Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (53 page)

Yet receiving intelligence information and making correct use of it are two entirely distinct things. What appears to have occurred is that Stalin and Molotov believed all the information that reinforced their own predisposition to mistrust their allies and disbelieved or discounted the information that tended to show the intentions of the British and Americans in a better light. It also meant that, where Stalin and Molotov came to a basic premise about a subject, the NKGB was pestered constantly for information to support and illustrate that premise. One crucial instance is that of the degree of conflict between the British and the Americans. Former ambassador to Britain Maisky appears to have convinced the leadership that the prevailing antagonism in the postwar world would be between the British Empire and the United States. Of course, once relations between Moscow and its allies began seriously to deteriorate, the Kremlin had to revise this basic assumption. But it seems it never underwent a fundamental revision and the expectation remained that sooner or later the British and Americans would fall out. This reinforced Russian reluctance to accept that a solid Western bloc was coming into being and that only through timely concessions could the Russians avoid cementing that bloc against their interests. ‘As usual,’ Modin recalls, ‘the Centre was very interested by [sic] the Anglo-American relationship, and by the various difficulties that might arise between Britain and the United States.’
³³
The extraordinary focus on the atomic bomb project naturally encouraged such expectations. The Americans absorbed British expertise then denied Britain the benefits of the programme. ‘We also knew’, Modin recalls, ‘that the Americans fully intended to deceive the British every step of the way. In the certainty that they were substantially behind the British in terms of research, their strategy was to use the expertise of their allies ... and then to jettison them once they had caught up. And this, of course, is exactly what they did.’
³⁴

Would absence of such information have made Stalin more cautious and have averted the Cold War? In answer to our first question we concluded that Stalin was set on the course he ultimately pursued, that he did not sufficiently fear the United States to justify deviating from that path, but that his decisions were based on calculated risks rather than the rash, intuitive risks that his successor Khrushchev was later to take. If that is correct, and the evidence thus far available suggests that it is, then intelligence information formed a crucial basis for those calculations : hence Molotov’s positive addiction to it and total reliance upon it. The inside historians of Soviet intelligence cite at least one instance in which Stalin drew back after hearing from intelligence sources what position the United States was about to adopt. This concerned Soviet demands on Turkey for territory which were made in 1945 and once again issued in 1947.
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It is entirely possible, though the proof has not yet been presented from the same files, that Stalin eventually backed down over West Berlin in 1949 having finally convinced himself through direct access to Western official thinking that he was not about to have his way in successfully cutting off all access from the democracies to this island of freedom in the midst of the Russian occupation zone. Thus, where the West showed every resolution to stand firm in their internal discussions, Stalin’s knowledge of that fact through intelligence would lead him to caution; where, however, that same access made him silent witness to internal dissent or conflict between Britain and the United States, it seems plausible to conclude that this encouraged him to remain defiant. If Stalin had known none of this, everything would have depended on the degree to which the democracies held to a firm position, such as Litvinov had advocated, and the degree to which Stalin believed in their firmness.
³⁶

But are we necessarily right in assuming that Stalin had fixed his course of action much earlier in the game than the West ever realised? Stalin had long adopted a method of decision-making which, contrary to totalitarian theorists and simplistic biographers, included rather than precluded the discussion of alternative avenues of advance.
³⁷
We know that in relation to both postwar Europe and the postwar Far East, Stalin had plans drawn up from varying perspectives. One of these was put together by a committee under Litvinov and this advocated what amounted to an Anglo-Soviet condominium in postwar Europe, but based on the kind of spheres of influence familiar to the democracies rather than the kind Stalin ultimately adopted. What if Stalin had followed Litvinov’s model rather than the form he finally decided upon? Could the Cold War have been avoided?

It may be put down to naivety, but not until the Red Army had liberated the territories of East-Central Europe did the Western Powers fully understand that what Stalin meant by a sphere of influence was in fact closer to what would commonly have been called colonisation. The accepted idea of what constituted a sphere of influence or interest was the Monroe Doctrine that governed US dominance in the Americas: powers external to the region would be forcefully prevented from interfering in the internal affairs of the region but, allowing for occasional and temporary armed intervention by the United States, these countries would largely be able to govern themselves according to their own priorities. The same principle had governed the status of the Low Countries in relation to Britain, which saw its security dependent upon the insulation of these states from direct external interference and which went to war in 1794 and 1914 in part to assert that vital principle. This minimalist approach to the maintenance of national security was more easily adopted by Great Powers with no recent experience of invasion than by a Power that had just undergone the horrors of Nazi occupation. Nonetheless the democracies assumed that Moscow would see its allies as a significant, if not the main, guarantor of its security in Europe after the common defeat of Germany.

It is often suggested that the real reason for the failure of the Russians and the West to agree upon a commonly accepted division into spheres of influence was US President Roosevelt’s steadfast refusal to commit himself. Yet the one agreement reached, between Churchill and Stalin in October 1944, was implemented by the Russians in the manner of colonisation rather than in the manner expected by the British. And it was as much Soviet procedures as Soviet ambitions that unnerved the democracies. There is thus little basis for assuming that had Roosevelt been more forthcoming on this question the Russians would have been more obliging.

But what if Stalin had conformed to Western expectation? Before one dismisses such a turn of events as impossible, it is worth reflecting on Stalin’s known pragmatism in foreign policy matters hitherto, and on the fact that a commission set up under his authority did recommend this very option. To essentialists like the American political scientist R. C. Tucker, the outcome was predetermined by the very nature of Stalin’s personality. But, if one could deduce Stalin’s foreign policy entirely from his personality, how is one to explain that in the 1930s he switched from one policy to another policy completely at odds with his first choice? It would be prudent to assume that, for all Stalin’s known paranoid tendencies, there was nonetheless a streak of pragmatism within his make-up that to a certain extent allowed for the effective influence of others on the options chosen.

In the West the proposals for spheres of influence in their traditional form were made by Walter Lippmann ( in the United States) and E. H. Carr (in Britain). The most explicit advocacy of this approach appeared in an editorial in
The Times
on 10 March 1944. Here Carr argued that ‘there can be no security in Western Europe unless there is also security in Eastern Europe, and security in Eastern Europe is unattainable unless it is buttressed by the military power of Russia’. He went on: ‘A case so clear and cogent for close cooperation between Britain and Russia after the war cannot fail to carry conviction to any open and impartial mind.’ More specifically, he continued: there should be ‘ungrudging and unqualified agreement’ between London and Moscow on the assumption that: ‘If Britain’s frontier is on the Rhine, it might just as pertinently be said - though it has not in fact been said - that Russia’s frontier is on the Oder, and in the same sense.

The launching of such a controversial
ballon d’essai
naturally had its impact in Moscow. It was no accident that only a matter of weeks later, on 31 March 1944, a committee on the preparation of the peace treaties and postwar construction was convened under the chairmanship of Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs Litvinov.
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On 4 August, well before its proceedings closed on 21 September, he began composing his findings, which he presented on 15 November. Since his removal as Commissar in May 1939, and despite his resurrection as ambassador to the United States after Pearl Harbor had brought the Americans into the European war, Litvinov was regarded with both mistrust and respect by Stalin. If he decided on the need for closer relations with the democracies, Stalin would need Litvinov again; hence his survival while others with no heretical views at all were mercilessly consigned to the police, the camps or the firing squad. For Litvinov had originally been dismissed for trusting the democracies. This was not something of which Molotov could ever be accused. Stalin’s reluctance to rule out any option, however remote, in international relations prompted him to set up the Litvinov committee. True, its relatively low status was evident from the fact that it had access to no classified material, only foreign press cuttings. Nonetheless the application of Litvinov’s trenchant intelligence and enormous experience of over twenty years at the helm of Soviet foreign policy counted for something. Litvinov explained the long-standing antagonism between Russia and Britain in terms of imperial disputes on the Asian periphery rather than ideological differences. In other words the conflicts of interest were not irredeemable but negotiable. As far as he was concerned this applied to the Soviet period as much as that of the tsars. This had been his consistently held view at least since 1920. Indeed it was this non-ideological approach to foreign affairs that set him at odds with mainstream Soviet thinking. Had not the collapse of Litvinov’s collective security policy in the 1930s underscored the existence of an unbridgeable ideological divide? Yet Litvinov hoped a lasting structure could be built on the temporary coalescence of interests forged in the alliance against Hitler’s Germany. Seeing the greatest danger in a postwar confrontation between London and Moscow, Litvinov argued that an agreement should be reached which amounted to an Anglo-Soviet condominium over Europe.

It is clear that what Litvinov meant by a sphere of influence was the same as what was meant in the English-speaking world, because he cited both Lippmann and
The Times
(Carr) as evidence of a willingness to move in this direction on the part of the Allied governments. ‘Such an agreement can be achieved’, he wrote,

He also envisaged an accommodation with British interests (to British advantage) in Iran, Afghanistan and Sinkiang (China).
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This pattern fitted that proposed by Carr in the editorial pages of
The Times
. Yet that august and usually authoritative mouthpiece of British foreign policy did not, under Carr’s direction, any longer represent the establishment consensus. In fact the democracies were reluctant to move in this direction. The Americans, tied by a political system that required Congressional involvement in major foreign policy decisions, resolutely abstained from such practices, though the British seemed to be moving in Litvinov’s direction when Churchill visited Moscow in October 1944. By then, however, Stalin had already sent his forces into Romania and Bulgaria and the die was cast. Litvinov, in later conversation, gave to understand that he believed a genuine opportunity had been lost; the idea being that had the democracies acted earlier - most probably when the Soviet Union was weaker - a deal could have been struck.

Had Stalin and Molotov chosen such an option, rather than the course they chose of imposing their own system on the countries they liberated and occupied, would the Cold War have been avoidable? The decision to allow the other states of Eastern Europe to go their own way in respect of domestic policy would most certainly have assured the democracies that it was not the intention of the Soviet regime to expand Communism on the point of the bayonet. This would have confirmed Carr’s claim that such revolutionary ambitions had withered on the vine by the close of the war. And it was most certainly the fear that the Russians would sponsor Communist revolutions in Central and Western Europe which worried the West (as in the 1920s), particularly because of the significant destruction of physical capital plus widespread social and economic dislocation consequent upon the war. Would not social unrest find fertile soil in such conditions, and could not social unrest result in revolution as in Greece? The sizeable vote for the Communist parties in France and Italy gave a clear indication of the trend of opinion in Western Europe, as did the election of a Labour government in Britain. In these circumstances reassurance on the issue of revolution was blatantly denied by the sovietisation of territories occupied by the Red Army.

It would not all have been plain sailing, however. It is striking that Litvinov’s recommendations omit Germany, which was the subject of another committee’s brief - that of Voroshilov.
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And in many respects Germany was a crucial focal point of difference between East and West. Stalin was determined that the fate of Germany should not be decided by the democracies without Soviet veto. It was also the case that if not Stalin then other members of his entourage still nurtured the old hopes of the decade after the October Revolution to take the red banner as far as Berlin. The only means of ensuring that Moscow retained a decisive role in the fate of Germany was to maintain military occupation, and how could that occupation be assured without secure lines of communication through Poland? And how could those lines be secured if the Poles were allowed to elect governments or were left free to have military
coups d’état
which would most likely bring to power men unalterably hostile to Soviet interests?