Historians have offered a number of competing interpretations of Stalin’s involvement in the Cold War, and it is worth pointing out how the analysis in this book differs from others.
The first systematic effort to explain the Soviet Union’s behavior in the immediate postwar period was the highly influential account by George F. Kennan. In 1946, as the senior U.S. diplomat in Moscow, he was concerned about Washington’s lack of response to Soviet aggressiveness and penned a long telegram home that attempted to show what was really going on. The “Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs,” he said, was in essence little more than the “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” dressed in the “new guise of international Marxism.” They were the same old Russians, only now their Marxist rhetoric gave them a “fig leaf” of “moral and intellectual respectability.”10 Kennan emphasized the centuries-long continuities in Russian history, played down Communist ideology, and instead pointed to the tsaristlike features of Stalin’s rule and Soviet foreign policy.11 This perspective eventually came to be dubbed the “traditionalist” school in studies of the Cold War. Kennan himself remained steadfast in his efforts to undermine the role of ideology, in favor of focusing on international strategy and power politics.12
It is certainly true that during all Stalin’s wartime dealings with the West, he uttered not a whisper of his revolutionary theories; nor did he hint at the deep convictions that he felt separated Communists from those he labeled capitalists, imperialists, and fascists. Instead he scrupulously hid his political passions and formulated demands for the postwar settlement exclusively in the name of guarding his country’s security.
Nonetheless, the “traditionalist” focus on international power politics misinterprets Stalin’s ambitions. My book contests the wisdom of such an emphasis and underlines the importance of the Soviet leader’s ideological convictions. As I show, Marxist-Leninist teachings informed everything in his life, from his politics to his military strategy and personal values. He saw himself as anything but an updated version of an old-style Russian tsar. For example, in 1936 and on a routine party form not meant for publication, Stalin described his “job” as “professional revolutionary and party organizer.”13 Those words reflected a certain truth, even though by that time he had been at the pinnacle of power for more than a decade and was the patron of patrons, busily constructing his own leadership cult.14
By the late 1950s and especially during the 1960s, American historians challenged the traditionalist approach. These “revisionists” began claiming that the East-West conflict, which by then had mushroomed into the Cold War, had arisen mainly because the Soviet Union was forced to defend itself against the aggressiveness of the United States. These writers asserted that the American pursuit of “open-door expansion” all but forced the USSR into fighting back.15 The documents show, quite to the contrary, that Moscow made all the first moves and that if anything the West was woefully complacent until 1947 or 1948, when the die was already cast.
Although there have been several varieties of revisionism, they are united in the claim that the primary responsibility for the emergence of the Cold War rests with the United States. Disputes arising within revisionism tend to concern questions of secondary importance. For example, some claim that the Americans were not driven by economics or acquisitiveness but by “foreign policy idealism.” These scholars take Washington to task for providing “the crucial impetus for the escalation” of the East-West conflict by refusing “to recognize” the validity of Soviet claims for a “security zone.”16 However, these accounts do not consider the consequences of any such concessions, nor do they ponder whether it was indeed possible to reassure Stalin. In any event, given the dozens of states along the borders of the USSR, granting his demand for such a zone would have meant forcing many millions of people to submit to domination from Moscow. And as Stalin demonstrated time and again, he did not care what the Americans theorized about his motives, so long as they did nothing to stop him from getting what he wanted.
A variation on the revisionist theme posits that the Cold War was sparked by American misperceptions of Moscow’s intentions, whereupon the United States then overreacted and provoked the Soviet Union into action “in a classic case of the self-fulfilling prophecy.”17 The documents reveal, of course, that Stalin took pride in deliberately misleading the White House.
The main revisionist arguments do not hold up under examination, and here I am in agreement with Russian historians like Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, who rightly insist that the Kremlin was not simply reactive to the West and entertained far greater ambitions than simply securing the borders.18
In this book I emphasize that the Communist ideological offensive commenced in August 1939 and persisted through the war against Hitler. The Western Allies, far from being too aggressive with their partner after June 1941, were overly accommodating. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt consistently sought to understand and sympathize with the Soviet position, and he bent over backwards to ignore or downplay Stalin’s horrendous methods of rule and obvious ambitions. Charles Bohlen, a Roosevelt translator, wrote that the president suffered from the “conviction that the other fellow is a ‘good guy’ who will respond properly and decently if you treat him right.”19 Although FDR certainly deserves full credit for keeping the USSR in the war and thus reducing the deaths of Americans in combat, he failed to recognize the fundamental ideological and moral gap that existed between the Western democracies and Soviet Communism. Instead, he emboldened Stalin.
The president’s sympathies were on display during the Big Three meetings in Tehran in November 1943, when he sided with the Soviet dictator rather than with British prime minister Winston Churchill. A member of the British delegation in Tehran remarked laconically: “This Conference is over when it has only just begun. Stalin has got the President in his pocket.”20 The Soviets invariably took Roosevelt’s efforts to be friendly or accommodating as demonstrations of weakness. They were quick to exploit FDR’s sympathies and his condemnation of old imperialist powers like Britain.21
Although Churchill had sensed what the Communists were all about at the time of the Russian Revolution, during the war he came to feel squeezed between the two new world powers and at times resigned himself to thinking he had to make the best of a bad situation. His strategy, to avoid blaming Stalin personally, involved a high degree of self-deception, as when he attributed policies he found particularly abhorrent to nameless Kremlin leaders behind the scenes in Moscow. Only thus could he hold on to his “cherished belief, or illusion,” that “Stalin could be trusted.”22
Another area that sets this book apart from others pertains to how the Soviet Union exported revolution. Precisely what steps it would take had to be worked out in practice, as indeed was the case after 1917 when Moscow had to decide how to rule its multinational state. Contrary to what we might assume, neither its politicians nor its administrators saw themselves as colonial masters, much less as tsarists or Great Russian chauvinists.23 Instead they would arrive as saviors and educators with a mission “to release” various communities and constituencies across their great land “from the disease of backwardness.”24 They did not, of course, express themselves so bluntly in public and preferred to say—at least initially—that they sought to enlighten the ignorant, to free the oppressed, and to foster their cultures and languages.