Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (51 page)

Beyond Germany, architectural planning became a matter of Wilhelm Kreis’s monuments to the dead which were to punctuate the landscape from Africa to the plains of Russia. More importantly, the regime planned major changes to Europe’s infrastructure. Canals would bring the grain and petroleum of Russia along the Danube, and three-lane motorways would enable German tourists to speed along in their Volkswagens from Calais to Warsaw or Klagenfurt to Trondheim. In early 1942, Hitler and his chief engineer, Fritz Todt, began plans for a four-metre-gauge railway, which would convey double-decker trains at 190 kilometres an hour to the Caspian Sea and the Urals. Some time after the defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk, Hitler was still designing saloon and dining cars to take ethnic German settlers to and fro in Russia.

Of course, historians who stress the chaotic and ultimately self-destructive character of the Third Reich would have us believe that all such plans were mere fantasy: the Third Reich was preprogrammed to collapse in 1945. What remains unclear, however, is how far their assumptions of an inevitable Nazi defeat are based on a realistic assessment of what could have happened - and how far on mere wishful and teleological thinking. Certainly, many aspects of Nazi planning appear so bizarre to us that it is hard to imagine their ever having been realised. But not all. While Himmler planned his ethnic revolution and Hitler built his architectural models, other agencies were mapping out futures for ordinary Germans which were far from unrealistic in their conception. Robert Ley’s mammoth German Labour Front apparatus (DAF) was the socially ‘progressive’ arm of a regime better known for repression and terror. Through its subordinate ‘Beauty of Labour’ and ‘Strength through Joy’ organisations it endeavoured to bring improved conditions, cheap holidays, sport and a greater sense of worth to the ‘German worker’, and hence to boost his or her productivity while breaking down traditional class solidarities. Even the exiled SPD leadership was forced to acknowledge the efficacy of these policies, lamenting the ‘petit bourgeois inclinations’ evinced by sections of its erstwhile constituency. During the first years of the war, the DAF’s Scientific Labour Institute made detailed plans for the provision of comprehensive health, insurance and pension coverage, thus simultaneously generating and responding to expectations of a postwar reward for present deprivation. Interpreting a specific mandate to improve public housing - a field hitherto neglected in favour of monumental building - as a general commission for welfare reform, Ley and his staff made proposals which bear some superficial similarities to the Beveridge Report. For example, there was to be a new national pensions scheme whereby the over sixty-fives would receive 60 per cent of their average earnings over the last decade of employment. These plans were augmented with a child benefit scheme and measures to reform health provision.
⁶²

Only a closer examination of these schemes reveals that the benefits were contingent upon past ‘performance’, and that whole categories of people were to be excluded from any provision whatsoever on the grounds of race or ‘asocial’ behaviour. The projected health-care reforms, including the provision of public clinics, factory physicians and affordable spas and sanatoria, also concealed a collectivist and mechanical view of human beings as epitomised in the chilling slogan ‘Your health does not belong to you,’ or in the objective of ‘periodically overhauling’ the German population in the same way as ‘one services an engine’. This would have been a welfare state only for those Germans who were not imprisoned, sterilised or murdered as ‘ballast existences’, ‘asocials’ or racial ‘aliens’.
⁶³
Perhaps it is this aspect of the counterfactual of a German victory which is most chilling of all - precisely because in its superficial ‘modernity’ it is so easy to imagine it coming true.

Jonathan Haslam

If there hadn’t been any Yalta conference at all, the result would have been much the same. I think history would have fulfilled itself, Yalta or no Yalta.

GLADWYN JEBB
¹

 

 

 

What does it mean to say that ‘history would have fulfilled itself’? Why would the result have been ‘much the same’?
Could
anything else have happened in 1945 or soon thereafter?

It is as well to confess at the outset that the author is a convinced sceptic as to the value of such questions. One dubious instance is where the historian arbitrarily selects a single favourite variable, alters its weight or true composition, but holds all other variables from the same equation constant. Very often this means choosing one historical figure who lost and replaying the game by tying the hands of others, reducing the significance of larger but material historical forces, and then arranging that figure’s victory with happy consequences all round. In the Western historiography of the Soviet Union, there has been no shortage of such wishful thinking. Moshe Lewin, a self-professed Marxist of anti-Stalinist beliefs, believed that Bukharin would have avoided the forced collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union, yet secured industrialisation and assured the future of socialism.
²
The more orthodox Marxist view, of course, is that the success or failure of a particular figure is to be explained as the result of a conjunction of larger circumstances, not as an independent variable in its own right. The danger is that the attachment of the historian to a particular figure - very often matched by deep dislike of that figure’s leading rival - blinds him to what else is driving events. A more serious objection to counterfactualism, however, was raised by the Italian historian and philosopher of history Benedetto Croce.
³
As he suggested, it is hard to justify jumping into the stream of history arbitrarily at a point of one’s choosing and at that point rearranging events, dismissing the effect of the past on the present. Why not another section upstream or downstream?

In order to allow at least in part for Croce’s misgivings, the choice of counterfactual must be made as consciously, as cautiously and as open-mindedly as possible. Perhaps also the way forward is to intervene at more than one point and take more than one variable at any given point to present various possible outcomes that may highlight the role of any one factor in the equation. Let us therefore take three counterfactual questions that will attack the issue of the origins of the Cold War from diverse directions:

The first question explores the impact of the atomic bomb on relations between Moscow and the West. It has been suggested that the bomb was dropped not to defeat the Japanese but to intimidate the Russians.
⁴
This raises the key issue whether the pattern of confrontation between the Russians and the democracies was set by US or by Soviet policy. The ‘revisionist’ school of historiography in the United States has never been in any doubt that ‘Truman’s early 1945 strategy toward the Soviet Union flowed in significant part from a belief that the atomic bomb, once tested, would strengthen the U. S. diplomatic position’;
⁵
that ’far from following his predecessor’s policy of cooperation, shortly after taking office Truman launched a powerful foreign policy initiative aimed at reducing or eliminating Soviet influence from Europe’;
⁶
and that ’Stalin’s approach seems to have been cautiously moderate’ through 1945.
⁷

The second question deals with the crucial issue of espionage. The list of spies the Russians possessed in the higher echelons of government in Britain is well known. Equally well known is the fact that the Russians employed spies who gave them critical information on the progress of experiments leading to the creation of the atomic bomb. And the US government has released documents which show the enormous extent of that atomic espionage.
⁸
What if the Russians had had no knowledge of the bomb before August 1945; what if they had had no knowledge of Western reactions to their expansionist moves against the democracies : would Stalin have taken such risks?

During the war there were advocates of the division of Europe into Russian and Western spheres of influence, in the Soviet Union, in Britain and in the United States. These advocates - Maxim Litvinov, E. H. Carr and Walter Lippmann - all envisaged a relatively benign system of spheres of influence of the traditional variety, according to which the internal politics and socio-economic structures of these countries would be allowed to function without undue interference from the neighbouring Great Power except where the conduct of defence and foreign policies was concerned. This was not how Stalin envisaged a sphere of influence. To him it ultimately entailed all but total control, and the implications of that interpretation and its implementation in Eastern and Central Europe provoked conflict with the West. What if he had chosen the course recommended by Litvinov, Carr and Lippmann? Could the Cold War have thereby been averted?

These are the questions we wish to consider. Before we proceed, however, the reader should be made aware of certain problems with regard to the sources upon which any interpretation of the origins of the Cold War have to be based. The first waves of writing were based exclusively on documents from the US National Archives because the US government was the first to declassify its holdings. More recently the British and the French have declassified the larger part of their archives relating to the 1940s. But the Soviet Union resolutely refused to do so, except for marginal access by official historians. As a result the historiography is necessarily one-sided. Throughout, the historians of US diplomacy and British and French foreign policy have had to limit themselves to drawing uncertain conclusions about the motives for Soviet behaviour. It is this, as much as anything, which explains the chasm yawning between the more conservative historians and the ‘revisionists’ - since there was no way of determining the reasoning behind Soviet foreign policy but through inference, ideological preference supplanted judgement based on documentary evidence.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 facilitated the opening of certain hitherto secret archives in Moscow. In 1992 the Russian Ministry of External Affairs agreed upon the release of documents to researchers, and since that time a mass of material from 1945 to 1955 has become available.
⁹
However, due to resistance from the operational departments of the Ministry, the most important documents - the ciphered telegrams which form the bulk of the diplomatic correspondence between ambassadors and the Ministry - have been debarred from declassification. Furthermore, the other responsible archives in foreign affairs - the RTsKhIDNI (which contains the archives of the International Department of the Central Committee), the Ministry of Defence, the KGB and the Presidential Archive (which holds Politburo papers on foreign affairs) - have all denied researchers access to their holdings for the period under discussion. Thus anyone currently analysing the development of Soviet foreign policy for the origins of the Cold War is deprived of the Russian equivalent of what can be found in the US, British and French archives. All is not entirely lost, however. Diligent research using the holdings now available from the Foreign Ministry - diplomatic letters, memoranda, ambassadorial diaries and annual reports - in combination with work in Western archives can still yield findings of significance. But we are here talking of research now under way, with only incomplete results so far available.

Within these limitations, therefore, let us address the questions asked above.

Although the bulk of the evidence demonstrates that the US administration under Truman decided to use the bomb against Japan primarily to forestall a full-scale and bloody invasion of Japan by the Allies, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the Americans also hoped that a by-product of the use of the bomb would be to moderate Russian behaviour.
¹⁰
Since the entrance of Soviet troops into Romania and Bulgaria in 1944, followed by Poland and the remainder of East-Central Europe in 1945, it had become apparent to Western leaders that the Russians were not interested in fully fledged cooperation at the close of hostilities in the Pacific; more than that, some believed they were moving beyond the establishment of a legitimate sphere of influence and on to a path of resolute expansion.

Before the bomb was dropped, Truman took Stalin aside at the Postdam conference and warned him about a new deadly weapon that they would use against the Japanese. Stalin famously showed no reaction. But in private Foreign Minister Molotov said: ‘They are raising the stakes.’ Stalin smiled and replied: ‘Let them. Today we must talk to Kurchatov [the head of the Soviet programme] about speeding up our own work.’
¹¹
The bomb thus had an identifiable effect on Stalin and his entourage. Stalin was evidently concerned that the United States should not sustain a monopoly of this new weapons system. However, it was not so much use of the bomb against the Japanese as the successful detonation of the bomb that prompted Stalin to speed up development. Restraint on Truman’s part would therefore have had no signal effect on the pace of the Soviet programme.

The proponents of the argument that the bomb had a decisive effect for the worse on East-West relations go much further than this. They argue that the United States used possession of the bomb to intimidate the Russians and succeeded instead only in precipitating the Cold War by frightening them into raising barriers against Western influence and striking out against those whom the West sought to defend.