The Soviet threat was bogus (huh?)

Like others of my generation, I hugely enjoyed the film Dr Strangelove when it came out in 1963, despite my orthodox view of the Cold War and its causes. But as I came to visit the United States and meet American politicians and military men, it struck me that General Jack D. Ripper is not such a total parody. This set me on a long and reluctant journey to Damascus. As I researched, through the diaries and memoirs of the key figures involved, it dawned on me that my view of the Cold War as a struggle to the death between Good (Britain and America) and Evil (the Soviet Union) was seriously mistaken. In fact, as history will almost certainly judge, it was one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time, and certainly the most perilous.

The Cold War began within months of the end of the second world war, when the Soviet Union was diagnosed as inherently aggressive. It had installed or was installing Communist and fellow-travelling governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The Red Army, intact and triumphant, was ready and able to conquer Western Europe at any time it was unleashed by Stalin, who was himself dedicated to the global triumph of communism. But ‘we’ — principally the United States and Britain — had just learnt from painful experience that it was not only futile but also counterproductive to seek accommodation with brutal and ‘expansionist’ dictators. We had to stand up to Stalin, in President Truman’s phrase, ‘with an iron fist’.

It was a Manichean doctrine, seductive in its simplicity. But the supposed military threat was wholly implausible. Had the Russians, though themselves devastated by the war, invaded the West, they would have had a desperate battle to reach and occupy the Channel coast against the Allies, utilising among other things a hastily rearmed Wehrmacht. But, in any case, what then? With a negligible Russian navy, the means of invading Britain would somehow have had to be created. Meanwhile Britain would have been supplied with an endless stream of men and material from the United States, making invasion virtually hopeless.

And even if the Soviets, ignoring the A-bomb, had conquered Europe from Norway to Spain against all odds, they would have been left facing an implacable United States across more than 2,000 miles of ocean — the ultimate unwinnable war. In short, there was no Soviet military danger. Stalin was not insane.

Nor was he a devout ideologue dedicated to world communism. He was far more like a cruel oriental tyrant. He was committed, above all else, to retaining power, murdering every rival, and ruling Russia by mass terror on a breathtaking scale. Stalin had long been opposed to the idea that Russia should pursue world revolution. He had broken with Trotsky, and proclaimed the ideal of ‘socialism in one country’. Of course he was content to have Communist parties abroad believe that the eventual global triumph of the creed was inevitable — Marxism made no sense otherwise — but for all practical purposes foreign Communist parties were instruments of Russian policy, encouraged to become significant enough to influence or interfere with their own nations’ actions where it helped Soviet purposes. But it was never Stalin’s idea — far from it — that they should establish potentially rival Communist governments whose existence and independence would be liable, indeed certain, to diminish the role of Russia as the dominant global power on the Left, and Stalin’s personal position. Yugoslavia and China were to demonstrate the peril of rival Communist powers.

In Britain many of us saw the bitter conflict between the Trotskyite Socialist Workers’ party and Communists as an amusing sideshow, some sort of absurd quarrel between two groups of fanatics on points of doctrinal purity. But the Trotskyites had a point. They understood, if others did not, that Moscow had betrayed the world revolution.

The Cold War began because of Russia’s reluctance to allow independence or freedom to the ‘liberated’ countries of Eastern and Central Europe, Poland in particular. Stalin was held to have welshed on promises at Yalta. Roosevelt and Churchill had demanded that Poland would be allowed a government that would be ‘free’ and also ‘friendly to Russia’.

It was a dishonest formula on both sides. The two countries had a long record of enmity. As recently as 1920, they had been at war. There was also the Soviet massacre of 11,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest. No freely elected Polish government would be friendly to the USSR. Furthermore, as Stalin pointed out forcibly at Yalta, Russia had been twice invaded through Poland by Germany in 26 years, both times with devastating consequences. The invasion of 1941 had led to the deaths of as many as 20 million Russians. Any postwar Russian government — Communist, tsarist or social democratic — would have insisted on effective control, at least of Poland if not of larger areas of Eastern Europe, notably Romania, as a buffer zone against future attacks. To Russia, it seemed a simple enough question of minimum security to prevent another disaster.

Churchill himself had seemed mindful of the point, offering at his famous meeting with Stalin in 1943 to divide Eastern Europe so as to leave a powerful Russia the predominant ‘influence’. The Americans recoiled from the suggestion when they heard of it — from Stalin.

The communisation of Central and Eastern Europe was swift in the case of Poland, slower elsewhere. Yugoslavia was wholly Communist, of course, but was already showing signs of the sort of independence that Stalin feared. Its aid to Greek Communists earned a rebuke from him. It was nonsense, he told the Yugoslav leaders, to think that the British and Americans would allow a Communist country to dominate their supply lines through the eastern Mediterranean.

The great Cold War warrior Harry Truman came to office in April 1945. He had little understanding of foreign affairs. The existing White House, including the belligerent Admiral Leahy, quickly convinced him that he must make an aggressive start. Within a fortnight, when Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, called to pay his respects to the new President, Truman gave him an astonishing drubbing about Russia’s failure to establish free elections in Poland.

In May, Churchill told Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, not only that the Polish deadlock had to be resolved but also that the Americans ought not to withdraw to the lines previously agreed in September. There had, he said, to be a ‘showdown’ over Poland and the Russian occupation of East Germany while the Allies were still strong militarily. Otherwise there was ‘very little prospect’ of preventing a third world war.

Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 — the phrase, by the way, originated with Dr Goebbels, warning of the same Red peril — accurately reflects the Great Warrior’s view of the Soviet menace. Not surprisingly, however, it was seen by the Russians as a threat. Referring to the new ‘tyrannies’, Churchill said, ‘It is not our duty at this time when difficulties are so numerous to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of countries.’ The inevitable implication was that there would be such a time when difficulties were not so numerous.

But Truman had already adopted an aggressive public attitude to Russia the previous October. He produced 12 points which he said would govern American policy, including the importance of opening up free markets. The programme would be based on ‘righteousness and justice’. There could be ‘no compromise with evil’. Since half of his points were aimed at Soviet rule in Eastern Europe, the evil he had in mind was plain. He also added that no one would be allowed to interfere with US policy in Latin America.

In short, Russian interference in countries essential to its safety was evil. But exclusive US domination of its own sphere of influence was righteous. The Russians must have thought that this was a fine piece of humbug. In any case, a programme based on ‘no compromise with evil’ is a preposterously naive basis for a foreign policy, destining a country to permanent warfare. (Perhaps, as the war against terrorism suggests, this is the capitalist world’s version of Trotskyism.) It was at about this time that General Patton, among other eminent figures, spoke of ‘an inevitable third world war’.

The Atlantic Charter of 1941 was another example of humbug, with its declaration that countries should be free to elect their own governments. Churchill had later to explain that this did not apply to the British Empire. Russia added its name to the charter — no harm in supporting what was obviously pious hypocrisy. Molotov inquired in this context what Britain intended to do about Spain. Spain was different, Churchill insisted.

Churchill’s hostility to the Soviet Union was very long-standing, despite the wartime alliance and despite his erratic opinion of Stalin himself, sometimes his ‘friend’, sometimes his enemy. Churchill had proposed in December 1918 that the defeated Germans should be rearmed for a grand alliance to march on Moscow. He supported the Allied intervention in the Russian civil war.

More important was his wartime theme that the Germans should not be treated too harshly or disarmed too extensively because they might be needed against Russia. Soviet sympathisers in the Foreign Office would no doubt have warned Stalin of this. Moscow also suspected, with reason, that some British politicians hoped that appeasing Hitler would leave him free to attack Russia. Moreover, the British government had seriously considered attacking Russia when it invaded Finland in December 1939. One suggestion was to bomb Russian oilfields.

Against this background, it is unsurprising that the Soviet attitude in the immediate postwar years was nervous and suspicious. The West made virtually no moves to allay these fears, but adopted a belligerent attitude to an imaginary military and political threat from an economically devastated and war-weary Russia. Based in no small part on our experience with Germany, the great leap in assumptions was that a regime that was wicked and brutal to its own people must also be a threat to us. It was an easy doctrine to sell in the early postwar years.

The fact that the Cold War continued after Stalin’s death and succession does not, as some would claim, prove the Soviets’ unchanging global ambitions. The invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 were brutal acts, but were aimed at protecting Moscow’s buffer zone — much as the United States had always protected her interests in Central and South America. The same may be said of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 (as a result of which, with the help of the CIA, the Taleban came into existence). In none of these cases was there a territorial threat to the West.

At times even Eisenhower seemed ambivalent about the Cold War. In his farewell address in 1960, he warned about the vested interests of the American ‘military-industrial complex’. Under his presidency US foreign policy had fallen into the hands of crazed crusaders such as John Foster Dulles. Of him, Anthony Eden complained that he was the only bull who carried his own china shop with him. He also accused him of really wanting a third world war. Followers of Dulles’s crusading approach remained prominent, especially under Reagan and until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Revisionist views of the Cold War regularly surface in the United States, though the case is sometimes spoiled by the authors’ socialist sympathies (something of which I have never been accused). In Britain, the revisionist view has not had much of a hearing.

One can, of course, understand why few anywhere in the West want the orthodox view of the Cold War overturned. If that were to happen, the whole edifice of postwar politics would begin to crumble.

Could it be that the heavy burden of postwar rearmament was unnecessary, that the transatlantic alliance actually imperilled rather than saved us? Could it be that the world teetered on the verge of annihilation because the postwar Western leaders, particularly in Washington, lacked imagination, intelligence and understanding?

The gloomy answer is yes.

it struck me that General Jack D. Ripper is not such a total parody

Gotta love a supposedly seriously political piece that springs from the premise that some movie (a hilarious, classic parody at that) this guy saw "was not such a total parody" after all. Somewhat akin to a person walking out of Star Wars and immediately trying to use "the force" to open his car door.

In fact, as history will almost certainly judge, it was one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time, and certainly the most perilous.

Sure, all such conflicts are "unnecessary" and "perilous". It wasn't necessary at all for Stalin to be such a brutal, expansionist, murderous tyrant. And it was certainly perilous that he was.

It was a Manichean doctrine,

"Manichean" is a favorite word of guys like this. They must all have gotten a Memo six months ago, "Describe anyone who believes in good v. evil in any given situation as 'Manichean'. It'll make you sound intellectual!"

seductive in its simplicity.

Or simplisme, as the French versions of this guy say it.

But the supposed military threat was wholly implausible. Had the Russians, though themselves devastated by the war, invaded the West, they would have had a desperate battle to reach and occupy the Channel coast against the Allies,

They would have? Why would they have "had to" reach the Channel coast, for the threat to be real? Perhaps they would go more slowly, one country at a time, and not try to take the Channel coast until sufficient time had passed for them to regroup and stock up. Notice that this guy's standard for whether USSR was dangerous seems to be the simple test, "Could they have reached the Channel coast in six months?" (or similarly brief time) The answer is no, Therefore USSR Was Not Dangerous At All! Uh, tell that to its victims and potential victims.

This all is like saying Jeffrey Dahmer was Not Dangerous as long as he could never get around to killing your next door neighbor. Bizarre notion, that.

But, in any case, what then? With a negligible Russian navy, the means of invading Britain would somehow have had to be created.

Ok, so now they've conquered the entire mainland and subjugated all of the Continent to Stalin's tyranny. But "what then"? Unless they could immediately invade Britain at that point, they were Not Dangerous.

Among other things, it also occurs to me that this guy doesn't seem to understand that wars take place in real-time. Sometimes taking years. USSR conquers Europe and "had to" invade Britain too right away? Why not wait a year? Two? Apparently this writer cannot conceive of that. All wars are instantaneous, he insists!

And even if the Soviets, ignoring the A-bomb, had conquered Europe from Norway to Spain against all odds, they would have been left facing an implacable United States across more than 2,000 miles of ocean — the ultimate unwinnable war. In short, there was no Soviet military danger.

So, now the USSR has conquered all of Europe, including Britain. But the USA remains to be conquered and this would be difficult. Therefore "there was no Soviet military danger".

This has ceased becoming bizarre, and entered into the realm of utter nonsense. When would they have become a danger, when they took over the entire world except for one guy (this guy)?

He was far more like a cruel oriental tyrant. He was committed, above all else, to retaining power, murdering every rival, and ruling Russia by mass terror on a breathtaking scale.

All correct. He was also keen on expansion and conquest. That's the point. Sheesh.

How is this supposed to convince me that Stalin was not so dangerous after all?

Of course he was content to have Communist parties abroad believe that the eventual global triumph of the creed was inevitable — Marxism made no sense otherwise — but for all practical purposes foreign Communist parties were instruments of Russian policy, encouraged to become significant enough to influence or interfere with their own nations’ actions where it helped Soviet purposes.

Right - USSR used the ideology of "Communism" to undermine/corrupt other nations and jerk them around like puppets on strings to their own imperial ends. But still remember, the USSR was Not Dangerous!

But it was never Stalin’s idea — far from it — that they should establish potentially rival Communist governments

No, of course not. He wanted puppet Communist governments everywhere, of course. Which is the part that is Not Dangerous, I wonder? This guy seems to be saying that Stalin was Not A Threat because he was such a colonial tyrant (trying to control other governments' policies through the Communist ideology) rather than a benevolent Communist who would allow/approve of various Communist governments acting independently.

Once again, bizarre. How does this make him less, rather than more, dangerous? The mind boggles.

It was a dishonest formula on both sides. The two countries had a long record of enmity. As recently as 1920, they had been at war. There was also the Soviet massacre of 11,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest. No freely elected Polish government would be friendly to the USSR.

Ah, so because the USSR had been so brutal to Poland (i.e. Katyn), Stalin could not have been expected to have not ruled tyranically over Poland. Why, the poor guy had no choice! He had no choice but to be a tyrant! (But remember, the poor reluctant brutal tyrant was still Not Dangerous! Always keep repeating this to yourself as you read this article, even though all the facts suggest otherwise.)

as Stalin pointed out ... the invasion of 1941 had led to the deaths of as many as 20 million Russians.

Uh, Germany's invasion combined with USSR's brutal murderous policies against its own people, yes. (How the number "20 million" should be divided between the two is unclear.)

Any postwar Russian government — Communist, tsarist or social democratic — would have insisted on effective control, at least of Poland if not of larger areas of Eastern Europe, notably Romania, as a buffer zone against future attacks. To Russia, it seemed a simple enough question of minimum security to prevent another disaster.

No choice but to be tyrants.

But not dangerous.

I keep looking at these two statements and they still appear to contradict. I guess I'm just dumb, or not trained enough in the fine art of doublethink.

Referring to the new ‘tyrannies’, Churchill said,

USSR was a tyranny only in inverted commas, eh? I guess this is just another "simplistic", "Manichean" statement on the part of Churchill.

Boy, the deeper into this article you get, the more pity you feel for the poor maligned brutal reluctant tyrant Stalin, no? The guy had practically no choice but to be a murderous tyrant - but despite this, the stubbornly stupid, "Manichean", "simplistic" West insisted on viewing him as dangerous. Poor, poor misunderstood Stalin... can't a guy be a Righeously Justifiably Murderous Tyrant without all these dumb "simplistic" people clucking their tongues?

[Truman] also added that no one would be allowed to interfere with US policy in Latin America. [..] In short, Russian interference in countries essential to its safety was evil.

Uh, interfering in which Latin American countries was "essential to USSR's safety"? I must've missed that part.

Anyway, how can one argue with this. Of course the poor tyranny had to "interfere" with rump states and their populations (including apparently those in Africa and halfway around the world in Latin America?), "for its safety" (ALL because of the Germany-through-Poland threat, apparently...even though Germany was utterly defeated in WWII, remember that?).

Had to be tyrants! Had to "interfere" with nations around the world! Couldn't be expected to allow elections in Poland!

But not dangerous and not a threat. Got that?

In any case, a programme based on ‘no compromise with evil’ is a preposterously naive basis for a foreign policy, destining a country to permanent warfare.

Saying this don't make it so. I bet it sure makes him feel smart, though.

Moreover, the British government had seriously considered attacking Russia when it invaded Finland in December 1939. One suggestion was to bomb Russian oilfields. Against this background, it is unsurprising that the Soviet attitude in the immediate postwar years was nervous and suspicious.

Yeah, that evil threatening Britain "considered" bombing Russian oilfields when Russia invaded Finland!!

Uh, so once again I guess Russia had no choice but to invade Finland. We proceed from that as a given. Poor misunderstood tyrants had to engage their ill trained lambs-to-the-slaughter Red Army in that stupid, ill-conceived war against their threatening neighbor....uh...Finland.

And the evil threatening Western countries wouldn't let them have a free hand in Finland! What jerks.

Well wait a sec. Yes they did "let" Russia invade Finland - after all, Britain didn't really do anything, militarily anyway. Just "seriously considered" doing something.

Yes, I see now. USSR and its righteous invasions risked being opposed in the West. Therefore USSR belligerence and "suspicion" toward the West was totally justified. So therefore, they were Not Dangerous. (Instead, they were righteous tyrants - perhaps ruling by Divine Right? or what? - whom no one had the right to oppose in any endeavor.)

This is all a very complicated rationalization but I think I understand now. Admittedly, it has the advantage of being Not Simplistic. (It has the disadvantage of being utterly sick BS...)

The invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 were brutal acts, but were aimed at protecting Moscow’s buffer zone — much as the United States had always protected her interests in Central and South America.

"Much as", huh? Somehow he fails to draw the precise parallel. Which Latin American country, precisely, did the US treat "much as" the Soviets treated Czechoslovakia?

Followers of Dulles’s crusading approach remained prominent,

Great! He worked the word "crusading" into this as well. Still following the Memo, I see....

One can, of course, understand why few anywhere in the West want the orthodox view of the Cold War overturned. If that were to happen, the whole edifice of postwar politics would begin to crumble.

In his delusional dreams. Meanwhile, back in the real world, a murderous tyrant is a murderous tyrant and opposing him is not "Manichean". And no amount of ridiculous rationalizations can somehow overturn logic to conclude that a guy who subjugates entire populations is Not Dangerous as long as he had some really, really good tyrant's reasons for "having to" subjugate (and murder large parts of) those populations.

the case is sometimes spoiled by the authors’ socialist sympathies (something of which I have never been accused)

Socialist sympathies? Perhaps not.

Rather, this guy (manifestly and objectively) has sympathy for tyrants and their needs for "buffers" and the mass murders which they understandably have no choice but to perpretrate. This is worse than having "socialist" sympathies, which (at least) many people grow out of.

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