The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (92 page)

The irony was not lost on Churchill that it was now his policy to appease Stalin; whereas many of the anti-Communist Tories who had once been the staunchest appeasers of Hitler were now violently hawkish in their denunciations of Soviet conduct. Only
The Times
was consistent. Jesuitically, the newspaper pointed out that the 1939 guarantee to Poland had only pledged its defence in the event of a
German
invasion; it did not commit Britain to restore Poland to her pre-war borders against Stalin’s wishes. In keeping with the power-worshipping realism of E. H. Carr,
The Times
counselled that Stalin, like Hitler before him, had legitimate claims to ‘security’ which it was the job of British diplomacy to divine and to fulfil. Nicolson, meanwhile, tried to justify himself as best he could:

People say to me, ‘But why, when you cursed us for wishing to appease Hitler, do you advocate the appeasement of Stalin?’ I reply, ‘For several reasons. First, because the Nazi system was more evil than the Soviet system. Secondly, because whereas Hitler used every surrender on our part as a stepping-off place for further aggression, there does exist a line beyond which Stalin will not go.’

In May 1945 such confidence in the self-restraint of Stalin was no more than a pioushope.

Nothing revealed more clearly the nature of the pact the Allies had
struck with Stalin than the way Soviet prisoners of war were treated. At Yalta, it had been agreed that all Soviet citizens in Axis hands should be returned to the Soviet authorities, including not only prisoners of war and slave labourers but also those Russians who had fought on the Axisside, like the 150,000 troops who had trained under the leadership of the turncoat General Andrei Vlasov or the 20,000 Cossacks who had joined the Germans to fight against their Soviet oppressors. In 1945 alone 1.7 million Soviet prisoners and slave labourers were returned, but this was only the beginning of a vast process of repatriation which by 1953 had sent nearly five and a half million people back to the Soviet Union. Of these around a fifth were either executed or sentenced to the maximum of twenty-five years in labour camps. Shamefully, British troops used deception and brute force to implement this agreement, despite glaring evidence of the fate that awaited those handed back to Stalin. Even those who were not shot or exiled after their interrogation by the NKVD lived the rest of their lives under a cloud, excluded from respectable employment.

Of course, not all the murder, the rape and the pillage that devastated Central and Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945 should be blamed on Stalin. The dance of death that played itself out in the ruins of the Third Reich was only partly choreographed in Moscow. Much of the violence against ethnic Germans was local and spontaneous. Poles and Ukrainians continued their savage border war for several years after 1945, even as the border itself moved beneath them. On Palm Sunday 1945 a band of Ukrainians dressed in NKVD uniforms drew up outside a Polish church in Hrubieszów and threw grenades at the congregation. Meanwhile, the civil war that the Axis powers had sponsored in the Balkans raged on, to the advantage of the Communists in Yugoslavia, to their disadvantage in Greece. As a cruel reminder that the Holocaust had not been an exclusively German undertaking, violence continued to be directed against the surviving Jews in Poland. There was a fully fledged pogrom in Kielce in July 1946, aimed at Jews who were attempting to return to their old homes.

Nevertheless, by the end of 1947, if not earlier, the net effect of the war in Europe was clear. In 1939 Britain had gone to war with Germany ostensibly to prevent Poland being overrun by Germany, as
Czechoslovakia had been the year before. By the end of 1945 neither country was any nearer freedom and with each passing month that prospect grew more distant. Central and Eastern Europe as far as the banks of the River Elbe was in Stalin’s iron fist. If the war had been about the fate of that region, then he had won it.

Who, moreover, had really won the war in Asia? It is true, the West European empires were not wholly broken up. Although the price of India’s loyalty turned out to be its independence (and partition) Britain regained control of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya. French power was restored in Indo-China. The experience of Japanese occupation had no doubt weakened the notions of European superiority on which colonial rule in some measure rested. On the other hand, local elites in Malaya and elsewhere had good reasons to welcome back European forces, if the alternative was to surrender power to more popular political forces within their own societies.

Yet the main beneficiary of victory in Asia, as in Europe, was once again the Soviet Union. At Tehran, Stalin had pledged to enter the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany, and at Yalta he had been promised an ample remuneration: the Kuril Islands, South Sakhalin, Outer Mongolia, Dairen, Port Arthur and the Manchurian railways. He had kept his word. On August 9, 1945, he had sent a vast force of 1.7 million troops into Japanese controlled Manchuria, Korea, Sakhalin and the Kurils. Fighting in this forgotten campaign had been heavy; the Japanese suffered very heavy casualties as they fought tenaciously against Soviet amphibious landings along the Korean coast. This, perhaps, was the war the Japanese should have fought; one which, had it broken out in 1941, might have dealt the Soviet Union a fatal blow from behind. But by 1945 their forces lacked the material means to prevail. The logical next step for Stalin was to make the Russian presence in Manchuria and Korea permanent – the pre-revolutionary Russian strategy that had been thwarted by the Japanese forty years before. The hasty American response was to divide the country into two provisional zones of occupation, leaving
Stalin all the territory north of the somewhat arbitrarily selected 38th parallel. Thus, as in Europe, the end of the war in Asia meant an improvised partition of contested territory. It also represented a triumph of Russian foreign policy beyond the fondest imaginings of the Tsars.

It was not so much that Stalin had a premeditated plan for Asian empire; rather, the Americans under estimated the extent to which nationalist movements in East Asia would run out of their control. The notion that Korea could be placed in some kind of international trusteeship proved completely unrealistic as indigenous politics burst into life after the Japanese defeat. Both Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee were, first and foremost, nationalists, and it was their ambitions more than the superpowers’ that set Korea on course for partition. At the same time, the Americans overestimated the stability of the Chinese Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek, whose value both to the war effort and to the future stability of East Asia was always much less than Roosevelt had hoped. Chiang, the President had said, was an ‘unconquerable man… of great vision [and]… great courage’. He had been given the red-carpet treatment at the Cairo Conference of November 1943. Post-war China, Roosevelt insisted, would be one of the Big Four, along with the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain. It turned out that Stilwell’s low opinion of ‘Peanut’ had been the right one. With the Japanese gone, the miseries suffered by the Chinese peasantry since the 1930scould no longer be blamed on a foreign invader. Increasingly, the Communists’ criticisms of Chiang’s regime as corrupt and incompetent won converts in the countryside. Even with American support, Chiang’s position began to crumble as the Communist forces – even without Russian support – advanced southwards and the civil war resumed. The Truman administration relaxed when Stalin recognized Chiang’s government and with drew Soviet troops from Manchuria in March 1946. So low was Truman’s estimation of Chiang’s regime that he seemed in different to the possibility that Chiang might be ousted altogether by an indigenous (but Soviet backed) Communist revolution. This relaxation was unwarranted.

In one of his last political musings, dictated to Martin Bormann on April 2, 1945, none other than Hitler, in a rare moment of percipience, had foretold the coming Cold War:

Between the defeat of the Reich and the rise of nationalist movements in Asia, Africa and perhaps also South America there will be only two powers in the world that can face each other on the basis of equal strength: the USA and Soviet Russia. The laws of history dictate that these two colossuses will test their strength, whether militarily, or just economically and ideologically.

In this he was surely right. The Second World War had undoubtedly ended in the summer of 1945 – on May 7 in Western Europe, on May 8 in Eastern Europe and on August 15 in Asia (or perhaps on September 2, when the Japanese belatedly signed the document confirming their surrender). Yet the War of the World was very far from over. For what had begun in the European border lands of Poland and in the Asian borderlands of Manchuria continued more or less unabated in the years after 1945.

Churchillian appeasement of Stalin was short-lived. It was on May 13, 1945 – less than a week after VE Day – that Churchill alarmed Brooke with the vehemence of his view son the future of Yugoslavia; so ‘delighted’ was the Prime Minister by ‘a telegram from Truman, full of bellicose views and ready to be rough with Tito’, that he gave Brooke the feeling he was ‘already longing for another war! Even if it entailed fighting Russia!’ The Chiefs of Staff had actually considered the possibility of a future confrontation with the Soviets as early as October 1944, though Brooke regarded the idea as ‘fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible’. Churchill, however, countered that the atomic bomb ‘would redress the balance with the Soviets’, as an appalled Brooke recorded in his diary:

The secret of this explosive, and the power to use it, would completely alter the diplomatic equilibrium which was a drift since the defeat of Germany! Now we had a new value which redressed our position (pushing his chin out and scowling), now we could say if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, Sebastapol etc. etc. And now where are the Russians!!!

This was prophetic indeed, before the Bomb had even been dropped on Hiroshima. In July 1945 Churchill asked the defence chiefs to work out the viability of a surprise attack on the Soviet Union – using,
if necessary, German troops. With good reason this notion was given the name ‘Operation Unthinkable’.

Yet the most puzzling thing about the origins of the Cold War is that Churchill proved to be wrong. The Bomb did not redress the balance – or, rather, did not tip the balance decidedly in favour of the Western powers– as it should have. Stalin was without question impressed by it. ‘War is barbaric,’ he had declared on hearing details of the destruction of Hiroshima, ‘but using the A-bomb is a superbarbarity.’ It was ‘a powerful thing, pow-er-ful!’ If he were to act in such a way that a Third World War broke out, he told a Chinese delegation to Moscow, ‘the Russian people would not understand us. Moreover, they would chase us away. For underestimating all the wartime and post-war efforts and suffering. For taking it too lightly.’ Yet Stalin was careful to conceal his anxiety, insisting in an interview that ‘atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves’. He refused to appear intimidated, despite the fact that the first successful Soviet test did not take place until August 1949; despite the fact that throughout the 1950s the balance of nuclear advantage was overwhelmingly in favour of the United States. Moreover – and perhaps Stalin divined this – Truman was deeply reluctant to use atomic weapons again after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Bomb might be ‘powerful’, but not if its owners were bluffing.

In the Middle East, to be sure, the Soviet tide was decisively turned back. The Western powers rejected Stalin’s demands for Turkish territory and control of the Black Sea Straits – another traditional Russian imperial objective – and insisted on his withdrawal from Iran, referring the matter to the new United Nations Security Council and deploying the American 6th Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean. Here was proof that the ‘strategy of containment’ recommended by the diplomat George Kennan could work; it was not proof, however, that the atomic monopoly would make it work. The period up until 1956 saw a reassertion of British and French influence and a new assertion of American power through Saudi Arabia and Israel. Likewise in Turkey and Greece the American assistance that counted was conventional (and financial) more than nuclear.

In Central Europe and Asia, on the other hand, the Soviet flood continued in full spate. True, Stalin did not succeed in getting his
handson all of Germany, as he had hoped. The generosity of the 1947 European Recovery Plan, named the Marshall Plan after Truman’s Secretary of State General George C. Marshall, was sufficient to begin the transformation of the post-war occupation zones into enduring political blocs. The 1948–9 Berlin blockade was a failure too, but again it was aid that the American planes transported eastwards, not atomic bombs(though Truman himself believed that only the Bomb had deterred the Russians from ‘taking over Europe’). In Czechoslovakia, however, hopes for democracy were dashed by a Soviet-backed coup in February 1948. This was the beginning of a series of coups in Central and Eastern Europe, the effect of which was to confer monopolies of power on ruthlessly Stalinized Communist Parties. Moreover, there seemed every reason to fear a Communist takeover in some West European countries. In December 1945 the Italian Communists had 1.8 million members and gained 19 per cent of the popular vote in free elections. The French Communist party had nearly a million members. In November 1947, at the instigation of Stalin’s Comin form, two million workers struck throughout France. Similar strikes paralysed Italy. In Asia, meanwhile, the Soviet triumph was very nearly complete. As early as July 1946, Truman declared that Korea was ‘an ideological battleground upon which our entire success in Asia may depend’, but for a time in 1947 it seemed as if the United States was about to withdraw from the peninsula altogether. In January 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson indicated that he did not regard South Korea as vital to American security.