In the Beginning
Armed Truce: The Beginning of the Cold War 1945-1946.
by Hugh Thomas.
Atheneum. 667 pp. $27.50.
More than four decades have passed since the end of World War II and the beginning of what we call the cold war that arose from it, yet the origins of the cold war and the responsibility for it remain the subject of serious controversy. That is understandable: the world in which we live has been largely shaped by the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the great issues of our time are related to that conflict. The interpretation of the causes of the cold war and of what some see as the failure to seize an opportunity to establish a true and lasting peace has therefore become a battleground, from which emerge justifications for one position or another in regard to the persistent conflict.
Those who place responsibility on the Soviet Union, seeing the cause of the cold war in the revolutionary imperialism of Stalin and the Soviet leaders who followed him, thereby justify America’s policy of resistance and containment resting on a strong political and diplomatic alliance of free nations and on a powerful military force as a deterrent to Soviet aggression. Those who take a different view of the Soviet Union and the Communist movement, or see America’s role in the world today as malign, place the blame for the cold war on the United States, whether because of its insensitivity to the needs and feelings of the Soviet Union, or because of some irrational hatred of Communism, or because of the inherently expansive, even imperialistic, character they attribute to capitalism.
The first interpretation dominated American thinking until the 1960’s, when a wave of left-wing revisionism began to argue for the second. The 1970’s saw the appearance of a number of post-revisionist studies that undermined most of the left-wing arguments without reverting to the earlier interpretation. The impression they gave is that there is some blame on both sides. Post-revisionism had a much smaller impact on the popular mind than did revisionism. It also has failed to take powerful hold in the academic world. My impression is that courses treating the cold war in most of the major universities in America today are taught mainly from the revisionist perspective, somewhat modified by the post-revisionist view. The earlier interpretation is rarely, if ever, presented favorably—to say nothing of a variant common in the 1950’s that blamed the United States, not for causing the cold war by excessive suspicion and toughness, but for allowing it to develop because of undue softness toward the Soviets that encouraged their aggression.
Students at universities typically emerge with generally revisionist assumptions that, to a considerable degree, shape their attitudes toward the problems and policies of our own day. The situation is similar to the one following World War I, when a revisionism that blamed that war not on Germany but on British and American “merchants of death” carried the day, dominated the thinking of a generation, and provided the basis for an isolationism that crippled the Western democracies and prevented them from resisting the growing menace of Italian Fascist, Nazi, and Japanese aggression.
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Such historical disputes, therefore, are not merely “quarrels between monks” but have great political importance. That is why there is reason to welcome Hugh Thomas’s great undertaking, a multivolume history of the cold war, of which the first volume has now appeared. It is very much in the tradition of the first interpretation, bolstered, however, by the mass of evidence that has come to light since the debate got under way. That debate has always been deformed, and to some degree will continue to be, by the vast disparity between the huge supply of evidence available on the Western side and the pitiful scraps of reliable information as to what Stalin and the Soviet Union were doing and thinking. Every fleeting and half-baked notion held by an American official shows up in somebody’s diary to be seized on by revisionists as evidence of one evil design or another. From the Kremlin we have nothing but official propaganda or silence.
Thomas has the advantage over his predecessors of the valuable evidence provided by the revelations of Stalin’s accomplice and eventual successor Nikita Khrushchev, by Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, and by his one-time confidant, the Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas, among others. These help redress the balance, and the result is a much fuller and fairer account of the thoughts and actions of the decision-makers on both sides than has been available in a single place.
The interpretation that emerges firmly places the blame for the conflict on the Soviet Union. Thomas sees Stalin’s Soviet Union as “a nation which aspired to world influence if not hegemony,” propelled by a combination of traditional Russian imperialism and Marxist-Leninist ideology, the two not contradictory but supporting each other. The chief cause of the conflict, however, he finds in the Communist ideology held by Stalin and those around him, which made them not so much unwilling as unable to come to terms with their former allies. Thomas places great emphasis on a statement made by Maxim Litvinov, former Soviet Foreign Minister, in June 1946. The root of the conflict, Litvinov said, was “the ideological conception prevailing here [in Moscow] that the conflict between Communist and capitalist worlds was inevitable.” If the West were to make all the concessions demanded, “It would lead to the West being faced, in a more or less short time, with the next series of demands.”
Such an interpretation renders irrelevant any questions about British and American actions. Readers, therefore, who look for detailed, point-by-point refutations of revisionist arguments will be disappointed. From time to time, and especially in the brief concluding chapter, Thomas rebuts some of these without taking on their authors directly and by name, but from the perspective he uses in this book they are beside the point.
This approach is probably a tactical mistake. Readers who begin by being disinclined to accept Thomas’s general interpretation, and they will be many, would benefit greatly from the specific, well-documented critiques he is well qualified to make. As it stands, this book runs the risk of preaching only or chiefly to the converted and ignoring the infidel. If that is the result it would be a great pity. Though it is a long, sprawling, not perfectly organized volume that cries out for more careful editing, a bibliography, and more helpful footnotes, it nevertheless offers an account of the origins of the cold war that is intelligent, persuasive, and full of information and understanding that needs to be known and absorbed by many readers, regardless of the prejudices they bring to it.
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Perhaps the most useful part, because its subject is so little known, is Book Three, “Disputed Lands,” in which Thomas offers a survey of how the postwar settlement came into being in the lands between the two great powers, from Poland to China, Japan, Korea, and Indochina. History, local conditions, the presence or absence of the Red Army, all help explain why some places fell under Stalin’s sway and others did not, but a general pattern emerges. The Soviet Union never failed to pursue its interests in the world of power politics, unless prevented by circumstances beyond its control.
Stalin, like Clausewitz, perfectly understood that the purpose of war is the extension of a nation’s political power and influence. When, as in Greece, Stalin allowed the British to prevail and chose not to support the Greek Communists, it was as part of a quid pro quo that gave him a free hand in Rumania. Except in such rare instances, Stalin pushed for the greatest advantage possible by whatever means were available.
The most usual procedure, characteristic especially of the Eastern European states, was the establishment of coalition governments that gave the appearance of freedom and autonomy. The Communist party, better organized than its opponents, led by experienced men who had been trained in the USSR for many years, would gain control of the ministries that controlled the police and the other security forces and imprison, terrorize, and murder their opponents until the time was ripe to tear away the veil and reveal a monolithic totalitarian state subservient to the Soviet Union. Similar techniques seem to be equally effective in the world today.
Western leaders, on the other hand, were confused, disunited, uncertain of their own goals and of their relations with one another, often ignorant of Russian and Communist history, and ill-informed about Stalin and his regime. They vacillated between attempts to win his good will and bouts of disappointment, suspicion, fear, and anger, when his words and actions confounded their hopes. The Western powers arrived at most of their decisions toward the end of the war on the basis of purely military considerations, in the hope of ending the fighting as soon as possible and sometimes with an eye toward avoiding conflict with the Soviets.
This explains why Eisenhower did not march eastward to Berlin when he could easily have done so, just as Patton could have marched into Prague but was held back. The Western powers also aided Communist partisans rather than their anti-Communist countrymen in Yugoslavia chiefly because Tito’s forces were judged more effective fighters. For quite different reasons, the Soviets moved forward to occupy whatever territory they could reach and never overlooked political goals. Thus they murdered a good part of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn forest and deliberately allowed the Germans to slaughter the insurgent Polish Home Army in Warsaw, preventing the Western nations from sending help. The notion that American behavior was the cause of objectionable Russian actions in 1945 and 1946 will not survive an honest reading of Thomas’s valuable narrative.
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Even the most casual reflection on the story Thomas tells will suggest that if any major developments in history can be called inevitable, the postwar conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States is one of them. The USSR’s modern history is a story of constant pressure against its neighbors and, when possible, expansion into their territory. One major goal of the czars and their Communist successors has been to control Poland and eastern Germany in order to defend the western approaches to their country and serve as a springboard for further advances of their own. Another has been to gain hegemony over the Balkans, a project especially dear to the Pan-Slavists of the 19th century. When the combative and apocalyptic Communist ideology is added to that historical tradition, the result is not likely to be a peaceful accommodation—unless other nations are willing to yield the entire Eurasian land mass to Soviet domination in one form or another.
The Americans had hopes of reaching a friendly settlement with Stalin, working out remaining disagreements through the newly formed United Nations, withdrawing and demobilizing their forces, and turning their attention to other things. They could not do so. World War II had started over the invasion of Poland. The Allies could hardly abandon that tragic nation to Stalin without protest, but any truly independent Poland would seem an intolerable threat to the Soviet Union. Promises of free elections made at Yalta were bound to be broken, and their breach would surely and, as Thomas’s account shows, rightly be taken as signs of Soviet bad faith and unacceptable ambitions.
For similar reasons conflict was inevitable, too, over Germany and over Western Europe, where Communist parties under the influence or control of Stalin disrupted attempts to return to normal conditions. No American government could long stand aside. The only questions were when Western leaders would recognize reality and how ably they would deal with it.
By 1946, Stalin’s actions in violation of written agreements, an unpleasant shift in the tone of his and his associates’ public statements, revelations of widespread Soviet espionage against the United States and Canada, and the complete failure of Western protests to have any effect, finally brought a greater degree of clarity to American understanding and with it a determination in American leaders to resist. Armed Truce breaks off at that point. Hugh Thomas’s further volumes promise the story of how the struggle developed. We may hope for improvements in them along the lines I have suggested here. However that may be, if they are as informative as this one they will be well worth reading.
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