The Origins of the Cold War

...As the war progressed, the specter of international communism and memories of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Russian invasion of Finland receded in the minds of men whose first duty was to oversee the Axis defeat...

...Tito, firmly entrenched in Yugoslavia, had ordered his forces into Trieste and the Italian province of Venezia Biulia...

...1968, p. 400...

...In light of the rejection by Truman of Churchill's suggestion that American troop movements in Europe be used as a bargaining lever against the Soviets, it is apparent that cooperation had not yet been discredited...

...To me the fundamental question in respect to our relations with Russia is whether we are dealing with a nation or a religion," Secretary of the Navy James F. Forrestal wrote of the dilemma that had beset American policy makers by the close of 1945...

...N.Y., 1948, p. 908...

...We ask it in Manchuria...

...Nor is it likely that American public opinion would have countenanced a sharp break with past policies at that time, even if the newly installed Truman Administration had been inclined to lead one...

...Stalin himself charged that the negotiations . . . have ended in agreement with the Germans, on the basis of which the German commander on the Western front - Marshall Kesselring, has agreed to open the front and permit the Anglo-American troops to advance to the East, and the Anglo-Americans have promised in return to ease for the Germans the peace terms...

...Amid western reports that an appeasement bloc had surfaced in the Soviet government, Moscow announced in July 1943 the formation of a Free Germany Committee, what seemed the nucleus of a pro-Soviet government ready to grasp power in Berlin should Hitler be overthrown...

...In the same sense, the Soviets must have applauded British willingness to talk of the postwar world in terms of regional influence...

...The war had cost the Soviets millions of lives...

...American Institute of Public Opinion Poll cited in John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947...

...What could such terms have signified to Joseph Stalin, author of the purges and spy mania of the thirties, of the collectivization that in terms of sheer brutality rivaled the Nazi invasion itself...

...Three months later, following the failure of the Foreign Ministers' Conference in London, the number had dropped to 44 percent...

...So must many a diplomat have groaned in the early days of victory...

...The two powers would share Yugoslavia...

...The jealousy of states, compounded by first principle and misperception, became the Cold War, a conflict more bitter for the promise that there could be no Cold War...

...They are accurate...

...By the Potsdam Conference (July, 1945), noncommunists in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Rumania had been barred from government's front door or ushered out by the back...

...General John R. Deane, head of the American Military Mission to the Soviet Union, argued in 1944 that the Russians simply cannot understand giving without taking, and as a result even our giving is viewed with suspicion...

...While western newspapers pilloried Churchill as a monarchist, Pravda and Isvestia remained silent...

...Three months after the Normandy landings, Churchill could write Stalin, I shall take occasion to repeat tomorrow in the House of Commons what I have said before, that it is the Russian army that tore the guts out of the German military machine and is at the present moment holding by far the larger proportion of the enemy on its front...

...The defeat of Hitler's Germany laid waste not only the threat of Nazi aggression, but the balance of power that had earlier failed to contain it...

...The guilty ones will be tried," Molotov reportedly assured American and British colleagues - Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-67...

...The Soviet Union would obviously have a major role to play, along with the other global policemen, Roosevelt assured the Soviet Foreign Minister...

...It is easy, after the Germans are beaten," Churchill cautioned critics yet unborn, to condemn those who did then-best to hearten the Russian military effort or to keep in harmonious contact with our great ally, who had suffered so frightfully.....Our hopeful assumptions were soon to be falsified, but they were the only ones possible at the time...

...Coupled with faith in the efficacy of collective security and guilt over the burden carried by the Red Army was the nagging uncertainty over whether the Soviets, if pressed too hard in the Baltic and Eastern Europe, might conclude a separate peace with Germany and abandon plans to enter the war against Japan...

...Positions on both sides hardened throughout 1946, On February 9, Stalin spoke on the theme of East-West incompatibility, a speech Time magazine labeled the most warlike pronouncement uttered by any top-rank statesman since V-J Day.!.' On February 28, the day after Vandenberg's Senate address, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes delivered the first public statement of the Administration's new Soviet policy, warning that the United States would frown on a slow nibbling away of the status quo...

...Robert E. Sherwood, Roose veti and Hopkins: An Intimate History...

...Were there to be no tangible rewards for the enormous Russian contribution to victory...

...It was not until May 1945 that of those Americans who recognized dissension in allied ranks, more blamed the Soviet Union than Great Britain...

...I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man...

...But neither a contemporary study commissioned by Forrestal nor the work of another generation of scholars has succeeded in explaining the peculiar mix of xenophobia, ideological fervor, and traditional imperialism that fashioned Soviet policies...

...Surely Stalin's claims that this disaster must not be allowed to happen again - (Poland) was a question of both honor and security" to the Soviet Union, Churchill remembered the Soviet dictator reminding him at Yalta - were not without merit...

...American Institute of Public Opinion polls, cited by Gaddis, p. 289...

...Robert Sherwood noted during his account of the Hopkins mission to Moscow in 1945: there was apparently no way of translating the word friendly' from one language to another so that it would make sense...

...Then in June came news of the arrest of six people, among them State Department officials, on charges of passing classified documents to the editors of Amerasia...

...State Department archives have only recently opened through to the end of 1946 - dogmatism can rest on no firmer foundation than political theory and bluster...

...Such was the nature of the Soviet system that western leaders may well have wondered what meaning the Russians attached to the words "trust" and security...

...When in March 1947, President Truman approached the Congress with an unprecedented request for aid to two nations far outside traditional American perimeters of defense, the measure passed handily...

...The first corollary to this view - which was by no means universal among FDR's advisers - was that good will was a more potent force than power...

...In rejecting the advice of former Soviet ambassador William C. Bullitt for a tougher bargaining stance toward the Kremlin, Roosevelt reportedly explained: I don't dispute your facts...

...Molotov suggested pointedly that the United States had been negotiating behind the back of the Soviet government which has been carrying on the main burden of the war against Germany...

...By 1946, politicians of both parties were scrambling to disown the wartime policy of appeasement...

...Such a task would go far beyond our strength...

...A capitalist America emerged from the war mightier than before...

...And if we can believe Khrushchev's claim that postwar demobilization had reduced Russia's armed forces by more than two-thirds within three years of the German defeat (cited in Adam Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence...

...In the West, strategists were alarmed but not surprised...

...Words have a different connotation to the Soviets than they have to us," Secretary Hull once observed...

...It appears that Soviet truculence over Poland had led Roosevelt to second thoughts, concerning his policy of cooperation, a wariness anticipated by the decision not to share atomic secrets with Stalin...

...Emphasis given the symbolic aspect of the Polish question by Harry Hopkins during his talks with Stalin four months later could not have impressed the Soviets with American determination to enforce the letter of treaty agreements on Eastern Europe...

...I don't dispute your reasoning...

...total Anglo-American losses were less than a million...

...there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any of the other special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests...

...With the fall of Naziism - the bailing wire and chewing gum of allied harmony - the two Great Powers were thrown together in a new world order...

...The balance of power had been discredited by history, leading American planners believed...

...I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and work with me in a world of democracy and peace...

...New York, 1968, p. 403), it would seem that Soviet fears of "atomic blackmail" were to some extent tailored for home consumption...

...It had appeared that some Russian pressure in East Europe was inevitable, if regrettable...

...as the scene of a clash of ideas in which the Soviet and western influences are likely to be hostile and conflicting...

...why do you not give me some latitude in Rumania?' " The Soviets could hardly have failed to notice other western signals...

...Stalin brooded darkly over the West's delay in establishing a second front, over German reparations and the British and American refusal to permit active Soviet participation in the occupation of Italy...

...By February 1946, it had reached 35 percent...

...If it's not one damn thing, it's another...

...The western-oriented Polish government in London, promised representation in the Warsaw puppet regime, was effectively blocked from power...

...We ask it in Eastern Europe and the Dardanelles...

...N.Y., 1972, p. 230...

...Fears that the United States and Great Britain would come to separate terms with Hitler dogged Stalin throughout the war...

...Formidable questions rose to my mind," Churchill recalled in his Memoirs...

...In August, a show of American naval power in the eastern Mediterranean apparently intimidated the Soviets into dropping demands for bases in the Dardanelles...

...There can be little doubt that Stalin was heartened by the American president's vision of things to come...

...Stalin might profitably consider the establishment of some form of international trusteeships over these islands and possessions," Sherwood reported Roosevelt as saying...

...In April 1945, calls from within the Party for postwar coexistence with the West European democracies had come under the scathing and apparently official attack of French communist leader Jacques Ducfos...

...The promise held out by the abolition of the Comintern (1943) and Stalin's wartime appeals to Russian nationalism seemed a pipe dream...

...Fifty-four percent of those Americans polled in August 1945 had voiced a willingness to trust the Soviets to cooperate at the end of the war...

...By mid-1945, the Yalta Declaration on Eastern Europe stood revealed as a fraud...

...At the first meeting of the Yalta Conference, President Roosevelt announced in passing that the American occupation of Europe would last no more than two years...

...From the beginning, it must have appeared to the Soviets that the West was willing to live and let live within assigned spheres of responsibility, despite the American preoccupation with idealistic documents...

...policy itself probably became the object of Soviet suspicions...

...In June, the Czech communist regime found itself faced with Soviet demands for cession of the Car-patho-Ukraine...

...Negotiators faced the same problem with political concepts...

...Under the provisions of a famous agreement between Churchill and Stalin in October 1944, the Soviet Union was assigned ninety percent influence in Rumania, while the British were to enjoy the same privilege in Greece...

...New York, 1968, p. 383...

...Later in the month, Andrei Gro-myko, the Russian representative at the United Nations, stalked out in protest of the decision to keep the Iranian question on the Security Council agenda...

...Two years earlier, Secretary of State Hull had banished the original sin of nations by promising Congress...

...As late as October 1943, Roosevelt was sufficiently concerned about the possibilities of Soviet withdrawal to query Ambassador Stanley in Moscow: What do you think, Bill, will he (Stalin) make a separate peace with Hitler...

...Then, too, long-term arrangements would have to be made for disarming the Axis powers and administering former colonial areas...

...Western Russia lay in ruins...

...But by March of the next year, Soviet forbearance on British policy in Greece had taken on a retrospectively ominous note...

...The American State Department which a year earlier had noticed links between revolutionary activity in Latin America and Soviet embassies there, quickly interpreted the article - aimed at the policies of American Party chief Earl Browder - as Moscow's signal for a new phase of Party activism...

...Nevertheless, the weight attached by American planners to procedural questions in the World Organization and their unwillingness to coordinate strategic planning with postwar political goals points up a reliance on Big Three cooperation which later events were to prove unrealistic...

...and German Italian-theater commanders in Berne, Switzerland-the talks were purely tactical, U.S...

...The Council of Foreign Ministers met through the end of the year, unable to mend growing disagreement over the reparations agreements on Germany...

...Western statesmen were all too aware of the burden Soviet armies had carried...

...FDR suggested that Mr...

...General Douglas MacArthur, who could later marvel at the generosity of American concessions at Yalta, remarked to a Washington staff officer in early 1945 that Soviet support would be essential for the planned invasion of Japan...

...By early 1946, the battle lines had been drawn...

...if we abandon this miserable fiction, often encouraged by our own fellow-travellers, that we somehow jeopardize the peace if our candor is as firm as Russia's always is...

...We ask it in Poland . . . . " Peaceful relations between East and West were possible, he said, but only if the United States speaks as plainly upon all occasions as Russia does...

...Traditional British reliance on the balance of power and Churchill's interest in Europe's soft underbelly" betrayed to many an unseemly preoccupation with postwar political gain...

...On March 5 Churchill - now a private citizen - warned his listeners at Fulton, Missouri, that From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent...

...In the unfamiliar daylight of victory, the Soviet Union emerged not as the allies had come to imagine her - co-defender of civilization, partner in the peace to follow - but as a Great Power, heir to both the dreams of Russian empire and the pretensions of a universal ideology...

...Such likely was the impression Molotov carried away from negotiations with Roosevelt on the opening of a second front in Europe before the end of 1942...

...Sixteen resistance leaders whom the Soviets had invited to Moscow for discussions on "broadening" the communist government had been arrested...

...With Soviet intentions in the immediate postwar period still unclear - the early years of the Cold War are among the most secretive in Russian history and U.S...

...The Soviets either refused or were unable to make the distinction between classical spheres of influence and the kind of domination they came to practice in Eastern Europe...

...Of the internal pressures that might have governed Soviet policies, we can only speculate...

...In retrospect, it is hard to see how things might have been different...

...At the back of their minds there are still lingering suspicions that we want to back Right Wing Governments or monarchies for their own sake...

...So FDR had earlier characterized the prospects of Soviet hegemony over the three Baltic states assigned her in the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact...

...Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg demanded of its architects...

...The talks, which ended with hedged American promises that a second front would be established, also touched on the shape of the postwar world...

...If I pressed, (Stalin) might say, I did not interfere with your action in Greece...

...Yet is it within the pale of common sense to suggest that the advantages of continued world tension sorely tempted Soviet leaders as they surveyed the price of victory...

...The war that began with the invasion of Poland had ended with her rape...

...With Hitler's fall, nothing was left - certainly little of the trust that had been the object of Roosevelt's grand design" for postwar cooperation...

...But by the end of 1945, both the American public and its government had succumbed to disillusionment...

...What is Russia up to now...

...Later estimates put the figure at between 15 and 20 million...

...When the United States and Great Britain faced the Soviet Union in the spring of 1945, it was across a chasm of suspicion that during the bleakest hours of the war had threatened the allied coalition with disintegration...

...officials explained - the Russians fumed...

...George F. Kennan's detailed analysis of the ideological underpinnings of Soviet expansion brought chills to an impressionable Washington audience...

...Alarmed at continued Soviet intransigence in Manchuria, in Europe, and in Iran - as well as prospects for Republican exploitation of the new mood - President Truman came to adopt the hard line anticipated by his sharp warning to Molotov the spring before on "living up to your agreements...

...In July 1945, Lord Halifax, British ambassador to the United States, reported to Churchill that despite an apparent readiness to stand up to the Russians, (The Americans) showed some signs of nervousness in my portrayal of Europe...

...Thus, small wonder that mispercep-tions and ill will hounded the Grand Alliance through most of its days...

...When, in March 1945, the United States rejected a Soviet bid to participate in the surrender talks underway between U.S...

...Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had campaigned for the League in 1920 as Democratic vice-presidential candidate, told a joint session of Congress following his return from Yalta: (The Crimean Conference) spells the end of the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliances and spheres of influence and balance of power and all the other expedients which have been tried for centuries - and failed...

...production had fallen 50 percent from prewar levels...

...If the Americans left Europe, Britain would have to occupy single-handed the entire Western portion of Germany...

...Churchill wrote that his authority to protest Soviet moves in Rumania had been undercut by the percentages arrangement concluded in Moscow...

...Suffering and destruction had been enormous...

...The Soviets proved as good as their word when the British stepped into the 1944 communist Greek insurrection...

...When they speak of insisting on friendly governments' in their neighboring countries, they have in mind something quite different from what we would mean...

...Cries of the imminence of western aggression had been useful since 1921 in marshalling tolerance for the sacrifices of war and labor...

...The Soviets, meanwhile, were absorbed with suspicions of their own...

...Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-67...

...Another source of the American preoccupation with allied harmony, which neither revelations of the Katyn Forest massacre nor the agonizing Soviet pause outside the gates of Warsaw could dampen, was a view of postwar security premised on the notion of collective security...

...The openness of U.S...

...Nor was the Soviet Union the exclusive object of American suspicions...