Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Russia too turned its back on the past, not so much denying its imperial traditions as repudiating them. According to Edmund Burke, ‘Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.’The new communist autocrats prided themselves on knowing history but still repeated it. Stalin, the ultimate tsar, bequeathed an empire more extensive than any of his predecessors and controlled with the same tools of suppression and repression. His successors continued his posturing, especially towards the American arch-enemy. The decades following Stalin’s death saw the Russian empire, still preaching the inevitability of global revolution, pitched in a cold war against a rival that had long since forgotten its own revolutionary roots. In both cases histories were rewritten and ideologies adjusted. The lusts that had driven one nation to become the undisputed master of the western hemisphere and the other to become the dominant power on the Eurasian landmass remained – unacknowledged – and now focused on each other.

  Hot War, Cold War, Phoney War

  Thousands of books, acres of newsprint and uncountable hours of TV and radio time have been devoted to the origins, character and eventual conclusion of one of the most epic confrontations of all time: the cold war. From 5 March 1946, when Winston Churchill declared that an iron curtain had descended across Europe, until 9 November 1989, when its concrete manifestation in Berlin was torn down, the world was pitched into a titanic struggle between two superpower empires. For good or bad the life of everyone on the planet was touched in a global contest for supremacy that would determine the history of the foreseeable future; indeed it would determine whether the world would have a future. The cold war between America and Russia could so easily have turned into the ultimate hot war. Life on earth might have vanished in a nuclear Armageddon. But it didn’t. In historical terms the cold war was a non-event. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 have been described by Niall Ferguson, in a phrase borrowed from A. J.P. Taylor, as ‘the turning point at which history failed to turn’. Similarly the cold war was the war that wasn’t.

  Even the episode that came closest to realising the nuclear nightmare, the Cuban Missile Crisis, served only to illustrate that neither empire had the appetite for the ultimate confrontation. The United States positioned missiles in Turkey, threatening Russian cities across the border, and Russia retaliated by shipping missiles to Cuba within range of American cities. For a few tense days both sides thumped the table, but at the last minute President Kennedy agreed to remove his missiles from Turkey and the Russian ships turned back.

  The historically important developments of the second half of the twentieth century had virtually nothing to do with the cold war. Advances in technology, the growing gap between poor and rich, the emergence of feminism, the re-emergence of religious fundamentalism, the revolution in communications, the continued growth and evolution of corporatism: none of these was triggered by the cold war. Only in the unravelling of the old European colonial empires did the conflict between the United States and Russia play a noticeable although essentially insignificant part. In geopolitical terms the outstanding feature of the period was the awesome global spread of American commercial and political control; Russia was as irrelevant to this process as Britain or France.

  Russia pretended to be a superpower, a pretence endorsed by the United States, but the reality was very different. Soviet leaders gave opportunistic support to radical movements from Cuba to Angola, and the KGB scurried around the world to little effect funding a host of terrorist groups from Ireland to Iraq and arranging occasional assassinations, but apart from a miserable attempt to colonise Afghanistan – repeating the dramatic mistakes of the British a century before – the Red Army did no more than act as a police force in its new eastern European possessions. Unlike America, Russia had no overseas commercial interests to protect or resources it wanted to control. In the two most bloody ‘confrontations’ of the period, in Korea and Vietnam, the Red Army was noticeable for its absence. By the end of the century US corporations had penetrated almost every corner of the globe and American troops were sprinkled across the world, while the Russian empire hovered close to collapse.

  With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that the outstanding feature of Russian history in the last half of the twentieth century was the doomed attempt first to consolidate the territories seized at the end of the Second World War into the Russian empire, and then more fundamentally to maintain the empire itself. By contrast the outstanding feature of American history was the success of American corporations, reinforced by the covert and overt might of the state, in expanding and deepening the commercial empire of the United States. It is now evident that in both cases the most crucial developments were within the two empires, and yet perceptions at the time were dominated by the cold war between them. It was not the weakening bonds that held the Soviet empire together or the massive capital flows within the American empire that captured the attention of contemporary observers but the bellicose pronouncements of politicians on both sides of the iron curtain and, above all, two full-scale wars in Asia – wars that seemed so very much more significant than history proved them to be.

  The Korean and Vietnamese civil wars have been presented as America battling the Russo-Chinese communist empire, but of the 10 million people who died – half of them civilians – around 92,000, less than one in a hundred, were American. American bodies dominated the TV screens but not the graveyards. In both cases the conflicts were essentially civil wars between local dictators made horrifically worse by outside intervention.

  The former Japanese colony of Korea was occupied by accident when the atomic bomb suddenly ended the Second World War. US troops diverted from invading Japan landed in the south and Russian troops diverted from invading Manchuria entered from the north. They met at the 38th parallel and partitioned the country, installing two dictators obsessed with toppling each other. At first Stalin simply told his protégé to shut up and America helped replace its first protégé with a more moderate version. Then in 1950 Stalin decided that action on the eastern front might distract attention from his antics in Europe and marginally increase his empire. North Korean forces rolled across the border, sweeping all before them. Having lost all but the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula, America and its allies responded with a flash of military genius when General MacArthur landed his forces at Inchon far to the north, cutting off the enemy advance and then pushing the North Koreans right back to the Chinese border. At this point Stalin apparently gave up and accepted that a pro-American Korea would sit on his frontier. However, Russia and America were not the only imperial powers in the region. Mao Tse-tung persuaded Stalin to continue, and Chinese forces streamed across the border. Over three years 600,000 Chinese and countless Koreans died in a war that eventually changed nothing. In 1953 the two war-weary sides signed an armistice that left the country just as it had been when the war started.

  The Korean War accelerated the division of the world into Russian and American camps. The Russian camp was an empire in all but name, albeit with China having a dominion-like status reminiscent of the role of Canada or Australia in the British empire. The American camp was not an empire in the traditional sense and the United States was anxious for it not to be seen as one, preferring to describe its realm as ‘the free world’. The Orwellian nature of this term soon became apparent when, during the Korean War, the US established military bases in Morocco, Libya, Saudi Arabia and fascist Spain, none of whose regimes stood for ‘freedom’ as understood by Thomas Paine and the Founding Fathers. To show how far America’s ideology had moved on since its own revolution against colonial authority, military aid was given to France to suppress the attempted revolution in its colony of Vietnam.

  In Vietnam a scenario similar to Korea was played out with a different final act. Vietnamese partisans, the Vietminh, fought against the Japanese, who invaded their country during the Second World War, and then against the French, who tried to reassert control afterwards. Once the French were expelled the communist-control
led Vietminh took control of the north and – now rechristened Vietcong – fought to topple the regime the French had left in the south. Once again two dictatorships battled for control.

  The first American to die in Vietnam was fighting not against the Vietcong but with them (or more correctly with the Vietminh). He was a military adviser working for the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA), training the guerrillas to resist the Japanese occupiers. During the Korean Civil War America swapped sides in Vietnam and gave massive but ineffective aid to the French. Russia remained wholly committed to the Vietminh and encouraged their guerrilla war in the south. When US troops entered the war Russia redoubled its logistical support, but stopped short of committing its own forces. In the end the United States was defeated not by the military might of the communist empire but by the stubborn resistance of the North Vietnamese leadership and its supporters in the south. The Korean and Vietnamese wars are remarkable not as manifestations of the cold war but as examples of the futility of the traditional military model of imperial control. Ten million people died in Korea and Vietnam in wars that had no lasting global significance.

  In 1968 the Tet or Lunar New Year was celebrated by a North Vietnamese offensive that heralded the beginning of the end for the US military occupation of South Vietnam. In 2002 Tet was celebrated in a very different way – by baking a gigantic 1,400 gram rice cake that garnered a place in the Guinness Book of Records for its fifty cooks and acres of positive publicity for the sponsor, Coca-Cola. The tentacles of American corporations and financial institutions have proved far more effective in changing the face of Vietnam than helicopter gunships and napalm.

  Although the political rhetoric continued and even heated up after the Vietnam War, US corporations were acting far more pragmatically. Even as Reagan thundered against the ‘Evil Empire’, US business was doing its best to maintain that empire’s economic well-being. The Soviet Union developed the world’s largest iron and steel plant, constructed by the American McKee Corporation, and Europe’s largest tube and pipe mill, again built largely with American equipment and technology. The period saw the full flowering of the commercial empire that had started to emerge after the Spanish-American War. The failure of military intervention in Vietnam seemed for a time to show the wisdom of moving away from the older, cruder imperial traditions that Russia continued to follow.

  In 1956 Russia demonstrated that its commitment to traditional imperialism was as strong as ever when protests in Hungary turned into full-scale war: 6,000 Soviet tanks supported by artillery and air strikes smashed an attempt to stage a popular uprising. Possibly as many as 3,000 Hungarians died as well as over 700 Russians; 200,000 refugees fled to the west. American leaders had been vociferous in their support for Hungarian aspirations but in the face of Russian military force they hastily backed away. It was a pattern to be repeated in Georgia half a century later.

  Left-wing historians have portrayed the Hungarian uprising as the workers trying to build genuine socialism to replace the travesty of Stalinism; American commentators saw it as a battle to replace socialism with democracy. The truth is that most Hungarians were simply fighting to achieve freedom from Russian rule; as in Czechoslovakia twelve years later the struggle was against imperialism, not for any particular political doctrine. It was a sign of the pressures forever bubbling across Russia’s empire.

  The Red Army was ready to crush colonial dissent, but heating up the cold war was not on the Kremlin’s agenda. In both Korea and Vietnam America showed itself to be far more adventurous militarily than Russia, committing hundreds of thousands of troops. The Red Army stayed away even when in October 1950 two US Air Force planes ‘accidentally’ attacked a Russian airfield near Vladivostok, the first American attack on Russia since American troops had withdrawn from Vladivostok thirty years earlier after failing to hold the Trans-Siberian railway. (The two pilots were court-martialled but acquitted.)

  Stalin’s one direct intervention in the Korean War was to send Russian fighter pilots into combat. As he was insisting that the conflict was a spontaneous popular uprising in which the Soviet Union played no part, the pilots flew planes bearing North Korean markings and were told to speak to each other in Korean in case they were overheard by American eavesdroppers – a ludicrously impractical instruction that involved taping phrasebook pages inside the cockpits; it was usually forgotten in the heat of combat. Even more absurd were attempts by the United States to keep secret its blanket bombing of neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam War – as if the enemy might not have noticed the bombs raining down on them. Only the American electorate was kept in ignorance.

  In some ways more surprising than such episodes is that both sides managed to hide so much from each other. In 1995 President Clinton ordered the release of thousands of documents relating to the cold war, including a CIA assessment dated 12 October 1950 that concluded Chinese intervention in the Korean War was ‘not probable in 1950’. Just two weeks later 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea. (Clinton’s action caused immense dismay inside the CIA; despite the reports having been freely available for six years, the Bush administration had them reclassified and removed from the public archives in a deliberate attempt to rewrite history.) The KGB was no more successful in understanding the enemy. Just two weeks before America’s final ignominious exodus from Vietnam the KGB leader Yuri Andropov warned that the US might win the war by launching an Inchon-style assault deep into North Vietnam.

  The main reason for such intelligence failures was that both the CIA and KGB devoted most of their attention not to spying across the iron curtain but to policing their own empires. Much of their intelligence came from brutal secret police forces like the AVH in Hungary or SAVAK in Iran, who inevitably focused primarily on domestic dissent. Rhetoric might fly between the empires but action was centred within them. The CIA was more concerned with Central America than Central Europe.

  Monroe Marches On

  On the night of 16 April 1961 two men having a quiet cigarette on an island beach were gunned down. It is possible they never saw their killers or heard the order to fire given by the group’s leader, CIA agent Grayson Lynch. They had become the first casualties to fall at the Bay of Pigs.

  One of the foundation stones of American imperialism was the Monroe doctrine under which the United States gave itself the right to intervene in the affairs of other nations in the western hemisphere. Since the age of the filibusters before the civil war the US had regarded Central America and the Caribbean as part of its informal empire. US troops occupied or intervened openly in Cuba (1899 and 1961), the Dominican Republic (1916 and 1965), Grenada (1983), Guatemala (1954), Haiti (1915), Honduras (1912), Nicaragua (1927 and 1980s) and Panama (1989). As so often the US has imposed economic sanctions, and with the globalisation of the world economy such sanctions can have far-reaching effects: for example, the United States was recently able to stop Spain and Brazil selling military equipment to Venezuela as it contained US-made components.

  The most famous case of military intervention in the region was, like Custer’s last stand at the Little Bighorn eighty-five years earlier, an ignominious failure. In 1952 Fulgencio Batista staged a coup in Cuba that ended any chance of democratic government on the island. When six years later Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and eighty Cuban exiles landed to overthrow Batista their cause looked helpless; within days half of them had been captured or killed. But the people rose up against one of the most vicious and corrupt dictatorships in the region, and in January 1959 Castro marched triumphantly into Havana. Like the Hungarians the previous year the Cuban rebels were clearer on what they were fighting against than what they were fighting for. Castro himself was castigated as an ‘adventurist’ by the communists and set off for the US to garner support, but his revolution had disturbed too many powerful commercial interest groups (among them organised crime, which had controlled Cuba’s lucrative casinos) for him to have any realistic prospect of success there. In a bipolar w
orld Castro was clearly not a friend of America’s corporatist empire.

  The US response was to sponsor an invasion of the island, which started three days before the Bay of Pigs landing when American B-26 bombers attacked Cuban airfields. The population did not rise up as expected to welcome the invaders, mostly Cuban émigrés, and President Kennedy refused the CIA’s pleas to commit overt US military forces. The invasion collapsed; most of the invaders were killed or captured. Castro turned to Moscow in earnest, eventually proclaiming himself a Marxist-Leninist, and becoming a Tony Blair to Russia’s George Bush – providing rhetoric and troops to support imperial adventures around the world.

  Most American interventions were more successful. As time went by the geographical limits of the Monroe Doctrine were swept away, and US actions in the Caribbean basin could be seen as exemplars of the imperial mindset that would later lead to military interventions in Asia and the Middle East. Nowhere was too small to be subject to US control when there was any deviation from the ‘American Way’. The original Monroe Doctrine explicitly excepted existing European interests in the region, but in 1983 this caveat was ignored in the case of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada.

  Grenada’s first post-Independence prime minister, Eric Gairy, was somewhat odd: he declared 1978 to be the Year of the UFO, and called for a UN Agency for Psychic Research into Unidentified Flying Objects and the Bermuda Triangle. More seriously, there were allegations of rigged elections and the Grenadan army and police received training in ‘security’ from the Chilean military regime of Augusto Pinochet. The opposition headed by Maurice Bishop seized power in a bloodless coup. For four years Bishop tried to find a middle way between competing ideologies – accepting aid from Cuba, increasing state spending in areas like health provision and allowing free rein to American corporations. The result was a reduction in unemployment, a significant improvement in per capita GDP and plaudits from the World Bank for his sound fiscal policies.