The Lost Peace

by Robert Dallek

  The partition and British withdrawal on schedule left the United Nations and Washington struggling to head off bloodshed. But neither had the wherewithal or the will to enforce a proposal for a trusteeship that aimed to delay partition and provide a temporary solution. In fact, neither the UN nor the Truman administration had the power to halt the movement toward a two-state solution and the fighting that it provoked. Neither could come up with a better alternative. Jews in Palestine and the United States rejected trusteeship as delaying the inevitable establishment of a Jewish state, while Arabs refused to agree to Israeli independence. Because the existence of Israel seemed to be a foregone conclusion, Truman saw no reason to delay recognition and lose the political and moral advantages it gave him.

  The decision to recognize Israel did not endear Washington to the Arabs, but it did not result in an immediate Soviet gain among them. As anticipated, Arab economic ties to the West were too strong to give Moscow an immediate advantage in the Middle East. In time, however, East-West competition for influence in the region would become a critical part of the Cold War.

  6

  THE TRIUMPH OF FEAR

  …

  The world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain;

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  —Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” 1867

  Across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, the end of the war brought not confidence in the future but doubt and apprehension. Recovery from the devastation wrought by the most destructive weapons in history seemed as arduous a challenge as anything faced by modern societies. And would the reconstruction be the prelude to yet greater future destruction in a world addicted to war?

  For a country as damaged as the Soviet Union, the problem of mobilizing the public for the Herculean effort seemed particularly daunting. Having extracted so much from his long-suffering countrymen in the war, Stalin wrestled with questions of how to instill new resolve in the survivors of the Nazi invasion and occupation, which left few families without physical losses and emotional despair. When one of Stalin’s inner circle recommended that two high-ranking officials accused of incompetence should be shot, Stalin replied, “It’s easy to shoot people. It’s more difficult to make them work,” although he was all too happy to imprison and murder anyone justly or unjustly suspected of opposing him.

  Andrei Zhdanov, a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and party chief in Leningrad, was Stalin’s number-two man after the war. Eighteen years Stalin’s junior, he shared a love of history and literature with Stalin and was known as Stalin’s “fellow intellectual.” The offspring of middle-class educators, Zhdanov acted as a kind of court jester, entertaining Stalin by singing, playing the piano, and telling jokes. But Stalin also saw him as a man of substance who could be charged with the oversight of Soviet cultural affairs to promote national unity. Zhdanov declared that “with millions dead and the economy destroyed,” the key to national revival was through “a new concept of spiritual values … based on classical [Russian] culture.”

  Zhdanov was also given control of foreign policy, which largely meant eradicating “alien influences” on popular thinking. While Stalin and Zhdanov expected to keep Soviet forces in Eastern Europe for the foreseeable future and then maintain control of the occupied countries with Soviet loyalists, they also aimed to ensure that contacts with Eastern Europeans did not infect Russia with subversive ideas. Exposure to the outside world inevitably produced comparisons that could not possibly favor Stalin’s governance and the Soviet standard of living, even in Eastern Europe, where Western influences were commonplace. Soviet prisoners of war and soldiers who had been exposed to the outside world as well as those who had shown any affinity for their German occupiers were sent to the gulag, where they could not tell the masses what they had seen and absorbed from foreigners.

  While Stalin was determined to close off Russia from the outside world, he was less keen on raising public morale and commitment to the Kremlin through associations with the country’s long-term past. His objective was to reestablish the total authority of Communist ideology and to regenerate the excitement and hope associated with the Bolshevik revolution.

  To move the country forward, Stalin believed it essential to assert total personal and Communist Party control at home and in Russia’s near western and eastern neighbors abroad. As the war was coming to an end, he predicted that “the soldiers [would be] forgotten and lapse into oblivion.” The first order of business was to eliminate the sway of the military chiefs who had brought victory in the war. They were seen as competitors for power with Stalin and the party. It meant consigning Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the greatest hero of the fighting, who was credited with the defeat of German forces at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Berlin, to the shadows. His hold on the public’s sympathies was seen by Stalin and the Politburo as a potential challenge to their authority. During 1946, Zhukov disappeared from the Soviet state media. History was rewritten to give other lesser military chiefs credit for victories in the Great Patriotic War. Soviet citizens cynical about the Kremlin’s manipulation of the past joked that the present and the future were easy to imagine. Only the past was unpredictable.

  For Stalin, the public’s enthusiasm for his Communist regime could no longer rest principally on promises of a better life for the masses. The moral and spiritual excitement generated by the revolution had waned. “The fire of revolutionary Marxism has definitely died out,” Kennan told Washington in May 1945. Stalin had under his command “a submissive but no longer an inspired mass of followers.”

  Moreover, the higher standard of living in every Western non-Communist society was a testament to the productivity of private enterprise and capitalism’s superiority to state ownership of the means of production. The need for isolation from the West chiefly rested on the demoralization and opposition to the Soviet experiment that contact seemed certain to bring. True, Stalin could still promise that in the long run communism would outstrip capitalism, which the Great Depression of the 1930s had demonstrated was no panacea for workers seeking security from impoverishment. But the emergence of the United States as the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation at the close of the war represented a transparent refutation to Soviet assertions of superiority as an economic and social system.

  On February 9, 1946, in a nationally broadcast speech from Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, Stalin used the occasion of elections to the Supreme Soviet to make the case to his people for Soviet rule. Because he could not send Zhukov into obscurity without paying homage to the Soviet military, his speech celebrated the courage and brilliance of Soviet fighting forces.

  Yet victory in the war was principally depicted as the result of socialism’s great leap forward in preparing and supplying the country’s military. Gone from the discussion was any mention of Allied supplies, of the sacrifices of British and American convoys ferrying munitions to the Soviet Union through hazardous waters. There was no question but that the lion’s share of Soviet fighting capacity was homegrown. But ignoring the contributions of American lend-lease to Soviet success was a sign of the distance Stalin now believed essential to put between East and West. Stalin also declared that Soviet science would be a favored child in the future, signaling that Moscow would not allow the United States to maintain its monopoly of atomic bombs: “I have no doubt that if we give our scientists proper assistance they will be able in the very near future not only to overtake but even outstrip the achievements of science beyond the borders of our country,” he declared.

  More disturbing were assertions that the two world wars were the inevitable result of the competition produced by “monopoly capitalism.” The rivalry among the capitalist states for raw materials and markets split
them into hostile camps that ended in armed conflict. “Perhaps catastrophic wars could be avoided if it were possible periodically to redistribute raw materials and markets among the respective countries … by means of concerted and peaceful decisions,” Stalin asserted. “But this is impossible under the present capitalist conditions of world economic development,” more than suggesting that Soviet Russia would need to prepare itself for the inevitable round of future wars that could once again threaten its existence.

  In Stalin’s rendering of events, World War II tested the Soviet economic and social systems. The war proved “the foreign press”— which decried Soviet Russia as “a ‘dangerous experiment’ that was doomed to failure,” a “house of cards” certain to collapse under the weight of the Nazi invasion—dead wrong. The Soviet victory not only refuted these assertions but also demonstrated that “the Soviet social system has proved to be more viable and stable than the nonSoviet social system, that the Soviet social system is a better form of organization of society than any non-Soviet social system.” One can only imagine the extent of the cynical response to Stalin’s pronouncement in a country that was struggling to repair its collapsed infrastructure and achieve a minimal standard of living.

  Yet in Stalin’s rendition of history, past superiority was insufficient to insulate the country from future dangers. The challenge now was to build upon past achievements with five-year plans that would “rehabilitate the devastated regions of our country” and increase the national economy threefold from its prewar levels. “Only when we succeed in doing that,” Stalin ominously declared, “can we be sure that our Motherland will be insured against all contingencies. This will need perhaps another three five-year plans, if not more. But it can be done, and we must do it.”

  Stalin’s principal associates echoed and expanded upon his pronouncements. Kennan reported from Moscow on the “militant” character of other Politburo members’ speeches. They warned that “forces of Fascist reaction are still alive in … bourgeois democracies and elsewhere.” Although they had defeated Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan, the Soviet Union was still facing “capitalist encirclement” and could put no faith in international collaboration. Kennan described “an attitude of total suspicion toward motives of [the] outside world…. ‘All those who may think of organizing new war against [the] Soviet Union should remember that it is already a mighty power,’” he quoted one speaker as saying.

  In 1979, I had a firsthand encounter with the Soviet determination to portray itself as a great power. In September 1979, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, the Yugoslavs invited historians from all the belligerents in the conflict to participate in a five-hour television discussion of the war. During a social gathering the evening before, the Soviet representative, a retired general from a historical institute, began talking about “the three world wars.” I interrupted to ask what was the third world war. He dismissively declared: “The Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and World War II, and if you don’t know this, you must be a sociologist and not an historian.” I could not resist deflating him a bit the next evening before the cameras by asking him about the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact.

  Whether Stalin actually thought that the capitalist nations caused the two world wars and would now threaten the world with another conflict by their competition with each other seems open to question. Walter Bedell Smith, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow beginning in 1946, saw divisions in the Politburo over what Russia might expect from the West: a divided group of nations that would fight one another or a coalition of states intent on combating communism. Stalin apparently sided with those who saw a temporary unity of purpose in the Western democracies, which felt endangered by the Soviet Union and were committed to bringing her down. He anticipated the revival of German power in “twelve to fifteen years.” As the war was ending, Stalin privately predicted: “We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we’ll have another go at it.”

  He also saw the danger of outside attack from the West, whether directly by Anglo-American forces armed with atomic bombs or by a resurrected Germany doing the bidding of Russia’s former allies, as a powerful motivator of national unity. With famine afflicting Soviet citizens in 1946, Stalin badly needed something more to sustain his control than happy talk about the virtues of the Soviet system. As in the past, suppression of dissent by execution or imprisonment in the gulags staved off any meaningful threat to Communist power. But rhetoric about the danger of “the other”—ruthless, self-serving capitalist countries—seemed like an even more effective means of stimulating a new surge of national solidarity under a Communist Party promising to advance the well-being of workers at home and abroad. Intimidation and paranoia were Stalin’s most effective weapons for defending his rule from any internal desire for a new regime.

  The response in the United States to the rhetoric from Moscow among public officials and attentive citizens was a mixture of disbelief, self-reproach, and appeals for reciprocated militancy. Was Stalin threatening or at least preparing for a war with the United States? Truman and Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state, scoffed at the idea. The president dismissed the belief in a February 1946 speech at the Women’s Press Club in Washington, saying that it reminded him of a senator who cynically declared, “Well, you know, we always have to demagogue a little before elections.” Averell Harriman, the tough-minded wartime ambassador to Moscow, also described the speeches as principally directed at the Soviet public. When Paul Nitze, a State Department official who was alarmed by Stalin’s pronouncements, described them as a “delayed declaration of war on the U.S.,” Acheson chided him for “just seeing mirages. Paul, you see hobgoblins under the bed. They aren’t there. Forget it.”

  That Truman and Acheson were more concerned than they let on, and purposely played down the Soviet threat to head off an overreaction in the United States, is possible, and even probable. By early February 1946, both of them were already leery of Soviet intentions. Yet they also shared former vice president and now secretary of commerce Henry Wallace’s feeling that too much harsh talk about Russia was provoking Stalin into a defensive reaction. When former U.S. ambassador to Moscow William C. Bullitt warned Wallace that Stalin’s speech signaled Soviet preparation for war against the West, Wallace told him that Stalin’s rhetoric “was accounted for in some measure by the fact that it was obvious to Stalin that our military was getting ready for war with Russia; that they were setting up bases all the way from Greenland, Iceland, northern Canada and Alaska to Okinawa with Russia in mind. I said that Stalin obviously knew what these bases meant and also knew the attitude of many of our people through our press. We were challenging him and his speech was taking up the challenge.”

  Others took the Soviet rhetoric at face value and urged the need for reciprocated toughness. Although Time magazine conceded that Stalin’s speech might have been given “for purely Russian reasons,” it described his language as “the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day.” Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas labeled Stalin’s talk a “Declaration of World War III.” And the widely syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, “Now that Stalin has [decided] to make military power his first objective, we are forced to make a corresponding decision.” Lippmann described the need for a “new mighty upsurge of national economy to balance it [the Soviet threat] and withstand it.” Truman, however, dismissed this talk as excessive: “Russia couldn’t turn a wheel over the next ten years without our aid,” he said. He seemed to share Kennan’s belief that “the Russians are a nation of stage managers; and the deepest of their convictions is that things are not what they are, but only what they seem.”

  The uncertainty over Soviet intentions was certainly justified. There can be no doubt that Stalin saw the Western democracies as a long-term threat to Communism and Soviet power in particular. Given Communist rhetoric about world revolution and the pre-1941 Western reaction to the Soviet regim
e, it’s no wonder that Stalin felt as he did. After the collaboration in World War II, he certainly could have imagined a different future for Russia’s relations with the capitalist democracies, but his fear that exposure of Soviet citizens to the more affluent and unregimented West would be enough to undermine Communist control was an inducement to describe the United States and Britain, whether ill-intentioned or not, as the “enemy.”

  Stalin saw anticapitalist talk as essential to internal Soviet stability; his uncertain hold on a country in such continuing dire need provoked rhetorical overkill toward the West. Truman was right about the immediate limits to Russia’s capacity to start an aggressive war. But Moscow’s inflammatory rhetoric stirred fears in the United States that the Soviets were intent on war and would take the first possible opportunity to strike out at the West. Although Truman and others skeptical of Soviet capacity to pose a serious threat were much closer to the truth, both about their strength and their plans, they nevertheless underestimated how quickly the Russians could build an atomic bomb and create a formidable military for the defense of its homeland and satellites.

  Soviet preoccupation with issues of housing, food supplies, and other consumer shortages echoed anxieties in the United States. While Americans were far better off than the great majority of Russians, they also worried about their creature comforts. In a January 1946 Gallup poll, 62 percent cited inflation, housing, food, clothing, fuel shortages, and finding work as their greatest concerns. Out of eight issues Americans named as likely to be the most important in the November 1946 congressional elections, all but one, military training, were focused on domestic needs.