The New Penguin History of the World (181 page)

Soviet armies also stood in 1945 on the borders of Turkey and Greece – where a communist rising was under way – and occupied northern Iran. In the Far East they had held much of Sinkiang, Mongolia, northern Korea and the naval base of Port Arthur as well as occupying the rest of Manchuria, though the only territory they actually took from Japan was the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and the Kuriles. The rest of their gains had been effectively at China’s expense. Yet in China there was already visible at the end of the war the outline of a new communist state which could be expected to be friendly to Moscow. Stalin might have backed the wrong horse there in the past, but the Chinese communists could not hope for moral and material help from anyone else. So it seemed that in Asia, too, a Soviet satellite might be in the making. There was no reason to think that the Soviet leadership had forgotten old Russia’s ambitions to be a Pacific power.

The new world power of the United States rested much less on occupation of territory than that of the USSR. It, too, had at the end of the war a garrison in the heart of Europe, but American electors in 1945 wanted it brought home as soon as possible. American naval and air bases around much of the Eurasian land mass were another matter. Although Russia was a greater Asian power than ever, the elimination of Japanese naval power, the acquisition of island airfields and technological changes which made huge fleet trains possible had together turned the Pacific Ocean into an American lake. Above all, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had demonstrated the power of the new weapon which the United States alone possessed (albeit in very small numbers), the atomic bomb. But the deepest roots of American empire lay in its economic strength. With the Red Army, the overwhelming industrial power of the United States had been decisive for the Allied victory, equipping not only its own huge forces but many of those of its allies. Moreover, by comparison with them, victory had cost it little. American casualties were fewer; even those of the United Kingdom were heavier and those of Russia colossally so. The home base of the United States had been immune to enemy attack in any but a trivial sense and was undamaged; its fixed capital was intact, its resources greater than ever. Its citizens had seen their standard of living actually rise during the war; the armament programme ended a depression which had not been mastered by Roosevelt’s New Deal. America was a great creditor country, with capital to invest abroad in a world where no one else could supply it. Finally, its old commercial and political rivals were staggering under the troubles of recovery. Their economies drifted into the ambit of America
because of their own lack of resources. The result was a worldwide surge of indirect American power, its beginnings visible even before the war ended.

Something of the future implicit in the great power polarization could dimly be seen before the fighting stopped in Europe. It was made clear, for example, that the Russians would not be allowed to participate in the occupation of Italy or the dismantling of its colonial empire, and that the British and Americans could not hope for a Polish settlement other than one wanted by Stalin. Yet (in spite of their record in their own hemisphere) the Americans were not happy about explicit spheres of influence; the Russians were readier to take them as a working basis. There is no need to read back into such divergences assumptions which became current a few years after the war, when conflict between the two powers was presumed to have been sought from the start by one or other of them. Appearances can be deceptive. For all the power of the United States in 1945, there was little political will to use it; the first concern of the American military after victory was to achieve as rapid a demobilization as possible. Lend-Lease arrangements with allies had already been cut off even before the Japanese surrender. This further reduced America’s indirect international leverage; it simply weakened friends it would soon be needing, who now faced grave recovery problems. They could not provide a new security system to replace American strength. Nor could the use of atomic bombs be envisaged except in the last resort; they were too powerful.

It is much harder to be sure of what was going on in Stalin’s Russia. Its peoples had clearly suffered appallingly from the war, more, probably, than even the Germans. No one has been able to do more than provide estimates, but it seems likely that over twenty million Soviet citizens may have died. Stalin may well have been less aware of Soviet strength than of Soviet weakness when the war ended. True, his governmental methods relieved him of any need, such as faced western countries, to demobilize the huge land forces which gave him supremacy on the spot in Europe. But the USSR had no atomic bomb nor a significant strategic bomber force, and Stalin’s decision to develop nuclear weapons put a further grave strain on the Soviet economy at a time when general economic reconstruction was desperately needed. The years immediately after the war were to prove as grim as had been those of the industrialization race of the 1930s. Yet in September 1949 an atomic explosion was achieved. In the following March it was officially announced that the USSR had an atomic weapon. By then much had changed.

Piecemeal, relations between the two major world powers had by then deteriorated very badly. This was largely the result of what happened in
Europe, the area most in need of imaginative and coordinated reconstruction in 1945. The cost of the war’s destruction there has never been accurately measured. Leaving out the Russians, about fourteen and a quarter million Europeans were dead. In the most stricken countries those who survived lived amid ruins. One estimate is that about seven and a half million dwellings were destroyed in Germany and Russia. Factories and communications were shattered. There was nothing with which to pay for the imports Europe needed and currencies had collapsed; Allied occupation forces found that cigarettes and bully-beef were better than money. Civilized society had given way not only under the horrors of Nazi warfare, but also because occupation had transformed lying, swindling, cheating and stealing into acts of virtue; they were not only necessary to survival, but they could be glorified as acts of ‘resistance’. The struggles against German occupying forces had bred new divisions; as countries were liberated by the advancing Allied armies, the firing squads got to work in their wake and old scores were wiped out. It was said that in France more perished in the ‘purification’ of liberation than in the great Terror of 1793.

Above all, more finally than in 1918, the economic structure of Europe had disintegrated. The flywheel of much of European economic life had once been industrial Germany. But even if the communications and the productive capacity to restore the machine had been there, the Allies were at first bent on holding down German industrial production to prevent its recovery. Furthermore, Germany was divided. From the start the Russians had been carrying off capital equipment as ‘reparations’ to repair their own ravaged lands – as well they might; the Germans had destroyed 39,000 miles of railway track alone in their retreat in Russia. The Soviet Union may have lost a quarter of its gross capital equipment.

A political division between eastern and western Europe was coming to be evident before the end of the war. The British, in particular, had been alarmed by what happened to Poland. It seemed to show that the Soviet Union would only tolerate governments in eastern Europe which were subservient. This was hardly what the Americans had envisaged as freedom for eastern Europeans to choose their own rulers, but until the war was over neither government nor public in the United States was much concerned or much doubted they could come to reasonable agreement with the Russians. Broadly speaking, Roosevelt had been sure that America could get on with the Soviet Union; they had common ground in resisting a revival of German power and undermining the old colonial empires. Neither he nor the American public showed any awareness of the historic tendencies of Russian policy. They disapproved strongly of British forces in Greece fighting the communists who sought to overthrow the monarchy after the German
withdrawal. (Stalin did not object: he had agreed with Churchill that Great Britain should have a virtually free hand in Greece in return for having one himself in Romania.)

President Truman (who succeeded Roosevelt on his death in April 1945) and his advisers came to change American policies largely as a result of their experience in Germany. The Russians were punctilious in carrying out their agreement to admit British and American (and later French) armed forces to Berlin and share the administration of the city they had conquered. There is every indication that they wished Germany to be governed as a unit (as envisaged by the victors at Potsdam in July 1945), for this would give them a hand in controlling the Ruhr, potentially a treasure-house of reparations. Yet the German economy soon bred friction between West and East. Soviet efforts to ensure security against German recovery led to the increasing practical separation of its zone of occupation from those of the three other occupying powers. Probably this was at first intended to provide a solid and reliable (that is, communist) core for a united Germany, but it led in the end to a solution by partition to the German problem which no one had envisaged. First, the western zones of occupation were for economic reasons integrated, without the eastern zone. Meanwhile Soviet occupation policy aroused increasing distrust. The entrenchment of communism in eastern Germany seemed to repeat a pattern seen elsewhere. In 1945 there had been communist majorities only in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and in other east European countries the communists only shared power in coalition governments. None the less, it increasingly looked as if those governments could, in fact, do little more than behave as Russian puppets. Something like a bloc was already appearing in eastern Europe in 1946.

Stalin obviously feared any reunification of Germany except under a government he could control; Russia had too many memories of attacks from the west to trust a united Germany. It would always have a potential for aggression which a satellite could not have. This would have been true whatever the ideological character of a Russian government; it only made it worse that a united Germany might be capitalist. Elsewhere, though, Soviet policy showed more flexibility. While anxiously organizing eastern Germany on the Russian side of a line slowly appearing across Europe, in China it was still officially supporting the KMT. In Iran, on the other hand, there was an obvious reluctance to withdraw Soviet forces as had been agreed. Even when they finally departed they left behind a satellite communist republic in Azerbaijan – to be later obliterated by the Iranians, to whom, by 1947, the Americans were giving military aid. In the Security Council the Soviet veto was more and more employed to frustrate its
former allies and it was clear that the communist parties of western Europe were manipulated in Russian interests. Yet Stalin’s calculations remain in doubt; perhaps he was waiting, expecting or even relying upon economic collapse in the capitalist world.

There had been and still was much goodwill for the USSR among its former allies. When Winston Churchill drew attention in 1946 to the increasing division of Europe by an ‘Iron Curtain’ he by no means spoke either for all his countrymen or for his American audience; some condemned him. Yet although the British Labour Government elected in 1945 was at first hopeful that ‘Left could speak to Left’, it quickly became more sceptical. British and American policy began to converge during 1946, as it became clear that the British intervention in Greece had in fact made possible free elections and as American officials had more experience of the tendency of Soviet policy. Nor did President Truman have any prejudices in favour of the USSR to shed. The British, moreover, were by now clearly going to leave India; that counted with American official opinion.

In February 1947 a communication from the British government reached Truman which, perhaps more than any other, conceded the long-resisted admission that Great Britain was no longer a world power. The British economy had been gravely damaged by the huge efforts made during the war; there was urgent need for investment at home. The first stages of decolonialization, too, were expensive. One outcome was that by 1947 the British balance of payments could only be maintained if forces were withdrawn from Greece. President Truman decided at once that the United States must fill the gap. It was a momentous decision. Financial aid was to be given to Greece and Turkey, to enable them to survive the pressure they were under from Russia. He deliberately drew attention to the implication; much more than propping up two countries was involved. Although only Turkey and Greece were to receive aid, he deliberately offered the ‘free peoples’ of the world American leadership to resist, with American support, ‘attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’. This was a reversal of the apparent return to isolation from Europe which the United States had seemed to pursue in 1945, and an enormous break with the historic traditions of American foreign policy. The decision to ‘contain’ Soviet power, as it was called, was possibly the most important in American diplomacy since the Louisiana Purchase. It was provoked by Russian behaviour and the growing fears Stalin’s policy had aroused over the previous eighteen months as well as by British weakness. Ultimately, it was to lead to unrealistic assessments of the effective limits of American power, and, critics were to say, to a new American imperialism, as the
policy was extended outside Europe, but this could not be seen at the time.

A few months later, the ‘Truman Doctrine’ was completed by another and more pondered step, an offer of American economic aid to European nations, who would come together to plan jointly their economic recovery. This was the Marshall Plan, named after the American Secretary of State who announced it. Its aim was a non-military, unaggressive form of checking communism. It surprised everyone. The British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was the first European statesman to grasp its implications. With the French, he pressed for the acceptance of the offer by western Europe. It was made, of course, to all European nations. But the Russians would not participate, nor did they allow their satellites to do so. Instead, they bitterly attacked the plan. When the Czechoslovakian coalition government also declined to adhere, that country, the only one in eastern Europe still without a fully communist government and not regarded as a Russian satellite, was visibly regretful in having to toe the Soviet line. Any residual belief in Czechoslovakia’s independence was removed by a communist coup which replaced the government in February 1948. Another sign of Russian intransigence was an old pre-war propaganda device, the Comintern, revived as the Cominform in September 1947. It at once began the denunciation of what it termed a ‘frankly predatory and expansionist course… to establish the world supremacy of American imperialism’. Finally, when western Europe set up an Organization for European Economic Cooperation to handle the Marshall Plan, the Russians replied by organizing their own half of Europe in Comecon, a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which was window-dressing for the Soviet integration of the command economies of the east.