Fearing the Worst

How Korea Transformed the Cold War

Samuel Wells Jr., Samuel F. Wells Jr.

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780231549943
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

After World War II, the escalating tensions of the Cold War shaped the international system. Fearing the Worst explains how the Korean War fundamentally changed postwar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union into a militarized confrontation that would last decades.

Samuel F. Wells Jr. examines how military and political events interacted to escalate the conflict. Decisions made by the Truman administration in the first six months of the Korean War drove both superpowers to intensify their defense buildup. American leaders feared the worst-case scenario—that Stalin was prepared to start World War III—and raced to build up strategic arms, resulting in a struggle they did not seek out or intend. Their decisions stemmed from incomplete interpretations of Soviet and Chinese goals, especially the belief that China was a Kremlin puppet. Yet Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-sung all had their own agendas, about which the United States lacked reliable intelligence. Drawing on newly available documents and memoirs—including previously restricted archives in Russia, China, and North Korea—Wells analyzes the key decision points that changed the course of the war. He also provides vivid profiles of the central actors as well as important but lesser known figures. Bringing together studies of military policy and diplomacy with the roles of technology, intelligence, and domestic politics in each of the principal nations, Fearing the Worst offers a new account of the Korean War and its lasting legacy.

PART I

The War

1

STALIN ENDORSES WAR IN ASIA

Joseph Stalin made a fateful decision in late January 1950. He agreed to provide limited support to a North Korean invasion of South Korea, with the conviction that this initiative would strengthen the Soviet Union’s position in Asia at very little risk. The Soviet Union was recovering from the devastation of World War II and had consolidated its control over the important states of Central and Eastern Europe. The communists had just won a lengthy civil war in China, and Mao Zedong was in Moscow at this time to negotiate a treaty of alliance and economic assistance. A Soviet-sponsored regime had established firm control in North Korea, while South Korea was riven with factional disputes and intrigue against the central government. In the United States, the administration of President Harry Truman was increasingly unpopular and under attack for poor management of the economy and foreign affairs. The president and secretary of state had recently announced a new strategy for East Asia that involved withdrawing from Taiwan and South Korea.

The Soviet leader was also keenly aware that the legacies of the Great Patriotic War contained very substantial vulnerabilities. The war had caused at least 25 million deaths, including about 9 million in military action and the rest as a result of German occupation and Soviet purges. A minimum of 2 million deaths occurred in the interior controlled by the communist government. Most of these individuals died in poor conditions in Soviet labor camps; many died in deportations of the Volga Germans and Chechens, who were accused of collaboration with the Nazis; and at least 800,000 died in the three-year siege of Leningrad. Many cities west of Moscow and at least 70,000 villages and towns were destroyed, many in the scorched earth retreat ordered by Stalin. By the end of the war, the Soviet economy had lost 20 percent of its population and 25 to 33 percent of its physical wealth.¹

Still, the effects of the war were not all negative. Much of Soviet industry in the west was dismantled as the Nazis advanced and moved to the Urals, to be reassembled under brutal conditions. The vital sectors of defense industry remained in the interior after the war—to be developed into closed, secret cities removed from all maps. These changes made defense industries more efficient by being concentrated and closer to their essential raw materials. They were also better protected from land invasion. The Soviet leaders completely reformed defense production processes during the war. They devised new methods to mass-produce rifles, artillery, tanks, and support vehicles in simple, sturdy designs. By the later stages of the war, the Soviet economy outproduced that of Germany in weapons, ammunition, and equipment. The five-year plan published in 1946 emphasized rebuilding heavy industry, including large allocations for defense. Consumer items, housing, and food supplies remained inadequate as late as the early 1950s.²

THE DICTATOR

By 1945, Stalin had gained full control of both the Communist Party and state power through a political system that operated on intrigue, intimidation, and terror. Starting in 1934, with the murder of Sergei Kirov, he gradually centralized authority for himself and a small group of party protégés as he eliminated his potential rivals step by step. In addition to having senior party officials tried and executed, he ordered purges of senior military leaders, which removed the most capable and experienced generals and admirals on the eve of war with Germany.³ In her memoirs, Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, describes how, after her mother’s suicide in 1932, Stalin became increasingly isolated and suspicious of everyone. Specially chosen members of the secret police managed the household, cared for the children, and provided security. All his food was specially grown on a closed farm or imported, and each element was tested and certified by doctors as free of poison.⁴ During the war, Stalin went to the front only once, when preparations were under way for the Smolensk offensive in August 1943.⁵

Beyond his appetite for power and his brutal methods of ruling, Stalin had more human qualities. His personality included a lighter side, although his dark inner core occasionally showed itself. Numerous observers commented on Stalin’s capacity for playacting. One of his closest colleagues, Anastas Mikoyan—an original Bolshevik who remained in the inner circle through all the purges—said in his memoirs that “when in his opinion it was necessary, Stalin could be the complete master of himself, knew how to receive people and converse with them so as to cast an excellent, pleasant impression of himself. This applies to both Soviet people and, especially, foreigners.” The Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas, who visited the Soviet leader many times, said it was “impossible to separate” Stalin’s role playing from his actual views. The diplomat Oleg Troyanovsky, who as a child first knew Stalin and later served as his translator, declared that the wily dictator “used his born abilities for acting as a means of achieving his political goals.”⁶

Stalin loved movies, and he had his minister of cinematography build a collection of the leader’s favorite adventure films with lavish amounts of blood and gore. Most of the movies were in English without subtitles, and neither Stalin nor his film master knew English, so the minister would memorize the plot and make up dialogue to accompany the film. According to Nikita Khrushchev, who attended many dinners and film sessions, Stalin would occasionally correct the minister’s dialogue or provide his own “translation.” Mikoyan describes one evening when the group was watching one of Stalin’s favorites. The plot revolved around a criminal gang hired by the king of England to go to India and bring back treasure. The gang leader organized his men, and after several mishaps they found their gold, diamonds, and rubies. The leader decided he wanted to keep a large share for himself, so he had the rest of his crew killed. Stalin, Mikoyan reports, “was enchanted. ‘Well done! How smart to do it that way!’” On another evening, the group watched a film about Ivan the Terrible, the tsar with whom Stalin most closely identified. Ivan is best known for unifying Russia by eliminating many of the higher nobility, or boyars, to win control of their land and power. “Stalin said that Ivan the Terrible didn’t kill enough boyars,” Mikoyan says, and “that he should have killed them all” in order to consolidate power earlier. These evenings could not have been fully enjoyable for the guests, for, as Mikoyan recalls, “No one could ever feel completely at ease with Stalin.”⁷

After the war, Stalin worked less frequently in the Kremlin but stayed for long periods in one of his dachas outside the city or in the south on the Black Sea. He devoted less time to government and party affairs and spent long hours alone reading and listening to classical music. Both Troyanovsky and Vyacheslav Molotov note in their memoirs that Stalin loved to read, and he was devoted to “thick literary journals…. The only literature Stalin considered to be especially valuable was that which would … strengthen the reader’s thoughts and emotions … [and] be useful to build socialism,” remarks Troyanovsky. The Soviet leader also spent long periods listening to music. He received all the records available in Moscow, and after listening to each of them, he would rate them as good, acceptable, bad, or garbage. He would put the records in the first two categories in a jukebox given to him at the end of the war by the Americans and listen to them over and over.⁸

Increasingly, in the late 1940s, the isolated dictator revealed severe but humorous obsessions. His frequent companion Mikoyan comments: “In his last years, Stalin would from time to time display capricious stubbornness, stemming from, as it seems, his limitless power.” One particularly striking episode involved Stalin’s love of bananas. One day at his dacha, he tasted bananas that were not fully ripe. He asked Mikoyan why they tasted funny, and the loyal Armenian replied that it must be the result of a mistake in the controls that allowed a bunch to be shipped too early. Stalin immediately blamed Mikhail Menshikov, the minister of international trade, for doing a “bad job as minister.” He demanded that the guilty party be found; but not waiting for a reply, he called Mikoyan at six the next morning with orders to fire Menshikov and fix the supply controls. When Kumykin, the chosen successor, was told of his appointment, he begged Mikoyan: “Don’t do this to me, please, don’t destroy me!” Apparently, a big promotion to minister was not always welcomed when it involved working directly for the Big Boss.⁹

A small group of Politburo members often did business casually over drunken, late dinners at Stalin’s dacha. Both Khrushchev and Djilas describe these evenings in graphic detail. The dinners would sometimes begin as late as 10 P.M. and last for six hours, with an abundance of liquor, many toasts, and meats prepared in the Georgian style. Along with a few items of business, Stalin would organize games during the meal, usually drinking games involving music and dancing. “Stalin found it entertaining to watch the people around him get themselves into embarrassing and even disgraceful situations,” Khrushchev reports. During one summer vacation by the Black Sea, the Hungarian dictator Matyas Rakosi irritated Stalin by intruding on his holiday and then made it worse by complaining that everyone at dinner was drunk. The next night, the Soviet leader responded by forcing so much wine on the Hungarian that Khrushchev feared he “would drink himself to death.” The next morning, Khrushchev recalls, “Stalin was in a good mood all day and joked, ‘You see what sort of a state I got him into?’” By 1948, Djilas declares that as the dinners increased in decadence, Stalin and his guests discussed less and less business.¹⁰

STALINIST CONTROL: THE LAST PHASE

Recognizing his physical decline, Stalin had already begun to reduce his daily responsibilities. On February 26, 1947, in explaining to the plenum of the Central Committee why he was giving up his prized post as minister of the armed forces, he declared: “I am very overworked, especially as, since the end of the war, I have had to immerse myself in civilian affairs…. Comrades, I am very overworked and ask that you do not oppose this. My age, too, has taken its toll.” N. V. Novikov, a diplomat who had not seen Stalin since the end of the war, remarked in April 1947 that the ruler had become “an old, very tired old man.” At this point, Stalin was sixty-eight years old.¹¹

Under Stalin’s direction, a resolution of the Council of Ministers on February 8, 1947, to some extent rationalized the relationship of the government ministries with the Communist Party. On paper, the division of authority was clear. The Council of Ministers controlled the economy, while the Politburo managed all political affairs, including government appointments, defense, foreign affairs, and internal security. But the defining feature of the new structure was that Stalin, who for the first time since the start of the war held no position in government, could define any issue he wanted as “political.” Although the Council of Ministers was run by committees and with routine bureaucratic procedures, the Politburo operated completely on the basis of the dictator’s personal decisions regarding membership, agendas, and the location and frequency of meetings.¹²

Complicating matters further was the shift, after Svetlana’s first marriage in 1944, in Stalin’s working hours to a nighttime schedule, with most Politburo business done over dinner and movies at his dacha. This meant that the key ruling group of six to eight members of the Politburo had to work at their regular duties during the day, try to steal an afternoon nap, and then remain available for a late-night summons until 4 or 5 A.M. When decisions were made at these night meetings, the resolutions would be circulated by courier to those Politburo members who had not been invited for them to sign. This tied them in a form of collective responsibility to decisions in which they had no part. Djilas, who attended at least two of these sessions, records that “a significant part of Soviet policy was shaped at these dinners…. It resembled a patriarchal family with a crotchety head who made his kinsfolk apprehensive.”¹³

Some aspects of Stalin’s earlier system of intimidation continued in his last years. In the winter of 1948–49, the Soviet leader orchestrated attacks on his two longest-serving Politburo colleagues, Molotov and Mikoyan. The charges were manufactured, and both men had experienced Stalin’s brutality before. Yet the punishment, especially for Molotov, was painful and personal. Molotov’s official mistake, in October 1948, was making changes in the draft Constitution of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), which Stalin disliked and rejected. But his real offenses were being seen by many in the Communist Party as Stalin’s logical successor and the fact that his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, had been a close and supportive friend of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who had committed suicide in 1932. At Stalin’s instigation, charges were brought against Zhemchuzhina, leading to her dismissal from a senior party position in 1939. Years later, it was her misfortune to have her name connected with the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee when, in the fall of 1948, they became the object of a vicious investigation by the security service. Stalin ordered Molotov to divorce his wife; and after he did so, the dictator had her expelled from the party, arrested, and finally sentenced to a labor camp. On March 4, 1949, Molotov was dismissed as foreign minister and later assigned to a third-tier job in the Bureau of Metallurgy and Geology. For his part, Mikoyan was asked by Stalin if he was not ready to move on from being minister of foreign trade, and he agreed to be replaced, thereby avoiding any investigation and charges.¹⁴

Stalin designed these humiliations, according to the leading scholars of the Soviet ruling group, to discipline colleagues of long standing and also to send a message to all other party and government officials. But unlike his purges of the late 1930s, Stalin tempered the punishment of these two senior colleagues. Although dismissed as ministers, both Molotov and Mikoyan “remained highly influential members of the Politburo,” and they soon resumed many of the most important duties at their former ministries. Furthermore, the details of the attacks and punishments were restricted to a small group of senior party members.¹⁵

The Leningrad and Gosplan affairs represented a more serious episode in Soviet governance than the earlier chastising of two senior members of the Politburo. But they stemmed from the same cause—Stalin’s boundless suspicions—and served the same purpose: to demonstrate the despot’s unlimited power. The linked affairs began with the discovery in January 1949 of an all-Russian trade fair in Leningrad that had not been authorized by the Council of Ministers. Investigators produced evidence of a network of patronage among Leningrad party leaders, which demonstrated autonomous tendencies that prosecutors could use to charge them with being an antiparty group. Tied to the Leningrad group was Politburo member Nikolai A. Voznesensky, the head of Gosplan, which was the economic planning agency responsible for coordinating the economy’s various sectors. When Stalin discovered that Voznesensky was not only a close associate of the Leningrad group but also had altered parts of the central economic plan and covered up the changes, he ordered a full inquiry.

The results of this inquiry were predictable. Stalin had placed a target on Voznesensky’s back, and his Politburo rivals, Minister of the Interior Lavrenti Beria and Central Committee Secretary Georgi Malenkov, were quick to encourage their friends in the security service to dig up damning evidence. In August, five senior Leningrad officials—including Aleksei Kuznetsov, a secretary of the Central Committee—were arrested. Later, investigators discovered that secret Gosplan documents were missing, resulting in Voznesensky’s arrest in October. After a year’s torture and interrogation, the Leningrad Five and Voznesensky were tried in secret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The War
• Part II: The Transformation
• Chronology
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index