H.1. The Cold War in global context, 1945-1991:
Triumph and disquiet: the human prospect in 1945:
The Fragile west:
Before 1914, the prophets of progress were applauding the achievements of Western
civilization. Highly competitive European nations experienced increased affluence at home,
and unprecedented influence abroad, but during World War 1, these illusions were
shattered. Ten million Europeans lost their lives and the war spelt disaster for the Ottoman,
German, Austrian and Russian empires. For Woodrow Wilson the war was a war “to end all
wars”, a “struggle to make the world safe for democracy”, but German resentment against
the victors set the stage for the rise of Nazism. Instead of extending principles of democratic
self-government, Britain and France enlarged their empires by taking control of Ottoman
territories in the Middle East. The USA refused to join the Nations League and turned
towards isolationism. In Russia the communists rejected the foundations of the Western
political and economic order. The depression of 1929 confirmed the verdict of fascists and
communists, that political pluralism and democracy were doomed to extinction.
Democracy on the defensive:
While the democracies were struggling during the 1930s, dynamic leadership in the fascist
states and USSR projected the image of national unity and overriding purpose, and most
importantly, these regimes brought food on the table by guaranteeing full employment, or at
least, this was the picture. It would take another world war, before the myth of omnipotent
leaders was toppled and widespread support for limited, rules-based government restored.
An optimistic view:
The remarkable economic transformation of Western Europe in the half-century since the
end of the war, with men and women living longer, healthier, wealthier and more comfortable
lives, seemed to legitimize a high level of confidence in democratic rule. Victory in 1945
became an important preamble to a broader triumph of enlightenment political and economic
values, first with the end of Europe's colonial empires (1960s-1970s), and then with the
downfall of communism.
A pessimistic view:
During WW2, the Soviets suffered almost half of the fatalities in Europe. Soviet productive
capacity, especially in the agricultural sector, was decimated. Soviet agricultural outputs did
not reach prewar levels until 1952, and some 6 million Slavs, Gypsies, communists,
pacifists, homosexuals and disabled persons perished during the war. One million Bangalis
died because of famine in India and Vietnam suffered from this too. The Chinese lost 15
million. No one was secure in a total war environment where technology and industrial
production were focused on physical destruction and psychological demoralization.
The eclipse of Europe:
For centuries the projection of Western power, culture, religion and ideas around the globe
had defined the parameters of early modern society and the modern world. In May 1945,
British and American troops occupied newly liberated lands in Italy, France and parts of
Germany. To the east, the Soviet army was in command of Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania,
Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Stalin also controlled Eastern Germany.
,Intellectuel disquiet:
No longer to be celebrated as a product of Enlightenment confidence in human nature and
human potential, democracy for some had become a compulsory defense mechanism, an
emergency survival strategy. Colonial peoples pointed to the destruction of the Japanese
empire as a precedent for the end of the European empire. How could the victors call for
self-determination in postwar Europe and deny the same opportunity to non-Westerners?
For millions of people around the world, 1945 was a year of want and a time of acute mental
anguish: civilization itself had arrived at a moral and material impasse.
Early superpower tensions:
The geopolitical conflict between the US and the USSR known as the Cold War became the
dominant feature of international relations for almost 45 years. For a moment in 1945 the
differences separating the West from Russia did not appear insurmountable. After all, the US
had supplied the Soviets with arms and supplies, and Stalin had disbanded the Comintern,
the organization to promote world revolution. Both states agreed on the need for
reconstruction, and both states opposed European imperialism. Noncommunist political
parties were allowed to operate for some time in the Soviet-controlled zone of occupied
Europe. Where communist parties in the east were less popular, in the west they gained
considerable strength. In Britain, the new Labour government committed to the
establishment of a wide-ranging socialist economic program, and at the newly founded UN,
the 11-member Security Council was designed around the principle of establishing global
consensus, with Britain, France, China, the US and the USSR holding permanent seats on
the Council.
A second front:
The difficult work of rebuilding economies and lives would necessitate a high level of postwar
cooperation and trust within the Grand Alliance, but a host of disagreements existed
between the inter-allied forces. First and foremost was Stalin’s suspicion that the opening of
a Western front against Germany had been delayed by the British and Americans until June
1944, in order to undermine Soviet human and material resources. From 1941 onwards
Stalin had repeatedly asked for the opening of a second front, but only in 1943 in Theran, did
Stalin receive assurances that the planned offensive would be centered on France. By this
date, the Red Army had already begun the process of dislodging the Germans from Soviet
Territory.
Eastern Europe:
The second area of disagreement involved Stalin’s insistence that future Soviet security
mandated the formation of friendly governments to the immediate west of the USSR. The
Soviets had lost some 7.5 million soldiers, and, together with malnutrition, forced labor and
physical dislocation, some 20 million citizens during the war. Britain and the US suffered a
combined one million fatalities. Since the overall majority of Soviet casualties were males,
the country experienced an acute drop in the overall birth rate, and together with the
widespread destruction of farms, livestock, agricultural machinery, factories, infrastructure
and home, it is hardly surprising that the Russians demanded secure frontiers. The Nazi
invasion reinforced the perception that from Napoleon to Kaiser Wilhelm to Hitler, Russia’s
sorrows originated in the West. For Stalin, friendly states meant subservient client states.
During a summit meeting in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945, he called for the
,imposition of harsh peace terms against Germany, particularly in the areas of reparations
and postwar political reconstruction, and he had no intention of allowing Western-style liberal
democracies in Soviet-occupied countries.
Deepening Western suspicions:
The US had emerged from the war as the dominant global power, with a monopoly on
atomic weapons, military mastery in the air and seas, the strongest private-sector economy
and the most advanced manufacturing base. In 1945 the US economy accounted for almost
50% of the world’s gross national product (GNP). Russia was economically poor and
disadvantaged in terms of usable physical plant. This economic weakness was offset
somewhat by the rapid postwar demobilization of American troops in Western Europe, made
necessary by political opinion at home and involving a reduction in personnel from 12 million
to 1.4 million by 1947. The Soviet military, reduced in 1948 to 3 million, was thus in a strong
position to enforce Moscow’s dictates on its zone of influence. In addition, wartime physical
and human devastation in Russia was offset by the fact that Stalin ruled an empire that
comprised one-sixth of the world’s land mass, rich in resources and with a population of
some 200 million people who understood the consequences of disloyalty. Thousands of
Soviet POWS returned home in 1945 only to be exiled to forced-labor camps or executed
for fear of anti-Soviet ideas. By 1953, some 5 million were working in Soviet labor camps,
and some half a million political murders had been carried out. Stalin reached the height of
his control in 1945: many Soviet citizens saw their leader as a national hero, and victory in
the “Great Patriotic War” intensified the cult of personality that developed around the dictator.
In the minds of some Western policy makers (Truman), a counterforce was necessary to
prevent the extension of Soviet power. Referring to the establishment of an “iron curtain”,
Churchill counseled that security could only be found in an alliance among Western
democracies. For the West, Soviet expansion meant the repudiation of the Enlightenment
project.
The communist perspective:
Stalin’s dictatorship was a brutal caricature of Marx’s vision of the final stage of human
history. But from the Russian (and later Chinese) perspective, it was the West that had the
long and distinguished record of international aggression and imperialism. And with the
defeat of Japan, the US had become the unrivaled power in the Pacific, establishing a string
of military bases with distinctly offensive capabilities. For Stalin, the hostility of the capitalist
West toward all newly formed communist states demonstrated that a strong defensive
posture was crucial if the Marxist alternative were to survive. Stalin argued that the heavy
hand of the state was necessary in nascent communist states so long as the forces of
international capitalism stood united in their opposition to the dream of a classless society.
One month before Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech, Stalin and Molotov publicly stated that
the Western democracies had become enemies of the Soviet state.
The German dilemma:
In Germany, an interim joint occupation had been agreed by the Allies in Theran, and in
1945 they issued a “Declaration on Liberated Europe”, that called for free elections across
occupied Europe, with each country determining its own future form of government. Hitler
had exhausted the natural and human resources of occupied countries, while massive Allied
bombing crippled the productive capacity of Europe. Food and housing were in short supply,
transportation networks were fractured, and economic collapse was the norm everywhere. A
, dangerous power vacuum emerged in May 1945. The British, Americans and Russians had
agreed that the disintegration of the Nazi regime was essential to the
future security of Europe. The most influential Nazi’s were tried and
concited by an international tribunal held in Nuremberg. In Yalta
1945, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that a punitive peace would
leave the Germans bitter and resentful and would only serve Soviet
interests on the continent. In Potsdam 1945, Stalin, Truman and
Attlee agreed to the details of dividing Germany into occupation
zones, and a similar model was imposed on Berlin. The Soviet
decision to remove natural resources and relocate manufacturing
plants from Germany to Russia, played an important role in
prompting the West’s decision to unite the French, British and
American zones of occupation in 1947, inaugurating a de facto
partition of the country. Free provincial elections were called in 1947, and the dominant
parties, Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, looked to the West for economic aid
and political support.
The Marshall Plan:
Crucial to the overall Western strategy of rebuilding Europe’s economies was the
implementation of the Marshall Plan. Although the Soviets attended the first meeting in 1947,
Stalin rejected the offer and prohibited Eastern European client states from participating. The
Soviets took exception to the plan’s recruitment that the US have some supervisory role over
and access to the budgetary records of the receiving countries, interpreted by Stalin as a
violation of the principle of national sovereignty. The additional requirement that Marshall
money be used to purchase American products struck the Soviets as another attempt to
extend the influence of the capitalist system. Moscow announced the establishment of the
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1949, to coordinate the rebuilding of those states
under Soviet control. Sixteen nationals accepted the Marshall funds and the Organization for
European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, later OECD) was created to supervise the grants.
The infusion helped to restart Europe’s industrial base while also serving to modernize the
agricultural sector. The contrast between East and West Germany became obvious, which
reflected poorly upon the Soviet system. The Red Army began to install pro-Soviet
communist regimes in every state under its control. By 1948 the Baltic states of Latvia,
Lithuania and Estonia, together with the occupied countries of Eastern Europe were
compelled to adopt Soviet-style political systems and state dominated command economies.
Western European states realized growth rates of 5% per year by 1952. The US reaped long
term benefits from the Marshall Plan: Two-thirds of postwar European imports originated in
America, and the reemployment of Europe’s laboring population translated into the rapid
stabilization of Europe’s democratic political system. The success of the Marshall Plan also
served to exacerbate the ideological divide with the East. Communist parties in the West lost
influence as prospects returned.
The Truman doctrine:
President Truman and his advisors were eager to foil potential Soviet influence elsewhere.
Secretive information-gathering and espionage organization, led by the CIA and National
Security Council (established in 1948) faced off against their Soviet counterparts around the
world, most immediately along the southern rim of Eurasia. In 1945 the USSR encouraged a
secession movement by the communist controlled Tudeh Party in Azerbaijan. Opposition
Triumph and disquiet: the human prospect in 1945:
The Fragile west:
Before 1914, the prophets of progress were applauding the achievements of Western
civilization. Highly competitive European nations experienced increased affluence at home,
and unprecedented influence abroad, but during World War 1, these illusions were
shattered. Ten million Europeans lost their lives and the war spelt disaster for the Ottoman,
German, Austrian and Russian empires. For Woodrow Wilson the war was a war “to end all
wars”, a “struggle to make the world safe for democracy”, but German resentment against
the victors set the stage for the rise of Nazism. Instead of extending principles of democratic
self-government, Britain and France enlarged their empires by taking control of Ottoman
territories in the Middle East. The USA refused to join the Nations League and turned
towards isolationism. In Russia the communists rejected the foundations of the Western
political and economic order. The depression of 1929 confirmed the verdict of fascists and
communists, that political pluralism and democracy were doomed to extinction.
Democracy on the defensive:
While the democracies were struggling during the 1930s, dynamic leadership in the fascist
states and USSR projected the image of national unity and overriding purpose, and most
importantly, these regimes brought food on the table by guaranteeing full employment, or at
least, this was the picture. It would take another world war, before the myth of omnipotent
leaders was toppled and widespread support for limited, rules-based government restored.
An optimistic view:
The remarkable economic transformation of Western Europe in the half-century since the
end of the war, with men and women living longer, healthier, wealthier and more comfortable
lives, seemed to legitimize a high level of confidence in democratic rule. Victory in 1945
became an important preamble to a broader triumph of enlightenment political and economic
values, first with the end of Europe's colonial empires (1960s-1970s), and then with the
downfall of communism.
A pessimistic view:
During WW2, the Soviets suffered almost half of the fatalities in Europe. Soviet productive
capacity, especially in the agricultural sector, was decimated. Soviet agricultural outputs did
not reach prewar levels until 1952, and some 6 million Slavs, Gypsies, communists,
pacifists, homosexuals and disabled persons perished during the war. One million Bangalis
died because of famine in India and Vietnam suffered from this too. The Chinese lost 15
million. No one was secure in a total war environment where technology and industrial
production were focused on physical destruction and psychological demoralization.
The eclipse of Europe:
For centuries the projection of Western power, culture, religion and ideas around the globe
had defined the parameters of early modern society and the modern world. In May 1945,
British and American troops occupied newly liberated lands in Italy, France and parts of
Germany. To the east, the Soviet army was in command of Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania,
Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Stalin also controlled Eastern Germany.
,Intellectuel disquiet:
No longer to be celebrated as a product of Enlightenment confidence in human nature and
human potential, democracy for some had become a compulsory defense mechanism, an
emergency survival strategy. Colonial peoples pointed to the destruction of the Japanese
empire as a precedent for the end of the European empire. How could the victors call for
self-determination in postwar Europe and deny the same opportunity to non-Westerners?
For millions of people around the world, 1945 was a year of want and a time of acute mental
anguish: civilization itself had arrived at a moral and material impasse.
Early superpower tensions:
The geopolitical conflict between the US and the USSR known as the Cold War became the
dominant feature of international relations for almost 45 years. For a moment in 1945 the
differences separating the West from Russia did not appear insurmountable. After all, the US
had supplied the Soviets with arms and supplies, and Stalin had disbanded the Comintern,
the organization to promote world revolution. Both states agreed on the need for
reconstruction, and both states opposed European imperialism. Noncommunist political
parties were allowed to operate for some time in the Soviet-controlled zone of occupied
Europe. Where communist parties in the east were less popular, in the west they gained
considerable strength. In Britain, the new Labour government committed to the
establishment of a wide-ranging socialist economic program, and at the newly founded UN,
the 11-member Security Council was designed around the principle of establishing global
consensus, with Britain, France, China, the US and the USSR holding permanent seats on
the Council.
A second front:
The difficult work of rebuilding economies and lives would necessitate a high level of postwar
cooperation and trust within the Grand Alliance, but a host of disagreements existed
between the inter-allied forces. First and foremost was Stalin’s suspicion that the opening of
a Western front against Germany had been delayed by the British and Americans until June
1944, in order to undermine Soviet human and material resources. From 1941 onwards
Stalin had repeatedly asked for the opening of a second front, but only in 1943 in Theran, did
Stalin receive assurances that the planned offensive would be centered on France. By this
date, the Red Army had already begun the process of dislodging the Germans from Soviet
Territory.
Eastern Europe:
The second area of disagreement involved Stalin’s insistence that future Soviet security
mandated the formation of friendly governments to the immediate west of the USSR. The
Soviets had lost some 7.5 million soldiers, and, together with malnutrition, forced labor and
physical dislocation, some 20 million citizens during the war. Britain and the US suffered a
combined one million fatalities. Since the overall majority of Soviet casualties were males,
the country experienced an acute drop in the overall birth rate, and together with the
widespread destruction of farms, livestock, agricultural machinery, factories, infrastructure
and home, it is hardly surprising that the Russians demanded secure frontiers. The Nazi
invasion reinforced the perception that from Napoleon to Kaiser Wilhelm to Hitler, Russia’s
sorrows originated in the West. For Stalin, friendly states meant subservient client states.
During a summit meeting in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945, he called for the
,imposition of harsh peace terms against Germany, particularly in the areas of reparations
and postwar political reconstruction, and he had no intention of allowing Western-style liberal
democracies in Soviet-occupied countries.
Deepening Western suspicions:
The US had emerged from the war as the dominant global power, with a monopoly on
atomic weapons, military mastery in the air and seas, the strongest private-sector economy
and the most advanced manufacturing base. In 1945 the US economy accounted for almost
50% of the world’s gross national product (GNP). Russia was economically poor and
disadvantaged in terms of usable physical plant. This economic weakness was offset
somewhat by the rapid postwar demobilization of American troops in Western Europe, made
necessary by political opinion at home and involving a reduction in personnel from 12 million
to 1.4 million by 1947. The Soviet military, reduced in 1948 to 3 million, was thus in a strong
position to enforce Moscow’s dictates on its zone of influence. In addition, wartime physical
and human devastation in Russia was offset by the fact that Stalin ruled an empire that
comprised one-sixth of the world’s land mass, rich in resources and with a population of
some 200 million people who understood the consequences of disloyalty. Thousands of
Soviet POWS returned home in 1945 only to be exiled to forced-labor camps or executed
for fear of anti-Soviet ideas. By 1953, some 5 million were working in Soviet labor camps,
and some half a million political murders had been carried out. Stalin reached the height of
his control in 1945: many Soviet citizens saw their leader as a national hero, and victory in
the “Great Patriotic War” intensified the cult of personality that developed around the dictator.
In the minds of some Western policy makers (Truman), a counterforce was necessary to
prevent the extension of Soviet power. Referring to the establishment of an “iron curtain”,
Churchill counseled that security could only be found in an alliance among Western
democracies. For the West, Soviet expansion meant the repudiation of the Enlightenment
project.
The communist perspective:
Stalin’s dictatorship was a brutal caricature of Marx’s vision of the final stage of human
history. But from the Russian (and later Chinese) perspective, it was the West that had the
long and distinguished record of international aggression and imperialism. And with the
defeat of Japan, the US had become the unrivaled power in the Pacific, establishing a string
of military bases with distinctly offensive capabilities. For Stalin, the hostility of the capitalist
West toward all newly formed communist states demonstrated that a strong defensive
posture was crucial if the Marxist alternative were to survive. Stalin argued that the heavy
hand of the state was necessary in nascent communist states so long as the forces of
international capitalism stood united in their opposition to the dream of a classless society.
One month before Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech, Stalin and Molotov publicly stated that
the Western democracies had become enemies of the Soviet state.
The German dilemma:
In Germany, an interim joint occupation had been agreed by the Allies in Theran, and in
1945 they issued a “Declaration on Liberated Europe”, that called for free elections across
occupied Europe, with each country determining its own future form of government. Hitler
had exhausted the natural and human resources of occupied countries, while massive Allied
bombing crippled the productive capacity of Europe. Food and housing were in short supply,
transportation networks were fractured, and economic collapse was the norm everywhere. A
, dangerous power vacuum emerged in May 1945. The British, Americans and Russians had
agreed that the disintegration of the Nazi regime was essential to the
future security of Europe. The most influential Nazi’s were tried and
concited by an international tribunal held in Nuremberg. In Yalta
1945, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that a punitive peace would
leave the Germans bitter and resentful and would only serve Soviet
interests on the continent. In Potsdam 1945, Stalin, Truman and
Attlee agreed to the details of dividing Germany into occupation
zones, and a similar model was imposed on Berlin. The Soviet
decision to remove natural resources and relocate manufacturing
plants from Germany to Russia, played an important role in
prompting the West’s decision to unite the French, British and
American zones of occupation in 1947, inaugurating a de facto
partition of the country. Free provincial elections were called in 1947, and the dominant
parties, Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, looked to the West for economic aid
and political support.
The Marshall Plan:
Crucial to the overall Western strategy of rebuilding Europe’s economies was the
implementation of the Marshall Plan. Although the Soviets attended the first meeting in 1947,
Stalin rejected the offer and prohibited Eastern European client states from participating. The
Soviets took exception to the plan’s recruitment that the US have some supervisory role over
and access to the budgetary records of the receiving countries, interpreted by Stalin as a
violation of the principle of national sovereignty. The additional requirement that Marshall
money be used to purchase American products struck the Soviets as another attempt to
extend the influence of the capitalist system. Moscow announced the establishment of the
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1949, to coordinate the rebuilding of those states
under Soviet control. Sixteen nationals accepted the Marshall funds and the Organization for
European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, later OECD) was created to supervise the grants.
The infusion helped to restart Europe’s industrial base while also serving to modernize the
agricultural sector. The contrast between East and West Germany became obvious, which
reflected poorly upon the Soviet system. The Red Army began to install pro-Soviet
communist regimes in every state under its control. By 1948 the Baltic states of Latvia,
Lithuania and Estonia, together with the occupied countries of Eastern Europe were
compelled to adopt Soviet-style political systems and state dominated command economies.
Western European states realized growth rates of 5% per year by 1952. The US reaped long
term benefits from the Marshall Plan: Two-thirds of postwar European imports originated in
America, and the reemployment of Europe’s laboring population translated into the rapid
stabilization of Europe’s democratic political system. The success of the Marshall Plan also
served to exacerbate the ideological divide with the East. Communist parties in the West lost
influence as prospects returned.
The Truman doctrine:
President Truman and his advisors were eager to foil potential Soviet influence elsewhere.
Secretive information-gathering and espionage organization, led by the CIA and National
Security Council (established in 1948) faced off against their Soviet counterparts around the
world, most immediately along the southern rim of Eurasia. In 1945 the USSR encouraged a
secession movement by the communist controlled Tudeh Party in Azerbaijan. Opposition
