Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (35 page)

Mackenzie King had no more faith in Americans than he did in Russians or Western Canadians. He expected them all to behave badly—or rather, he expected them to conform to the steps of the traditional dance. The United States and the Soviet Union, as the most powerful states surviving amidst the wreckage in 1945, were almost bound to identify each other as potential enemies. It wasn’t really about ideology at all: as John Starnes, a young diplomat who later became undersecretary of state for external affairs and then director general of the Security and Intelligence Directorate of the RCMP, wrote in January 1948, “If the United States and the U.S.S.R. were both Communist states … the degree of conflict would be unabated and [perhaps] even be more sharply drawn.”

Great powers automatically fear and mistrust each other—a point U.S. secretary of commerce (and former vice-president) Henry Wallace made forcibly to President Truman in March 1946, writing to him that “the events of the past few months have thrown the Soviets back to their pre-1939 fears of ‘capitalist encirclement.’ ” In a subsequent letter, Wallace warned Truman that the large peacetime U.S. defence budget, American atomic bomb tests in the Pacific, the production of long-range bombers and American attempts to get overseas bases “must make it look to the rest of the world as if we are only paying lip-service to peace at the conference table. These facts rather make it appear either (1) that we are preparing ourselves to win the war which we regard as inevitable or (2) that we are trying hard to build up a preponderance
of force to intimidate the rest of mankind.” But when Wallace made the same remarks in public later in the year, Truman fired him: “I was afraid that, knowingly or not, he would lend himself to the more sinister ends of the Reds and those who served them,” he said. Truman’s own attitude had already been defined in instructions to his secretary of state on January 5, 1946, only four months after the war’s end.

It actually didn’t take as long after San Francisco as it did after Versailles before normal service was resumed.

In later years, when the Cold War had set as hard as ice, a comment like that would have attracted the charge of “moral equivalence”: that the speaker was wilfully ignoring the titanic moral struggle that underlay the military confrontation, and justified even the risk of nuclear war. Western ideologues would have added that the Soviet Union’s behaviour was inherently aggressive because it was driven by Marxist ideology, which sought, as an ultimate goal, the conquest (or at least the conversion) of the entire world, and that all Soviet actions past and present must be seen in the light of that interpretation. But
that was later. In the early days, even Canadian generals could see that this was nonsense.

There was a time, it is true, when the Soviet Union was ruled by revolutionaries who really expected Communism to conquer the whole world. “What? Are we going to have foreign relations?” Lenin reputedly exclaimed in 1917 when it was proposed that he appoint a commissar for foreign affairs. Why do that if, as he expected, the rest of Europe was going to fall to the same revolution within a few weeks or months? And even after the Bolsheviks had faced up to the fact that the revolution was not going to spread, they denied that the Soviet state was any more than a transitional phenomenon. But that was before Stalin virtually annihilated the old revolutionaries in the great purges of 1935–39, and made the state bureaucracy the dominant force in the land.

By the late 1930s, the Soviet Union was behaving just like other great states in its foreign relations, making alliances with Nazis or “imperialists” as the state’s interests dictated, and showing no interest whatever in the fate of the Communist parties in other countries if they did not serve Soviet state interests. Soviet foreign policy had become so utterly traditional and non-ideological that Moscow vigorously pursued its claims to all the lost territories that had once belonged to the Russian empire but had been lost at the time of the revolution. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the former Russian shares of Poland and Romania were recovered at the time of the alliance with Hitler in 1940. When the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in August 1945, with the intention of recovering the territories lost to Japan at the end of the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, Stalin’s Order of the Day urged the troops to “efface the shame of forty years before.”

Soviet behaviour in the countries that had been liberated by its armies fitted the same pattern of duplicating (but not exceeding) tsarist ambitions. The war aims that had been discussed by the tsar’s diplomats with his Western allies in the First World War—a Russian-dominated Eastern Europe, a Western Europe essentially run by Britain and France, with a weak and divided Germany in between—were also the Soviet war aims in the Second World War. And, except that Western Europe became American-dominated instead, it all came to pass.

This was hard on Eastern Europe, but at Yalta, the conference between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in February 1945 where the main lines of postwar policy in Europe were laid down, the Western powers had signalled (quite sensibly) that they would not do anything practical to dispute Soviet domination there. Stalin wanted a ring of client states in Eastern Europe for all the usual reasons that great powers like to have that sort of thing: military buffer zones, areas for economic exploitation, sheer prestige. He reckoned the Soviet Union’s sacrifices in the war entitled him to demand it, and he would have interpreted any Western attempt to frustrate it as an attack on the vital interests of the Soviet state.

It is still difficult to explain what caused so much Western alarm about Soviet intentions after the war. It cannot have been the actual division of Europe into Soviet and Anglo-American spheres of influence: that had effectively been agreed at Yalta. Nor should the fact that all the
“liberated” lands received political systems similar to those of their respective liberators have caused any astonishment. Thus Romania, where you could have counted the number of genuine native Communists in 1945 without taking your shoes off, duly had a “Communist revolution” in 1947, while France and Italy, where the Communists were the most powerful and credible political force at the end of the war thanks to their leading role in the resistance movement, nevertheless wound up with liberal-democratic political systems and capitalist economic systems.

Stalin’s Communization of the Eastern European states had nothing to do with ideological fervour. He did it because the Eastern European countries, if they were not confined within a system that shackled them to the Soviet Union and cut them off from the West, would have drifted into the orbit of the richer and culturally more attractive Western European states sooner or later. But Stalin’s first step after the Communists came to power in Eastern European countries was to instigate purges (like his own in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s) in which all the dangerous revolutionaries and “real” Communists were killed off, leaving conservative, state-oriented bureaucrats like himself in command.

Stalin never showed the slightest ambition to extend the Soviet domain in Europe beyond the territories allocated to the Soviet Union at Yalta. There was a good deal of violence involved in the process of imposing an alien Communist system on the countries of Eastern Europe, but that was an implicit part of the deal that had been struck in 1945. The other half of the deal, also implicit, was that the Soviet Union would not seek to boost the powerful Communist parties of Western Europe into power, and it did not. Even in the Italian election of 1948, when the Communist Party stood a real chance of winning and huge amounts of American money were being spread around to stop it, the Soviet Union sent no money to help the Italian Communists.

So how did the Soviet Union’s ruthless actions in nailing down the empire it had acquired in Eastern Europe (by agreement with the
Western allies) get reinterpreted as proof that it was an irresistibly expansionist state embarking on an ideological crusade aimed at world conquest? That is a good question.

Czechoslovakia definitely fell within the Soviet sphere of influence by the terms of the Yalta agreement, but it was the only Eastern European country that had been a genuine democracy before the Second World War, and it weighed heavily on Western European consciences as the country they had sold down the river in 1938 to win another year of peace. Moreover, the Czechs had managed to resurrect their democracy after the end of the German occupation in 1945, and by 1948 the country was not occupied by Soviet troops. So the Communist coup in Prague in February 1948, and the subsequent “defenestration of Prague”—the death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk in a fall from a second-storey window at the Foreign Office on March 10, 1948—came as a profound shock to the countries of the West. It was not an overt Soviet military move, but the Prague coup was just the kind of subversive internal action that most people had been predicting in Western Europe, and it had a profound effect on Mackenzie King.

Mackenzie King was still profoundly opposed to any peacetime alliances for Canada, but he was deeply shaken by Masaryk’s fate. “Time may tell whether this was a suicide or whether that means was taken by the Communists to destroy his life,” King wrote. “One thing is certain. It has proven there can be no collaboration with Communists.” And on March 11, 1948, the day after Masaryk’s death, King received an urgent letter from the British prime minister, Clement Attlee: