In 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States.  This was after Nixon’s impeachment in 1974.  (Impeachment = Kicked out for crimes.)  The Soviets couldn’t understand this, because in the Soviet system stealing a few records meant nothing.  Nixon’s thugs had broken into the basement of the Watergate Hotel in DC and they stole some files from the Democratic Party that was running against him.  Why Nixon’s thugs did this was unclear since he was already winning, but since he was caught trying to cover it, up he got kicked out.

Okay.  The Soviets could never really understand this.  In their system, they wouldn’t have that.  Stalin killed people he didn’t like.  But the American public and news media didn’t like a dishonest president, so Nixon was out.  Gerald Ford, a former American football player at the University of Michigan, was president for a coupl of years and met Brezhnev at Vladivostok,  but come 1976, the Americans were tired of Washington politicas and elected Jimmy Carter, a God-fearing  Christian peanut farmer --  a man with a reputation as clean & honest man, etc.  Carter was full of phrases like “I believ in God” and “I love my wife”, etc.  He brought his Georgia cronies with him to Washington – many of them were inexperienced in national politics.  So the USA traded the cynical realpolitik of Nixon for the naïve liberalism of Jimmy Carter.  (One of his top advisers had an expired passport!)

However, Carter really believed in Human Rights.  In 1975, the Americans, Soviets and 33 other countries signed the Helsinki Accords.  At Helsinki, there were 3 ‘baskets’ of articles:

1.       Settling the borders of Europe once and for all (or so they thought) and political accords

2.       Diplomatic procedure, increase cooperation, trade and economics, technology, etc.

3.       Human Rights!

Q (Abhinav): why did the Soviets agree to the first basket?

A: Remember, the Soviets had settled the borders of Eastern Europe after WW2.  It was the Soviets who picked up the country of Poland and moved it 200 km to the West, kicking out Germans (and Poles) in the process.  So, for the big Western nations to agree to the borders, that was a diplomatic victory for the Soviets. 

The Soviets liked baskets 1 and 2, but they didn’t understand what Human Rights were.  They said “America shouldn’t talk about human rights, look how they treat blacks in their own country!”  Many Soviet leaders objected to this 3^rd basket, but Gromyko pointed out: “Look – it’s baskets 1 and 2 that are important  -- that’s what we want  -- as for basket #3, we control the areas they are talking about – Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR, so let’s just sign it and then we will do whatever we want in those areas.”  So they all signed the Helsinki Accords and the Soviets thought they had a victory because of baskets 1 and 2, and Jimmy Carter thought he had a victory because of basket 3.    Jimmy Carter said the Russians were abusing human rights by keeping too many people in prison, by denying basic freedoms, and especially by not allowing people to leave.  In particular – the Jews who were neither allowed to practice their religion, nor allowed to emigrate to Israel, became an issue with Carter and the Americans.  They were called “refuseniks” because they were refused permission to emigrate.  For the next 14 years, Human Rights become extremely important in Eastern Europe & the USSR, especially in Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union itself.

So, the relations between the USSR and the US begin to worsen in the late ‘70s because Carter, rather naively, kept bugging the USSR about Human Rights and because Brezhnev’s health was declining, and there were several trouble spots around the world, particularly in Africa, and the USA was blaming the USSR for the behavior of Cuba – which was supporting various movements in Africa.  Then, in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and that ended Détente. 

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is:

In 20 minutes, write 2 paragraphs answering the question For what reasons and with what results did the super-powers pursue a policy of Détente in the years 1969-1975?

n  Typed by Matty

Pop has asked: why did the Cold War come to an end?

There are three major theories about why the Cold War came to an end.  They all acknowledge the fact that changes in policies amongst Soviet leaders, and especially the explicit policy that rebellions in Eastern Europe would not be put down by force, led to the end of the Cold War.  In particular, this policy led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, after which the Cold War was essentially finished.

So what caused these change in policies?  The three major ideas are:

1) The view of the "triumphalists," particularly on the American right: it was the Reagan doctrine: the clear anti-communist leadership of Ronald Reagan and his advisors.  Hence, SDI (or "Star Wars"). the resistance in Afghanistan, etc. made the Cold War too costly, both economically and politically, for the Soviet Union, so they surrendered.

2) The view of the "liberals" -- especially popular in Europe: it was the aspirations of the peoples of Eastern Europe that peacefully ended the Cold War.  For 45 years they had been agitating for freedom and to throw off the yoke of Soviet domination.  The Communist sytem in Eastern Euope had failed -- economically and politically.  The regimes of Honecker, Ceausescu, Jaruzelski, etc. were way past their "Sell By" date.  The peoples of Eastern Europe demanded an end to Soviet domination and put an end to the Cold War.

3) The view of the "Great Man" theorists: it was mainly two individuals, Reagan and especially Gorbachev, who put an end to the Cold War.  These two men completely reinvented Soviet-US relations in a way that made the Cold War not only unnecessary, but obsolete.  They did so even as their advisors tried to convince them otherwise.

Of course, you might want to emphasize a combination of these interpretations or come up with your own.

In both Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China, foreign policy was dictated by the dominant national ideology: Nazism or Maoism.  In both cases, we can find example after example of irrational foreign policy decisions, detrimental to the nation, that were driven by the dictator’s obsession with his national ideology.

In Hitler’s Germany, foreign policy was subordinate to Hitler’s vain ideas of Lebensraum, Aryan supremacy and regaining national pride and national territory after the “stab in the back.”  Therefore, his immediate foreign policy objectives were the Anschluss and the retaking of territories where German-speaking peoples were the majority.  In 1935, Hitler retook the Saarland, militarily, gloating about the superiority of the Germans over French.  When he unified Germany with Austria in a well-organized coup and occupation in 1938, he appealed to the population about the greatness of the German race and the need for a great German empire.

Because of the Fascist tendencies in Nazism, which many describe as a Fascist ideology, Hitler allied himself with similar-thinking regimes, such as Mussolini’s Italy, or Imperial Japan.  Therefore, he sided with the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

Of course, this aspect of Nazism was disastrous for the German people.  Hitler’s obsessive national ideology pushed him on to catastrophic decisions.  He was obsessed with expanding to the East, because his theory of Aryan supremacy convinced him that Germans needed “breathing space” (Lebensraum).  This pushed Hitler into Eastern Europe.  After first taking Sudetenland, he went further into Czechoslovakia and then into Poland.  The expansion into eastern Europe was motivated by three strands of his national ideology: his need for Lebensraum, revenge for the humiliation of World War I, and an assault on “Communist Jewry.”  Hitler associated Communists with Jews, and he justified his expansion into Eastern Europe by his hatred of Jews, who he claimed, had conspired against Germany.  This led to Operation Barbarossa, of course, his irrational attack of the USSR, and the downfall of Hitler and Nazism.

In Mao’s China, foreign policy was also subordinate to Mao’s vain and irrational ideas about Communism under Mao Zedong Thought.  From October 1, 1949, Mao began imposing odd and injurious policies that hurt the Chinese people.  For example, he went to Moscow from December, 1949 to February 1950 to negotiate a “Peace and Friendship” Treaty with Stalin that turned out to be incredibly expensive to china.  This is because Mao decided that China must “Lean to One Side” and enter the struggle between the superpowers on the side of the USSR.  Accordingly, he kicked out the ambassadors of Western powers and confiscated their assets.  This immediately put China at risk, and it was even worse after Mao entered the Korean War in October, 1950.  This was driven by Mao’s mad ambitions, both to advance Communism and to please older brother: Stalin, who would not commit Russian troops to the effort.  Mao therefore caused hundreds of thousands of PLA soldiers to lose their lives.

In the 1950s foreign policy in China was dominated by Mao’s sloganeering, such as: Death to America!  or Liberate Taiwan!  On several occasions, Mao put China on the verge of a disastrous war with America because of his obsession with Taiwan.  Using his immense popularity and peculiar stategy of unleashing popular anger, Mao had small groups of people all over China putting on shows, burning effigies of Uncle Sam, and acting out street theater where America and its allies were portrayed as “Running Imperialist Dogs.” In both Taiwan Straits crises, but particularly the Second Taiwan Straits Crisis in 1958, Mao indicated that he didn’t care if the USA attacked with nuclear weapons.  He indiscriminately bombed Taiwanese islands without provocation.  His actions here greatly angered Khrushchev, again causing great danger to the Chinese nation.  For what?  “To “liberate” Taiwan?  Mao was obsessed with his ideas of Communism under Mao Zedong thought, and he couldn’t bear to think of Chinese people living under capitalism.

In the 1960s, Mao continued his bizarre policies, but now things got even worse because of the Sino-Soviet split.  Now Mao turned his back on the Soviet Union, and mobs and their street theater, instead of satirizing America’s “Running Dogs”, were now attacking Khrushchev and his “revisionists.”  The Sino-Soviet split was clearly because Mao was obsessed with spreading communism and promoting Mao Zedong Thought as the most advanced form of Communism, and he could not bear the thought that the Soviets were starting to consider more sensible policies.  The origins of the split can be traced back to the 1956 Hungarian Crisis, when the Soviets were considering a peaceful resolution to the crisis, but Mao angrily labeled them “revisionists and encouraged them to violently crush the rebellion.

Mao continued his strange and isolationist policies right through the 1960s.  After the PLA had occupied Tibet and starved a significant part of its population, Mao launched another disastrous war, this time against India in 1962.  Again, this was a consequence of Mao’s bizarre ideas of permanent revolution and the need to persecute all religions, because the Dalai Lama, a Buddhist, had fled to India.  His timing coincided with the Cuban Missile Crisis, showing again that Mao was indifferent to the prospect of Nuclear War.  Furthermore, Mao closed off China to the outside world, greatly harming its economy, so that he could unleash the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 – another disaster that was a result of his bizarre obsession with permanent revolution.

As we have seen, Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China both had obsessive national ideologies, closely identified with the dictator himself, that drove foreign policy.  The foreign policies of each dictator, in case after case, led to disastrous results.  In Germany, it led to the total destruction of Nazi Germany, and now, virtually every German repudiates Hitler’s policies.  In China, the bizarre foreign policies began to change as Mao neared death (ping-pong diplomacy) and then, after he died, Deng Xiaoping totally reversed China’s course.

            Ever since the publication of Alan Bullock's pioneering work, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, in 1991, historians have tended to compare the regimes of Hitler and Stalin, and to point out the similarities rather than the differences.  Both men were ruthless tyrants; both regimes attempted totalitarianism; both were expansionist; they carved up Poland savagely; both regimes annihilated targeted sections of their own populations, etc.  While such comparisons are tempting, we must also note the extraordinary contrasts between the two regimes.

            In terms of ideology, both regimes were fanatic about ideology, but the ideologies themselves were strikingly different.  National Socialism, as an ideology, was incomplete, largely incoherent, and the ramblings of one man based on one book: Mein Kampf.  Hitler actually believed in National Socialism, but his beliefs were not very sophisticated.  At the heart of his beliefs were anti-Communism, Antisemitism, Aryan supremacy, and a burning desire to avenge WWI and to make Germany more powerful.  When we consider that Hitler viewed Bolshevism as a “Jewish conspiracy” (which is largely what he believed about Western capitalism, too), Hitler's views, plain and simple, boil down to this: racist expansionism. 

            Hitler's speeches contained constant references to “the November Criminals” and “the stab in the back” so it is clear that his primary political focus was to explain the humiliation that Germany suffered in WWI.  For this he needed a scapegoat: the Jews.  In the Nazi ideology, the Jews are crowding the pure German race, which in turn needs Lebensraum (or “breathing space”), which must be gained at the expense of the inferior and unworthy Slavic race being led by despicable Jewish Bolsheviks – “a guild of international criminals” (Rees, 2008).  We must add Hitler's adolescent views of “the law of the jungle” and “the dynamism of the charismatic leader” to complete the ideology of National Socialism but those ideas are hardly sophisticated political theory – a teenage bully might use the same ideas to justify his domination of a playground.

            Marxism – Leninism, the official ideology of the Soviet Union, was by the 1920s a much more sophisticated political ideology than Nazism would ever be.  Since 1848, when Marx and Engels published their influential pamphlet, “the spectre haunting Europe” (Communism) was not only a powerful political force, but it was also greatly feared throughout Europe.  In 1916 Lenin published a much more sophisticated, and convincing analysis of WWI than Hitler's scatterbrained theories about “the stab in the back.” 

            Throughout the 1920s, there were passionate debates within the organs of the CPSU.  The arguments were put forth by  highly articulate “theoreticians” such as Trotsky and Bukharin.  Stalin, who could not compete intellectually with these giants of communism, had a different sort of genius: organization, administration, and false modesty.  He posed not as an original Marxist-Leninist theoretician but as “no more than an interpreter of Lenin” (Bullock, 1991, p. 174).  Indeed, when Kaganovich suggested that Marxism-Leninsm should be changed to Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, Comrade Stalin allegedly replied, “how can you compare a dick to a watchtower?” (James, 2003, p. 168).  Such self-effacement is unthinkable in Hitler.

            Economically, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were remarkably different.  First, their attitudes towards private property and big capitalists were profoundly different.  Although Hitler distrusted big capitalists, he used them, even before he came to power, and eventually won them over to his side.  Fritz Thyssen was a big industrialist who supported Hitler in 1930 (James, p. 160).  The early Communists of the Soviet Union had a different attitude towards the big industrialists – they shot them and confiscated their assets.  The Soviets desired total control over the national economy.

            The Nazis, who were accepted by von Papen as an alternative to discredited liberal democracy or the spectre of communism, did not interfere with some of Germany's most lucrative industrial houses, and the Nazi economy was largely unplanned.  Nazi Germany had one failed attempt at a “4 - Year Plan”, assigned to Göring in 1936, which never materialized (James, 2003, p. 161).  In contrast, the Five-Year Plan was a regular feature of Soviet life, and in 1929, it was a detailed economic document of 1700 pages (James, 2003, p. 170).    This even regulated farm life, where Stalin determined that even a couple of horses was too much private property and he went on to “eliminate the kulaks as a class”.  This resulted in the murder, imprisonment or starvation of millions of peasants, both during the Holomodor in the Ukraine, and in Kazakhstan, during the early 1930s.

            Stalin's frustration with the kulaks was an indication that in the 1930s Stalin never had the full totalitarian control that he wanted.  The primary reason was that the Soviet Union was just too big.  On its perimeter there were peoples, lands, and autonomous republics that were never fully under the control of Moscow.  Chechnya, for example, never trusted the Soviet leadership (Montefiore, 2003, p. 434).  Stalin's frustration morphed into paranoia, and after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Stalin's attempt at totalitarianism spun out of control, and into the Great Purges of 1937 – 1938.

            So, the differences between the two regimes and were profound, and, finally, there were quite a few differences between the tyrants themselves.  Stalin was obsessed with detail and a workaholic.  He read vociferously and he was a keen student of Russian history.  Hitler would often not arise until lunchtime, and then show only a cursory interest in the day's events.  Ian Kershaw points out that this was more than a matter of style, but a fundamental difference in the regimes:

“Hitler's increasing aloofness from the State bureaucracy and the major organs of government seems to mark more than a difference of style with Stalin's modus operandi. It reflects, in my view, a difference in the essence of the regimes, mirrored in the position of the leader of each”   (Kershaw, 1993)

            As WWII pressed on and the German Army advanced to within 18 km of Moscow, a final and crucial difference between the two leaders emerged.  Stalin came to the conclusion that he needed to listen to his generals, particularly Zhukov and Timoshenko.  Hitler, the egomaniac, could never abandon his Führerprinzip and listen to the good advice of his generals.  He ignored Römmel and sacrificed the Afrikakorps, and even worse, he ignored Paulus, and sacrificed the 6^th Army – a million German soldiers perished.  Paulus, who had pleaded for permission to surrender, was told to commit suicide instead.  He refused, went over to the Soviets, and made propaganda against  “that damned Austrian corporal.”

 

Works Cited

Bullock, A. (1991). Hitler and Stalin: Parallel lives.  London: HarperCollins.

Kershaw, I. (1993). 'Working Towards the Führer.' Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship

Contemporary European History, 2, 2 (Jul., 1993), pp. 103-118

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, retrieved from:   http://www.jstor.org/stable/20081474,  accessed: 30/01/2010.

James, H. (2003). Europe reborn: A history, 1914 – 2000.  Harlow, England: Pearson Education Ltd.

Montefiore, S. (2003). Stalin: The court of the red tsar.  London: Orion House.

Rees, L. (2008). World War II behind closed doors: Stalin, Nazis and the west. London: BBC Books.

21. “An unnatural alliance that was bound to fall apart after the defeat of the common enemy.” To what extent does this statement explain the origin of the Cold War?

 

The statement “An unnatural alliance that was bound to fall apart after the defeat of the common enemy” is a perceptive yet incomplete explanation of the origins of the Cold War.  There is no doubt the USSR and the West had a common enemy, Nazi Germany. In many ways, the alliance was “unnatural” since the USSR and the Western countries were opposed to each other on so many issues, especially Communism vs. Capitalism.  However, one could argue that it was a natural alliance, since the countries involved were fighting for survival against the aggressive Axis Powers.  Once Nazi Germany was defeated, the rivals who formed the alliance were likely to fall apart, but that is not to say that the break-up of the alliance was inevitable.

Was the alliance between the USSR and the West (especially the UK, the USA and France) unnatural?  Perhaps.  The rivalry between the communist USSR and the Western Allies, who promoted capitalism and democracy, began with the Russian Revolution of 1917, when Lenin declared that the Russian Revolution was just the beginning of a worldwide proletariat revolution.  This was a threat to the capitalist countries of Western Europe and the USA.  The seriousness of the threat is a matter of debate for historians; however, the UK and the USA probably overreacted by supporting (with munitions and troops) the notoriously corrupt White Russian Armies who were trying to restore the imperial order in Russia.  This deepened the mistrust between the two sides, and made an alliance unlikely.

In 1933, Roosevelt restored relations between the USA and the USSR and relations were improving between those two countries, at least.  The same year Hitler took power and it soon became clear to observers East and West that Hitler was going to be a terrible menace.    International diplomacy was at a nadir, with the depression making countries reluctant to take initiatives, and the League of Nations proving ineffective.  Hitler then pulled Germany out of the League of Nations and then the USSR was invited to join, so the beginning of an alliance was in place by 1934.  

Later in the 1930s, the USSR and the Western Allies (or groups of their citizens) supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, so the possibility of cooperation between the Soviets and the West was still in place.  It seemed that Europe was splitting into two camps: Fascist and Anti-Fascist.  However, Britain and France chose appeasement after Hitler’s chest-thumping in Munich (1938), and Stalin trumped that by agreeing to the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  Now the stage was set for WWII: the two sides that would eventually fight the Nazis, East and West, did not confront Hitler together; instead, they were hoping that the other side would take the brunt of Hitler’s aggression.   So, the alliance between the USSR and the West had always been uneasy; it could only be an alliance of convenience, not of ideology, and it could be fairly called “unnatural.”

The cooperation between the USSR and the Western Allies probably reached its high point in 1944, after D-Day, when Stalin was relieved by his army’s victories and the opening of a Western Front.  Soon, however, the cracks began to appear.  In late 1944, when Churchill flew to Moscow and handed Stalin his infamous “Percentages Agreement,” it became clear that there would be rivalries between the victorious powers over the future of Central and Eastern Europe.  But there was still a war on and there was a fruitful alliance; Yalta cemented that alliance; although there were disagreements about the future of Europe, the “Big Three” got along famously amidst the euphoria of knowing that victory was not far away, and the “unnatural allaince” was strong, proud and unshakable.

Roosevelt, rather naively, liked and trusted Stalin, whom the Americans called “Uncle Joe.”  Even though the Atlantic powers (the UK and the
USA) met at Malta a few days before Yalta, there was some concern amongst his American advisors that Roosevelt liked Stalin better than Churchill.  On the question of India, in particular, Roosevelt preferred Stalin's stance to Churchill's.  There was a moment, in early 1945, when the Allies, might have been able to work together to plan the monumental task in front of them (reconstructing Europe, defeating Japan, and presenting a now model for governance to Asia) if the few visionaries (possibly including Roosevelt) amongst them had taken charge.  However, there was still a war on,  Roosevelt died in April of 1945 and the “unnatural alliance” began to fracture.

Truman was much less independent than Roosevelt, and in particular, he was dependent on the advice of some anti-communist advisors, including Averill Harriman and George Kennan.  Furthermore, by Potsdam, there was confusion about the leadership of Britain (Atlee was about to come in), and the conference was marked by mistrust  The greenhorn Truman couldn't believe that Stalin wasn't impressed by his announcement of a super-weapon -- of course, Stalin had known about it before Truman did.  Potsdam marls the beginning of the end of the unnatural alliance.

Was the unnatural alliance “bound to fall apart”?  Perhaps, but it seems to depend on what is meant by “bound”?  If Roosevelt had lived, for example, and Churchill had been returned to office, it is quite possible that the Atlantic partners in the Big Three would have been able to bring enough pressure to get the kind of changes they wanted in Eastern Europe.  They had clout, and they had no designs on the Soviet Union in 1945.  However, Stalin perceived Truman and Atlee as weak, and this gave him the confidence to move on Eastern Europe without fear of repurcussions, perhaps including The Bomb.

Even with the death of Roosevelt and the defeat of Churchill, there was still a window of opportunity.  After all, the Soviet Union was wrecked in the immediate post-war era.  The key was the Marshall Plan.  Stalin commented about the Marshall Plan to Molotov: “Look, the is NOT the Lend-Lease Agreement.”  Indeed, the Marshall Plan required policy advisors to come in and study and control the economy; in short, it would have required the USSR to switch from Communism to Capitalism.  If the US could have marshaled a softer agreement for the Soviet Union, considering its enormous contribution to the war effort, there might have been an opportunity to avoid the break-up of the alliance.

Therefore, the “unnatural alliance” was not “bound to fall apart”; however, it was still very likely to fall apart, especially under the circumstances, with Roosevelt's death and Churchill's removal to backstage, where he was troublesome.  The author of the above statement should be congratulated for a very succinct and perceptive explanation of the origin of the Cold War; however, upon close examination, the explanation is not complete.

 

 

The Cold War ended because of the collapse of the Soviet empire.  The collapse of the Soviet Empire was twofold: it was both political and economic.  The political collapse of the Soviet Empire was centered in Eastern Europe, where organizations such as Solidarność and Charter 77 put enormous pressure on a faltering and outdated political system.  The economic collapse of the Soviet Union was centered in Moscow itself.  The catalyst that accelerated the end of the Cold War was the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of glasnost and perestroika.

The Soviet Union was the major player in the Cold War.  Whether the Cold War began in 1917 (with the October Revolution, as many anti-communists argue) or just after World War II (a more conventional starting date), the Cold War is primarily the story of the Soviet Union and the world’s reaction to it.  The extraordinary 73 years of Soviet history (1919 – 1991) marked one of the boldest experiments in government and human engineering in modern times.  For most of those years, no one could predict that the Soviet Union would fail.  It wasn’t until the collapse of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th, 1989, that that anyone could imagine that the Soviet superpower would meet such an unglamorous end.  However, in retrospect, we can see that the political system built by Lenin and Stalin, anchored in secrecy and repression, was simply untenable by the end of the 1980s.

Stalin cemented his iron grip on the USSR after the assassination of Kirov in 1934.  For the next 20 years, through the purges, during the Second World War, and into the Cold War era, that political system seemed to work.  Indeed, while the democracies of the West were changing governments, Stalin could laugh at their expense.  Through his spy network, Stalin sometimes knew what was happening in Western governments better than the Western leaders knew themselves.  For example, he knew of the Manhattan Project before Harry Truman did. 

However, the Stalinist system of repression through the secret police was unpopular, particularly in the Eastern European satellite states.  In Czechoslovakia (1948), East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956), Stalinist methods were used to crush the yearning for political and economic reform.  But the yearning would not go away and it built up into what Václav Havel would later call “a pressure cooker.”  Tanks, secret police, assassinations, labor camps, and strongmen loyal to the USSR could not keep the lid fastened down forever, and by the Prague Spring of 1968, the immensely popular reformers were no longer throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at tanks, but were instead producing poems, novels, movies and even conversations with the tank drivers.  It had now been 23 years since the end of WWII, and the peoples of Eastern Europe wanted democracy and a better standard of living.

In the 1970s, increased oil and gas revenues allowed the Soviet Union to bribe its puppet states into accepting the Soviet system, but the USSR’s new wealth also brought them into closer contact with the West, resulting in more contradictions.  For example, the Helsinki accords of 1975 seemed to be a victory for the Soviet Union, as its dramatic postwar relocation of the Ukrainian, Polish and German borders, together with the massive population removals, were now codified into European law.  However, the human rights provisions signed at Helsinki would become troublesome to the USSR.  The momentum for political change in Eastern Europe was becoming unstoppable with the formation of groups like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, groups of Jewish emigrants from the USSR, who had earlier been refused emigration, and Helsinki Watch groups. 

In 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the disastrous occupation that followed demonstrated to the world that Soviet imperialism was weak.  Then, in 1980, Solidarność was formed, and this was the beginning of the end of the Eastern Bloc.  The pro-Soviet Polish regime, under Jaruzelski, could not repress Solidarnośc.  The labor union had multiple advantages which made it irrepressible: 1) it was a trade union, formed by workers, the backbone of any Communist system; 2) it was protesting higher food prices, so it was immensely popular; 3) it appealed for religious freedom in a period of Catholic resurgence in Poland sparked by Pope John Paul; 4) it appealed to huge communities of ethnic Poles in West Germany, France, the UK and the USA; and 5) it became the darling of Western news agencies in the TV era. These factors allowed Lech Walesa, chairman of Solidarność, to inform the police who arrested him, “this will be the end of your regime.”  It required another 7 or 8 years, but he was correct; the tanks and Stalinist measures that Jaruzelski used in December 1981 were out of date, and his days were numbered.

As the political forces in Eastern Europe gathered momentum, unstoppable economic forces were also rising.  The Stalinist system of 5-year-plans had outlived its usefulness.  In 1973, the Yom Kippur War and the OPEC Oil crisis drastically affected the world economy.  Oil prices more than tripled within a year or two.   This should have been a boon for the oil-rich Soviet economy, which was also discovering new oil and gas reserves, but the Soviet economy was mismanaged, and it was entering a period known as “Brezhnev Stagnation”.  The Soviet economy suffered from four related factors: 1) Inability to adjust to Global Market Forces; 2) Overemphasis on Central Planning, coupled with corruption and inefficiency; 3) Overreliance on Heavy Industries, including iron and steel; and 4) an enormous Military-Industrial Complex with powerful backers in the Politburo.

Once the Oil Crisis hit, adaptable economies, such as those of Japan and West Germany, adjusted to the new global reality.  They reduced their dependency on oil and gas, built more fuel-efficient cars and machinery, used and developed computers and electronics more efficiently, diversified their sources of raw materials, etc.  The Soviets, however, did no such thing.  Obsessed with 5-Year Plans, and with Heavy Industry, the Soviet economy churned out enormous quantities of steel and iron in the era of silicon and plastic.  By the Brezhnev era, the Soviet Union had developed “the greatest 1890s economy in the history of the world” (Eric Hobsbawm).

The Soviet Union had also achieved the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, but to what purpose?  They were surrounded by hostile powers, and with one mishap (as almost happened during the Able Archer incident of November 1983), nuclear missiles could come raining down on the Soviet Union from east, west, north and south.   The Soviet Union now had nuclear bragging rights but at the expense of a crippled economy.  The corruption, misappropriation, stagnation, and diversion of resources associated with this huge military apparatus forced the peoples of the Eastern Bloc into shortages, outages, queues, and general malaise.  At the same time, the information revolution made it obvious that the peoples of the West had a better standard of living than the peoples of the Eastern Bloc, a crucial causative agent in the end of the Cold War.

Finally, the ageing Soviet leadership gave way, not to economic or political inevitabilities, but to Death.   After “three elderly invalids in a row” (Martin Walker) succumbed to Father Time, Gorbachev entered with high ideals and bags of promises.  He introduced perestroika (restructuring) to solve the USSR’s economic woes and glasnost (openness) to solve the political problems.  Gorbachev was a breath of fresh air in Soviet leadership: affable, modern, well-educated, and immensely popular in Western Europe.  He debated with the common people on the streets of Eastern Europe and he clearly wanted to open Vaclav Havel’s “pressure cooker” and let off some steam.  However, he calculated that by introducing a few reforms, and letting off some steam, the grand Soviet system would resettle into a postmodern socialist utopia.  He grossly miscalculated.

Instead, once Gorbachev cracked the lid on the pressure cooker, the enormous pressure inside exploded into the end of the Cold War.  Politically, the peoples of Eastern Europe took what Gorbachev offered and then demanded more.  Economically, once market reforms began, the shrewd but previously repressed capitalists of Eastern Europe (including the 7 or 8 oligarchs who would take over the economy of Russia) started to amass incredible fortunes.

So, the end of the Cold War was centered in Eastern Europe, especially within the Soviet Union.  However, there is an alternative viewpoint.  From the perspective of American conservatives (after all, history is always written by the winners, isn’t it?) the Cold War was not lost by the Soviet Union but won by the USA.  This is what Melvyn Leffler has termed “the triumphalist viewpoint”, and he sums it up succinctly: “Ronnie Reagan won the Cold War!”  Many Reaganites would like to claim that Reagan and Thatcher’s policies, with their “moral clarity”, forced the Soviet Union to crumble.  However, a close inspection of the Reaganites’ own documents shows that they had no idea that the Soviet Union was about to collapse, and their policies were simply a continuation of the reactionary anti-Communism that formed part of the American political landscape since McCarthyism, or perhaps before: since the Riga Axioms dating back to the 1920s and early 1930s.

In conclusion, the Cold War was the story of the Soviet Union and its interaction with the rest of the world, especially in the era after WWII.  The Soviets lost because of their own failings -- the political and economic systems of the USSR could not survive in the rapidly globalizing world of the 1980s.  The Soviets produced great propaganda posters and banners of Lenin, but they could not compete with the poems of Szymborska or the plays of Havel.  The Soviets outperformed iron and steel quotas, and they produced great hockey teams, cosmonauts and nuclear missiles, but they were no match for Sony, Mercedes, and Coca-Cola.  The inefficiencies and contradictions within the Soviet system became unbearable to the Soviet leaders, especially after the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev.  The problems were gargantuan and the nations of the Soviet empire needed to surrender the Cold War in order to fix their own problems.

 

 

Today I told the Year 13s the story of the murder of Patrice Lumumba.  It's gruesome, but the story has been well-told:

It is very interesting to watch.

Historians debate when the Cold War began.  Some historians, typically anti-Communist or “Orthodox” in their view, consider the October Revolution of 1917 as the beginning of the Cold War.  Others, more likely to be Revisionist in their outlook, say the Cold War began in 1946 – 1947, when the containment policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan took hold.  However, the Cold War really began in 1945, when events surrounding the defeat of the Axis Powers turned wartime allies into post-war rivals.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, there was an amicable spirit.  Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill got along famously.  This was natural since the war against Germany was almost won, and the victorious allies were in a celebratory mood.  However, there were tensions beneath the surface of camaraderie.  Churchill and Roosevelt had met at Malta, for a few days before Yalta, and plotted their joint strategy not only against the Nazis, but against Stalin as well.  It was clearly two against one, and Stalin, with his superior network of spies, was well aware of that.  The potential debates over the future of Europe, over the war against Japan, over the policy towards a defeated Germany, and over make-up of the United Nations, were swept under the rug amidst the euphoria of allies who are about to win a war.  However, they would become significant later in 1945, especially at Potsdam.

The death of Roosevelt in April 1945 was one of the most significant events at the beginning of the Cold War.  After Roosevelt died, in stepped Harry S. Truman, just 83 days into his Vice-Presidency, and inexperienced in foreign affairs.  He didn’t impress elder Republican senators (the Republicans were the majority in the Senate) who had been senior to him in the Senate just a few months before, especially with proclamations like, “heck, fellas, say a prayer for me!”  This was the moment when US policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union turned to the right.   Roosevelt’s idealism and his belief that the West could work with the Soviets to create a peaceful and democratic postwar Europe were discarded in favor of the Riga Axioms: the Soviets are dangerous and expansionist, hell-bent on world revolution, continuing Tsarist designs on Europe, and not to be trusted.  Averell Harriman, with ties to trans-Atlantic business empires that were in a position to dominate the economy of Europe, and other prominent diplomats took charge of American foreign policy.  Truman was a bystander.

As Nazi Germany crumbled in May 1945, the West and the Soviets scrambled for loot.  All the victorious powers wanted a piece of Germany.  The Americans and the British were desperate to get the German rocket scientists.  The Soviets were intent on revenge.  As early as March 1945, rockets scientists and intelligence officers made secret arrangements to surrender to the West, so that they could avoid almost certain execution at the hands of the Red Army.  The Soviets were unambiguous: Nazi Germany deserved no sympathy; the Russians would take whatever they could get.  The Red Army moved through eastern Germany in the spring of 1945, raping, looting and destroying the local population.   A divided Germany was suddenly a de facto arrangement.  The different sides were obvious. The West, which was “soft on Fascism”, welcomed thousands of former Nazis into its ranks, especially to the Americas. The East was intent on punishing Germany and executing former Nazis.  This was the beginning of the division of the Germany: a central structural element of the Cold War.  Germany would remain divided for 45 years, when the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany marked the end of the Cold War.

In August 1945, the USA dropped atomic bombs on Japan.  This was a clear signal to the Soviets that further escalated Cold War tensions.  On August 6^th, the USA a-bombed Hiroshima, signaling to the Russians that the USA would be the sole power in post-war East Asia.  On August 9^th, Nagasaki was obliterated and on the same day, the Soviets sent their forces en masse into East Asia.  The scramble for Japan, China, Mongolia, etc. was underway, and it was an embryonic element of the Cold War. 

In conclusion, we can see how 1945 marked the beginning of the Cold War.  Some historians believe the Cold War started before 1945, but the wartime alliance between the two sides who would contest the Cold War shows the possibility of an amicable post-war arrangement.  In 1945 the two sides crystallized and the opportunity for a world without a Cold War was lost.  Some historians believe that the Cold War didn’t begin until 1946 – 1947.  However, the events of 1945 show that the tensions between the two sides were already irreconcilable, and the year of victory over the Axis Powers marked the beginning of the Cold War.

 

Mei-Ling asked a good question: in studying the Cold War, we are not hearing about Great Britain so much, why not? 

Great Britain was a Great Power for centuries, and probably achieved its pinnacle of imperial power in the years just after World War I.  However, the United States emerged as a Great Power during and after World War I, when Great Britain and other European countries, including France and Germany, owed the USA so much money (a problem discussed in Keynes’s classic booklet from 1919: The Economic Consequences of the Peace).

After WWII, much of the European continent was destroyed, Britain was nearly bankrupt, the USA’s economy was thriving, and the USA was the world’s only atomic power.  The transfer of superpower status to the USA was complete.  Household goods were being rationed in Great Britain in 1945.  The UK election of 1945 dismissed Churchill, an anti-communist and imperialist.   Arguably, Britain might have taken a larger role in the beginnings of the Cold War if the British electorate had retained Churchill as Prime Minister.  However, the new Labour government, under Clement Attlee, prioritized domestic problems, particularly the economy.  They promised full employment and social programs such as welfare and a national health care system.  Although Churchill dismissed such programs as “socialist,” this is what the voters wanted.  They appreciated Churchill’s leadership during the war, but now that the war was won, they wanted a government that would solve the problems at home, not a government that would send troops overseas under the banners of Empire and Anti-communism.

Furthermore, Attlee’s Labour Party was divided in its attitude towards the Soviet Union and the USA.  The left wing of the Labour Party was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and/or to the ideals of Communism.  However, the USA had democratic tradition and a giant economy that would soon start pouring money into Europe via the Marshall Plan, which attracted the centrists in the Labour Party.  Significantly, the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was anti-Soviet and pro-American, so during the six years of Attlee’s leadership, the British Foreign Policy drifted towards anti-communism and the American camp.

In addition to Bevin, we should also mention Frank Roberts.  Roberts was one of the more interesting interviewees in the Cold War video series.  He gave those interviews in the last year of his life, and one can detect the charm, humor and thoughtfulness for which he was famous.  He was a British diplomat in Moscow, just after the war, and he was a friend to George Kennan.  Roberts is one of the architects of the Cold War diplomatic policy in the West, and he is quoted on the opening page of the chapter I told you to read from Eric Hobsbawm’s book: The Age of Extremes.  Hobsbawm correctly observes that Roberts’ view of the Soviet Union changed drastically between 1945 and 1947.

The transcript of Roberts’ interview is interesting:

http://www.argumentations.com/Argumentations/StoryDetail_2300.aspx

To summarize, Great Britain was involved in early the Cold War, through diplomats such as Frank Roberts, but the primary concerns of Attlee’s government were domestic.  Furthermore, the primary foreign policy problems were not in Europe, but in the British colonies, which were demanding independence.  Therefore, in terms of foreign policy, the British had their hands full in places like India, Malaya, Kenya, and the Middle East.  This was very distressing to the Leader of the Opposition, Churchill, who returned in 1951 to proclaim, “I will not preside over the dismemberment of the empire.”

Ten or fifteen years ago, IB students (especially in so-called “American" schools) were taught basic lessons about the Historiography of the Cold War. They were taught that the original interpretation of the Cold War is called orthodox, and its thesis is:

The Origins of the Cold War were the in the actions of the Soviet Union: Stalin broke the agreements he made at Yalta, particularly on Poland, and this revealed Soviet expansionist tendencies, provoking a defensive reaction by the West. A principal proponent of this theory would be Thomas A. Bailey. Thomas A. Bailey wrote a famous high school textbook for AP American history, and the book is pro-American. In the early years, many IB schools were mixing IB history with AP History, so the book is well-known amongst IB students, especially at “American” schools.

In the 1960s, many American intellectuals (including professors and historians) became disenchanted with US Foreign policy, and there emerged a New Left among American historians, whose thesis was revisionist:

The USA wanted to dominate the post-war world, so it was aggressive towards the Soviet Union. Americans were trying to establish an empire, particularly an economic empire. Actually, the USA had been expanding and empire-building from the early 18^th Century, so the Cold War was a continuation of American expansionism. A principal proponent of this theory would be William Appleman Williams.

In other words, according to this type of thinking, the first school of thought, orthodox, primarily blames the Soviet Union. The second school of thought, revisionist, primarily blames the USA. We could summarize the orthodox school of thought as “it was the pinko commies’ fault!” We could summarize the revisionist school of thought as “it was the yanqui imperialists’ fault!” As Mei-ling pointed out: aren’t there historians who are more balanced? Yes, according to Wikipedia, Ms. Walker, and Tagore, there now comes a third school of thought: post-revisionist:

According to this school of thought, mistakes were made on both sides, both sides were characterized by fear and misunderstanding, and we cannot blame the Cold War on one side or the other. I would classify Martin Walker in this school, although John Lewis Gaddis claims (or at least once claimed) to be in the post-revisionist school, too.

If this conversation bores you, you can stop right here.

However, I cannot teach this because I don’t believe it. First of all it is terribly USA-centered (although Martin Walker grew up in the UK, he lives in the US, and all the other historians are American). There is no consideration of British historians, Norwegian historians, or Russian historians, for example. Secondly, I believe this fiction has been invented by the American right, including Gaddis, to make their position seem reasonable. Notice that Williams and the New Left are a reaction to the American establishment, and then Gaddis in turn is a reaction to the New Left.

Furthermore, IMHO, John Lewis Gaddis is clearly an apologist for the American establishment. If you google him, you will see him beaming after receiving his “Humanities Medal” from his pal George W. Bush. That’s a worrying sign to me, but even worse: I don’t like his books. He takes liberties with the truth. For example, after the Vietnamese coup against Diem in 1963, Gaddis claims that American officials were “shocked” to learn that Diem had been killed. But American officials organized the coup!

Lastly, the reference to Gaddis as a “post-revisionist” is a reference to the books he wrote in the 1970s. At that time, maybe you could think of Gaddis as a “post-revisionist”. However, since then he has written many more books. Lately, he has revealed his true colors: he is a fervent anti-communist, and, I would argue, a triumphalist. In essence, in books like Now We Know, he is arguing that the Americans won the Cold War because they had the better economic and political system: “Freedom” versus “Communism,” and the Soviets lost the Cold War because they oppressed their own people. There is some truth to his arguments, but I think his view is far too simplistic, and I have doubts about the political and economic system of a country which has been the richest country in the world for more than 60 years, and yet still has extreme poverty among its own citizens.

 

 

p.s. I apologize for using the word "American" to refer exclusively to the USA, but it is so common that it is hard to avoid.