Cold War

An International History

Carole K. Fink

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000480818
• Edizione: 3
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Weltgeschichte

Now in its third edition, Cold War provides an accessible and comprehensive account of the decades-long conflict between two nuclear-armed Superpowers during the twentieth century.

This book offers a broader timeline than any other Cold War text, charting the lead-up to the conflict from the Russian Revolution to World War II, providing an authoritative narrative and analysis of the period between 1945 and 1991, and scrutinizing the 30-year aftermath, including the prospect of a "new Cold War." In this new edition, Carole K. Fink provides new insights and perspectives on key events, with an emphasis on people, power, and ideas. The third edition covers developments in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America as well as in Europe. It also includes

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• Eleven new or revised maps that illustrate the global reach of the long conflict
• An extended chronology that includes recent international events
• A discussion of the post-Cold War roles of the US, Russia, and China in world politics
• An updated bibliography reflecting new scholarship in Cold War and post-Cold War history

Cold War is the consummate book on this complex twentieth-century rivalry and will be of interest to students of contemporary US and international history and history enthusiasts alike.

1 Prelude Soviet Russia and the West, 1917–1941

DOI: 10.4324/9780429356681-2

Capital is an international force. To vanquish it, an international workers’ alliance, an international workers’ brotherhood, is needed.

Lenin, Letter to the Workers and Peasants of the Ukraine (1919)

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Winston Churchill, Radio Broadcast, October 1, 1939

The starting point for our study of the Cold War is the year 1917, when the Bolshevik leadership established a communist regime in Russia and defied the international order by preaching world revolution and challenging conventional diplomatic practices. The Western powers (Britain, France, and the United States) responded with military intervention and ostracism. During the next 24 years the estrangement between Russia and the West was overshadowed by the challenges of Italy, Japan, and Germany, but the capitalist world continued to regard the Soviet Union with fear, mistrust, and repugnance – sentiments that Moscow duly reciprocated.

War and Revolution

The Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in November 1917 not only shaped the outcome of World War I but also changed the history of the twentieth century. For more than three years tsarist Russia had been an indispensable member of the Triple Entente with France and Great Britain. It had pinned down vast numbers of German and Austro-Hungarian troops in the East by launching several crucial, if costly, offensives, and also kept pressure on the Ottoman Empire. It had nonetheless been a difficult partner with the West: repressive at home, suspicious of its allies and their clients’ territorial designs in southeastern Europe and the Middle East, and insistent on annexations in Poland and Constantinople.

The March 1917¹ Revolution created Russia’s first constitutional government, kindling hopes of freedom among its subject peoples, salving its allies’ consciences, and facilitating the US entry into the war on the side of the Entente. But one month later, the charismatic Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin returned from his ten-year exile in a sealed train provided by the German government and was determined to seize power. When Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky chose to continue Russia’s disastrous combat against the Central Powers, the Bolsheviks – appealing to the population’s widespread war weariness and land hunger – led an insurrection of workers, soldiers, and sailors and toppled the provisional government on November 7.²

¹ According to the Julian calendar, which remained in use in Russia until 1918, the March 1917 Revolution occurred in February and the November 1917 Revolution in October. ² Although these have diminished since the end of the Cold War, the once-heated debates over the origins and nature of the Bolshevik Revolution posed two significant historical questions: (1) Did November 7 represent a popular uprising or a small conspiratorial coup? and (2) Did Lenin’s regime abandon its peaceful and progressive program under the pressure of domestic opposition and foreign intervention, or did its inherently autocratic tendencies lead to a continuation of tsarist domestic and foreign policies?

Like the French revolutionaries of 1789, the Bolsheviks were imbued with messianic fervor. In his 1916 expansion of classic Marxism, Lenin had characterized Russia as “the weakest link in the imperialist chain,” but also as the potential spearhead of a global uprising against the imperialist powers that had ravaged the earth with their greed and militarism. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks’ first acts were to call for an immediate end to the fighting (the Decree on Peace), to publish all the secret wartime treaties over the disposition of enemy territories, to denounce annexations and indemnities, and to proclaim the right of all nationalities to secede from foreign rulers.

Western leaders condemned the revolution as a German-Bolshevik conspiracy and feared the spread of strikes, mutinies, and rebellions across their borders. Russia’s erstwhile partners were also irate over Lenin’s repudiation of tsarist war debts, which wiped out some 25 percent of France’s foreign investments, as well as over the Bolsheviks’ seizure of private property. For European socialists, many of whom had sacrificed the principle of class solidarity for the defense of their homelands, the Bolsheviks’ ascendancy, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the call for armed revolution had violated their patriotic and democratic creed. Consequently, after November 1917 the hostility between democratic and revolutionary Marxists became almost as strong as the enmity between capitalists and communists.

Russia’s former allies moved swiftly to counter Bolshevik propaganda. In January 1918 British premier David Lloyd George and US president Woodrow Wilson each enunciated their nations’ war aims in ringing and idealistic terms. In particular, Wilson’s Fourteen Points provided a democratic and capitalist alternative to Lenin’s dramatic appeal to the world by calling for open diplomacy, global disarmament, freedom of the seas, border adjustments based on national claims, and an international organization to secure the peace.

The Central Powers’ reaction was harsher. Driving deeper into a devastated Russia and impervious to Leon Trotsky’s audacious “no war – no peace” stratagem, in March 1918 the German military extracted a punitive peace at Brest-Litovsk. This treaty eliminated Russian power from Europe, creating a string of puppet states in the western part of the former tsarist empire and establishing German control over vast amounts of its agricultural and mineral resources. A jubilant German Reichstag (parliament), ignoring its 1917 Peace Resolution and the Bolsheviks’ protests over a dictated treaty, ratified Brest-Litovsk by an overwhelming majority, with the opposition Social Democrats merely abstaining.

The Bolsheviks’ diplomatic debut at Brest-Litovsk established important precedents for future relations between Soviet Russia and the West. Among them was the introduction of Lenin’s concept of a “breathing space,” a temporary coexistence with a more powerful enemy. Overcoming the hard-liners’ protests, Lenin insisted on the necessity of this retreat in order to save the Bolshevik Revolution. With stunning pragmatism, he also appreciated the value of dividing the capitalist world by establishing contact with the still-powerful Germans.

The West regarded Brest-Litovsk as evidence of Moscow’s treachery, which enabled Germany to break the Allied blockade and opened the way for its new offensive on the Western front. On the pretext of preventing a German seizure of their military supplies stacked up in Russian ports, as well as rescuing stranded Czech and Slovak prisoners of war and reopening an eastern front, the Allies in March 1918 sent troops to the East. After landing in Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Southern Russia, the Caucasus, and Siberia, their forces collaborated with anti-Bolshevik factions and were briefly embroiled in Russia’s civil war, stirring bitterness among the Soviet population and a long legacy of resentment toward the West (see Map 2).

Map 2 Allied intervention, initially to prevent German capture of armaments, expanded into support of anti-Bolshevik forces and was ultimately unsuccessful.

In another major surprise, Germany’s western offensive failed in July 1918. When the Allies’ counterattack created panic within the imperial command, the German leadership appealed to Wilson for an armistice based on the Fourteen Points. Faced with Germany’s unexpected collapse and its revolution in November 1918, the victors made the momentous decision to convene a major peace conference – the first in a century – to rebuild the postwar world. And for the first time in history, a US president traveled to Europe to attend the conference. Thousands of supplicants from all over the globe along with a huge press corps thronged to Paris expecting the peace of justice that Wilson had promised.

A Contested Peace

More than a hundred years later, the Treaty of Versailles remains one of history’s most castigated diplomatic documents – beginning with the almost immediate (and still pervasive) charges of a dictated “Carthaginian peace” that brought on the World Depression and the triumph of Nazism in Germany, to the more recent accusations of a Western imperialist compact to dominate the colonial world. Despite the meticulous archival research after World War II that has produced more balanced analyses, these negative judgments have retained their power not only in textbooks and historical literature but also over politicians and the public mind.

Peacemaking between January and June 1919 was dominated by the leaders of the three democracies, Britain, France, and the United States – which were also the world’s largest empires. Their deliberations took place in the shadows of their clients’ expansive territorial claims, German recalcitrance, and communist uprisings in Berlin, Munich, and Budapest. Moreover, the Big Three had fundamental differences over the postwar order, with France demanding maximum security against Germany and Soviet Russia, Great Britain seeking to revive the old balance of power, and the United States promoting democracy and open markets, the end of colonialism, and a League of Nations to preserve the peace. As they plunged into a series of complex economic and territorial issues, the victors excluded their enemies, Germany and Russia, from their often-fraught deliberations.

Predictably, there were awkward political compromises. Poland, a state resurrected after a century of partitions by its neighbors, was a prime test case. Out of Franco-British wrangling over its western border came the improvisations of the “Corridor” (giving Poland access to the sea, but also separating the main part of Germany from East Prussia), the Free City of Danzig (a German city placed under international control to serve as Poland’s port), and the plebiscite in Upper Silesia that would eventually divide the coal-rich province between Germany and Poland. Over Polish protests, the Allies forced the Warsaw government to sign the world’s first minority treaty to protect the rights of non-Poles, numbering some 33 percent of the population, and proceeded to impose similar arrangements on several other unwilling Eastern European governments.

Map 3 The territorial changes between 1919 and 1923 fed revisionist sentiment among the defeated states and contributed to the volatile political conditions in Central and Eastern Europe.

The League of Nations was created at the peace conference; but as a global body it had several major impediments. Against the will of their populations, the former Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire (Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine, and Lebanon and Syria) designated as League mandates, were divided between Britain and France according to their secret wartime agreements; and Germany’s colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific were handed over to Britain, France, South Africa, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. There were other anomalies: US, British, and Australian opposition blocked Japan’s efforts to insert a clause guaranteeing racial equality in the League Covenant. The League’s membership exclu...