by Gwynne Dyer
The Mackenzie King Record, vol. 3
Mackenzie King had no more faith in Americans than he did in Russians or Western Canadians. He expected them all to behave badly—or rather, he expected them to conform to the steps of the traditional dance. The United States and the Soviet Union, as the most powerful states surviving amidst the wreckage in 1945, were almost bound to identify each other as potential enemies. It wasn’t really about ideology at all: as John Starnes, a young diplomat who later became undersecretary of state for external affairs and then director general of the Security and Intelligence Directorate of the RCMP, wrote in January 1948, “If the United States and the U.S.S.R. were both Communist states … the degree of conflict would be unabated and [perhaps] even be more sharply drawn.”
Great powers automatically fear and mistrust each other—a point U.S. secretary of commerce (and former vice-president) Henry Wallace made forcibly to President Truman in March 1946, writing to him that “the events of the past few months have thrown the Soviets back to their pre-1939 fears of ‘capitalist encirclement.’ ” In a subsequent letter, Wallace warned Truman that the large peacetime U.S. defence budget, American atomic bomb tests in the Pacific, the production of long-range bombers and American attempts to get overseas bases “must make it look to the rest of the world as if we are only paying lip-service to peace at the conference table. These facts rather make it appear either (1) that we are preparing ourselves to win the war which we regard as inevitable or (2) that we are trying hard to build up a preponderance of force to intimidate the rest of mankind.” But when Wallace made the same remarks in public later in the year, Truman fired him: “I was afraid that, knowingly or not, he would lend himself to the more sinister ends of the Reds and those who served them,” he said. Truman’s own attitude had already been defined in instructions to his secretary of state on January 5, 1946, only four months after the war’s end.
Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand: “How many divisions have you?” I do not think we should play compromise any longer.… I’m tired of babying the Soviets.
It actually didn’t take as long after San Francisco as it did after Versailles before normal service was resumed.
The Cold War was an accumulation of misperceptions on both sides. There’s no doubt about it. We were unduly afraid of their intentions, and they were paranoid about ours, and these worked on each other. It was a dreadful mistake.
John Holmes, Canadian Embassy, Moscow, 1947–48
In later years, when the Cold War had set as hard as ice, a comment like that would have attracted the charge of “moral equivalence”: that the speaker was wilfully ignoring the titanic moral struggle that underlay the military confrontation, and justified even the risk of nuclear war. Western ideologues would have added that the Soviet Union’s behaviour was inherently aggressive because it was driven by Marxist ideology, which sought, as an ultimate goal, the conquest (or at least the conversion) of the entire world, and that all Soviet actions past and present must be seen in the light of that interpretation. But that was later. In the early days, even Canadian generals could see that this was nonsense.
I have never yet heard a convincing argument to prove that the USSR harbours aggressive designs, that is to say, the use of physical force in Western Europe.
General Maurice Pope, Canadian Military Mission, Berlin, September 1947
There was a time, it is true, when the Soviet Union was ruled by revolutionaries who really expected Communism to conquer the whole world. “What? Are we going to have foreign relations?” Lenin reputedly exclaimed in 1917 when it was proposed that he appoint a commissar for foreign affairs. Why do that if, as he expected, the rest of Europe was going to fall to the same revolution within a few weeks or months? And even after the Bolsheviks had faced up to the fact that the revolution was not going to spread, they denied that the Soviet state was any more than a transitional phenomenon. But that was before Stalin virtually annihilated the old revolutionaries in the great purges of 1935–39, and made the state bureaucracy the dominant force in the land.
By the late 1930s, the Soviet Union was behaving just like other great states in its foreign relations, making alliances with Nazis or “imperialists” as the state’s interests dictated, and showing no interest whatever in the fate of the Communist parties in other countries if they did not serve Soviet state interests. Soviet foreign policy had become so utterly traditional and non-ideological that Moscow vigorously pursued its claims to all the lost territories that had once belonged to the Russian empire but had been lost at the time of the revolution. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the former Russian shares of Poland and Romania were recovered at the time of the alliance with Hitler in 1940. When the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in August 1945, with the intention of recovering the territories lost to Japan at the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, Stalin’s Order of the Day urged the troops to “efface the shame of forty years before.”
Soviet behaviour in the countries that had been liberated by its armies fitted the same pattern of duplicating (but not exceeding) tsarist ambitions. The war aims that had been discussed by the tsar’s diplomats with his Western allies in the First World War—a Russian-dominated Eastern Europe, a Western Europe essentially run by Britain and France, with a weak and divided Germany in between—were also the Soviet war aims in the Second World War. And, except that Western Europe became American-dominated instead, it all came to pass.
This was hard on Eastern Europe, but at Yalta, the conference between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in February 1945 where the main lines of postwar policy in Europe were laid down, the Western powers had signalled (quite sensibly) that they would not do anything practical to dispute Soviet domination there. Stalin wanted a ring of client states in Eastern Europe for all the usual reasons that great powers like to have that sort of thing: military buffer zones, areas for economic exploitation, sheer prestige. He reckoned the Soviet Union’s sacrifices in the war entitled him to demand it, and he would have interpreted any Western attempt to frustrate it as an attack on the vital interests of the Soviet state.
The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was much more brutal than I think anybody had expected—perhaps we should have expected it, but it was extremely brutal.… We could just feel the alliance with the Soviet Union eroding away under our feet.
Escott Reid, External Affairs, 1941–62
It is still difficult to explain what caused so much Western alarm about Soviet intentions after the war. It cannot have been the actual division of Europe into Soviet and Anglo-American spheres of influence: that had effectively been agreed at Yalta. Nor should the fact that all the “liberated” lands received political systems similar to those of their respective liberators have caused any astonishment. Thus Romania, where you could have counted the number of genuine native Communists in 1945 without taking your shoes off, duly had a “Communist revolution” in 1947, while France and Italy, where the Communists were the most powerful and credible political force at the end of the war thanks to their leading role in the resistance movement, nevertheless wound up with liberal-democratic political systems and capitalist economic systems.
Stalin’s Communization of the Eastern European states had nothing to do with ideological fervour. He did it because the Eastern European countries, if they were not confined within a system that shackled them to the Soviet Union and cut them off from the West, would have drifted into the orbit of the richer and culturally more attractive Western European states sooner or later. But Stalin’s first step after the Communists came to power in Eastern European countries was to instigate purges (like his own in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s) in which all the dangerous revolutionaries and “real” Communists were killed off, leaving conservative, state-oriented bureaucrats like himself in command.
Stalin never showed the slightest ambition to extend the Soviet domain in Europe beyond t
he territories allocated to the Soviet Union at Yalta. There was a good deal of violence involved in the process of imposing an alien Communist system on the countries of Eastern Europe, but that was an implicit part of the deal that had been struck in 1945. The other half of the deal, also implicit, was that the Soviet Union would not seek to boost the powerful Communist parties of Western Europe into power, and it did not. Even in the Italian election of 1948, when the Communist Party stood a real chance of winning and huge amounts of American money were being spread around to stop it, the Soviet Union sent no money to help the Italian Communists.
So how did the Soviet Union’s ruthless actions in nailing down the empire it had acquired in Eastern Europe (by agreement with the Western allies) get reinterpreted as proof that it was an irresistibly expansionist state embarking on an ideological crusade aimed at world conquest? That is a good question.
Czechoslovakia definitely fell within the Soviet sphere of influence by the terms of the Yalta agreement, but it was the only Eastern European country that had been a genuine democracy before the Second World War, and it weighed heavily on Western European consciences as the country they had sold down the river in 1938 to win another year of peace. Moreover, the Czechs had managed to resurrect their democracy after the end of the German occupation in 1945, and by 1948 the country was not occupied by Soviet troops. So the Communist coup in Prague in February 1948, and the subsequent “defenestration of Prague”—the death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk in a fall from a second-storey window at the Foreign Office on March 10, 1948—came as a profound shock to the countries of the West. It was not an overt Soviet military move, but the Prague coup was just the kind of subversive internal action that most people had been predicting in Western Europe, and it had a profound effect on Mackenzie King.
He had really become a kind of anti-Communist by this time, as well as fearing Russian military power, but … he wanted us to follow and never to lead (and not to follow too soon). I think that was quite true until the defenestration of Prague.
Mackenzie King had known Masaryk and liked him, and he was really quite horrified. There was a kind of real conversion that day. I watched the whole thing, and of course the whole Cabinet went down to listen to Truman’s speech on the radio, and that’s when the Western alliance was really founded. You know, it took months to get the treaty made, but that’s when it was really founded, that day, and it was a sudden conversion.
Jack Pickersgill, secretary to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, 1937–48
Mackenzie King was still profoundly opposed to any peacetime alliances for Canada, but he was deeply shaken by Masaryk’s fate. “Time may tell whether this was a suicide or whether that means was taken by the Communists to destroy his life,” King wrote. “One thing is certain. It has proven there can be no collaboration with Communists.” And on March 11, 1948, the day after Masaryk’s death, King received an urgent letter from the British prime minister, Clement Attlee:
[It] pointed out the need for a united front on the part of free nations. The importance of assistance from the United States. Necessity to organize collective security groups—one now being worked out in the Benelux group [nations associated under the Treaty of Brussels signed on March 17]. The other one to be worked out for the French–U.K.–U.S. and Canada in particular. Another, a Mediterranean group.
This message stated they … wanted to know if I would be agreeable to having the situation regarding Atlantic regional security group explored by British officials, United States and ourselves.
The Mackenzie King Record, vol. 4
The prime minister was still nervous, but Attlee’s letter was just the opening the activists in the Department of External Affairs were looking for. King was persuaded to send Pearson to Washington, and in early 1948 Canada and Britain set about seducing the United States into joining a formal alliance with Western Europe.
Mr Pearson’s cover story for his absence from Ottawa was that he was going to New York for a few days to help out General McNaughton, the Canadian representative on the Security Council, who was under the weather. General Charles Foulkes, the chairman of the Canadian Chiefs of Staff Committee, came in civilian clothes.…
The meetings were held in the War Room of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff in the bowels of the Pentagon, and staff cars were sent to pick up the participants and to deliver them directly to a secret entrance in the basement of the Pentagon. The entrance was so secret that one Pentagon chauffeur got lost trying to find it.
Escott Reid
As far as the Russians were concerned, all the secrecy was a bit superfluous, since the second secretary at the British embassy in Washington, Donald Maclean, was a Soviet spy, and was providing Moscow with a “fairly full record” of the talks. But in the first couple of months this would not have occasioned much alarm in Moscow, for the negotiations did not go smoothly.
It was a miraculous birth.… Most informed observers at the beginning of 1948 would have said that a North Atlantic treaty was impossible.…
I can’t believe that one could have had the treaty if there hadn’t been two people at the State Department, not at the very top, who were enthusiasts for it—Jack Hickerson and Ted Achilles. Even though their superiors were opposed: George Kennan and Chip Bohlen and Robert Lovett.
Escott Reid
For a long time we were afraid to admit we were really negotiating a treaty. We were saying we were discussing common security problems. As a matter of fact we didn’t even admit that we were talking privately with the Canadians and the British about it. There had been indications in Canada, by St. Laurent, by Mike Pearson and Norman Robertson, of interest in some Western defence agreement supplementing the United Nations. We knew they were thinking along these lines—as the British were. We thought that the three of us had a basically common approach.… We felt that anyone else might be approaching it from a nationalistic point of view.
Ted Achilles, director, Western European Affairs, U.S. State Department, 1947
It was, to begin with, very much the old Anglo-Saxon alliance of the war years revived: those excitable Europeans were too nationalistic, and they might have spies in their midst. But even this cozy English-speaking club might not have reached agreement if the first of the Berlin crises had not spurred them on. Only a couple of months after the secret talks began, the Western powers introduced a new currency in Germany, which meant, in effect, that the three-quarters of Germany that they occupied would henceforth be linked to the capitalist world economy.
Very few people in what was to become West Germany objected to this measure (which rapidly rescued the economy from the utter collapse in which it had been mired), and the Western powers had only done it after despairing of getting any agreement with the Soviets on a joint programme for German economic recovery. But Moscow interpreted it as a Western decision to divide Germany—which it was, in effect. The Russians struck back two days later, on June 24, 1948, by cutting off electricity to the Western-occupied sectors of the German capital, Berlin (which was located deep in the Soviet zone of Germany), and blockading the land access routes by which West Berlin’s food and fuel supplies arrived from the West. The U.S. Army briefly considered sending a convoy to fight its way down the autobahn to Berlin, but in the end the Western occupying powers decided to circumvent the Soviet blockade by an airlift.
The blockade (which lasted almost a year, until the Russians finally agreed to reopen the land routes to West Berlin) was just what the secret NATO negotiations needed. It lent added strength to the view that the Russians were an unreasoning power that could only be dealt with by the threat of force. It was also a powerful propaganda tool—all those planes carrying food and supplies to a besieged population—to prepare Western public opinion for the alliance being secretly hatched in Washington. However, the increasingly militarized context of the secret discussions in Washington was disturbing to people like Pearson:
There is, I think, real danger of old-fashioned alliance
policies dictated by purely military considerations.… [Ideally, NATO] would set forth the principles of Western society which we were trying not only to defend but to make the basis of an eventually united world, and not simply make us part of an American war machine against the Russians.
Lester Pearson, “Mike”: Memoirs, vol. 2
Pearson eventually managed to get Article 2 (the “Canadian article”) included in the NATO treaty, calling for economic collaboration, and social and cultural cooperation among the members as well as military guarantees. But Article 2 was mainly a sop to the fastidious and faint-hearted who didn’t want to admit to themselves that they were creating a military alliance. For the more robust and single-minded, the events of the past couple of years were ample proof that the Soviet Union was an inherently aggressive “outlaw state” that could only be stopped by force.
The Soviet Union was not on an expansionist rampage in the late 1940s, but it was behaving in a ruthlessly opportunistic fashion in what it considered its sphere of influence. This greatly facilitated the general round-up of stray nations that took place in 1948. As the secret tripartite talks progressed in Washington, the idea gradually expanded to a “North Atlantic” security pact that would embrace all the countries of Europe that weren’t under Communist domination. And even though the Russians knew all about the secret talks, the secrecy paid off in the end, for it allowed the stage to be thoroughly set before the Europeans and the U.S. Congress and public were invited in to contemplate the manifold virtues of a North Atlantic treaty.
It enabled the United States administration to pretend to Congress that the second stage of the negotiations, which began in July 1948 with France, the Netherlands and Belgium added to the original three [the U.S., Canada and Britain], grew out of the resolution of [Senator] Vandenberg’s which had been adopted by the Senate authorizing that kind of negotiation. Whereas, in fact, the State Department when it drafted the Vandenberg resolution was securing a legitimation of the results of the tripartite talks. The secrecy about the first stage of discussions also enabled the United States and Britain and Canada to pretend to France and the Benelux countries that they had participated in the discussions from the outset.