed to turn the government into a discussion club." In Polish conditions, Stalin looked for a somewhat more than purely formal pluralist political system that would reflect the complex nature of postwar Polish society and permit some space for the resolution of the inevitable conflicts in the course of modernizing a predominantly agricultural society.

Recent publications of the Bulgarian historian, Mito Isusov, have shed new light on the ways in which Stalin took Bulgarian communists in tow after the war. Throughout 1945 and 1946, Stalin would try to dampen the ardor of a Bulgarian party that he clearly considered excessively revolutionary and a disruptive influence on Soviet relations with its wartime allies. In january 1945, he admonished a Bulgarian delegation:

It would be a mistake to think that the soviet form is the only one which leads to socialism. There can be other forms such as a democratic republic. In some circumstances, a constitutional monarchy will lead to socialism.

In August 1945, the Soviet dictator gave an awkward civics lessons to Bulgarian Communists who were going too far too fast:

In a society with antagonistic classes, there has to be an opposition . . . Don't forget that for you, the evolution towards a soviet system can proceed along a different path through a parliament. This path is slow but it can also lead to this end.(5)

As late as September 1946, Stalin would announce that the Russian revolutionary model was obsolete in the modern world and the Bulgarian people were capable of making a "transition to socialism in a special manner without a proletarian dictatorship." Once more in Bulgaria, the archival record makes a solid case that Stalin continued to pursue "Teheran" policies in Eastern Europe well into 1947.

In a November 1944 meeting with the leader of the French Communist Party, Stalin again intervened personally to rein in the resistance movement and adjust its political program to the strategic objectives of the Soviet Union. Stalin's main concern was to persuade reluctant French Communists to dissolve their armed partisan militias and submit themselves to the authority of a "government recognized by the allied powers."(6) Stalin urged French Communists to abandon what he deemed a confrontational sectarian strategy and soft-pedal their program to appeal to the "average Frenchman." Above all, the PCF was told to avoid isolating itself from the political mainstream and concentrate on pulling together a "left-wing bloc" that should be ecumenical enough to encompass socialists, liberals, trade unions, and all sympathetic groups. Stalin went one step further than the Maiskii Memorandum when he advised French Communists to drop the term "Popular Front" out of deference to the sensibilities of a bourgeoisie still smarting from the working-class insurgencies of the 1930s. To enable the PCF to dissolve into this broad coalition, Stalin tacked on the suggestion that French Communists stop flying red flags in their parades and refrain from the use of the term "communist" in their programmatic literature. In the postwar world, Stalin had his heart set on doing business with the "democratic fraction of capitalists" on the basis of the wartime anti-fascist alliance.(7)

Warning French Communists not to overestimate their own strength, Stalin wanted the leadership to forswear even the theoretical option of revolution and commit itself exclusively to the parliamentary path. To the PCF, Stalin assigned the primary task of preventing a discredited collaborationist right from rehabilitating itself and returning to power in a "reactionary government" hostile to the Soviet Union. The best guarantee against a resurgent anti-Sovietism was for the PCF to become an indispensable part of a broad coalition government. The cooperative strategy outlined by Stalin for the PCF was geared towards cultivating the respectable political credentials required to play this role. Stalin's insistence on the PCF abandoning even lip service to revolutionary goals was but an aspect of the broader geopolitical strategy intended to forestall a global bipolarization that would plunge the Soviet state back into a hostile capitalist encirclement.

In his sensational book Stalin's Unloved Child: My Moscow did not Want the GDR,(8) Wilfried Loth draws upon a wealth of information unearthed from the archives of the former GDR that shows how Stalin maneuvered to put the Popular Front strategy into practice in occupied Germany. The German historian demonstrates convincingly that Stalin's conciliatory conception of the postwar world was heavily influenced by Eugene Varga, a theoretician whom the Soviet tyrant had twice saved from being purged. Stalin's continuing respect for Varga was evident in his decision to take the Hungarian-born economist along with him to the Potsdam conference injuly 1945 as an advisor. At the time, Varga was in the midst of publishing a series of controversial articles that he would combine one year later into a book entitled Changes t'n the Economy of Capitalism as a Result of the Second World War. This text provided the theoretical underpinnings for what later in the Khrushchev era would come to be known as the doctrine of Peaceful Coexistence.

In his own book and an accompanying documentary anthology, Loth draws heavily on the contemporaneous notes of Wilhelm Pieck, a veteran German Communist and former Comintern functionary. Among many historical gems, Pieck provides a running account of ajune 1945 dialogue of Stalin with the leadership of the German Communist Party that mapped out the character of postwar reconstruction. Stalin laid down the law to the German delegation: their primary objective was to be the "completion of a bourgeois democratic revolution" and the establishment of a "bourgeois democratic government."' This self-limiting revolution translated no more and no less into "breaking the power of the landlords" and "eliminating the vestiges of feudalism" that had provided the backbone of German militarism in the past. Pieck's notes on Stalin's marching orders confirm a more detailed summary of the stern instructions issued to the top leadership of the German Communist Party immediately before its departure from Moscow:

The political task in Germany is not to implement socialism or initiate socialist development. This tendency should be viewed as detrimental and resisted. Germany confronts a bourgeois-democratic restructuring that in its content and essence will be comparable to the completion of the bourgcois democratic revolution of 1848.(10)

At this point, the chief worry of the Soviet authorities was that the revolutionary tradition to which the old KPD was heir would interfere with the Tcheran settlement with the United States and Great Britain.

Stalin's objective was definitely not the sovietization of Germany, but rather its permanent postwar demilitarization enforced by an alliance of the victors. His support for the peaceful reunification of a capitalist Germany was motivated by a fear that a less clear-cut outcome would enable the United States to seize upon the resulting tension to begin pulling together an U.S.-German military axis in Europe cemented by an anti-communist animus. In a February 1946 meeting with Gennan Communists, Stalin reminded his audience that the political situation in the West with its deep-rooted parliamentary traditions was "entirely different" from that of the Soviet Union. Stalin held open the possibility of a specifically German "democratic path to working-class power" founded upon political compromise and pluralism that bypassed the need for a repressive "dictatorship." Once more in December 1946, Stalin urged a delegation of German Communists to continue seeking common ground with "left-wing elements of the German Social-democratic Party." The object of this strategy was to establish "united front committees . . . opposing Western reaction" bent upon establishing a West German state and incorporating it into a new military alliance.

East German archives offer proof that right up until the time of his death, Stalin opposed the establishment of a sovietized regime in the Eastern occupation zone. If Stalin could be said to have a master plan, it appeared to be the consolidation of a capitalist parliamentary democracy in a demilitarized united Germany. The historical record shows that Stalin stuck doggedly to the provisions of the Potsdam agreement on a reunified Germany while a wide array of forcesin thewestledbywashington setaboutabrogatingthe agreement and taking the first steps towards the division of the country.

As late as mid-1947, Stalin still held out hope that the geopolitical rivalries fracturing Europe could be bridged and the United States persuaded to provide the Soviet Union with "its share" of Marshall Plan aid.(11) The Soviet foreign ministry was initially disposed to enter into serious negotiations with Washington to eliminate objectionable aspects of the foreign aid plan and, according to a confidential report, mold it into something resembling lend4ease."(12) In telegrams sent to all Eastern European capitals, Moscow encouraged its allies to "show the proper initiative" in procuring foreign aid through the Marshall Plan. Mid-way through the multilateral negotiations, the chief Soviet representative received intelligence information confirming the suspicion that he was being strung along by the Western powers who had no intention of admitting Moscow to the Marshall Plan. With all hope of foreign aid dashed, the Soviet delegation retreated into a hard-line rejectionist posture.

Even after thisjuncture, the Polish and Czech governments still wavered in the face of badly needed Western aid offers and only then did Stalin pull out all the stops to ensure a final rejection. After a particularly truculent session with Stalin, the Czechoslovak foreign minister, jan Masaryk, realized that a historical rubicon had been crossed in the evolution of postwar Europe with the breakdown of the talks on the Marshall Plan: "I went to Moscow a free minister and came back as Stalin's valet."

The vacillafion of Eastern European governments laid bare the internal fragility of the Soviet alliance structure when subjected to the pressures of U.S. economic might. The imposed sovietization" of Eastern Europe ensuing after the summer of 1947 was a product of the cold war and not its cause. Stalin acted predictably in demanding coercive regimentation as the most reliable means of lashing together a ramshackle geopolitical bloc to meet a vastly superior U.S. challenge. In December 1948, a delegation of Bulgarian Communists would quote the earlier lenient Stalin in a bid to obtain more flexible conditions for replicating thc institutions of the Soviet police dictatorship within their own society. On this occasion, after the Tito crisis had broken, Stalin would have none of it and stipulated that whatever they called the new order, the Bulgarian state will carry out the functions of a proletarian dictatorship."(13) Stalin had laid to rest the "Teheran" prospect of exchanging more open Popular Front regimes in Eastern Europe and emasculated Communist Parties in the West for foreign aid and due recognition of Soviet security interests.

Towards a NATO-centric Western Europe

From the Soviet side, all the declassified information made available to date confirms that the perceived strategic interests of the rulers of the United States (and not Stalin's expansionist aims) were the driving force squandering the opportunity to build a united demilitarized Germany in the heart of Europe, avoid the postwar division of the continent, and prevent a prodigally wasteful arms race. The catalyst of the Cold War was the enormous strategic imbalance between a United States bulldozing its way towards world empire and its only real opponent, the revolutionary impulse of the anti-fascist resistance and the anti-colonial movements. The Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy, would boil the moralizing rhetoric of U.S. foreign policy down to its hard core when he declared in May 1945 that the United States "ought to have our cake and eat it too." McCloy meant that the United States should feel free to claim all the conventional prerogatives of a regional power within its own hemispheric sphere of influence while simultaneously exercising the right to intervene at will everywhere in the world. Confrontation on the continent and the push towards a NATO-centric Western Europe became the means of structuring the newworld order. As intended, the resulting permanent war economy contributed to the great post-war boom in the United States, Western Europe, andjapan, while burdening the Soviet Union with massive and wasteful military expenditures.

Setting the record straight on the origins of the Cold War is not just a matter of challenging the traditional prerogative of the victors to rewrite past events to suit their present purposes. Many of the interests that generated the first Cold " I have been reasserting themselves, as in the dismembering of Yugoslavia and the proposed expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe. World capitalism cannot seem to do without the permanent war economy, nor the generation of tacitly complicit demonized "necessary enemies" to justify the global repressive apparatus of the U.S. national security state.

NOTES

(1.) I. Maiskii, "Memorandum," Istochnik 4 (1995). (2.) I. Iazhborovskaia, "Check it out with Stalin" in U Istokov `Sotsialisticheskogo Sodruzhestva', [ On the Origins of the Socialist Commonwealth'] ed, Gibianskii, (Moscow: Science, 1994). (3.) Narinkskii, M., "Berlin Crisis," Novaia i Noveishaia Istoriia 3 (1995). (4.) W. Gomulka, Pamietniki, ['Memoirs'l v. 2 (Warsaw: BGW, 1994), p. 477. (5.) M. Isusov, Stalin i Bulgaiiia ['Stalin and Bulgaia' ] (Sofia: KO, 1991), pp. 16, 33-34. (6.) "Transcript," Istochnik 4 (1995). (7.) M. Narinkskii, "USSR and the Marshall Plan," Novaia i Noveishaia Istoriia 3 (1995). (8.) W. Loth, Stalins ungelietbtes Kind: warum Moskau die DDR nicht wollte (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1994). (9.) W. Pieck, Aufzeichnungen zurdeutschlandpolitik 1945-1953 'Notes on German Politics'], eds. R. Badstuebnerandw. Loth (Berlin: Akademie, 1994), pp. 50-51. (10.) W. Leonhard, Die Revolution enlaesst ihre Kinder ['The Revolution Devours its Children' (Cologne: Kiepenheuer, 1995), p 332. (11.) G. Adibekov, Kominform i Poslevoennaia Evropa ['Cominform and Posuwar Europe'] (Moscow: Iur, 1994), p. 25. (12.) M. Narinkskii, "USSR and the Marshall Plan," Novaia i Noveishaia Istoriia 2 (1993). (13.) M. Isusov, Stalin i Bulgariia, p. 168.

I am a revolutionist by birth, reading, and principle, I wn always on the side of the revolutionists because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Mark Twain, interview, New York Sun, 15 April, 1906

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