23 The Cold War
The Cold War lasted for the whole of the last forty-six years of Soviet history. It was an epic contest, ranging over the whole world, from Berlin and Peking to the most distant parts of Africa and Latin America. For much of the time the Soviet Union seemed to have a good chance of “winning” in some form, and indeed the more hysterical of its opponents were convinced that it was immensely powerful. In reality, the Soviet Union came from behind in the struggle and was never close to defeating its new enemy, the United States. For most of the time, it struggled just to keep up and survive with its newfound power more or less intact.
At the end of the Second World War the two new powers seemed relatively evenly matched, for both were industrial powers and similar in population, the United States at 151 million and the Soviet Union at 182 million. The population figures were an illusion, however, for the Soviet figure was the result of concealment of war losses and may have been as low as 167 million. Soviet industry, however, had been only third in 1940 behind the United States and Germany and much of it was now in ruins. The devastation of the country was unparalleled, even in Germany, and the United States had suffered no war damage at all, outside of Pearl Harbor and the Aleutian Islands. The war had restored American prosperity after the Depression and was a huge boost to American technology and industry, as the rapid success of the atomic project demonstrated. At the time Stalin was convinced that after the war the “contradictions” between the United States and other Western powers would grow, especially as he anticipated a rapid recovery and rearmament of Germany and Japan. Eventually there could be another war among the Western powers. Some in the Soviet hierarchy questioned this view, pointing out that England, for all its differences with the United States, was fundamentally dependent on American money and power, and so would be Germany and Japan. Stalin simply suppressed such dissent.
In spite of his optimistic assessment of the world, Stalin took no chances. During the war he had paid little attention to the construction of an atomic bomb at first, in spite of repeated warnings from Soviet scientists, who were concerned both about Germany and the United States. Soviet intelligence had actually acquired some very valuable information early in the war from Britain, but it sat in Beria’s files unused. As always, he was afraid it might be just clever disinformation. Soviet physicists wrote to Stalin lobbying for action, for they realized that the Americans were working on a bomb (all publications by the relevant physicists in the United States had disappeared from science journals) and were fearful that the Germans might make a bomb first. Finally in 1943 Stalin decided to establish a research unit to build a reactor and put Igor Kurchatov in charge, one of the talented physicists to come out of Ioffe’s Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute. Starting in a small building in the south of Moscow, Kurchatov and his group were able to make the reactor, but only with the news of Hiroshima did Stalin put the bomb project into full gear, establishing a laboratory south of Moscow called Arzamas-16 in the buildings of the famous nineteenth-century Sarov monastery. Beria was in charge of the bomb project, as well as the whole nuclear industry that was extracting and processing uranium in the USSR, eastern Germany, and Czechoslovakia. There remained the problem of the exact design of the bomb, and this time intelligence from Klaus Fuchs at Los Alamos and the mere fact of American success helped Soviet scientists to gain at least a year in time. In 1949 they exploded their first atomic bomb in secret. The US government learned of it only from analyzing atmospheric fallout.
The construction of the bomb was an immense technological feat for a relatively backward country, one that came at equally immense cost in capital investments. The mere existence of the bomb did not solve all Soviet military problems. No Soviet bomber then existing could fly from the Soviet Union to strike the United States, and bombers were the only delivery vehicles then available. To make things worse, the Soviets did not have aircraft engines big enough to power a large bomber. The United States maintained a network of bases in Western Europe and Turkey from which aircraft could strike virtually any important target in the USSR, but the only reply or preventive action would have to target those bases, not the United States itself. The Soviet air force had been primarily a ground support weapon, having abandoned strategic bombing before the war to build smaller bombers to support the infantry. Thus Stalin had to order the construction of long-range bombers and a massive air defense network to defend the main Soviet target cities, all at colossal expense. By the time of his death the foundations of these forces were in place.
Military power was all very well, but Stalin and his circle realized that their greatest advantage was in the political sphere, in the prestige of the Soviet victory over Hitler and of the Communist movement in the world generally. Spreading Communist rule and the socialist system, they assumed, would also spread Soviet power. The first arena in which they saw possibilities was quite naturally in Eastern Europe, which had been liberated from the Nazis and was now under Soviet occupation.
The Soviets hosted many exiled Communists in Moscow during the war, and came into contact with the underground as they advanced into Eastern Europe. The strategy that Stalin developed and required the local Communists to follow was the establishment of a regime of “people’s democracy.” The Communist party was to make a coalition in each country with other leftist and agrarian groups rather than seize power in its own name. New constitutions were to be worked out with new elected governments (a change from pre-war dictatorships) and in the one previously democratic country, Czechoslovakia, the old constitution was restored. Stalin, however, was by no means relinquishing the opportunity for control provided by the victory in the war. In all of the liberated countries the Communists were to be a major partner in the government, and if they could not do that honestly, then by manipulation of the elections. The local Communists everywhere took charge of the ministries of the interior that controlled the various police forces, and those ministries were effectively controlled by the Soviet security forces. Further, the local Communists consulted the Soviet authorities, either the Soviet ambassador or Moscow directly on virtually every issue of importance.
This situation was not stable in the long run. It had the same problems that the Popular Front did in the Spanish Civil War, the incompatibility of the Communist parties with their coalition “partners” in methods and aims. The disastrous economic situation of most East European countries added more instability, and the war had left a residue of violence and hatred that further complicated matters. Even the Soviet ambassadors were shocked at the amount of anti-Semitism in post-war Czechoslovakia and other countries, and were nervous at its exploitation by local Communists. As they came to realize, nationalism was just under the surface even in the Communist parties, for all East European countries had a modern history where nationalist movements predominated, not liberalism or socialism, and the war had only exacerbated the situation. The non-Communist coalition parties were determined not to surrender complete control to the Communists, something they found increasingly difficult. Finally, the Soviets were not popular everywhere, even if they had defeated Hitler. If the Yugoslavs and the populations of Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria greeted the Red Army as liberators, Hungary and Rumania were a different matter. The nationalist dictatorships had been popular until Hitler began to lose the war, and both were stridently anti-Soviet and anti-Russian. In Poland the Communists were a minority in a mass resistance movement that was also anti-Communist and anti-Russian, and the Warsaw uprising remained a bone of contention. Germany was especially difficult, as support for Hitler had been nearly universal and the victorious Red Army had behaved as conquerors toward Germans civilians, not as liberators, looting houses and raping women.