The Lost Peace

by Robert Dallek

  In October, Stalin went to a Black Sea retreat for six weeks to rest and recover. During his absence, Politburo members Molotov, Beria, Georgy Malenkov, and Anastas Mikoyan administered day-to-day affairs, though Stalin still ruled on all larger matters. When Stalin read that rumors about his health problems were circulating in the Western press and that Molotov and Marshal Zhukov might replace him, he became incensed at his associates. Molotov, in particular, who was urging a softer line toward the West, became the object of Stalin’s wrath. But he wormed his way back into Stalin’s good graces with requests for forgiveness that demonstrated his obeisance to his master.

  The conflict between the two partly grew out of substantive policy differences: Molotov understood that the USSR could not possibly control the United States and push it out of Europe or East Asia, but Stalin would not relent on his goal. It made for tensions with Molotov and other Stalin lieutenants, who he saw defying him. Above all, it challenged Stalin’s “insatiable vanity and love of power” and agitated his “inordinate touchiness, an endless vindictiveness, an inability ever to forget an insult or a slight…. He is said once to have observed that there was nothing sweeter in life than to bide the proper moment for revenge, to insert the knife, to turn it around, and to go home for a good night’s sleep.”

  Although his ruthless, vindictive side was never far from the surface, Stalin muted it with ingenious political calculation and maneuvering. In the presence of foreigners, he masked his basest instincts: “There was no striving for effect,” Kennan said. “His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed, they often were. An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious façade.”

  During the all-night dinners attended by his inner circle, the men he kept closest to him, Stalin was more overtly dominating and made himself the object of deference and rivalry for his attention. In his dealings with these men and Soviets more generally, it was possible to see Stalin’s “unconscionable ambition and ruthlessness…. This was a man of incredible criminality, of a criminality effectively without limits; a man … without pity or mercy; a man in whose entourage no one was ever safe.” And the people who were closest to him and shared most directly in his crimes were in greatest danger, because he could never trust anyone with his most closely held secrets.

  Although Stalin’s dinners were ostensibly devoted to policy discussions or what an associate called a “political dining society,” they were Stalin’s way of consolidating his control over the Politburo, the Communist Party leaders who uncritically accepted Stalin’s dictates while publicly pretending to be part of a democratic inner circle voicing independent viewpoints that represented the many different ethnic and interest groups making up the Soviet Union.

  The courtiers survived by reading Stalin’s moods and responding to them with words and gestures that avoided anything that might distress him and appealed to his desire to be admired, put on a pedestal as some great historical figure. Anyone who made him uneasy risked exposure to sarcasm or a tongue-lashing, though revenge would more often take the form of an icy silence. More drastic consequences would usually occur later—after the offender had left Stalin’s presence.

  It seems reasonable to conclude, without formal discussion of psychopathology, that Stalin was uniquely abnormal, which says next to nothing about the man’s troubled mind. But to what possible category can psychologists ascribe one who killed so many people with seemingly little, if any, regret? Even if we could classify him, it would provide little clue as to how he managed to hold so much power for so long in so large a nation.

  A more important question: Was it ever possible to reach reliable agreements with Stalin? Kennan, who was one of a handful of American experts on Soviet Russia and had spent more than twenty years monitoring the inner workings of its operations, thought not. A man of exceptional intelligence with a genuine regard for Russia’s language, culture, and history, Kennan was no knee-jerk anti-Communist but a thoughtful analyst committed to explaining, as best he could, why and how Stalin behaved as he did. Joining the Foreign Service in 1925 after graduating from Princeton, Kennan used his posting to the Baltic countries to monitor developments in the Soviet Union. When the United States gave formal recognition to Russia’s Communist government in 1933, Kennan’s expertise on Soviet Russia and a command of the Russian language won him a posting to Moscow.

  Having served in Russia throughout the war, Kennan could speak with considerable authority on Stalin. “Unlike Lenin, who could view objective reality as something apart from himself,” Kennan concluded at the end of the 1950s, “Stalin was able to see the world only through the prism of his own ambitions and his own fears.” Because Stalin’s dominance and outlook blurred the actual antagonisms between Russia and its rivals, Kennan could see no way to find shared interests that could ameliorate tensions between East and West. Lenin was more approachable. It was possible to communicate with him, as was the case later with Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, and therefore to doubt “whether an enemy with whom one can communicate is really entirely an enemy, after all.”

  Yet Stalin was not simply the sum of his distorted thinking about opponents. After the Nazi attack on Russia in 1941, he went into a blue funk at his failure to anticipate Hitler’s “betrayal” of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939. As the Nazis overwhelmed the Soviet armies in the opening days of the fighting, Stalin declared himself a failure: “Everything’s lost,” he told Politburo comrades. “I give up. Lenin founded our state and we’ve fucked it up.” Stalin did not show up at the Kremlin for two days while the fighting fronts were collapsing. While his withdrawal was a genuine sign of a breakdown in this worst crisis of his career, it was also contrived “for effect.” It was Stalin’s way of demanding a reaffirmation of his authority from the Politburo. And it worked. He was assured that he was the indispensable leader, and he seized upon this renewed vote of confidence to destroy military chiefs who became the scapegoats for the defeats.

  My point here is that Stalin did not function solely through his distorted views of reality, of which there were plenty. He also could see his way clear to deal with unpalatable truths—the sacrifices that would have to be made to defeat Hitler’s armies, and after the war, the limits of what he could do to assure Russia’s national security. In sum, however small the likelihood of accommodations with the West in the post-1945 years, it was not impossible. Had Stalin lived into the 1970s, for example, it is imaginable that like Khrushchev and Brezhnev he might have accepted détente as a necessary accommodation with the United States.

  Jimmy Byrnes did not share Kennan’s view of Stalin as having no interest in international agreements. Byrnes’s assumption, however, would prove to be out of sync with current affairs. He attributed the stalemate at the London conference in September 1945 to Molotov, who, Byrnes believed, was at odds with his ostensible master. When the London talks reached an impasse over postwar treaties, Byrnes took it as a personal failure and decided that he needed to go to Moscow. A Byrnes associate recorded in a diary, “He [Byrnes] is blue over outlook. [He] has no confidence in building peace with M[olotov], sees only solution for next meeting to be held in M[oscow] where he can deal with Stalin.”

  Mindful that Byrnes was vulnerable to his manipulation, Stalin agreed to have a Big Three foreign ministers’ conference in Moscow in December. Kennan, then counselor of embassy, considered the meeting to sign peace treaties with defeated foes a serious mistake. “The entire world of thought out of which these encounters [Yalta, Potsdam, and now Moscow] arose was foreign and distasteful to me,” he recalled. He saw them as doing nothing more than preserving “some fig leafs of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship in the respective Eastern European countries.” Kennan “saw little to be gained by our having anything at all to do with the new regimes in these countries.” The Moscow talk
s seemed likely to convey the false impression that the United States had some influence “in the Soviet-dominated area, or that the countries in question faced anything less than the full rigor of Stalinist totalitarianism.”

  Kennan, who sat in on the meetings, recorded the pointlessness of the proceedings. Molotov “sat leaning forward over the table, a Russian cigarette dangling from his mouth, his eyes flashing with satisfaction and confidence as he glanced … [at] the other foreign ministers, obviously keenly aware of their mutual differences and their common uncertainty in the face of the keen, ruthless, and incisive Russian diplomacy. He had the look of a passionate poker player who knows he has a royal flush and is about to call the last of his opponents. He was the only one who was clearly enjoying every minute of the proceedings.”

  Kennan was scathing about Byrnes’s reckless lack of preparation and self-serving motives: Byrnes’s “main purpose is to achieve some sort of an agreement, he doesn’t much care what. The realities behind this agreement, since they concern only such people as Koreans, Rumanians, and Iranians, about whom he knows nothing, do not concern him. He wants an agreement for its political effect at home.” As far as Kennan could tell, Byrnes was little more than a slick, parochial politician angling to carry home a diplomatic agreement that he could trumpet in a run for the presidency.

  Kennan’s observations, which he confided to only a handful of embassy associates and a few sympathetic members of the Moscow diplomatic corps, had no impact on Byrnes’s discussions. He drove forward on a variety of subjects, including shared information on atomic energy, European peace treaties, Japan’s occupation, a coalition government in China, and a provisional Korean government; differences over Iran and Turkey were notable by their absence from the conference’s final communiqué.

  Although Byrnes would hail the outcome of the talks in a December 30 address to the nation as a return to Big Three cooperation similar to wartime collaboration, the results were much less than they seemed. The agreements, such as they were, did nothing to change current power arrangements in Eastern Europe, Asia, or the emerging nuclear arms race. The conference was most notable for its negative impact on the Truman-Byrnes relationship.

  Truman complained that Byrnes proceeded without full consultation with the president and arrived at agreements that he could not fully endorse. Specifically, Truman objected to the commitments Byrnes had made to recognize the Soviet-controlled Bulgarian and Rumanian governments and to share scientific information with Moscow about atomic energy. In a letter to Byrnes on January 5, 1946, the president stated his dissatisfaction with Byrnes’s freelancing, complaining that he had not been kept sufficiently informed, and declared his determination to warn the Soviets against threatening either Iranian or Turkish sovereignty. He decried Byrnes’s compromising, which was code for the ultimate diplomatic blunder of appeasement, and promised that American foreign policy would now follow a tougher line, declaring, “I’m tired [of] babying the Soviets.”

  Whether Truman was kept as “completely in the dark” as he alleged is open to question. His differences with Byrnes rested on muted personal tensions and more overt disputes about what was realistic in dealing with the Russians. Truman had cause for annoyance with Byrnes’s almost dismissive attitude toward him. Byrnes could not disguise his ongoing resentment that Roosevelt had chosen Truman over him for the vice presidency and that Truman instead of Byrnes was president and commander in chief. Truman, who jealously guarded the prerogatives of office and resented anyone who exacerbated his own abundant personal doubts about his fitness for the presidency (he had confided to Mrs. Roosevelt that alongside FDR, he could not think of himself as president), was stung by Byrnes’s show of independence and, by December 1945, determined to dismiss him at the first opportunity.

  Truman’s personal antagonism to the man he now described as “my conniving secretary of state” combined with political pressures and policy differences to force a break with Byrnes. Before Byrnes went to Moscow, he had confronted an explosion of conservative opposition over sharing atomic energy information with the Soviets. In November, after Byrnes had reached an agreement with Attlee and Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King on how to go about bringing Russia and the United Nations into conversations on future control of nuclear weapons, he belatedly invited Michigan Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg and Texas Democrat Tom Connally, the ranking members of the Foreign Relations Committee, to endorse the procedure. They resented being presented with a fait accompli.

  Two days before he left for Moscow, Byrnes’s plans for conciliatory talks on atomic energy with the Russians provoked the senators’ sharp opposition. Moreover, when he returned from the conference with an agreement that Vandenberg saw as failing to safeguard U.S. atomic secrets, the Truman White House became vulnerable to charges of appeasing the Russians. Separating himself from Byrnes by suggesting that the secretary had reached an agreement without the president’s full endorsement protected Truman from Republican attacks. Truman also kept his distance from his secretary of state by insisting on stronger protections against Soviet use of U.S. technology to build an atomic arsenal. Although they played only a small role in the president’s dealings with the Soviets over atomic power, such personal and political considerations demonstrated how crucial foreign policy questions had become enmeshed with domestic politics.

  By the time Byrnes went to Moscow, Truman was already highly skeptical of the Soviets, whom he saw as untrustworthy, all too ready to reach agreements they would never honor. Soviet behavior toward Iran had intensified Truman’s doubts. The Soviets had promised to remove troops from Iran’s northernmost provinces, where they had been stationed since 1941 as a defense against a German takeover of Iranian oil fields, six months after the close of the war. But after the war ended in Europe, Moscow used Iranian threats to Russian security as a reason to delay a troop withdrawal. Soviet suspicions of Anglo-American interest in controlling Middle East oil and a perceived threat to Russian oil fields bordering Iran gave some substance to their fears.

  With each side now distrustful of the other’s professions of good intentions, and seeing the other as pursuing aggressive rather than defensive policies, Iran became a case study in how differing perspectives divided the wartime allies. Preventing Soviet dominance of the Persian Gulf, a Western lifeline to essential Middle East energy supplies, was seen in London and Washington as vital to the defense of Western Europe against a Communist stranglehold on its economy. On the other hand, forestalling Western control of a border country that could pose a threat to its Baku oil fields was, in Moscow’s view, a sensible act of self-defense rather than one of hostile aggression.

  The differences over Iran joined with suspicions of Soviet intentions toward Turkey to further erode wartime ties. Historical Russian interest in the Dardanelles, the passageway through Turkish territory into the Sea of Marmara running east of Istanbul and into the Black Sea, had long been a security concern. In 1944 attacks on Crimean targets by eight German warships that had passed through the straits without Turkish resistance had convinced Stalin that Turkish control of the Dardanelles had given a small nation “a hand on Russia’s throat.” At Yalta and Potsdam, Stalin demanded shared control of the straits with Turkey, a Soviet base in the Dardanelles, and return of Russian—or more precisely, Armenian—territory ceded to the Turks in 1921. Truman proposed internationalization of the Straits as a way to defuse the issue. But when Stalin rejected his proposal at Potsdam, pointing out that neither the British nor the Americans would agree to internationalize the Suez or Panama canals, Truman saw it as a prelude to a Soviet attack on Turkey.

  Stalin dismissed talk of Soviet aggression against its southern neighbor as “rubbish.” Truman, however, persisted in his belief that Stalin intended to seize the straits at the first opportunity, and the presence of 200,000 Soviet troops in Bulgaria gave resonance to his fears. Their withdrawal in November 1945, however, did not reassure the president, who assumed that they could return at
any time. In December he privately expressed the conviction that the Soviets only understood force and that he regretted the absence of any divisions he could send to the eastern Mediterranean to dampen Moscow’s ambitions.

  American sleight of hand on limiting a Soviet role in Japan’s occupation convinced Stalin that Washington was as intent on checking Soviet power in East Asia as Moscow had been in limiting Anglo-American influence in Eastern Europe and Iran. Although Byrnes had agreed to an Allied Control Council for Japan that included the Soviet Union, MacArthur’s chairmanship of the council, which gave him controlling authority, meant that Moscow had no more than a symbolic presence in postwar Japan.

  While the United States was firmly in control of Japan, it was uncertain about whether it would be able to keep Korea, which was under divided occupation by U.S. and Soviet troops, out of the Communist orbit. Likewise, Indochina, where the French were reestablishing colonial rule, was threatened by a Communist insurgency. The competition for dominance in East Asia, however, revolved around China—the biggest postwar prize in the battle for hearts and minds in the emerging East-West conflict.

  The object of Roosevelt’s and then Truman’s policies was to tie the Chinese to the United States by keeping peace in Asia and promoting self-determination for former colonies. Because Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government was so weak, the United States had tried to avert a civil war that could give Communist insurgents, ostensibly tied to Moscow, control of the country. A coalition government of Nationalists and Communists supported by both Washington and Moscow seemed to be the best solution. For self-serving reasons, Stalin, who feared the emergence of a Chinese Communist regime as a rival for world control of Communist parties and a threat to U.S. influence in East Asia that might drag Moscow into a confrontation with America in China, was ready to sign on to such an arrangement. But neither Chiang nor Mao Tse-tung, both of whom believed they could outlast the other in a military contest, yielded to U.S.-Soviet pressure.