The Lost Peace

  The reaction in the United States was general approval. Numerous Americans, like the administration, were receptive to Churchill’s tough talk about Russia. Seventy-one percent of responders to a Gallup survey said they disapproved of Soviet foreign policies, and two-thirds in another poll favored a continuing U.S. monopoly of atomic bombs: they expressed opposition to having representatives of other nations observe or learn anything from atomic tests scheduled for the summer.

  At the same time, a substantial minority of Americans on the left, led by Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, deplored Churchill’s call for an Anglo-American military alliance, seeing it as an attack on the former Soviet ally by someone who could not free himself “from the roll of the drums and the flutter of the flag of Empire.” They also saw the speech as an assault on the United Nations and international cooperation other than that between America and Britain. When Churchill showed up for a speech in New York the following week, pickets greeted him with chants of “Winnie, Winnie, go away, UNO [United Nations Organization] is here to stay,” and “Don’t be a ninny for imperialist Winnie!”

  However eloquent, Churchill’s speech had a quality of bombast to it that raised concerns beyond liberal circles. Yet the stubborn refusal of people like Henry Wallace to see that the Soviet Union was not a benign force for universal economic equality but an imperial aggressor intent on securing itself from foreign dangers provoked American conservatives into excessive fears of U.S. vulnerability to subversion at home and Soviet ambitions and capacity for world domination abroad. Left naivete and right militancy now fed on each other, opening up a division in the United States that would make it difficult for any administration to respond realistically to problems overseas. For the left, the Truman White House’s expressions of compromise toward Moscow were now seen as insufficient to assure the peace, while tough talk and actions could not satisfy the right that the administration was doing enough to fend off disaster.

  Truman now found himself caught between left and right. To counter concerns in Moscow and the United States that he had aligned himself with Churchill’s forceful criticism of the Russians, Truman denied that he had read Churchill’s speech before its delivery or was endorsing his remarks. His presence on the stage at the college signaled otherwise, however, giving some comfort to anyone eager for a tough response to Soviet aggression. Yet his refusal openly to align himself with Churchill’s tough talk angered conservative critics.

  In Moscow, Churchill’s speech provoked a heated response from Stalin, who was quoted in Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper, as saying that Churchill was laying claim to Anglo-American moral superiority, which Stalin likened to Hitler’s “racial theory.” He also denounced the speech as “a dangerous act” that signaled an inclination to fight a war against the Soviet Union.

  Prospects for long-term peace following the end of the war in 1945 were now, to borrow Shakespeare’s phrase, “a fleeting shadow” that was “seen no more.”

  PART II

  STATE OF WAR

  7

  COLD WAR ILLUSIONS—AND REALITIES

  Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  On his return from the United States, Churchill felt compelled to prod the Labor government and all of Britain toward an understanding of the dangers the Western democracies now faced from Russia’s postwar ambitions for international control. As important, he wished to underscore his message to Stalin that he was risking the future of his country and of European recovery if he kept on the path he had taken since the end of the war.

  In a speech to the House of Commons, Churchill “venture[d] to give this friendly hint to my old wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin…. Soviet propaganda has been steadily making headway backwards. I would not have believed it possible that in a year, the Soviets would have been able to do themselves so much harm, and chill so many friendships in the English-speaking world.” The “despotic” rule imposed on part of Europe by “the Commissars in the Kremlin” was sowing “the seeds of a new world war…. We may be absolutely sure that the Sovietising and, in many cases, the Communising of this gigantic slice of Europe … will not be achieved in any permanent manner without giving rise to evils and conflicts which are horrible to contemplate,” Churchill told the Parliament.

  Because Britain was “exhausted physically, economically, and, above all, financially,” Churchill believed that the United States, increasingly irritated by Moscow’s behavior, would in time be stirred to respond. “The American eagle sits on his perch, a large, strong bird with formidable beak and claws,” Churchill declared. “There he sits motionless, and Mr. Gromyko [the Soviet Ambassador] is sent day after day to prod him with a sharp pointed stick—now his neck, now under his wings, now his tail feathers. All the time the eagle keeps quite still. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that nothing is going on inside the breast of the eagle.”

  By the summer of 1946, Churchill believed that the West would fight a war with the Soviet Union and its East European satellite countries in seven or eight years. “We ought not to wait until Russia is ready. I believe it will be eight years before she has these [atom] bombs…. America knows that fifty-two percent of Russia’s motor industry is in Moscow and could be wiped out by a single bomb. It might mean wiping out three million people,” he told his physician, Lord Moran, but he justified this by saying that the Russians “would think nothing of that. They think more of erasing an historical building like the Kremlin.”

  It was an astonishing confession of acquiescence in the possibility of a nuclear war that would indiscriminately kill millions of civilians. After the unprecedented destruction of so many lives in the century’s two world wars, the deaths of millions more seemed less like an impermissible alternative than an almost natural outcome to irrepressible human conflict. Yet it is difficult to square Churchill’s readiness to fight with his onetime observation that it is better to jaw, jaw, jaw than to war, war, war. He had grown so apprehensive about Moscow’s reach for world control, however, that he was ready to consider another international cataclysm and to assume that the United States would take the lead in answering the Soviet threat. Indeed, his “Iron Curtain” speech had been an overt attempt to shape America’s response to Soviet aggression. For Churchill, it was nothing more than what he had been doing since 1940, when the Canadian industrialist William Stephenson had set up the British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York with Churchill’s blessing to encourage anti-Nazi and pro-British sentiment.

  Churchill’s warnings were heard in Washington and Moscow, and both could imagine a war in seven or eight years, as Churchill had predicted. But neither felt compelled to initiate the fighting; certainly not in the immediate future. Each was confident that it could hold off the other for the time being.

  In 1946, Stalin saw little risk in defying the United States. Despite Churchill’s description of the eagle’s limited patience, Stalin believed that American indebtedness to the Soviet Union for its wartime sacrifices remained a bar to an attack. Moreover, Stalin saw Truman as indecisive and inhibited by unsettling popular divisions centered on the national economy, which Communist doctrine confidently predicted was about to suffer another serious downturn that would temporarily immobilize the Americans from any kind of assertiveness in foreign affairs.

  The constraints upon the Americans persuaded Stalin that he didn’t need to satisfy their demands for representative governments in Eastern Europe. On the contrary, agreeing to self-determination for Russia’s western neighbors seemed like a prescription for hostile nations on Moscow’s borders that could undermine communism. The Americans might complain loudly about Soviet aggrandizement, but Stalin did not think Washington’s unhappiness would result in war—at least not yet. Eventually, yes, but for the time being the American government was unable to mobilize its people to fight, and by the time it did, he expected Russia to have the bomb.

  Although some in the Politburo might
disagree with Stalin’s assessments, none were powerful enough to shape policy; Stalin’s views were Soviet doctrine: “The Russian Government is like the Roman Catholic Church,” Churchill said; “Their people do not question authority,” or show any doubts about the wisdom of their ideology.

  In Stalin’s judgment, class warfare in the democracies was more likely in the immediate future than another great conflict between nations. Among Communists, this idea was holy writ. But it had little, if any, basis in reality. Labor and management in the United States might be at odds over a host of issues, but this was not the advance wave of revolution. Moreover, the assumption that class struggles would erupt in the West poorly served the Soviet Union, undermining prospects for better relations abroad.

  There was no give or flexibility in Communist thinking about how economic and political interactions worked. After almost thirty years of Communist mismanagement in Russia, the party still could not accept more pragmatic means to achieve economic growth and social peace if these contradicted their ideology. If they had been open to alternative ideas, or to incorporating Western thinking into their economic planning, they could have been more accepting of interactions with the outside world and less aggressive about imposing themselves on other peoples. Such open-mindedness could have brought reconstruction help from abroad and more rapid revival and expansion of Russia’s postwar economy.

  But paranoia about Western intentions and fears of collapse dominated Soviet thinking and behavior. Stalin believed that any sort of compromise with the capitalists would mean the demise of what he and the Bolsheviks had worked to establish since the Revolution. A severe drought in the Ukraine in the spring of 1946, for example, crimped grain production and caused famines later in the year that forced Moscow to rely on the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to feed part of its population. Food was in such short supply that feeding Soviet troops in Germany became a worry. The famine intensified Stalin’s fear that dependence on the West could cripple his regime, and the Soviet press complained that the food shortages were giving Washington a way to exert political pressure on Russia.

  At the same time, Stalin was preoccupied with domestic intrigues and fear of colleagues he believed intent on replacing him, a bunker mentality that left no room for flexibility toward outside competitors for international power or consideration of the possibility that the West was ready to live in a world divided between capitalist and socialist camps. In this oversimplified formulation, capitalists were unalterable enemies of socialism and Stalin’s rule of a Soviet state. Stalin trusted no one at home or abroad: allies—domestic or foreign—were nothing more than temporary collaborators who were all too ready to exploit any weakness they detected in his and Soviet behavior.

  In 1946, Stalin was determined not only to diminish high-ranking collaborators as a way to keep them under control but also to make sure that the educated men and women who could become more distant rivals for power did not stray from his party line. He complained that Russia’s “middle intelligentsia, doctors and professors,” were without “patriotic education. They have unjustified admiration for foreign culture…. This tradition comes from Peter [the Great] … admiration of Germans, French, of foreigners, of assholes. The spirit of self-abasement must be destroyed.”

  Jewish Communist party leaders particularly worried Stalin; he saw them as his most likely internal and foreign enemies. “Jews were ‘middlemen, profiteers and parasites,’” Stalin told Roosevelt at Yalta. The influence of American Jews and heightened identification of Soviet Jews with their brethren after the Holocaust intensified Stalin’s suspicions of an ethnic group he had always distrusted. The interest of Soviet Jews in establishing a homeland in the Crimea became in Stalin’s view “a sinister Zionist/American Trojan horse…. Zionism, Judaism and America became interchangeable in Stalin’s mind.”

  In a three-thousand-word cable sent to the Soviet Foreign Office in September 1946, Nikolai Novikov, Soviet ambassador in Washington, confirmed the Kremlin’s belief that America was determined to destroy Russia’s Communist regime—not at once, through a quick war, but in time. Washington was aiming at “world domination. This is the real meaning of repeated statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles that the U.S. has a right to world leadership,” Novikov explained in what may be seen as the Soviet equivalent of Kennan’s February 1946 “Long Telegram” deciphering past, current, and future Soviet policy.

  Novikov described a failed wartime U.S. plan to let the European and Asian powers exhaust each other in the fighting while the U.S. stood on the sidelines. Washington now intended to realize its ambitions for international control “through the creation of a system of naval and air bases far from the U.S., an arms race, and the creation of newer and newer weapons.” FDR’s death meant the rise of Truman, “a politically unstable person with certain conservative tendencies” reflecting “the influence of the most reactionary circles of the Democratic Party on foreign policy.”

  Novikov’s cable bristled with talk of Anglo-American imperial ambitions, plans to divide the world into spheres of influence, and “world domination” that would eventually bring the Soviet Union to its knees by injecting “American monopoly capital” into economies all over the world. The United States aimed to eliminate the veto in the United Nations Security Council as a way to subject Moscow to international sanctions that could force the overthrow of pro-Soviet governments in Eastern Europe. In addition, Washington planned to resurrect German and Japanese power as a prelude to an anti-Soviet war fought with atomic bombs.

  Although most of what Novikov wrote was nothing more than the speculations of a suspicious mind that resonated with what Kremlin ideologues were thinking, he could point to Washington’s 1946–47 defense budget as giving his argument plausibility: $13 billion for the military, over 36 percent of the national annual spending, was thirteen times what the United States had spent each year on national security before the war. In addition, the postwar presence of American military forces in Europe, the Near East, and Asia aroused Moscow’s worst fears.

  Novikov saw clear evidence of Washington’s anti-Soviet outlook in the Truman administration’s decision to force Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace’s resignation in September 1946. To most Americans on the left, Wallace was the representative of a pro-Soviet policy they were convinced FDR would have carried over into the postwar era. Wallace was outspoken in his opposition to what he openly described as the belligerence of those in the United States and abroad who wanted to fight a war with the Soviet Union. He characterized Soviet actions in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East as not acts of aggression but as a response to American hostility to Moscow. He predicted that a return to Roosevelt’s friendly dealings with Stalin would assure the future peace and urged Truman to side with friends of Russia rather than the anti-Communists in and out of his administration.

  Truman’s repudiation of Wallace’s public pronouncements on administration policy toward Russia forced him to resign. Privately, he denounced Wallace’s irresponsible wish “to disband our armed forces and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politbureau [sic].” He dismissed Wallace and “the Reds, phonies, and ‘parlor pinks’” as “a national danger.” Because Truman saw Wallace and “the crackpots” supporting him as living in some fantasyland about Stalin and Soviet realities, he was happy to see Wallace go. At the same time, however, he was pained at the fact that Wallace’s unrealism allowed right-wing critics to attack the White House as coddling pro-Communist subversives and to win public backing for a more belligerent stance toward Moscow. Justifiably, Truman felt caught between those on the left and the right underestimating and overestimating the Soviet threat.

  In 1946 false assumptions in the United States, Russia, China, and Korea put international stability and peace at risk, both in the short and long term. Truman later reflected on the travails of a president weakened by opposition that immobilized him and made it difficul
t for him to follow a more realistic foreign policy: “Our country has never suffered seriously from any acts of the president that were truly intended for the welfare of the country; it’s suffered from the inaction of a great many presidents when action should have been taken at the right time.” His experience of that year taught him that a president must not be “afraid of controversy” or of offending groups opposed to his actions. In retrospect, he was convinced that “reasonable people will always go along with a man who has the right ideas and leadership.”

  It was an idealized picture of what he and perhaps other leaders in other countries might have accomplished for the sake of peace in the year and a half after the war ended. The intense antagonisms in the United States and among so many others abroad, including Russia, made the immediate postwar period more a combat zone than an environment in which sweet reason could have prevailed in charting a foreign policy assuring international harmony. Domestic crosscurrents made Truman’s reach for coherent dealings with Soviet Russia a nearly impossible challenge. The response to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech was but one example of how divided the country was about a sensible unified policy.