Hess arrived by plane in Scotland on 10 May. When news of his arrival reached Moscow via Kim Philby, then spying for the Russians within the heart of Whitehall, Stalin demanded to know what peace terms had accompanied him. At the Foreign Office Deputy Secretary Orme Sargent expressed the 'wish we could get out of the Hess incident some material which Sir Stafford Cripps could use on the Soviet Government'.[172] Philby, after some anxious investigation, concluded that 'now the time for peace negotiations has not yet arrived, but in the process of the future development of the war Hess will possibly become the centre of intrigues for the conclusion of a compromise peace and will be useful for the peace party in England and for Hitler'.[173] Sargent did not immediately recommend adoption of the Cripps proposal, but before the end of May he did recommend a variation of it, to be delivered as a 'whisper'. The line was 'to give some assurance to the Soviet Government that they need not buy off Germany with a new and unfavourable agreement because there is clear evidence that Germany does not intend to embark on a war with the Soviet Union in present circumstances'.59 Cripps's proposal and Sargent's comments were precisely the confirmation that Stalin needed to demonstrate that all talk of a German invasion had been merely a British plot and that, having found out that it no longer served its purpose, London had reversed its line. Thus it was that on 22 June the Soviet government was caught unawares when Hitler attacked. The full consequences of Stalin's misjudgement were to be felt for a long time to come. The tragedy went further than the massive loss of life entailed. The very suspicions that had given rise to the mistake were to multiply as the war proceeded and would lead to the very situation Neville Chamberlain once feared and Churchill hoped would never come to pass: the emergence of Soviet Russia as a mighty power determined to hold the balance of Europe in its own hands. This was not the first time and certainly not the last when Western ignorance of the Soviet Union inadvertently combined with deep-seated Russian suspicions to wreak havoc with a relationship that had never been good.
59 Sargent's comment of30 May 1941 on Cripps (Moscow) to London, 27 May 1941: Public Record Office, FO 371/29481. The fact that these documents were not declassified under the thirty-year rule but fifty years later indicates that the usual excuse of 'security' is utter nonsense. These materials were retained evidently to save the Foreign Office embarrassment at such monumental incompetence.
Moscow's foreign policy, 1945-2000: identities, institutions and interests
TED HOPF
A great power has no permanent friends, just permanent interests', an oft- heard aphorism about international politics, assumes these interests are obvious. In Britain's case it was to prevent the domination of continental Europe. For Great Powers in general, it has been to maintain a balance against emerging hegemonic threats, such as Napoleonic France, Hitler's Germany or the post-war Soviet Union.
Advising states to balance against power, the aphorism also warns against treating other states as natural allies, as an enemy today might be a friend tomorrow, as Britain found with the Soviet Union in June 1941. But aphorisms are rarely more than half-truths. States' interests are no more permanent than their allies or enemies. Threats and interests are not obvious or objective. There is nothing about French and British nuclear weapons that make them objectively less threatening to the United States than Chinese warheads.
How, then, does a state become a threat? Realism tells us that power threatens. No Great Power feels threatened by Togo. But power is only necessary, not sufficient, to threaten. Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and France did not balance against Hitler's Germany before the Second World War. Britain and France did not balance against the United States after the Second World War. Britain, France, China and Russia have not balanced against the United States since the end of the Cold War.
The meaning of power is not given; it is interpreted. Threats are the social constructions of states. States construct threats both by interacting with other states and their own societies.[174] For example, France could have learned that Soviet power was more dangerous than Nazi Germany's through its interactions with Moscow. But France may have felt more threatened by the Soviet Union than Germany because French understanding of itself as a bourgeois liberal capitalist state made the Communist Soviet Union more dangerous than Fascist Germany.
1 explore Moscow's relations with Eastern Europe, China, Western Europe, the decolonising world and the United States (US) since 1945 from the perspective of Soviet and Russian identity relations with these states. Six different identities have predominated in Moscow since the Second World War:
• 1945-7, Soviet Union as part of a Great Power condominium
• 1947-53, Soviet Union within capitalist encirclement
• 1953-6, Soviet Union as natural ally
• 1956-85, Soviet Union as the other superpower
• 1985-91, Soviet Union as normal Great Power in international society
• 1992-2000 Russia as European Great Power
Each of these identities has its roots in the relationship between the state and society.
Post-war ambiguity, 1945-7
The re-establishment of an orthodox Stalinist identity for the Soviet Union took only eighteen months. From September 1945 to June 1947 uncertainty about Soviet identity was replaced by a strict binary: the New Soviet Man (NSM) and its dangerous deviant Other. The NSM was an ultra-modern, supranational, secular carrier of working-class consciousness. The formal declaration of the triumph of orthodoxy over difference was Andrei Zhdanov's August 1946 speech declaiming authors who offered a 'false, distorted depiction of the Soviet people', that is, who did not write as if the NSM was reality.
Zhdanovshchina began with the closure of the literary journals Zvezda and Leningrad and the expulsion of Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko from the Writers' Union.[175] A connection was drawn between these deviations and the imperialist threat to the existence of socialism. This was not a wholly imagined danger. Reports from local Ministry of State Security (MGB) and oblast committee (obkom) secretaries to their superiors in Moscow told of widespread rumours among the peasantry that Britain and the United States were threatening to use military force to coerce Stalin to disband collective farms.[176] Meanwhile, the US and Britain were providing military aid to anti- Soviet guerrillas in Poland, Western Ukraine and the Baltic republics, and this was known to Stalin.[177]
The level of danger was tied to parlous economic conditions. As early as September 1945, workers demonstrated at defence plants in the Urals and Siberia. Crime, especially the theft of food, soared. Best estimates are that 100 million Soviets suffered from malnutrition in 1946-7, and 2 million died of starvation from 1946 to 1948. There was no soap or winter clothing. Local party committees cancelled the 7 November 1946 celebration of the Bolshevik revolution, realising people would freeze to death without adequate clothing.[178]
Stalinism itself was the primary institutional carrier of the NSM. All instruments of the party and state both policed Soviet society for deviance and saturated the public space with the dominant discourse. But a peculiar foreign policy institution operated, too. Many post-war East European Communist Party elites had spent the war in the Soviet Union and had formed close ties with Soviet party elites. The latter had their favourites among these allies, and the former curried favour in the Kremlin by energetically fulfilling Soviet wishes in their own countries. Indeed, foreign Communists competed to demonstrate their obedience. This relationship was an institutional route for Moscow's influence in Eastern Europe. East European Communist leaders, identified with Moscow, were often hostage to Soviet elite politics; leadership manoeu- vrings in the Kremlin reverberated throughout the alliance in Eastern Europe.[179]
172
Comment by Sargent dated 14 May 1941 on Cripps (Moscow) to London, 13 May 1941: ibid.,
173
From KGB archives: O. Tsarev, 'Iz arkhivov KGB SSSR: Poslednii polet "chernoi berty" ',
174
For systemic constructivism, see Alexander Wendt,
175
Leonid Mlechin,
176
E. Iu. Zubkova, 'Stalin i obshchestvennoe mnenie v SSSR, 1945-1953', in I. V Gaiduk, N. I. Egorova and A. O. Chubar'ian (eds.),
178
Elena Zubkova,
179
For Poland, see I. S. Iazhborovskaia, 'Vovlechenie Pol'shi vStalinskuiublokovuiupolitiku: problemy i metody davleniia na pol'skoe rukovodstvo, 1940-e gody', in A. O. Chubar'ian (ed.),