by Will Podmore
Eisenhower said in November 1945, “Nothing guides Russian foreign policy so much as a desire for peace with the United States.”4 Many historians agreed that the Soviet Union wanted peace. Sir Michael Howard judged, “No serious historian any longer argues that Stalin ever had any intention of moving his forces outside the area he occupied in Eastern Europe.”5 Andrew Alexander agreed, “The opening up of the Soviet archives underlines the fantasy of the old view of the Russian ‘threat’.”6 Geoffrey Roberts confirmed, “the western cold war caricature of the Soviet Union as an aggressive and expansionist power aiming at world domination can be definitely discarded. The archives reveal no such plans, intentions or ambitions.”7 He noted, “The Soviet perspective was that great-power collaboration would continue in the long term to contain Germany and to maintain a stable setting for postwar reconstruction.”8
Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov concluded that Stalin “was not prepared to take a course of unbridled unilateral expansionism after World War II. He wanted to avoid confrontation with the West. He was even ready to see cooperation with the Western powers as a preferable way of building his influence and solving contentious international issues. Thus, the Cold War was not his choice or his brainchild. … Stalin’s postwar foreign policy was more defensive, reactive and prudent than it was the fulfillment of a master plan.”9 Garthoff summed up, “The burden of all the available evidence from Soviet archives and memoirs confirms the view that some of us had at the time, that no Soviet leadership at any time during the Cold War ever contemplated a military attack on the West.”10
Warren Cohen noted of the US government, “Even as they contemplated projecting American power more than five thousand miles from their shores, substituting it for declining British power in the proximity of Soviet borders, they perceived Soviet behaviour in the area as threatening, American actions as defensive.”11 In fact, as Garthoff pointed out, “On the whole the United States used its own military forces coercively more frequently …”12
The US and British governments responded to what they called the Soviet ‘peace offensive’ with Churchill’s Fulton speech (a virtual declaration of war), the Truman Doctrine, which threatened worldwide US intervention, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (six years before the Warsaw Pact was created) and the Marshall Plan. The Plan was to open the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe’s countries to control by Western capital. Russian historian Dimitri Volkogonov later noted that Stalin rejected the Plan because accepting it would have meant ‘accepting virtual US control over the Soviet economy’. Volkogonov commented, “Stalin’s understanding of the Marshall Plan had not been mistaken.”13
In March 1945, US Assistant Secretary Struve Hensel had recorded of Roosevelt, “The President indicated considerable difficulty with British relations. In a semi-jocular manner of speaking, he stated that the British were perfectly willing for the United States to have a war with Russia at any time and that, in his opinion, to follow the British program would be to proceed to that end.”14 Later, President Truman said he agreed with Vice-President Henry Wallace when he said, “the purpose of Britain was to promote an unbreachable break between us and Russia.”15
At the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the Allies agreed that they would jointly occupy Germany to disarm and democratise it, to ensure that it fulfilled its obligations to the Allies and to erase its war-industrial potential. But in December 1946, the US and British governments agreed to fuse their zones, thereby splitting Germany in breach of their earlier commitments. Many historians agreed that, as Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick wrote, “the United States and Great Britain charged towards confrontation with the Soviet Union.”16 Zubok pointed out, “Stalin left to the West the role of breaking the agreements of Yalta and Potsdam and starting a confrontation.” He observed, “every Soviet step towards creating units of military and secret police inside the zone was taken after the Western powers took their own decisive steps toward the separation of West Germany: Bizonia, the Marshall Plan, and the formation of West Germany.”17
From the late 1940s, the USA carried out secret, illegal spy flights over the Soviet Union, at the cost of losing 140 US pilots and crewmen shot down. From February 1945, “British Special Operations were already smuggling anti-Soviet agents in and out of Poland disguised as Allied ex-POWs.”18 On 18 June 1948, Truman authorised ‘preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and … subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups’. As Kennan wrote of the anti-Soviet ‘Operation Rollback’, “this project would follow a principle which has been basic in British and Soviet political warfare: remote and deeply concealed official control of clandestine operations so that governmental responsibility cannot be shown …”19 (When ex-President Truman in May 1952 made some overly revealing comments about Operation Rollback, the Foreign Office told the BBC not to mention them.20) Between 1944 and 1953, Latvian ‘national partisans’ trained by Nazi counter-intelligence and backed by the CIA and MI6 killed 3,242 Red Army soldiers. As late as 1953, MI6 was still sending agents, arms, explosives and timers for sabotage operations into Ukraine and Poland.21
Jeffrey Burds summed up, “U.S. and British intelligence were supporting Ukrainian and Polish underground rebel actions against Soviet forces long before victory over Germany, … the Soviet leadership was by autumn 1946 deeply cognizant of this support - information which had a powerful impact on U.S.-Soviet relations during the crucial years of postwar transition from 1944 to 1948.” He concluded, “in 1946 the Soviets discovered solid evidence of Western support for paramilitary groups who were actively conducting not just espionage (sanctioned by their Western controllers) but also terror, assassinations, diversion, and sabotage against Soviet citizens and state and party officials on a wide scale. … the Soviets did indeed have something to be concerned about vis-à-vis U.S. threats to their own national security following World War II. And Pavel Sudoplatov’s claims, that “the origins of the Cold War are closely interwoven with Western support for nationalist unrest in the Baltic areas and Western Ukraine,” do not seem so far-fetched. This interpretation would be wholly consistent with a new view emerging among some post-Soviet scholars, a view that interprets Soviet policy and Soviet perceptions in the early Cold War as having been driven by legitimate concerns about their own national security, and not merely by Stalin’s personal foibles, Communist ideology, or traditionally presumed notions of a drive for world domination.”22
After the USA dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan, Stalin said, “Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The balance has been broken. Build the bomb – it will remove the great danger from us.” On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first plutonium bomb. As Cohen later affirmed, “The Soviets had no choice but to acquire nuclear weapons.” He stressed, “there was nothing unreasonable about their fear of Germany or of NATO, or about their decision to arm against the threat they perceived.”23
The Soviet bomb ended the huge danger of the US government’s believing that it could defeat the Soviet Union by nuclear attack. The leading American strategist Bernard Brodie acknowledged, “If the atomic bomb can be used without fear of substantial retaliation in kind, it will clearly encourage aggression.”24 As David Holloway, the historian of the Soviet nuclear bomb, summed up, “The great success of Stalin’s military policy was that it helped to persuade the United States that the atomic air offensive would not be decisive, and that war with the Soviet Union would be prolonged and difficult.”25
The USA exploded its first H-bomb in November 1952. In August 1953, the Soviet Union produced the world’s first deliverable H-bomb, again restoring the balance. As British strategist Colin Gray conceded, US ‘nuclear deterrence may have been redundant’, since the Soviet Union was not bent on aggression. But the nuclear deterrent was not redundant for the Soviet Union. Soviet diplomacy, backed by the S
oviet bomb, prevented any US nuclear attack. Of course, any such attack would have been suicidal: as military historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski noted, “A full-scale NATO wargame in 1955 discovered that West Germany could not be saved without being destroyed.”26
In March 1952, the Soviet Union proposed creating a neutral, united Germany and withdrawing all Allied forces from Germany. In April, Stalin told the German Democratic Republic’s leaders, “Whatever proposals we make on the German question the Western powers won’t agree with them and they won’t withdraw from West Germany. To think that the Americans will compromise or accept the draft peace treaty would be a mistake. The Americans need an army in West Germany in order to keep control of Western Europe. .. The Americans are drawing West Germany into the [NATO] pact. They will form West German forces ... In West Germany an independent state is being formed. And you must organize your own state.”27 NATO indeed turned down the Soviet proposal.
By contrast, Molotov was prepared to make a deal with NATO that would have given up the GDR in exchange for a peace treaty on Germany. Giving up the GDR would have undermined the whole Soviet bloc. In 1953, after Stalin died, Molotov and Premier Georgy Malenkov continued to push for a German peace treaty. In June, Malenkov said, “Profoundly mistaken are those who think that Germany can exist for a long time under conditions of dismemberment in the form of two independent states. To stick to the position of the existence of a dismembered Germany means to keep to the course for a new war.”28 But events proved that Malenkov and Molotov were mistaken, not Stalin.
Rebuilding, again
Yet despite the threats, sabotage and terrorism, the Soviet people rebuilt their industry and agriculture. The state kept the ownership of the means of production, which it allocated, not sold, to factories: they were not commodities. The Soviet Union recovered remarkably quickly from the effects of the war. National income increased by 64 per cent between 1940 and 1950, industrial production by 73 per cent and agricultural production by 14.2 per cent. Real wages tripled between 1945 and 1950.29 1940’s GNP was reached again by 1948 and 1950’s level was nearly 50 per cent above 1940’s.30 Soviet output grew by 7.3 per cent a year from 1947 to 1958 (a higher rate than all but Japan and West Germany). Between 1947 and 1952, output of consumer goods increased substantially every year and retail prices were cut by more than 40 per cent, thanks to productivity increases, which cut costs.31
In a planned system, the incentive for innovation came from its promotion by the planners, with the active participation of workers at the point of production. The Soviet Union used a comprehensive set of standardisation procedures to improve product quality.32 From 1951 to 1965, industry’s productivity grew by 6.4 per cent a year, which put the Soviet Union ‘among the world leaders in this period’.33
Between 1946 and 1950, 652,000 students graduated, more than in any previous five-year-plan period. By 1950, there were a record 1,247,400 students in Soviet universities and professional institutes, by 1960, 2,396,100, almost three times the number in 1940. By 1950, 59 per cent more specialists with degrees were working than in 1941.34 Enrolment of engineering specialists was 57 per cent up on 1940’s figure and by 1955 had almost doubled again.
As a result of this huge investment in higher education, the decade of the 1950s was the Soviet Union’s best for growth. The Soviet Union also launched the world’s first satellite, the Sputnik, and sent the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. It conducted the world’s first flight of a supersonic passenger aircraft. It became a world leader in specialised metals, machines for seamless welding of railroad tracks and eye surgery equipment. Its performing artists and athletes were among the world’s best.
Khanin summed up the 1950s, “at the beginning of the decade the level of consumption of basic foods was characteristic rather of a developing country, as a result of the rise in per capita consumption of high-quality goods like meat, milk, sugar, vegetables and pulses by 1.5-2 and more times, it reached the level of a number of developed countries. … Completion of housing rose two and a half times, reaching the level of highly developed countries per head of population. … the enormous increase in life expectancy, to 69 – the level of the most developed countries in the world at the time. … These immense economic and social achievements, in my opinion, permit us to call the 1950s the decade of the ‘Soviet economic miracle’. … this result should be considered a unique social and economic achievement. … The command economy in this period demonstrated its viability and macroeconomic efficiency. The Soviet economy, being in essence the largest corporation in the world, made skilful use of the strengths of any large corporation: preparing and implementing long-range plans, using colossal financial resources for development in priority directions, carrying out major capital investments in a short period of time, spending large sums on scientific research and so on. The achievements of the 1950s were based on the powerful heavy industrial and transport potential created in the 1930s-1940s … The USSR skilfully used its limited resources for the development of sectors which determine long-term economic progress: education – including higher education – healthcare and science.”35
US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told the US National Security Council in 1956, “the United States had very largely failed to appreciate the impact on the underdeveloped areas of the world of the phenomenon of Russia’s rapid industrialization. Its transformation from an agrarian to a modern industrialized state was an historical event of absolutely first class importance.” He observed that underdeveloped countries saw “the results of Russia’s industrialization and all they want is for the Russians to show them how they too can achieve it.”36 Economist Joseph Berliner told the US Congress’s Joint Economic Committee in 1959, “Two generations ago people debated the question of whether a socialist economy could possibly work. History removed that question from the agenda. The last generation changed the question to whether the Soviet economy could work at all efficiently. That question has also been answered. These hearings would not otherwise be taking place. My discussion takes for granted that the Soviet economy is reasonably efficient, and that the question at issue is how efficient.”37
Russia expert Alexander Werth affirmed in 1969, “the ordinary Russian of today … is extremely conscious of the fact that the system works, and has on the whole been an enormous success. What’s more, thanks to State control, it works without slumps, economic crises and unemployment. … The country is, moreover, the greatest welfare state in the world, with 34 million old-age pensioners, a free health service, and a vast free education system.”38
More recent students agreed that Soviet workers did well. Ellman pointed out, “Workers in state socialist countries are often better off from the standpoint of social security (in old age or illness) than workers in capitalist countries at comparable stages of development, or than workers in the socially backward countries (e.g. the USA).”39 David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu observed in 2013, “In general Soviet economies tended to have much higher life expectancies than capitalist economies at similar levels of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] per capita (such as Chile, Turkey, Botswana, South Africa, etc.). On average, Soviet men had 4.8 years greater health and Soviet women had 7.7 years greater health for their country’s level of income compared with capitalist economy averages.”40
All this the Soviet Union achieved despite the permanent sanctions against all socialist countries which restricted their trade and borrowing. The US government ensured that Western Europe’s countries and Japan imposed these sanctions too. The blockade made it harder for the Soviet Union to buy the technological innovations available to the rest of the developed world. And the Soviet Union still had huge problems, especially the poor quality and shortages of housing and consumer goods.
Stalin, the architect of socialism, died in 1953. Churchill said of him, “He was a man of outstanding personality who left an impression on our harsh times, the period in which his life ran its course. Stalin
was a man of extraordinary energy, erudition and inflexible will, blunt, tough, and merciless in both action and conversation, whom even I, reared in the British Parliament, was at a loss to counter. His words resounded with gigantic strength. This strength was so great in Stalin that he seemed unique among leaders of all times and peoples. … This was a man who used his enemies’ hands to destroy his enemy, who made us - whom he openly called imperialists - do battle against imperialists. He found Russia with a wooden plow, but he left it equipped with atomic weapons.”41
Carr concluded, “Stalin, in driving forward the industrial revolution at breakneck speed, in constantly urging the need to catch up with the west, proved a more pertinacious, more ruthless and more successful revolutionary than any of the other party leaders: this certainly accounted for the support he received over a long period.”42 And, “He carried out, in face of every obstacle and opposition, the industrialization of his country through intensive planning, and thus not only paid tribute to the validity of Marxist theory, but ranged the Soviet Union as an equal partner among the Great Powers of the western world. In virtue of this achievement he takes his undisputed place both as one of the executors of the Marxist testament and one of the great westernizers in Russian history.”43 Egor Gaidar, Russia’s Acting Prime Minister from June to December 1992, called 1929-53 ‘the only period when communism triumphed’.44 American journalist Howard K. Smith observed, “Stalin did more to change the world in the first half of the twentieth century than any other man who lived in it.”45 He had found the Soviet Union a ruin and left it a great power.