The Superpowers

A Short History

Paul Dukes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134581528
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Superpowers traces the development of the USA and Russia (later USSR) from 1898 through to 2000, placing the Cold War, from inception to ending, into the wider social, economic and political context. This is the first history of the two major participants and their relationship throughout the twentieth century.
The Superpowers: explores the intertwining history of the two powers chronologically and includes discussion of:
* the inheritance of the two great powers and their imperial background
* World War One and the Russian Revolution
* Capitalism and Socialism
* World War Two and its impact
* the conflicts in Berlin, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam and Afghanistan
* Perestroika and the end of the USSR
* the significance of the events of 1991 and their legacy.

1 Inheritance
Nations and empires, before 1898

There were two superpowers in the twentieth century: the USA and the USSR. At the beginning of the next century, from most points of view, there appears to be only one, the USA. In the future, there may be others: China seems a prime candidate. And in the past, before the superpowers, there were the ‘great powers’, mainly the European empires but including both the USA and the USSR’s predecessor, Tsarist Russia. Already in 1835, in a famous prediction, Alexis de Tocqueville talked of them as ‘two great nations’ apparently tending towards the same end, if starting from different points, each of which seemed to be ‘called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world’. As we shall soon see, we have to go far further back than 1835 in order to understand the origins of the two twentieth century superpowers.

But before that, a brief definition is in order. I suggest the following necessary characteristics. A ‘superpower’ must be able to conduct a global strategy including the possibility of destroying the world; to command vast economic potential and influence; and to present a universal ideology. Thus, the USA and USSR were involved in an arms race which threatened the ultimate holocaust; were capable of commanding the necessary resources for this purpose while promoting the capitalist free market and the socialist planned economy, respectively; and, more generally, acted as major spokesmen for liberal democracy on the one hand and communist ‘Marxism–Leninism’ on the other. As we shall see, many modifications may be made to this basic definition, the most important of which can only be explained by examining historically how the superpowers themselves and their predecessors evolved through previous centuries. This will involve going back to medieval times, before 1492, the year of the epic voyage of Columbus when Ivan III was tsar, and then on to early colonial expansion before 1776, the year of the American Revolution, when Catherine the Great was Empress of Russia, looking for the roots of the political culture and other features of both the USA and the USSR.

I have to recognise a considerable difficulty here. There will be those, I have to admit, who will ask why a book which claims to be concerned with the twentieth century should find it necessary to begin with a whole chapter in which this century will scarcely be mentioned. All I can do here is quote the words of Shakespeare, carved on the front of the US National Archives in Washington DC: ‘what’s past is prologue’, and to remind you of some of the references made during the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton which took place in Washington in 1998–9. These included not only the intentions of the Founding Fathers when they were framing the Constitution of 1787 but also the ideas of Sir Thomas More in the sixteenth century, the meaning of ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’ as adopted in the High Court of Parliament in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even the clauses of the Magna Carta of 1215. If the long historical dimension is appropriate for the arraignment of a president, why should it not be appropriate for the comparative examination of the history of his country and that of its great rival? Such an argument receives powerful support from the comprehensive study of Soviet Diplomacy and Negotiating Behavior, commissioned by the Committee of Foreign Affairs of the US House of Representatives and published in 1979, which considers the emerging forms of diplomacy under the Greeks, then contributions from Rome and Byzantium, before coming on to aspects of the modern age.¹

Geography and history (before 1492)

If, as was often alleged during the years of the Cold War, the twentieth-century struggle was indeed one between godless Communism and Christian democracy, there could be little doubt that the Almighty weighted the scales in favour of his principal adherents and against his chief adversaries when he arranged the basic conditions of the USA and the USSR. Historically, Russia’s vast size has often been a tremendous handicap, contributing as much as the poor climate and maldistribution of natural resources to the slow pace of its development. On the other hand, waves of invaders up to the Nazi Germans in the Second World War have found themselves swallowed up in the monotonous steppes, while strategic thinkers from the beginning of the twentieth century to the nuclear age have seen the advantages of domination of the Eurasian land mass. Geography, indeed, has been no less evolutionary than history.

In fact, the former Soviet Union, now the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) plus the ex-Baltic republics, is about equal in area to the USA plus Canada and Mexico; that is, the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA). However, the relationship of the two land masses to the sea has been of considerable significance. Although Russia’s coastline is very long, much of it is north of the Arctic Circle and not yet of any great use. One of her historic drives has been to obtain a coastline on a navigable sea, first to the White Sea, then to the Baltic Sea, later to the Black Sea and finally to the Pacific Ocean. But only the Black Sea is completely ice-free, while none of Russia’s ports enjoys completely open access to blue water. The USA has been much better endowed with exploitable coastline on both Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, remote Alaska being the only seaboard state to be seriously threatened by ice.

While the sea has been more agreeably arranged for the USA than for Russia, a broad comparison can be made between their manner of exploitation of the Atlantic Ocean and the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Black Sea, the eastern and western littorals of the Pacific Ocean. In the eighteenth century, St Petersburg and other towns on the Baltic, forming the window on the west, maintained Russia’s connection with the European civilisation that stretched over the Atlantic to Boston and other ports before and after the American Revolution. The USA’s takeover of the Gulf of Mexico, providing more access to the Atlantic in two principal stages during the first half of the nineteenth century, might be likened to Russia’s assimilation of the northern and eastern shores of the Black Sea, her outlet to the Mediterranean, a few years before. The Crimea and the northern shore of the Black Sea are juxtaposed here to Louisiana, and the Caucasus to Texas. Continuing this over-fanciful comparison and quickly passing over a superficial similarity between Russia’s Central Asia, where some nomadic peoples as well as others more settled were subdued in the late nineteenth century, and America’s Far West, where the ‘Red Indians’ made their last stand at about the same time, we come to the Pacific shores. Vladivostok, although founded in 1860, had some years to go before it could begin to rival San Francisco, and recently has been falling behind rather than catching up. Only the most visionary enthusiast could claim that the Russian Far East could become another California.

Leaving the seas, we move inland along the rivers, which have played an important part in the history of both superpowers. Kievan Russia grew up on the Dnepr, and was infiltrated by Northmen coming up the Western Dvina and other rivers, just as they penetrated North America along the St. Lawrence. With the growth of Muscovy, the rivers rising near Moscow were vital arteries for the new society. These included not only the Dnepr and Western Dvina, but also the Don and the Volga and their tributaries. Outstanding among these became the Volga, whose value would have been even greater had it flowed into the Black Sea rather than the landlocked Caspian. The USA’s nearest equivalent to the Volga, the Mississippi, did not achieve its full significance until well into the nineteenth century. Before then, the rivers leading into the hinterland from the conveniently indented seaboard, the James, the Hudson, the Delaware and others, were of most service before the mountains were crossed and the Ohio was among those that came into use. The rivers remote from the first centres assisted exploration and communication, whether the Ob, Yenisei and Lena systems in Siberia, across to the Russian Pacific down the Amur, to a lesser extent into Central Asia along the Syr Daria and Amu Daria, or down to the North American south-west along the Rio Grande and Colorado, up to the north-west along the Columbia, from Northern to Southern California along the Sacramento and San Joaquin. While the heartland rivers were supplemented by canals, those beyond it were not, partly because this would have been less useful in their case, but more because their exploitation was not fully developed before the arrival of transport by rail and, in some cases, by air.

Alighting, we need now to develop further the concept of the heartland in an economic sense (as opposed to the strategic). In North America, this extends from the Atlantic westwards beyond the Mississippi into the prairie, from the Gulf of Mexico northwards near to Canada. The circumstances for agriculture have been mostly favourable. In Russia, a ‘Fertile Triangle’ tapers from a base line between St Petersburg on the Baltic Sea and Odessa on the Black Sea (since 1991 in independent Ukraine) over towards the Ural Mountains. Russia’s heartland is smaller (especially since 1991) and also less productive. While the human factor should not be discounted, two fundamental physical features have been more influential. First, the fact that both St Petersburg and Moscow are to the north of Ketchikan, Alaska, gives a clear indication of the disadvantageous situation of Russia from the point of view of latitude. Second, the vast flattened and distorted rhomboid shape of the former Soviet Union, as opposed to the irregular triangle that is North America, has given it a continentality of climate that increases in extremity towards the east and makes it virtually impossible to farm in deeper Siberia. Moreover, cold is an enemy to the north, as is dryness to the south.

The parts historically played within the agricultural heartlands by the steppe and the prairie, as well as by the respective forests, have been central to the development of both the USA and Russia. Carving and burning out small plots of land in the wooded regions, or farming more extensively in the rolling plains, the frontier people in both societies have struggled against vast natural difficulties in an epic manner. Yet there is one more key difference: the relatively minor importance of mountains during the expansion of Russia. The Urals are in many places no more than high hills, and the Caucasus does not come on to the scene significantly until the nineteenth century, while the mountains of Central Asia and the Far East have always been on the fringe. On the other hand, the Appalachians were important moulding influences in American colonial times and beyond, while the crossing of the Rockies was one of the most momentous episodes in the great trek west.

Turning from the use of the land to that of its contents, we find again that the USA has been better endowed than its counterpart, especially as far as accessibility is concerned. Many of Russia’s natural resources are to be found in remoter Siberia. Whereas the USA’s northeastern states contained most of the necessary ingredients for early industrialisation, coal and iron were less conveniently located from the Russian point of view. Then, in the ambitious attempt to catch up with its rival during the Five-Year Plans in the 1930s and after, the USSR suffered handicaps beyond bureaucratic incompetence and ruinous purges.²

But we must begin nearer the beginning, with the Muscovite period of Russian history following on from the Kievan period after centuries of the earlier development of the Slavic peoples. Some readers will ask again, is this really necessary? Here, I shall try to convert those who still doubt the uses of the past by beginning with a State Department Order made to a specialist at Harvard University. If an important branch of the US government believed that it was in order to spend taxpayers’ money on finding out the mainsprings of Soviet behaviour, should the rest of us doubt that this was a worthwhile exercise? Moreover, fortunately, the assignment was carried out by a leading scholar who adapted it for wider consumption as ‘Muscovite Political Folkways’. In his article, Edward Keenan argued that Soviet political culture was an update of that developed in medieval Russia and conditioned by the natural conditions of life in the East European forest. Since these threatened survival itself:

the most significant autonomous actor in peasant life was not the individual (who could not survive alone in this environment), and not even the nuclear family (which, in its extended form, was marginally viable, but still too vulnerable in disease and sudden calamity), but the village, to whose interests all others were in the end subordinated.

The main features of the consequent political culture were:

a strong tendency to maintain stability and a kind of closed equilibrium; risk avoidance; suppression of individual initiatives; informality of political power; the considerable freedom of action and expression within the group; the striving for unanimous final resolution of potentially divisive issues.

These features, moreover, were to be found not only in the village but also, writ large, in the emergent Muscovite state. And since for it too, the major aim was survival, this state gave its prime attention to policies directed at the avoidance of chaos, at safety first, while the major guarantor of such policies was believed to be a strict principle of centralisation. The centre should hold on to all it could, extending its grasp where possible. But this did not mean a single ruler: as in the village, so in the state, ultimate responsibility was not individual, but collective. While such an aim was more easily considered than achieved – since among powerful aristocratic families extended in clans, there were great regional and dynastic problems sometimes leading to civil war – by about the end of the fifteenth century a kind of resolution had been achieved. This consisted of a coalition of the clans gathered around ‘the divinely anointed grand prince of Moscow’. At the same time, however, the evolution of this coalition was accompanied by the emergence of a bureaucracy.

With some justification, critics of Keenan’s approach pointed out that he had said little about Byzantine or Mongol influences, about the steppe and colonisation, or about international relations.³ To take one example a little further, as far as the influence of Byzantine culture and the Orthodox Church was concerned, Keenan argued that:

It cannot be demonstrated … that during its formative period (i.e. 1450– 1500) Muscovite political culture was significantly influenced either by the form or by the practice of Byzantine political culture or ideology. Nor is there convincing evidence that any powerful Muscovite politician or political group was conversant with Byzantine political culture, except perhaps as the latter was reflected in the ritual and organisation of the Orthodox Church, which itself had little practical political importance in early Muscovy and little formative impact upon Russian political behavior.⁴

On the other hand, Dimitri Obolensky writes:

It is highly significant that Russia entered the European family of nations through her conversion to Christianity, for which she is indebted to Byzantium. The heritage of East Rome was not, as it is sometimes suggested, Russia’s ‘mark of the beast’ that isolated her from medieval Europe: it was, in fact, the main channel through which she became a European nation. Byzantium was not a wall, erected between Russia and the West: she was Russia’s gateway to Europe.⁵

Let us leave for now the question of the harsh conditions of the Russian frontier and their influence on Muscovite and Soviet folkways to cross Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to ask a similar question about early influences on the political culture of the other superpower, the USA. Some immediate problems present themselves. First, there is no convenient counterpart to the US State Department Order that led to Keenan’s article. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR never commissioned a Soviet scholar to analyse the remote roots of the behaviour of the US government. Second, and much more significantly, far from existing in the late fifteenth century on which Keenan focuses, the USA was not foreshadowed even in the wildest dreams of the ‘discoverer’ of America in the same period, Columbus in 1492. For many historians, even though they would concede that the Americas were far from ‘empty’ at that time, to look for explanations of the twentieth-century political culture of the USA in the period before the beginning of the colonial period might still be seen as wild eccentricity. Nevertheless, because it is in the interests of parity, and, indeed because it might have intrinsic validity, the attempt must be made.

Passing over for the moment the period of later clashes and interaction between Native Americans on the one hand and immigrant Europeans and Africans on the other, let us concentrate to begin with on the political culture of the principal promoter of the North American colonies. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, Muscovite Russia was not the only state suffering civil war among powerful families accompanied by great regional and dynastic problems. For England, the Wars of the Roses involving the houses of York and Lancaster fits that description all too well. But for at least one observer, the way forward had already been indicated. Just as Edward Keenan found directions for Russian development already indicated in earlier centuries, so the historical anthropologist Alan Macfarlane has asserted that ‘most of the central legal, political, economic, social and demographic premises that were observable in the early nineteenth century were already formed by the fourteenth century at the latest’.

The Common Law reached a mature stage of development by the end of the thirteenth century, while the principle that England was not an absolutist state but that the Crown was under the law and responsible to parliament was established even before the Magna Carta of 1215. M...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1: Inheritance: Nations and Empires, Before 1898
• 2: Conception: The First World War and Revolution, 1898–1921
• 3: Gestation: New World Orders and the Second World War, 1921–45
• 4: Youth: Cold War and Decolonisation, 1945–68
• 5: Maturity: Cold War and the Third World, 1968–91
• 6: The Legacy: Death or Rebirth? 1991
• Notes
• Bibliography