Case Study: Was Stalin Responsible for the Cold War?
The historiography of the cold war seemed to begin simultaneously with the onset of tensions between the free and communist worlds. In addressing the question of responsibility, the debate among historians seemed to center around two distinct groups of scholars. The first group, commonly referred to as the orthodox or traditional school, held the Soviet Union responsible for the cold war. Because some of the school's proponents were themselves participants in the events of the era, it was easy for them to see Soviet culpability in the bro-ken promises and duplicitous actions highlighting the early cold war years. And as the Soviet Empire cast its menacing shadow over Eastern Europe, it became increasingly apparent that Joseph Stalin in particular could not be trusted. Also, the volatile nature of the postwar world—especially the vulnerability of the newly emerging nations of the postimperialist era—created a tempting morsel for the "Russian Bear."
A new policy, "containment," was created to control the voracious Soviet appetite. it would last for almost half a century and would lead to many crises, wars, and conflicts, which marked the cold war. A new school of thought was created to counteract the influence of the traditionalists. Members of this school of thought became known as the revisionists, and they began to view the cold war from an entirely different perspective. From this would come a new set of assumptions, including:
(1) the postwar weakness of the Soviet Union, which prevented the Soviets from being the threat to world peace that many felt they were;
(2) the obsession of free-world leaders in viewing any world problem as being Soviet-created;
(3) the view that, after a careful examination of World War II diplomacy, many of the actions of the Western Allies, including the use of the atomic bomb, induced Soviet leaders to feel threatened and to react accordingly. Thus, much of the , responsibility for the cold war, according to the revisionists, must be laid at the feet of the West and its leaders.
Subsequently, much of cold war historiography was dominated by this traditionalist/revisionist dichotomy. And as the historical profession became more influenced by a conflict-oriented mode rather than a consensus-centered one, the revisionists began to gain momentum in the crisis-laden 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam War helped to trigger this response, as many began to see the mistakes of the cold war being played out again and again. There were no longer any "sacred cows" of the traditionalist variety.
A new policy, "containment," was created to control the voracious Soviet appetite. it would last for almost half a century and would lead to many crises, wars, and conflicts, which marked the cold war. A new school of thought was created to counteract the influence of the traditionalists. Members of this school of thought became known as the revisionists, and they began to view the cold war from an entirely different perspective. From this would come a new set of assumptions, including:
(1) the postwar weakness of the Soviet Union, which prevented the Soviets from being the threat to world peace that many felt they were;
(2) the obsession of free-world leaders in viewing any world problem as being Soviet-created;
(3) the view that, after a careful examination of World War II diplomacy, many of the actions of the Western Allies, including the use of the atomic bomb, induced Soviet leaders to feel threatened and to react accordingly. Thus, much of the , responsibility for the cold war, according to the revisionists, must be laid at the feet of the West and its leaders.
Subsequently, much of cold war historiography was dominated by this traditionalist/revisionist dichotomy. And as the historical profession became more influenced by a conflict-oriented mode rather than a consensus-centered one, the revisionists began to gain momentum in the crisis-laden 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam War helped to trigger this response, as many began to see the mistakes of the cold war being played out again and again. There were no longer any "sacred cows" of the traditionalist variety.
Guiding Question:
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Topics for Discussion:
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Reading:
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For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 28 Cold War Conflict and Consensus and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
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Cold War Timeline:
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Sources:
Source 1: Joseph Stalin - Formation of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) 1947
Despite his instrumental role in defeating Fascism, the head of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, deeply mistrusted his Western allies. Convinced that their ultimate goal was to destroy communism, Stalin moved rapidly to establish a buffer zone of satellite states in eastern Europe. |
Hence the imperialist camp and its leading force, the United States, are displaying particularly aggressive activity. This activity is being developed simultaneously along all lines — the lines of strategic military measures, economic expansion and ideological struggle. The Truman-Marshall Plan is only a constituent part, the European sub-section, of the general plan for the policy of global expansion pursued by the United States in all parts of the World. The plan for the economic and political enslavement of Europe by American imperialism is being supplemented by plans for the economic and political enslavement of China, Indonesia, the South American countries. Yesterday's aggressors the capitalist magnates of Germany and Japan — are being groomed by the United States of America for a new role, that of instruments of the imperialist policy of the United States in Europe and Asia.
The arsenal of tactical weapons used by the imperialist camp is highly diversified. It combines direct threats of violence, blackmail and extortion, every means of political and economic pressure, bribery, and utilization of internal contradictions and strife in order to strengthen its own positions, and all this is concealed behind a liberal-pacifist mask designed to deceive and trap the politically inexperienced. . . . |
Source 3: Harry Truman, National Security Council, Paper Number 68 (1950)
Although he had helped to end World War II, U.S. President Harry S. Truman had little time to celebrate. Daunting challenges still lay ahead as the fagile wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union collapsed. The classified report, excerpted here, elucidates not only the basis of U.S. cold war tactics but also the fears and perceptions underlying them. |
Two complex sets of factors have now basically altered this historical distribution of power. First, the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires have interacted with the development of the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that power has increasingly gravitated to these two centers. Second, the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency....
On the one hand, the people of the world yearn for relief from the anxiety arising from the risk of atomic war. On the other hand, any substantial further extension of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled. It is in this context that this Republic and its citizens in the ascendancy of their strength stand in their deepest peril. The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our deliberations. With conscience and resolution this Government and the people it represents must now take new and fateful decisions. .. . Our overall policy at the present time may be described as one designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish. It therefore rejects the concept of isolation and affirms the necessity of our positive participation in the world community. This broad intention embraces two subsidiary policies. One is a policy which we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat. It is a policy of attempting to develop a healthy international community. The other is the policy of "containing" the Soviet system.... |
Source 4: The Atomic Age - Hearing in 1939 that the Nazis had begun efforts to develop the world's first nuclear weapons, the United States strove successfully to beat them to the punch. By 1945 the United States had three bombs; one was tested at Alamagordo, New Mexico in July 1945, and the other two were dropped on Japanese cities in early August 1945.
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Source 5: Novelist William Faulkner speaks of the bomb during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1945)
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Our tragedy is a general an universal fear... There are no longer any problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I blow up?...
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; the when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound; that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. |
Source 6: Winston Churchill, notes the signs of the Cold War (1946)
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From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities... lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject in one form or another... to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow. The Communist parties... have been raised to preeminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control... This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.
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Source 8: Soviet Official Andrei Zhdanov interprets United States "aid" as imperialism (1947)
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With a view to consolidating America's monopoly posiition in the markets gained as a result of the disappearance of her two biggest competiors, Germany and Japan [due to their defeat in the war], and the weakening of her capitalist partners, Great Britain and France [a result of the toll of winning the war], the new course of the United States' policy envisages a broad program of military, economic and political measures, designed to establish United States political and economic domination in all countries marked out for American expansion, to reduce these countries to the status of satellites of the United States and to set up regmines within them which would eliminate all obstacles on the part of labor and democratic movement to the exploitation of these countries by American capital. The United States is now endeavoring to extend this new line of policy not only to its enemies in the war and to neutral countries, but in an increasing degrees to its wartime allies also
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Source 9: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know; Rethinking Cold War History, Clarendon Press, 1997
Historian John Lewis Gaddis states that after more than a half a century of cold war scholarship, Joseph Stalin still deserves most of the responsibility for the onset of the cold war. |
Stalin's policy, then, was one of imperial expansion and consolidation differing from that of earlier empires only in the determination with which he pursued it, in the instruments of coercion with which he maintained it, and in the ostensibly anti-imperial justifications he put forward in support of it. it is a testimony to his skill, if not to his morality, that he was able to achieve so many of his imperial ambitions at a time when the tides of history were running against the idea of imperial domination—as colonial offices in London, Paris, Lisbon, and The Hague were finding out—and when his own country recovering from one of the most brutal invasions in recorded history. The fact that Stalin was able to expand his empire when others were contracting and( while the Soviet Union was as weak as it was requires explanation. Why did, opposition to this process, within and outside Europe, take so long to develop?) One reason was that the colossal sacrifices the Soviet Union had made during the war against the Axis had, in effect, "purified" its reputation: the USSR and its leader had "earned" the right to throw their weight around, or so it seemed. Western governments found it difficult to switch quickly from viewing' the Soviet Union as a glorious wartime ally to portraying it as a new and dangerous adversary. President Harry S. Truman and his future Secretary of State Dean Acheson—neither of them sympathetic in the slightest to communism non-the-less tended to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt well into the early postwar era.... Resistance to Stalin's imperialism also developed slowly because Marxism-Leninism at the time had such widespread appeal. it is difficult now to recapture the admiration revolutionaries outside the Soviet Union felt for that country before they came to know it well....
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Source 10: Martin J. Sherwin, "The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War," Routledge, 1994
Historian Martin J. Sherwin counters that the origins of the cold war can be found in the World War II diplomacy involving the use of the atomic bomb. |
During the Second World War the atomic bomb was seen and valued as a potential rather than an actual instrument of policy. Responsible officials believed that its impact on diplomacy had to await its development and, perhaps, even a demonstration of its power. As Henry L Stimson, the Secretary of War, observed in his memoirs: "The bomb as a merely probable weapon had seemed a weak reed on which to rely, but the bomb as a colossal reality was very different." That policymakers considered this difference before Hiroshima has been well documented, but whether they based wartime diplomatic policies upon an anticipated successful demonstration of the bomb's power remains a source of controversy.
Two questions delineate the issues in this debate. First, did the development of the atomic bomb affect the way American policymakers conducted diplomacy with the Soviet Union? Second, did diplomatic considerations related to the Soviet Union influence the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan? These important questions relating the atomic bomb to American diplomacy, and ultimately to the origins of the Cold War, have been addressed almost exclusively to the formulation of policy during the early months of the Truman administration. As a result, two anterior questions of equal importance, questions with implications for those already posed, have been overlooked. Did diplomatic considerations related to Soviet postwar behavior influence the formulation of [Franklin D.] Roosevelt's atomic energy policies? What effect did the atomic legacy Truman inherited have on the diplomatic and atomic energy policies of his administration? Although Roosevelt left no definitive statement assigning a postwar role to the atomic bomb, his expectations for Its potential diplomatic value can be recalled from the existing record. An analysis of the policies he chose from among the alternatives he faced suggests that the potential diplomatic value of the bomb began to shape his atomic energy policies as early as 1943. |
Source 11: John Green, Crash Course World History: USA vs. USSR Fight! The Cold War
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