A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  His imperial ambitions were limited. With some exceptions, they were essentially confined to consolidating Moscow’s hold over its newly gained security corridor, the occupied nations of Eastern Europe. This was understandable enough, as they had been the invasion route into Russia in two wars in the twentieth century and two of those East European nations, Romania and Hungary, had enthusiastically joined Hitler in his invasion on the promise of capacious segments of Russian territory. In Asia, he wanted to recover the imperial concessions Russia had held under the czars in Manchuria and, with the approval of Roosevelt and Churchill, had wrung them from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, only to have to give them up a few years later to Mao Tse-tung, the Communist victor in the Chinese civil war. He also wanted to retrieve Russian possession of the southern half of Sakhalin Island off the coast of Siberia north of Japan, which had been lost to Tokyo in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, and, again with the assent of Roosevelt and Churchill, got it on the surrender of Japan. In the Middle East, he wanted to reestablish the pre-First World War czarist dominance of northern Iran and he coveted, as the czars had, the Turkish Straits—the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. These lead from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea, control of which was obviously vital to Russia’s security. While he meant to manipulate the large Communist parties in Italy and France in order to weaken and hinder U.S. influence in those and neighboring countries, he had no intention of provoking a war with the United States by invading Western Europe.

  George Kennan, who spoke Russian and was, along with Charles “Chip” Bohlen, Roosevelt’s interpreter at Yalta, one of the two leading specialists on the Soviet Union within the State Department, cast this misreading of Stalin and the nature of his state into dogma as early as February 1946. Kennan was chargé d’affaires of the U.S. embassy in Moscow at the time. On February 9, 1946, Stalin gave his first major speech since the end of hostilities the year before. He called for a return in economic development to the prewar emphasis on heavy industry through three new and successive five-year plans. The speech caused concern within the administration in Washington, because the emphasis on heavy industry was regarded as an ominous sign of military preparations. In fact, Stalin intended no menace toward the United States in the speech. Indeed, he was careful to praise “the anti-Fascist coalition of the Soviet Union, the United States of America, Great Britain and other freedom-loving countries” that had won the Second World War. He was setting a course to strengthen the Soviet Union to weather the long interregnum that he foresaw in the postwar period and to prepare the country for the contingency of a Third World War in which he thought that interregnum would end. Kennan was asked by Washington to provide an “interpretive analysis” of the speech and what it portended. His response, as Daniel Yergin, the American historian, noted in his study of the Cold War, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State, was aptly named the Long Telegram because it was, at 5,500 words, up to that point probably the longest telegram ever sent in the U.S. diplomatic service. It laid down the doctrinal basis for the hemming in of Soviet power that was to become the U.S. policy of containment.

  Kennan’s analysis did not reflect the reality of the Soviet Union or of Stalin. Rather, it reflected Kennan’s ideological antipathy to both and confused the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric trotted out for ritual occasions with the actual reasoning that lay behind Soviet moves. The Long Telegram was, in a way, evidence of how difficult it was for a foreigner, even one who spoke the language and was as familiar with the Soviet Union as Kennan was, to penetrate beyond the facade of Stalin’s closed society. In Kennan’s view, Stalin was a fanatical revolutionary, not the complex mixture of genuine Marxist faith, cynicism, Realpolitik calculation, and suspicion and cruelty that history has shown him to be.

  The Soviet attitude toward the outside world was not shaped by an “objective analysis of situation beyond Russia’s borders,” Kennan telegraphed. “At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.” As a result, Stalin and his associates in the leadership were permanently engaged “in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.” Marxist dogma reinforced this behavior. The “basic Soviet instinct” was “that there can be no compromise with rival power and the constructive work can start only when Communist power is dominant.” In short, coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union was impossible. “We have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken if Soviet power is to be secure.” The way to counteract this force, Kennan suggested, was for the United States to draw the Western nations together and systematically block all attempts at Soviet expansion. “Impervious to logic of reason, [the Soviet Union] is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw—and usually does—when strong resistance is encountered at any point.” This last observation was well taken, but it resulted from the caution Stalin frequently exercised in the conduct of foreign policy, from conscious reasoning, not from some auto-neurotic instinct of an ideologically driven power elite.

  Preventing further expansion of the Soviet Union was sound policy for the United States to follow in the postwar era, but not from motives of fantasy and in an atmosphere of fear and irrationality that could bring excesses of its own. The idea that a man as respectful of American power as Stalin was would commit his badly wounded nation to a venture as foolhardy as the attempted destruction of the United States was ludicrous, but that is what many men in Washington wanted to hear. Having just triumphed over the expansionist monster Hitler and the forces of Imperial Japan, they seemed, unconsciously, to be seeking a new monster with whom to do mortal combat. The perception of Communism as some sort of international social contagion that could, by almost biological means, infect and destroy society was also widespread in the United States. If Russia was a society with a profound sense of insecurity, as Kennan maintained, America was equally so.

  Kennan’s Long Telegram was not only the longest in the history of the U.S. Foreign Service, it was also the most enthusiastically welcomed and widely read. H. Freeman Matthews, director of the State Department’s Office of European Affairs, who had requested the analysis, telegraphed Kennan that it was “magnificent,” saying, “I cannot overestimate its importance to those of us here struggling with the problem.” Copies were sent to U.S. diplomatic missions around the world and distributed among the leadership in Washington. James Forrestal, the fiercely anti-Communist secretary of the Navy, soon to become the nation’s first secretary of defense with the creation of the Defense Department under the National Security Act of 1947, had hundreds of copies made for circulation within the Navy and, according to an acquaintance, “sent it all over town.” It was also leaked to the press to prepare the public for a change, the American people having heard little during the war years except praise for their gallant Soviet ally. Time, the magazine of another fervent anti-Communist, Henry Luce, carried a full-page article illustrated by a map entitled “Communist Contagion.” The map labeled Iran, Turkey, and Manchuria as “infected” and Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan, and India as “exposed.” The Long Telegram was also the making of George Kennan. He returned to Washington not long afterward and in April 1947 was made the first chief of the new Policy Planning Staff of the State Department.

  From that time on, every move by Stalin was interpreted in the blackest perspective, an attitude his bullying manner and frequently bad judgment did nothing to mitigate. He had shown how bad his judgment in foreign affairs could sometimes be during the first postwar meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London in September 1945, held to decide the question of German reparations to the Soviet Union and the future status of the c
onquered Reich. This was the conference at which Jimmie Byrnes sought to intimidate the Soviets with the atomic diplomacy scheme that he and Truman had conjured up, quipping pointedly to Molotov, who was representing the Soviet Union at the conference, about the atomic bomb he was going to pull out of his hip pocket. Stalin and Molotov had anticipated the strategy before Molotov left Moscow and had decided how to parry. Molotov proceeded to do so, mocking the American atomic monopoly, belittling the importance of nuclear weapons in general, and clinging stubbornly to irreconcilable positions on the issues the ministers were supposed to negotiate. He was living up to the Party pseudonym he had adopted during the Bolshevik Revolution: Molotov means “Hammer Man” in Russian. (His family surname was Skryabin.) Byrnes had the wit to see that atomic diplomacy was not going to play with the Soviets and after a number of fruitless days privately suggested to Molotov that they get down to business and negotiate a treaty that would keep Germany disarmed for the next twenty to twenty-five years. Molotov cabled Stalin for permission to proceed. Stalin told him to let the conference fail, that Byrnes, and thus the United States, would be blamed in international opinion. The opposite turned out to be the case. The Soviets were blamed because of Molotov’s obduracy and Stalin missed his one and only opportunity to keep Germany from rearming.

  The initial crisis with the United States occurred over Iran. Prior to the First World War, czarist Russia and Britain had divided Iran between them, with the Russians exercising a sphere of dominance over the north and the British over the south because of the Royal Navy’s interest in the huge oil reserves there. A pro forma Iranian government continued to exist in Tehran under the enfeebled Qajar dynasty. The Iranian soldier who replaced the Qajars and declared himself shah in the interwar period, Reza Pahlevi, was a modernist and reformer in his domestic policy, but pro-German in foreign policy. In the wake of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union had therefore invaded the country to establish a land line of supply to Russia, similarly dividing it north and south. Both nations were supposed to withdraw their troops by March 2, 1946, and turn the country over to a new Iranian government, but Stalin, in the hope of regaining the czarist position, gave every sign of hanging on. He sponsored a separatist regime of Iranian Azerbaijanis, the Turkic people who inhabit the north, and protected it with the Soviet occupation troops.

  Oil was the prize. The Soviets assumed that, since Iranian Azerbaijan lies just below Soviet Azerbaijan with its ever-flowing fields at Baku, the Iranian region must hold plentiful resources as well. The United States also had its eye on Iranian oil concessions for American companies. Forrestal and others were worried that the United States was consuming its own reserves with sufficient rapidity that it would become dependent on imported oil in the not distant future. Truman saw Stalin’s northern Iran ploy as part of a far bigger scheme of expansion. He feared that if Soviet forces remained permanently entrenched in the north, the Soviets would soon take over the entire country and then threaten the even richer oil reserves the United States coveted in neighboring Saudi Arabia, where the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) had held the concession since 1933. The oil motive was never mentioned publicly during the crisis, however. Nor was the influence Washington’s London ally continued to exercise in southern Iran through the large, British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Instead, the administration hammered away at Soviet “aggression,” and insisted on a full airing in the Security Council of the just established United Nations. The crisis became so heated on the American side that at one point Truman told Averell Harriman, who had returned from his wartime tenure as ambassador in Moscow, that “this may lead to war.” A resentful Stalin backed down, withdrew his troops in the spring of 1946, and the separatist regime in Iranian Azerbaijan collapsed.

  The Turkish Straits, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, were next. The lengthy passage of the Dardanelles from the Mediterranean into the diminutive Sea of Marmara and the exit from the Marmara into the Black Sea through the short strait of the Bosporus at Istanbul had been an irritant and source of vulnerability for Russia far back into czarist times. The British and French expedition that had laid siege to and subsequently captured the Russian Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea during the Crimean War of 1853–56 had gained entry through the Straits. During the First World War, when Turkey had been allied with Germany, German battleships had used the Straits for raiding forays into the Black Sea. During the Second World War, Turkey had officially been neutral, but had followed its traditional anti-Russian and pro-German proclivity and again allowed the German navy to sail freely through the Straits, this time to inflict considerable damage on the Soviet Union. The issue went beyond the vulnerability of the Black Sea area. Stalin, as had the czars, wanted unhindered access to the Mediterranean for his own navy, although at the time it was just a coastal defense force with no plans for a seagoing fleet.

  At Yalta in February 1945, Stalin had said it was intolerable for Turkey to have “a hand on Russia’s throat” and denounced the Montreux Convention, the international agreement of 1936 that essentially gave Turkey control over the Straits. Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that a revision was in order, but Stalin failed to take advantage of the moment to bargain then and there for precisely what he wanted. Instead, he clumsily instructed Molotov in June 1945 to demand a lease from Turkey for a Soviet base in the Straits and the return of two Turkish districts, once conquered by the czars, that Lenin had ceded to Turkey in 1922 when a weak Soviet Union was seeking tranquillity on its southern borders. (The territorial claim was probably just a bargaining gambit, as Stalin later dropped it.) The Turks refused, but Stalin pressed on, apparently assuming that the assent he had received from Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta still held in Washington and London. In March 1946, he massed a few dozen tanks on the border and in August raised his demand to joint Soviet-Turkish custodianship of the Straits. He was attempting to intimidate the Turks. There is no evidence he intended to actually invade the country.

  He does not seem to have understood how profoundly the attitude toward the Soviet Union had changed in Washington and thus the significance of what he was inadvertently provoking—the first show of armed force by the United States against Russia. As early as the end of 1945, Truman was convinced that if Stalin was not deterred, he would invade Turkey and seize the Straits and the United States would have to go to war against the Soviet Union. “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making,” he told Jimmie Byrnes. As the crisis worsened into August 1946, with the Americans urging the Turks to defy Stalin, Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state, convened a study group with the military leadership to recommend a course of action to the president.

  The group’s report was presented to Truman in an August 15 meeting at the White House. The finding was the first statement of the domino theory that was to so govern and oversimplify and distort American thinking during the Cold War. If Stalin acquired joint control of the Straits, Soviet control of Turkey would inevitably follow. It would then “be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prevent the Soviet Union from obtaining control over Greece and over the whole Near and Middle East.” The recommendation was to send a naval task force to the Dardanelles as a display of American resolve to protect Turkey. Forrestal had assembled a force of five destroyers, two cruisers, the new aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the battleship USS Missouri, on which, just one year before, the representatives of a defeated Japan had signed the documents of unconditional surrender. Dwight Eisenhower, then chief of staff of the Army, asked Acheson in a whisper if the president understood that the course they were recommending could lead to war. Acheson repeated the question to Truman. The president took a large map of the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean from his desk drawer and asked those present to gather around him. Spreading out the map, he explained precisely why the falling dominoes finding of the study group was correct. The naval task force, led by the
majestic Missouri with her sixteen-inch guns, was dispatched to the Dardanelles, and Stalin, still more resentful, again backed down.

  16.

  CONTAINING THE MENACE

  The Turkish crisis was the watershed. Having summoned up the nerve for confrontation once, it was much easier on the second occasion. The British precipitated the next crisis and a policy consensus that had been gradually taking shape in Washington. Under a tacit division of tasks, Britain was supposed to watch over its traditional sphere of influence in the eastern Mediterranean. Virtually bankrupt, the London government suddenly informed the U.S. administration on February 21, 1947, that it was withdrawing from Greece because it could no longer afford to prop up the right-wing government in Athens that was battling Communist-led guerrillas in a civil war. The British also warned that they would be unable to supply the funds Turkey needed for economic and military assistance to buttress itself against the Soviet Union. The response of Dean Acheson, his new superior, General George C. Marshall, now secretary of state, and the president was that the United States would obviously have to step into Britain’s place. At a meeting of the congressional leadership, which Truman convened to persuade them to vote the hundreds of millions of dollars he would need, Marshall gave a rather bland presentation that failed to arouse any enthusiasm. With the permission of the general, Acheson stood up to speak.