The Cold War and its Origins, 1917-1960

Volume One 1917-1950

D.F. Fleming

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000261967
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book, first published in 1961, is an analysis of the great struggle of the twentieth century, the Cold War. It carefully examines the conflict's origins in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and follows the thread of antagonism between west and east all the way up to 1960. These were the key years of the Cold War, when it seemed that the prospect of nuclear confrontation was a real one, and this book offers a close reading of the main events of those years. This volume concentrates on the European theatre, and Volume Two focuses on the Cold War in the East.

PART I
ENEMIES AND ALLIES
1917–1945

CHAPTER I
WORLD WAR AND RED REVOLUTION
1914–1917

Winston Churchill voiced an old idea when he declared that Russia is “an enigma wrapped in a mystery.” Russia has always been a mystery to the western world because: (1) it is a vast country situated in the heart of the world’s largest land mass; (2) its people living on great plains have been invaded so often that they have deep suspicions of foreigners; (3) they have been ruled for centuries by autocrats who did not usually promote foreign observation; and (4) other peoples have studied far too little Russian history.

Today it is easy to say that Soviet Russia has drawn an “iron curtain” around her domain, including half of Europe, and absolve ourselves from the effort of learning about Russia. It is equally easy to accept the proposition that she is an enemy and therefore we do not need to study her history and policies with any sympathy or objectivity.

Each of these ideas is suicidal, for we have reached a point in the evolution of war which precludes its use as a means of settling national rivalries. We cannot conquer or rule the Soviet Union, any more than she can subdue or control North America, but the two of us can destroy western democratic civilization, the very thing we are so anxious to defend. We literally have no alternative except to live on the same constantly shrinking planet with the Soviet Union, and to learn to adjust our differences with her without war. It is a matter of life and death to us and, since it is, we cannot even “defend” our way of life if we have false ideas about Russia and her way of life. This is not to say that any one writer can present the truth about Russia, but it is to say that everyone must strive to present it, for our very self preservation, if for no other reason.

Red Revolution. Our lives are made uneasy now because the Russian Revolution of 1917 resulted in the creation of a rival system to our own. This revolution was the most sweeping in all modern history. We had thought that the French Revolution which began in 1789 was the last word in horror and upheaval. During it many heads rolled and many old privileges were ended. Yet the French revolutionists did not attempt to change everything. They left most of the old institutions unchanged, or only altered somewhat, and the former ruling classes survived to contest the Revolution itself, down to this very day. The ancien rigime never died in France and it retained enough power to contribute heavily to that perpetual split which finally paralyzed France and created the Vichy regime in 1940.

The French Revolution profoundly affected human life and institutions throughout the western world, but it was a mild affair by comparison with the Russian Revolution. In Russia all the old landmarks were swept away. The autocrat of all the Russias was killed and his throne destroyed. The Church lost all of its wealth and power. The landed nobility ceased to exist. Title to all land went to the state and eventually several hundred thousands of the larger farm owners were ruthlessly killed or deported to hard labor while the land was organized into great collective farms. The old bureaucracy was destroyed. The imperial army was no more. The courts no longer functioned. The intellectual radicals who had mainly led the opposition to Tsarism for generations were killed or scattered. All industrial establishments went into the hands of the state and the profit system was absolutely destroyed. Throughout the giant reaches of the Soviet Union no man can employ another, if he profits from his labor.

Many of these social changes might have been accepted by the world’s conservatives in time, but the nationalization of industry, business and the land—never. J. B. Priestley once said that the minds of England’s conservatives snapped shut at the height of the Russian Revolution and had never opened again. This world-wide closing of minds was greatly accelerated by the brutalities of the revolution and the civil war. When it was all over thousands of the high bom in Russia had been killed and much larger numbers scattered over Europe as living examples of what Red revolution could do. All who had possessed wealth, privileges and power in Russia went out and an entirely new set of rulers drawn from the lower masses took over and ruled solely in the name of the great masses.

This is why the Russian Revolution shook the world as none ever had and divided it as never before. The division is still deep and vital, yet the new system in Russia inevitably began at once to evolve and it is still in motion. Moreover, the older currents of Russian history began to flow again and they continue to run with growing momentum.

Medieval Russia. What are some of these currents and why did an all-out socialist revolution come to Russia, of all places?

Excellent glimpses of the forces which moulded pre-revolutionary Russia are to be found in a small book by a Russian long resident in England, Soloveytchik’s Russia in Perspective. He denies that Russian history is a mystery. For example, a great state flourished around Kiev in the eleventh century, as modern and as European as any of its contemporaries. For 600 years in the Middle Ages also two northern city states, Novgorod and Pskov, developed an essentially democratic kind of government, along with much European commerce. The 300-year sway of the Tartars, beginning in 1224, profoundly influenced Russia, but did not orientalize her completely since the Tartars were content to leave tax collecting to Russian princes.

Serfdom. The role of Peter the Great in westernizing Russia is well known. After he died, in 1725, the enslavement of the peasants and the glorification of their betters both reached ultimate degrees. It would have been difficult to find “a more eccentric, extravagant and profligate society” than during the reign of Catherine II ( 1762–96). One’s standing was measured by the size of his personal staff. The very rich had from 300 to 800 servants who performed scores of functions, under minute written instructions, the violation of which brought flogging or torture from the masters. There was “little or no protection against their quite pathological abuse of power.”¹

1 Soloveytchik, Russia in Perspective, New York, 1947, p. 103.

Competition in great entertainment exploits led to gruelling labor for thousands of hapless serfs, as lakes or mountains were ordered created as backdrops for some new show. Each gentleman had some bizarre specialty in grandeur and all considered their serfs as mere cattle, usually to be whipped and worked to premature graves. One prince gave a party at which an entire Turkish war, with its chief battles was reproduced. Only the gentry could own serfs and they had full power over them. One administered 500 strokes of the rod for absence from holy communion. All possessed the right to send their serfs as convicts to Siberia and to reclaim them at will.²

2 Bernard Pares, A History of Russia, New York, 1944, pp. 247, 251; London, Cape, 2nd rev. ed., 1947.

Nineteenth-century Progress. Russia’s nineteenth century, from the death of Catherine in 1796, has been aptly called the era of “autocracy tempered by assassination,” since three of the five Tsars of the period were killed by their restless subjects. Serfdom was finally ended in 1862 and there was a splendid flowering of literature and art. The Imperial law courts, too, had a good deal of integrity. The Soviets sent as many people to Siberia in a year or two during the liquidation of the Kulaks as the Tsars did in their last century. There was slow progress toward a freer life. Industrialization also made rapid progress after a delayed start. It is a great mistake to believe that all reform began with the Soviets.

Peasant Degradation. Nevertheless, reform was far too slow. Though legally freed the peasants continued to live in hunger, squalor and ignorance. A representative of the old regime has left this description of village life:

“The roads are deep in mud, often rendering them impassable. Near the houses there are no trees, no bushes to rest your eyes on. The horse-pond is close to the well, and the dung oozes into it. In the courtyards everything is filthy, the odor quite intolerable. The cattle in their inclosure stand knee-deep in excrement. The entrance room and the living-room are black from neglect, and the living-room is shared with pigs, sheep, geese; sometimes the cow is also placed here to get warm (an English traveler wondered at the low demands of a Russian cow, that it was able to endure such a room). Still, where there are cattle the lowest pitch of poverty had not been reached. In the same room, a baby crawls on the flopr with a potato in its hands. Cockroaches, bedbugs, fleas infest the rooms in legions, and the heads, beards, mustaches and even eyebrows of grown-up men are filled with the most hideous insects. ‘Well, ‘tis nothing’. … Everything is so utterly foul, there is not a spot where you could lie down. … The mark of evil taste and barbarism is stamped on everything, on the household, on the devastated natural surroundings.”³

3 M. Menshikov, Letters to My Neighbors, 1905, pp. 521–2. Quoted in M. J. Olgin, The Soul of the Russian Revolution, New York, Henry Holt, 1917, pp. 26–7.

It was the peasant’s lot to balance perpetually between hunger in good crop years and famine in bad ones. Inevitably, says the leading foreign historian observer of Russia under the last Tsars, all ideas of justice left the younger people. They became “eternally drunk, with disfigured features and averted eyes. Covered with rags, they looked like half-tamed beasts…. No trace of anything human remained.”⁴

4 E. J. Dillon, Russia Today and Yesterday, New York, Doubleday, 1930, p. 94; London, Dent, 1929.

Church and State. This state of affairs was perpetuated by a tight union of church and state. In the year 1700 the patriarchate had been abolished and thereafter the head of the church was a minister of the state. Each of these two institutions supported the other. The state taught the people to obey the church and the church taught the duty of obeying the “little white father.” The church could be depended on to condemn all liberals and liberal movements and to banish to monastic prisons such of its representatives as evinced progressive ideas. The government starved the peasants by merciless taxation. The church rigorously took its share and sanctified the peasants’ hunger in frequent fasts. Both church and state had an abiding antipathy to education. The government opposed the efforts of some local Zemstvos to establish schools. The Minister of Public Education sought to nullify such public schools as he could not forcibly destroy “by creating rival church schools which reduced education to the narrowest limits.”⁵

5 Charles E. Smith, “The Internal Situation in Russia,” The Annals, July 1905, Vol. 62, p. 98.

A part of the Soviet campaign against the Orthodox Church sprang from the Marxian doctrine that “religion is the opiate of the people,” but this slogan was not needed to doom the church as it existed in Tsarist Russia. A clergy which had prostituted itself to the perpetuation of autocracy, and whose priests were universally charged with rapacity, drunkenness and the grossest immorality, could not expect to escape the severest action from any successful revolution.

Urban Squalor. The leadership of the industrial proletariat in any revolution was equally certain. The young industrialism of Russia was in its rawest exploitative stage, comparable to the period in British industrialization when women and children were worked long hours in the coal mines, many of them remaining underground for months and years.

In Moscow fifty years ago living conditions were not much better for the new factory workers. In 1899 the Moscow dty administration gathered data about 15,922 flats in which factory workers lived. A total of 174,622 persons lived in these flats, or eleven per flat, yet three-fourths of these “flats” consisted of one room only. Tenants rented stalls, comers, any fraction of space in rooms which the city investigators described as follows: “The air is hot and stale,” says one account, “the rooms incredibly crowded. The flat is damp and exceedingly low; a tall man can hardly stand upright. The odor is foul.” … “The sight of the flat is horrifying,” states another investigator; “The plaster has crumbled down, the walls are full of holes and stuffed with rags. Everything is filthy. The stove is a mere ruin. There are legions of cockroaches and bed-bugs. It is cold. The lavatory is in a dangerous position and children are not permitted to go there. All the flats of the house are in a similar condition.”… “The atmosphere is suffocating,” remarks a third investigator: “The exhalations of the people, the evaporations of wet clothes and dirty linen fill the air. The walls are wet; cold draughts blow from everywhere. When it is raining, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliographical Foreword
• Part I: Enemies and Allies, 1917–1945
• Part II: The Cold War in Europe, 1945–1950