The rouble is now an internationally traded hard currency, accepted everywhere on equal terms with dollars or euros. It is not only those in power but also the man and woman in the street who show a modest prosperity, while young, long-legged blonde beauties display the marvels they have bought at Chanel or Dior boutiques round the corner from the Kremlin. The new Russia is immodest, impatient, and eager to live life to its fullest. The past is an ever-present reminder that things can be much worse than they are now.
Meanwhile, at the Northern River Port, a very different Russia can still be seen. The ceiling of the main building is still adorned with the insignia of former Soviet republics. Vast quantities of sickles, hammers, rising suns and bushels of corn are displayed. When he opened the canal, Stalin must have liked what he saw: totalitarian classicism, and God help those who dared to differ. Everything is written in Cyrillic letters, except for three of the republics. They are the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia who escaped Russia’s rule after 1917 and were added and annexed again according to the secret provisions of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 23 September 1939. The ignominious complicity of Europe’s great tyrants in carving up Eastern Europe along the Curzon line – still today Poland’s eastern border – allowed Hitler to attack Poland from the west and Stalin to come in from the east – thus opening the gates of hell for the whole of Europe. Here history has stopped, like the clock halfway up the tower overlooking the entire edifice. No one cares to get it moving again, nor even start a modest clean-up operation. If ever in a distant future archaeologists excavate the remains of the Soviet Empire, what they find will be sad or threatening, without much meaning and mostly worthless, a Kafkaesque universe.
The reasons for final failure
The decline and fall of empires, long before Gibbon published his magisterial three volumes on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, has always captivated the minds of rulers and generals, philosophers and historians. The decline and fall of the Soviet Empire is no exception. But the reasons for final failure are much clearer than in the case of, for example, Rome. The implosion of the Soviet state and, indeed, the Soviet bid for world power, throughout the 1980s, were part of the imperial overstretch of Russia, while today Russia’s resurgence is owed not only to the shedding of the imperial burden and the retreat from global ambition but above all to the control of oil and gas for decades to come. The old industrial economies of the West need more energy than ever before, while India and China join the race for power and prosperity. This is bound to create growing and almost unlimited demand, driving prices to spiralling heights and indeed opening a worldwide scramble for resources as never before.
At the time of the Cold War it was not fashionable, nor politically wise, throughout the West to point at the inherent weakness of what the Pentagon in its annual review of Soviet power habitually called the ‘Soviet threat’. But it should be noted that as early as 1947 George Kennan, who coined the phrase, and the concept, of ‘containment’,[3] diagnosed the Soviet system as suffering from ‘deficiencies which will eventually weaken its total potential’. This would, Kennan continued, ‘warrant the United States entering with reasonable confidence upon a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world.’ If the United States were to live up to its own promise, ‘the aims of Russian Communism must appear sterile and quixotic, the hopes and enthusiasm of Moscow’s supporters must wane, and added strain must be imposed on the Kremlin’s foreign policies’. Kennan’s policy advice was: ‘The United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the breakup or the mellowing of Soviet power.’
Rarely in the history of diplomacy has an analysis been more poignant, a prognosis more coherent, a policy more appropriate than the one suggested by the then head of the State Department’s planning staff.
There were limits, though. Kennan, who never wanted the United States to be locked into a global confrontation with the Soviets and even doubted the ability of the US system of government to run a global defence alliance, was, tragically, of two minds. He saw that at the end of the Second World War both the Soviets and the US wanted the Germany of their choice, but that this implied two mutually exclusive maps of Europe and, indeed, the world. While he succeeded in designing ‘containment’ as a long-term strategic confrontation over central Europe in general, and Germany in particular, he failed to keep the US military out of the confrontation. His plan B for German neutrality, unfortunately proved to be incompatible with his plan A for containment of Soviet expanionism. The bid of two opposing world powers for ‘the whole of Germany’, as defined already at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, had become the unintended consequence of the Second World War. Both sides had an idea of Europe and of the world: but those ideas were mutually exclusive. As Berlin was the key to Germany, and Germany the key to the domination of the European continent, neither side could cede precedence. The result was what Walter Lippman, in his critical response to Kennan, called the ‘Cold War’.
Containment
While the Soviet Empire under Stalin reached its apogee, those ‘present at the creation’ – to quote the memoirs of Dean Acheson, Secretary of State at the time the North Atlantic Pact was signed on 4 April 1949 – believed not only in containment but also in the eventual weakening and, as a consequence, ‘mellowing’, as Kennan had put it, of Soviet power. Containment itself was a two-pronged strategy, economic-financial and military-political. The economic element began even before the end of the war with the Bretton Woods system for the postwar reconstruction of an American-sponsored world economy, based on a strong dollar and free trade. What was needed was an economic blood transfusion to Europe and, above all, West Germany. This strategy was administered by the Marshall Plan, more precisely called the European Recovery Program (ERP).
But sound economics was not enough to stop the Red Army. The military framework was constructed around the Brussels Pact – the 1948 West European Defence Union directed against the Soviet present and the German past – when the US invited Canada and the Brussels Pact allies to join the North Atlantic Pact in early 1949. The Truman administration was convinced that for the time being Soviet appetites had been satisfied. This was due, among other factors, to the nuclear bomb which the Americans had and the Soviets had not but were desperately trying to manufacture through their own research, espionage and the kidnapping of German scientists the US was enabled to translate its initial nuclear monopoly into what came to be called ‘extended deterrence’, extended from the American heartland to the faraway shores of Europe. Washington, true to its fundamental philosophy of open sea lanes and free trade relations, saw it as a vital US interest to strengthen liberal economies on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The ‘wise men’ of Washington – as they were referred to in an excellent book about Kennan, John McCloy, Chip Bohlen and General Lucius D. Clay – set out to build a dam against more communist takeovers and eventual Soviet control of the whole of Europe. Germany, by virtue of its geopolitical position between the Eurasian landmass and the sea-bathed islands and peninsulas of Western Europe, was the centre of gravity, nowhere more so than with the precarious allied position in the divided city of Berlin. Without the territory between the Rhine and the Elbe, Truman wrote in his memoirs, the defence of Western Europe would have been ‘nothing but a rearguard action on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean’.