Dispelling a Dangerous Illusion
DAVIES, RICHARD T.
Dispelling a Dangerous Illusion Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945 By Vojtech Mastny Columbia University. 409 pp. $16.95. Reviewed...
...He writes, for example, that on the eve of Yalta Stalin was "Eager to both have the cake of Western cooperation and eat his Eastern Europeans too...
...Vojtech Mastny's classic study makes it possible to overcome this failure...
...Indeed, compelling arguments can be cited to explain why the development was inevitable...
...Thus General Eisenhower in 1945 decided for military reasons not to press forward as rapidly as possible into the territory east of the Elbe...
...Nowhere has the ambiguity of the realistic thesis been more evident than in the continuing controversy about the apparent or real inconsistencies in the ideas advocated at different times by the leading proponent of that thesis, George F. Kennan...
...It is therefore especially noteworthy that in Russia's Road to the Cold liar, Vojtech Mastny has given us a philosopher's stone for those willing to apply it...
...While some scholars today see the reality at least in part, they are hotly contested by others whose vision remains deceived...
...Why have the leaders of the free world failed to learn these lessons...
...In other words, the United States has been acting on the mistaken supposition that as long as we take care of the purely military end, the political will take care of itself...
...If its nature is properly understood, it can be used to our advantage...
...There are two lessons to be learned from all this...
...Reviewed by Richard T. Davies Former U.S...
...In London and Washington, unfortunately, the attitude was one of annoyance at having to negotiate with those stubborn Poles on such minor issues as borders and the composition of governments...
...A large part of the answer appears to lie in the inability of our politicians to comprehend that, while the dynamics of Soviet decision-making are concealed and radically different from ours, politics exists in the USSR and the Soviet bloc no less than it does in every society and supranational organization...
...The Kremlin has long recognized this...
...On one level, this book is an analysis of the antecedents, motivations and objectives of Soviet wartime policy...
...More recently, with the strategic balance ostensibly shifting in favor of the Russians, the same reasoning has often led to complacency about the spread of Soviet influence...
...what we have won on the swings, we seem to have lost on the roundabout...
...he has the perseverance needed to follow a very complicated story through archives, libraries and personal interviews...
...For he offers a kind of wisdom that this country has not yet assimilated or applied in its relations with the Soviet leadership, still so much the epigoni of the monstrous dictator (whose centennial year this is...
...An associate professor of history at the University of Illinois, he is proficient in 13 Western and Eastern European languages, enabling him to master the multitude of sources...
...Yet Stalin was concerned at every step of his expansionist way to avoid antagonizing his Western allies-though he need not have worried...
...Taking strong except ion to t he contention that we will not really know what happened until the Kremlin archives are opened, Mastny demonstrates that from the available evidence we can draw reasonable conclusions about Stalin's forces, methods and goals...
...Mastny shrewdly writes: "It has been a commonplace to observe that nothing could have prevented the Russians from overrunning the countries they did and installing there regimes of their choice...
...Similarly, General Wladyslaw Si-korski's attempt to establish a basis for postwar cooperation with Czechoslovakia was defeated as much by Western indifference as by Soviet hostility and the naive reliance of Edvard Benes on Moscow's goodwill...
...First, we are negligent if we fail to clearly define the limits beyond which the expansion of Soviet influence risks provoking a forcible Western reaction...
...and he has a mordant wit that will surprise those accustomed only to dull accounts of the origins of the Cold War...
...Second, it is a serious mistake to believe that Soviet expansion can be halted by military means alone...
...In sum, the failure today is one of perceptions, and specifically our perception of what lies behind the optical illusion with which Soviet decisionmakers continue to mislead their Western counterparts...
...Neither of them seriously contemplated confronting Stalin over his evident imperialistic intentions in Eastern Europe...
...His humor resembles that of Karel Capek or Jaroslav Hasek...
...But Mastny shows that in the complicated struggle over the formation of the Polish provisional government, Stalin was initially amenable to a coalition headed by Stanislaw Miko-lajczyk...
...Mastny quotes from an article that appeared in the January 1943 issue of Bolshevik: "Politics and war influence each other but . . . primacy always belongs to politics...
...During the Cold War, it bred the fallacy that Russian expansion could only be dammed effectively by military means, a reasoning conducive to the excessive preoccupation with the military attributes of power that has been characteristic of the American "national security state...
...The author is supremely qualified to undertake this task...
...On the whole, Mastny concludes, Roosevelt and Churchill "failed not so much in their perceptions as in their negligence to prepare themselves and their peoples for the . . . breakdown of the wartime alliance...
...You should have done this three years ago...
...As Maxim Litvinov said to Edgar Snow in 1945: "Why did you Americans wait until now to begin opposing us in the Balkans and Eastern Europe...
...Yet Mastny has produced more than a readable and consistently convincing analysis of Stalin during World War II...
...For-paradoxical as it may seem-by vigorously defining the limits of our tolerance, we would be providing the more hesitant elements of the Politburo with a convincing argument for restraint...
...As a result, our ability to influence political developments in Poland, already small, was reduced to nothing...
...Ambassador to Poland (1972-78) In his book Titoism and the Comin-form (1952), Adam Ulam wrote that "the seeming resolution and inflexibility of Russia's foreign policy is an optical illusion created by the secrecy surrounding the decision-making process . . ." More than a quarter of a century later that illusion has not been dispelled...
...But this 'realistic' argument which overlooks the difference between Soviet capability and Soviet aims, is a poor guide to both understanding history and inspiring action...
...Now it's too late...
Vol. 62 • November 1979 • No. 21
