Stalin and the cold war



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THE COLD WAR

Mark Kramer

The Cold War began at the end of World War II, when the Soviet Union emerged as the dominant military power in Europe and the United States emerged as the most powerful country in the world, rivaled in the military sphere only by the Soviet Union. Two features of the Cold War distinguished it from other periods in modern history: a fundamental clash of ideologies (Marxism-Leninism versus liberal democracy); and a highly stratified global power structure in which the United States and the Soviet Union were clearly seen as preeminent over all other countries, a status that conferred on them the designation of “superpowers.”

During the first eight years after World War II, the Cold War on the Soviet side was identified with Stalin. Stalin’s antagonistic conception of East-West relations was evident in the 1930s, when he launched a massive program of espionage in the West, seeking to plant spies and sympathizers in the upper levels of Western governments. In the United States alone, more than 300 individuals were actively working as Soviet spies in the 1930s and early 1940s.

In the closing months of World War II, when the Soviet Union gained increasing dominance over Nazi Germany, Stalin was able to resort to a more overt way of spreading Soviet influence, by relying on Soviet troops to occupy vast swaths of territory in East-Central Europe. The establishment of Soviet military hegemony in the eastern half of Europe, and the sweeping political changes that followed, were perhaps the single most important precipitant of the Cold War. So long as Soviet military control over East-Central Europe continued, it is doubtful that any lasting reconciliation between East and West would have been feasible.

The extreme repression that Stalin practiced at home carried over into his policy vis-à-vis the West. Stalin’s unchallenged dictatorial authority within the Soviet Union gave him enormous leeway to formulate Soviet foreign policy as he saw fit. The pervasive suspicion and intolerance that he displayed at home were replicated in his approach to foreign affairs. The huge losses inflicted by Germany on the Soviet Union after Adolf Hitler abandoned the Nazi-Soviet pact and launched an attack on the USSR in June 1941—a pact that Stalin had upheld even after he received numerous warnings from well-placed intelligence sources that a German attack was imminent—made the Soviet leader all the more unwilling to trust or seek a genuine compromise with his Western counterparts after World War II. Having been humiliated once, he was determined not to let down his guard again.

Stalin’s supremely mistrustful outlook was evident not only in his relations with Western leaders, but also in his dealings with fellow Communists. During the civil war in China after World War II, Stalin kept his distance from the Chinese Communist leader, Mao Zedong. Although the Soviet Union provided crucial support for the Chinese Communists during the climactic phase of their civil war, Stalin and Mao never managed to develop a close relationship. Mao himself, upon traveling to Moscow in December 1949, was still almost in awe of Stalin, but his sentiments were not reciprocated. During the two months that Mao was in the Soviet Union, Stalin agreed to meet privately with him only twice, leaving him with little to do the rest of the time. This high-handed treatment was typical of the relationship that Stalin maintained with Mao. In the lead-up to the Korean War in June, 1950, Stalin did his best to outflank Mao, giving the Chinese leader little choice but to go along with the decision to start the war.

Stalin took a similar approach in his relations with the East-Central European leaders. He exercised remarkably tight control over the political situation in East-Central Europe, giving only the most tenuous leeway to indigenous officials. At Stalin’s behest, the Communist parties gradually solidified their hold through the determined use of what the Hungarian Communist party leader Mátyás Rákosi called “salami tactics.” Moscow’s supervision over the communization of the region was further strengthened in September 1947 by the establishment of the Cominform, a body responsible for binding together the East European Communist parties as well as the French and Italian Communist parties, under the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party. By the spring of 1948, “People’s Democracies” were in place all over East-Central Europe, ready to embark on Stalinist policies of social transformation.

Stalin’s unwillingness to tolerate dissent was especially clear in his policy vis-à-vis Yugoslavia, which had been one of the staunchest postwar allies of the Soviet Union. In June, 1948, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform and publicly denounced. The Soviet-Yugoslav rift, which had been developing behind-the-scenes for several months and had finally reached the breaking point in March, 1948, arose because Stalin declined to give the Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito, any leeway in diverging from Soviet preferences in the Balkans and in policy toward the West. When Tito demurred, Stalin sought an abject capitulation from Yugoslavia as an example to the other East European countries of the unwavering obedience that was expected.



Despite the rift with Yugoslavia, Soviet influence in East-Central Europe came under no further threat during Stalin’s time. From 1947 through the early 1950s, the East-Central European states embarked on crash industrialization and collectivization programs, causing vast social upheaval yet also leading to rapid short-term economic growth. Stalin was able to rely on the presence of Soviet troops, a tightly-woven network of security forces, the wholesale penetra­tion of the East European governments and armies by Soviet agents, the use of mass purges and political terror, and the unifying threat of renewed German militarism to ensure that regimes loyal to Moscow remained in power. By the early 1950s, Stalin had established a degree of control over East-Central Europe to which his successors could only aspire.
Stalin thus achieved two remarkable feats in the first several years after World War II: he had solidified a Communist bloc in Europe, and he had established an unusually close Sino-Soviet alliance, which proved crucial during the Korean War. These twin accomplishments marked the high point of the Cold War for the Soviet Union.




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