Shortly after the conference, when U.S. ambassador Walter Bedell Smith met with Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky in Moscow about some minor custom procedures, Vishinsky “departed from the usual attitude of personal friendliness regardless of official subject and showed irritability and antagonism. It is quite obvious that he had received instructions to make no concessions whatever.” Unable to find common ground on the major differences facing them, U.S. and Soviet representatives saw themselves as adversaries waiting to see which one would feel compelled to attack the other with arms rather than words.
In December, when Truman submitted a detailed request to Congress for Marshall Plan appropriations, he resorted to rhetoric similar to that he had used in his earlier appeal for Greek-Turkish aid. He once more described the Soviet-American confrontation in apocalyptic language: Europe’s recovery, he said, was “essential to the maintenance of the civilization in which the American way of life is rooted.” Nothing less was at stake than “peace and stability in the world.” America’s “economic system” and its national security, with “our freedoms and privileges,” were in jeopardy as well.
A crisis over Czechoslovakia beginning in February 1948 became the impetus for consideration of a Western military arrangement. The Czech government, which included a number of Communists freely elected in 1946, began a purge of non-Communist officials to strengthen their hold on power. Countermoves by center-right parties precipitated a political crisis that compelled President Edvard Beneš to give the more numerous Communists majority control. Two weeks later, after the pro-Western foreign minister Jan Masaryk leaped or was thrown to his death (almost certainly the latter) from a window in his ministry residence, Western capitals exploded with indignation at the demise of Czech democracy.
The death of Czech independence, especially Masaryk’s alleged suicide, which seemed like an all too convenient development favoring Communist power, understandably frightened people in the West. Rumors that Masaryk intended to resign as foreign minister and live in exile in London, where he had resided during World War II as a symbol of Czech independence from Nazi rule, may have been too threatening to the Communists: an exile proponent of Czech freedom could have been too much of a rallying point against Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia and other East European countries for Moscow to allow Masaryk to live. As it was, undisclosed tensions with Tito in Yugoslavia, joined to prospects of German and West European revival, put the Kremlin on edge about its capacity to sustain its hold on its East European empire.
In Moscow’s view, forcing Prague into the Soviet camp was a strictly defensive action. But Stalin should have understood that making Czechoslovakia a Soviet satellite was bound to stir war talk in Western Europe and the United States, where the “Czech Coup” was only seen as an act of aggression reminiscent of Hitler’s prewar actions. A cable from General Lucius Clay, the commanding U.S. officer in Berlin, who had considered war unlikely with Russia “for at least ten years,” now predicted that a conflict “may come with dramatic suddenness.”
Kennan was chagrined not only by Clay’s “error of interpretation” but also by the readiness of the State Department and the rest of official Washington to accept Clay’s warning as gospel. They “would have done better,” Kennan wrote in his Memoirs, “to rely on the judgment of some of us who knew something about Russia.” Although Kennan remonstrated against Clay’s overreaction at the time, “a real war scare ensued, the intensity of which may be judged from the fact that on March 16 the Central Intelligence Agency thought it necessary to hand to the President an estimate saying that war was ‘not probable within sixty days.’” When U.S. Air Force chiefs were urged to consider extending this time period by another two weeks, they refused. Remembering the fate of the brass at Pearl Harbor, they did not wish to take the fall for an unanticipated attack.
Stalin’s clamp-down on the Czechs and Eastern Europe was so “abrupt and clumsy” that few could doubt his aggressive intentions, or think of him as mainly defending his homeland against a future German or Western invasion. Anti-Communist purges across Eastern Europe and the creation of economic agencies in Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, Rumania, and Poland that transferred their agricultural and industrial wealth to Russia added to impressions of ruthless Soviet rulers seizing everything they could for their own benefit. Seventy-seven percent of Americans told pollsters that “Russia is trying to build herself up to be the ruling power of the world.” Only 12 percent thought that her move against Czechoslovakia could be seen as “protection against being attacked in another war.”
Kennan understood the limits of Soviet capacity to turn its fears of the West into military expansion, but his subtlety of comprehension was beyond the grasp of almost all political leaders across the West and threw them, especially the French, into frenzied efforts to build a military wall that would prevent the sort of defeat Hitler inflicted on them at the start of World War II. “I regarded the anxieties of the Europeans as a little silly,” Kennan wrote later. “This was not … the time to start talking about military defenses and preparations.” He “saw dangers in any form of … reassurance that would encourage them in their military preoccupations.” He accurately foresaw that unneeded military steps would provoke counterreactions leading to an unpredictable cycle of defense preparations that could result in another European war.
But Kennan’s rational calculations were of no consequence in shaping current events. Fears of Russian power and longer-term German revival haunted the French. They imagined Russian control of all Germany followed by an invasion of France, and saw the United States abandoning Western Europe to the Soviets, with “Russian hordes” occupying “the area raping women and deporting the male population for slave labor in the Soviet Union.” They expected the U.S. to retaliate with atomic bombs that would devastate Western Europe.
Despite an understanding in both European and American military circles that the Soviet Union was in no position to begin an offensive war any time soon against Western Europe or certainly the United States (it was economically weak, lacked the air power to sustain a successful campaign, and had no atomic weapons), Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg felt compelled to sign a mutual defense agreement, the Brussels Pact, which the United States endorsed as essential to their long-term security.
Like the Europeans, Truman now saw Stalin and the Soviets as another Hitler and the Nazis. “We are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in 1938–9 with Hitler,” he wrote his daughter on March 3. It was an imperfect analogy: although the Russians were as ruthless in their disregard for free expression as the Nazis, their military strength compared to Western adversaries was nothing like Hitler’s advantage on the eve of World War II. But the memories of appeasement at Munich seemed too compelling to ignore. Marshall counseled the president against overstating the dangers, but Truman told some of his aides that the secretary’s advice “stank.”
In an appearance before a joint congressional session on March 17, Truman “felt it necessary to report to the nation … on the grave events in Europe [that] were moving so swiftly.” He pointedly upbraided the Soviet Union as the “one nation” that “has not only refused to cooperate in the establishment of a just and honorable peace, but—even worse—[it] has actively sought to prevent it…. The Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe. It is this ruthless course of action, and the design to extend it to the remaining free nations of Europe, that have brought about the critical situation in Europe today.” The Brussels Pact, Truman concluded, was “a notable step in the direction of unity in Europe for protection and preservation of its civilization.”
That night, in another speech in New York before a St. Patrick’s Day group, Truman reiterated his concerns and repeated a call for Congress to fund the Marshall Plan, extend the military draft, and pass a law requiring universal military train
ing (UMT) for every able-bodied male turning eighteen. Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King read the president’s pronouncements as an expression of U.S. readiness to rely on force in any future confrontation with the Soviets.
In the spring of 1948, if doubts had existed among Washington policymakers about a defensive alliance, a crisis over Berlin put them to rest. During the first months of 1948, London and Washington agreed to the creation of a West German state with a separate currency from that of the Soviet occupation zone. Concessions to Paris assuring it protection against a remilitarized Germany won French support for the plan. At the same time, American and British military planners began secret discussions that leaked to the Russians on how to meet the Soviet threat with expanded production of atomic bombs and promises of support for the Western union should it face a Soviet attack.
The prospect of a West German state incorporated into a Western bloc that would directly threaten the Soviet Union convinced Stalin that he needed to thwart Washington’s plans for Germany. He ordered a shutdown of Anglo-American access to West Berlin from West Germany through the 110 miles of rail lines stretching through Soviet-controlled East Germany. Because a loss of West Berlin seemed likely to demoralize all Western Europe, Washington and London decided to defend its rights of access and the freedom of West Berliners, even at the possible cost of war. Stalin saw the limited blockade not as a pretext for war but as a bargaining chip to deter the creation of a West German state. The fear of a revived Germany was greater in Russia than the worry that limits on Western access to Berlin would touch off an East-West war.
Although neither side wished to use force, the stakes for both were high enough to provoke discussions of a military clash. To make clear the U.S. determination not to back down, the Senate passed a bipartisan resolution in June, named for Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg, pledging American backing for the Brussels Pact. (Domestic politics, especially in a presidential election year, were never absent from foreign policy and national security decisions. Having already credited the Democratic administration with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Republicans insisted on attaching a prominent Republican senator’s name to assure bipartisan support for another major overseas initiative.)
When the Western occupiers formally declared the creation of a West German state with a new currency at a London conference in June, the Russians expanded the rail-line disruption, which they had temporarily suspended for the sake of possible negotiations, into a full-scale blockade of West Berlin, closing off all rail and highway traffic through its East German zone.
For the sake of his standing at home and in Eastern Europe, Stalin felt he could not afford to let the move toward a Western German state go unanswered. True, he and all Russia trembled at the thought of another confrontation with a rearmed Germany, but Stalin’s hold on his own government and his satellites also seemed imperiled by Western defiance of his wishes.
In significant part, Stalin’s power continued to rest on intimidation and terror. Anecdotes about the fears of anyone brought into Stalin’s presence abounded: the first time the young diplomat Anatoly Dobrynin encountered him, surrounded by personal bodyguards in the halls of the Kremlin, Dobrynin cringed with his back to the wall and hands thrust forward to show that he had no weapon as the great man approached. Stalin stopped to ask who he was and, sensing the young man’s fright, declared: “Youth must not fear Comrade Stalin. He is its friend.” Dobrynin remembered that he “shuddered.”
In the spring of 1948 Stalin was clearly in declining health, and several members of the Politburo were vying for his endorsement as his successor. Because Stalin had no intention of relinquishing his power before physical incapacity or death compelled him to, he encouraged competition among those believed to be contenders for his replacement as the Communist Party’s general secretary. To head off any premature attempts to oust him, Stalin struck these men down before they could act. The Politburo men around him described Stalin’s “intellectual decline and dangerous unpredictability,” and said that he showed “conspicuous signs of senility.” But he remained as ruthless and driven as ever. His systematic elimination of his oldest Politburo comrades, like Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan, from influence reflected the actions not of someone who had lost his mental faculties but of a tyrant clinging to power by crushing those most likely to succeed him.
Soviet general V. N. Gordov, a decorated hero of the Stalingrad fighting, said in December 1946 that everybody was “fed up with his life, people say so quite openly—on the trains—in the Metro, everywhere, they come straight out with it.” He told his wife of his contempt for Stalin: “I can’t bear to look at him, I can’t breathe the same air…. It’s just like the Inquisition, people are just dying…. I’m not the only one … not by a long shot.” Gordov and his wife were arrested and executed in 1947.
It was all part of Stalin’s campaign to terrify dissidents or anyone suspected of dissension. But “the idea that they [high ranking officials around Stalin] could engage in intrigues of their own is laughable,” one commentator said. “It was he [Stalin] who organized them in rival groupings and egged them on to destroy each other. One man and one man only stood behind each and every one of the Kremlin cliques: the Boss.”
An attempt to destroy Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito was another part of Stalin’s effort at this time to sustain his hold on power. In Stalin’s view, Tito was a defiant upstart whose independence threatened his control at home and abroad. Against Stalin’s wishes the Yugoslav president, who enjoyed enormous popularity in his country as a result of his organized resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II, had aided the Greek Communists, clashed with Anglo-American forces in attempts to wrest Trieste from Italy, and established a Yugoslav-Bulgarian federation. Having avoided any significant reliance on Soviet military intervention to free Yugoslavia from Nazi control and having achieved the nearly impossible in unifying his nation’s competing ethnic groups, Tito had no intention of submitting to Stalin’s dictates. He was determined to preserve his country from the fate Stalin meted out to Balkan neighbors.
Stalin wished to make Tito an example of how Moscow dealt with governments that put their national interest above the Communist party line written in Russia. On June 19, 1948, five days before Stalin imposed the Berlin blockade, he instructed his deputies at the second Cominform meeting in Bucharest to expel the Yugoslav president as “an Imperialist spy.” Stalin told one Politburo member, “I’ll shake my little finger and there’ll be no more Tito.” But Tito was not so easy to bring down: mindful of other foreign visitors to the Kremlin who never returned home or were heard from again, Tito refused a February 1948 invitation to visit Stalin and then foiled two assassination attempts by Kremlin agents who could not penetrate the shield Tito put up against Stalin. Stalin’s inability to work his will against the defiant Yugoslav became another reason for the Berlin blockade: it seemed essential for Stalin to demonstrate his power on the larger problem of West Germany.
The blockade suggested that conditions were ripe for a full-blown confrontation with the West. But neither Moscow nor Washington saw the clash of wills as a reason for war. The Russians did not try to starve West Berlin into submission, allowing its occupants to buy foodstuffs, petrol, and coal from the East. They also did nothing to close or imperil the air corridors between West Germany and West Berlin. As a consequence, U.S. air forces were able to begin an around-the-clock airlift of basic supplies for West Berliners. Some 130 large air transports began making 250 daily round trips into the Berlin Tempelhof airfield.
Similarly, while Truman made it clear that the United States would “stay in Berlin,” he took care to avoid provocations that could trigger a military clash. He rejected proposals from General Clay for armed surface convoys into the city, insisted on exclusive White House control of atomic bombs, and declared his determination to use all possible diplomatic means to resolve the crisis. During a meeting in Moscow in August between the American, British, and French a
mbassadors and Stalin and Molotov, all of them made clear that they wanted to reach a settlement, though neither side was ready to concede enough to bring an end to the impasse.
Kennan, who had a better understanding of the Kremlin’s motives and intentions than anyone else in the U.S. government, was incensed at the inclination of the Europeans and Americans to use the crisis to rattle sabers. He saw the Czech coup and the Berlin blockade as “just the predictable ‘baring of the fangs.’ Nor did I see any reason why the development of military strength on our side, and particularly the development of new relationships of alliance between this country and European countries, was required to meet that behavior.”
The lack of response to his warnings puzzled him: he wondered “why so much attention was paid in certain instances, as in the case of the telegram of February 1946 from Moscow and the X-Article, to what I had to say, and so little in others. The only answer could be that Washington’s reactions were deeply subjective, influenced more by domestic-political moods and institutional interests than by any theoretical consideration of our international position.” He saw himself as naive “in the assumption that the mere statement on a single occasion of a sound analysis or appreciation, even if invited or noted or nominally accepted by one’s immediate superiors, had any appreciable effect on the vast, turgid, self-centered, and highly emotional process by which the views and reactions of official Washington were finally evolved.”
Like any assertive personality ambitious for influence in the highest councils of government, Kennan was sensitive to anything he considered a slight by his superiors, who were erratic in their responses to his advice. But he glimpsed the truth when he surmised that more than strict theoretical calculation and personal disregard for him went into the making of foreign policy in response to the Czech and Berlin crises.